With two days to go before the election, the menace represented by Donald Trump and his fanatical followers is hanging over me like a dense cold fog, almost a shroud. Hillary may not be a knight in shining armor, but she’s all that is standing between us and the screaming hordes of misogynist, racist, violent bigots, who have been turning out by the tens of thousands for their orange-skinned leader.

This is a moment when I can palpably feel the personal, political and planetary spheres aligning, not in joy but in fear and awareness of what a Trump win would mean for me personally, for the tattered political system of America, and for our beleaguered planet.

Personally, as a woman of Jewish descent, as a feminist and an eco-feminist at that, I am squarely in the crosshairs of the Trumpist band of haters. Not only that but I married a Mexican, making my sons fair game as well! Yes, I would feel unsafe and threatened in a country that legitimized Trump’s bigotry by making him the leader of the land and commander-in-chief of our oh-so-powerful and oh-so-obedient police and military forces.

Politically, we see Hillary holding the status quo center, standing defiantly with the big banks and the corporations that have been fattening on our sick economy for a long, long time. Trump and Bernie Sanders take their stands in the right and left wings, Trump advocating for deregulation and a survival-of-the-mightiest economy, while Bernie is our modern-day Robin Hood, standing up for the poor and oppressed.

If Bernie had been allowed to finish his race without having his hamstrings cut by the media and the Democratic National Committee, we would have had a much more animated and perhaps even more polarized race. As it is, between the status quo or descending into fascist chaos, well, even many Republicans are going with Hillary, though vowing to tie her up in knots once she wins the White House.

On the planetary level, just check “none of above,” as far as either Trump or Clinton being advocates for the Earth. One will dig, drill and burn—the other will do it even faster and harder. The best we can say for Clinton is that she is a reasonable, rational person; she reads the fine print in policy reports; she is a mediating type who is likely to try to find solutions that please as many people as possible. I can see her pushing the fossil fuel industry to reinvent itself as a clean energy machine, even if I can’t see her standing with water protectors for a photo op.

This election won’t be over when it’s over. If Trump should win, it would send an immediate chill over the land, the gloom of winter shading into the dismal gray of the unhinged fascist capitalism represented by the self-aggrandizing faux-gold chrome of Trump. Remember the palette of the film 1984? That’s what I see coming our way with a Trump win.

If Hillary wins, the Republicans will be united once again through their common hatred of the Clintons, and will stop at nothing to obstruct her presidency.

I am already wondering how it could be legal for the U.S. Senate to refuse to do its job in holding hearings for Supreme Court nominees. Shouldn’t there be a way for the American people to insist that our representatives, whose salaries we pay, do the job we elected them to do?

Whatever happens on Tuesday, life will go on. Next weekend I’ll once again be retreating to the cozy Rookwood Inn to lead a group of women in aligning the personal, political and planetary in their own life stories, through my technique of purposeful memoir. We may linger a bit on the political this time, reflecting on how the political backdrop against which our lives have played out has influenced who we have become.

In fact, politics is more than a backdrop; it’s interwoven into the warp and woof of every minute of our lives. Liberal Americans, the coastal and urban blue types, have long had the privilege of believing that America really stood for “liberty and justice for all.” Our eyes have been steadily opened these past few years, as smartphones and social media have shown us scene after scene of the targeting of the less powerful by the security forces of the elites. Less visible perhaps, but no less damaging is the predatory stranglehold of the finance, chemical, pharmaceutical and military-industrial/fossil fuel complexes on our entire society.

Our immediate task, this week, is to take a strong stand against Trump’s would-be fascist dictatorship by electing Hillary Clinton—the first woman president of the United States!

And then—we need to look hard at the conditions that led to Trump’s insurgency, and start working on the deeper ailments of our society. Why are people so angry and afraid? Why are people so stressed, anxious, unhealthy and unhappy? What can be done to level the playing fields for our young people, eliminating the specter of debt bondage and supporting them as they get a fresh start on the journey of life?

How can we stop trashing our planet and start investing in economies based on renewable energy, permaculture and an awareness of the sacredness of all life? How can we shift our ways of living so that we are united by the solidarity of common purpose, buoyed by energetic hope and optimism in our future?

This past week, I have been reading The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein with my current leadership students. I’ll close with a passage (p. 201) to ponder:

“The best victory, says Sun Tzu, is the one in which the losers don’t realize they have lost. In the old story, we overcome evil and leave our enemies in the dust, wailing and gnashing their teeth. No more. Everyone is coming along for this ride. In the new story, we understand that everyone left behind impoverishes the destination. We see each human being as the possessor of a unique lens upon the world. We wonder, ‘What truth has this man been able to see from his perspective, that is invisible from mine?’”