#i just hate this stupid fucking city and the stupid fucking racist trump supporters here.

[halcionic]

fire is a weapon when wielded by a white man // s.w. — may 30, 2020

the city i live in built it’s bones on land stolen from native americans in 1858 —this city has burned to the ground so many times there’s nothing left to remind people of the history this city was built on: theft and murder and arson. do not forget that.

#spilled ink #writing #poetry #indigenous #for full disclosure i am white so !! if any of this is offensive please tell me so i can correct it! #i just hate this stupid fucking city and the stupid fucking racist trump supporters here. #pretty in prose

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

A Tale of Red States and Blue States

Once upon a time, there was a state.

It was a large state, with vast stretches of country between its world-class cities. It had communities rich in diversity and activism and ideas – and it had a lot of resentful white people who were just plain old rich.

The richest and most resentful white people created a terrible blight they called “modern conservatism.” They set their wicked curse on the state, and then unleashed it on the nation with two Republican presidents – one lamentable, the next even worse.

There were many along the way who sounded the alarm, but there were more who ignored the danger far too long. The spell had summoned a beast. The beast was hideous and stupid. It was no good at anything except being a hateful beast. But the dark spell had done so much damage that being a hateful beast was enough for the beast to win, at least for a time.

In one version of the story, the state is called “California.”

In another, it is called “Texas.”

It’s strange to think of now, with a decade of sneering about the “left coast” and “San Francisco liberals” and blah blah blah baked into political conventional wisdom, but it’s true. The reactionary modern conservatism which held the whip hand on the backlash to the great civil rights advances of the 1960s was born in California. California voted for Richard Nixon six times: once as their senator, twice as Eisenhower’s vice president, and then three times as the Republican presidential nominee. In between those elections, Nixon of course had to win primaries. In 1968, when he was the Republican front-runner, he faced an upstart challenger who wanted to make sure he’d be racist enough to keep conservative southerners in the tent. That person was not a southerner, but the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who would go on to be the next Republican elected after Nixon.

So what the fuck happened? Well, a lot of things, and I don’t want to pretend to do justice to the generations of righteous activism that pushed back against this disastrous regime. Democrats did occasionally win state-wide – notably, California elected two Democratic women to the Senate in 1992 – even though Orange County was practically a metonym for American conservatism right up until the 2018 midterms. But the turning point that seems to have gotten your average voter to turn on the Republican party for good was in 1994. Governor Pete Wilson, a kind of hard-right proto-Trump, threw his weight behind a hateful anti-immigrant ballot initiative. It passed, even though it was so deranged that it never went into effect because a federal court ruled it unconstitutional within days of the vote, because the California electorate really was that conservative. The electorate changed, almost on a dime. Mexican-American voters organized. Their friends and neighbors and fellow citizens realized that sitting back wasn’t an option. And now the Republican Party of California is a fucking joke.

This isn’t, like, the eternal winds of history blowing microscopic chips off the statue of Ozymandias. If you remember the Clinton presidency, this happened in your lifetime. If you’re a little bit younger than that, it happened in your big cousins’ lifetimes.

Part of what makes it hard to see changes like this is that the dim bulbs in our political media see everything through a horse race lens, where who gets one particular W is the only piece of information worth retaining. You win and you’re clever; you lose and you’re a dumb sucker who tried. Who gets power is really important! But if you only care about that, then you miss the really important trends.

Take the Georgia 6th, the district once represented by Newt fucking Gingrich. Its representative joined Trump’s cabinet in early 2017, at least in part because it was such a supposedly safe Republican seat, so there was a special election for his replacement. Traumatized Democrats and Women’s Marchers threw themselves into the steeply uphill campaign of former John Lewis intern Jon Ossoff. When he came up a few points short, our blue-check media betters tried to turn Ossoff into a punch line stand-in for silly #Resistance liberal losers coping with Trump by losing some more, SUCK IT, MOM! but the other, correct, interpretation is that Ossoff only came up a few points short in a district that was supposed to protect the kookiest of right-wing cranks. His campaign had functioned as kind of an ad hoc boot camp for novice organizers, canvassers, and future school board candidates who had previously been too discouraged and disorganized to take this kind of swing, and it showed Democratic party donors that the district was winnable. So when gun safety advocate and Mother of the Movement Lucy McBath stepped up to the plate in the 2018 midterms, her campaign had the infrastructure it needed, and now she’s well-positioned to be reelected because she’s doing a great job. Meanwhile, Ossoff’s organizing chops and the enthusiastic work his supporters did for Rep. McBath are a big part of why he’s in a dead heat against incumbent Republican Senator David Purdue.

That’s why I’m keeping an eye on the South this year. The presidential campaign there is interesting, but the real story is in those network effects. There’s a rising tide that threatens to make the blue wave of 2018 look like a light spring shower if things break the right way. Just look at the Democratic senate candidates. They’re a diverse group: men and women, Black and white, preacher and fighter pilot. Most are relative newcomers to national audiences, but only some of them are young. Jon Ossoff is just 33; when he was in grade school, Mike Espy of Mississippi was Secretary of Agriculture. What they do seem to have in common is that they are having the time of their fucking lives.

Here’s Espy:

Moving and grooving in McComb. pic.twitter.com/RANCRGGpX7

— Mike Espy (@MikeEspyMS)

October 31, 2020

Ossoff:

The people of Georgia are tired of having a spineless, disgraced politician serve as their Senator. pic.twitter.com/OdaYwFKzmz

— Jon Ossoff (@ossoff)

October 30, 2020

Senator Doug Jones of Alabama:

I know you’ve heard us say it before, but when you see this clip, it bears reappearing: This guy really is clueless. https://t.co/w9YOUHegCW

— Doug Jones (@DougJones)

October 22, 2020

Jamie Harrison of South Carolina:

It's debate night and y'all know I'm going to walk it like I talk it. Let's see if @LindseyGrahamSC can do the same. pic.twitter.com/TNABxsaTEO

— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime)

October 30, 2020

And the bad bitch with her eye on the big prize, MJ Hegar of Texas:

It's about time Texans had a senator as tough as we are. https://t.co/8MQ8Tykmyt pic.twitter.com/bgPr5vtgdh

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 16, 2020

Clutch those pearls, John! https://t.co/iWej8MrhtV

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 22, 2020

The spineless bootlicker Hegar is challenging, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, is currently resting his dainty patoot in the seat once held by none other than Lyndon Baines Johnson. As president, LBJ would aggressively push for some of the greatest human rights legislation in American history in pursuit of what he called the Great Society. That meant Medicare and Medicaid. It meant a revolution in environmental protections. It meant PBS. And it meant telling the one-party authoritarian regime in the Jim Crow south that America was done with their bullshit, they were going to have real democracy, they were going to do it now, and if they didn’t like it they could eat his ass.

Johnson was a complicated guy and left a complicated legacy. His project required an unusual leader of courage, conviction, and unmitigated savvy, cut with streaks of megalomania and dubious mental health. No architect but Lyndon Johnson would have built the Great Society, and no place but Texas could have built Lyndon Johnson.

Then again, Texas also gave us the Bushes in the late twentieth century. It gave us a terrorist attack on a Biden campaign bus just this weekend.

That darkness is real. So is the long, grinding slog to turn on the light. Like the GA-06 silliness, Democratic efforts in Texas get laughed at as some quixotic waste of resources by arrogant flops. In fact, the past few years of high-profile statewide elections in Texas have been on a pretty clear trajectory. In 2014, Wendy Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth who captured widespread progressive attention with her heroic filibuster of a 2013 state abortion ban, ran for governor. She lost by the ~20-point margin you’d expect in a year where Republicans everywhere did really well, but it was a vitamin B-12 shot to a perpetually overwhelmed state Democratic party. The 2016 Clinton campaign, when it was (correctly!) on the offensive before FBI Director Comey decided he would really prefer a Trump presidency, invested heavily in its Texas ground game. It was always a long shot, but even after the Comey letter and the Texas-specific sabotage by the Russian Internet Research Agency, Texas Democrats cut Trump’s margin there down to single digits. That is to say, they recruited the volunteers and taught the skills and raised the cash and registered the voters to carry the ball way down the field. And in the 2018 midterms, El Paso representative Beto O’Rourke built on all that energy to fight Senator Ted Cruz to a near draw. O’Rourke didn’t quite make it, but he did help a lot of downballot Democrats over the finish line and forced Republicans to light a few oil drums of cash on fire to save a seat that they had always assumed would be safe.

That growth has been possible because of a ton of hard work and persuasion, but it’s also been possible because there was so much untapped potential. As progressives have argued for years, Texas was less of a “red state” than a non-voting state. I’m not a person that usually has a lot of patience for people not bothering to vote, because the people who get to be loud about that are whiny, privileged assholes who can afford to be flip about the right to vote. But there are a lot of people who find it hard because they absolutely do know the weight and importance of voting, because they or their mothers or their grandfathers were beaten and terrorized to keep them away from the polls. They might make the same mouth-noises as the selfish dilettantes about how it doesn’t matter and they’re all corrupt and blah blah blah. But a vote is a tiny little leap of faith. It’s at least a skip of hope. And it hurts to know the weight and importance of that and to keep feeling that disappointment over and over again.

A key thing that Republicans in the South managed to do for a while, but California Republicans didn’t, was to let their misrule seem almost tolerable day to day. As outrageous as the overall trends were, as catastrophic the results were for a lot of people’s lives, it didn’t necessarily feel entirely irrational for lots of people to avoid the inconvenience and disappointment of trying to stop them. But if you’re just going to be a constant, unwavering shit show of incompetence and evil, infuriating people every waking minute of every fucking day for years on end, they’re not going to be deterred by inconvenience and disappointment. They're not going to be deterred by fucking tear gas. They’re going to understand that it’s worth trying to get rid of you, even if it’s a long shot. They’re going to line up to kick you in the shin just for the hell of it. And that’s exactly what millions of them have already done.

These dumbass motherfuckers radicalized Taylor goddamn Swift!

LOOK WHAT YOU MADE HER DO!

So yeah. People who had given up are fucking voting. Texas has already had hundreds of thousands more people vote than voted in all of 2016. BEFORE ELECTION DAY!

Vice President Biden likes to recite a poem by the great Irish bard Seamus Heaney. It’s about how you have to have faith that a better world is possible, even when you don’t have any rational reason to expect it any time soon, because it’s the only way you’ll be able to seize the most precious of opportunities, when “justice can rise up/ And hope and history rhyme.”

Sometimes hope and history walk into a bar to tell dirty jokes for a bachelorette party in downtown Austin. And they rhyme.

For a hundred and fifty years, unreconstructed revanchist terrorist sympathizers have threatened that “the South will rise again.” They mean the treasonous mobsters who called themselves the Confederacy.

Why do those losers get to define the South? Like, literally, they’re losers. They lost.

There’s another South. The terrorists cut it off at the knees, so it never quite rose the first time. But it’s always been there. The South the heroes of Reconstruction tried to build. The South of the Kennedy Space Station and the Center for Disease Control. The South of the French Quarter of New Orleans and the gay neighborhoods of Atlanta. The South of Barbara Jordan, Ann and Cecile Richards, Stacey Abrams, and the young women of the Virginia state legislature. The South of Maya Angelou, Molly Ivins, and Mark Twain. The South of the exiles of Miami and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The South of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Representative John Lewis. The South of James Earl Carter, William Jefferson Clinton, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Once upon a time, there was a colossus. The richest and most resentful white people feared it, for it was both great and good. So they hunted it mercilessly. They tortured and killed its most vulnerable people. They bound it and silenced it and told the rest of the world it didn’t even exist. But they knew that wicked lie was the best they could do, for something so mighty could never be slain by the likes of them.

The giant grows stronger every day as it struggles against its chains, and those chains are turning to rust. One day soon  - maybe in this decade; maybe this week – it will break free. It will rise. And it will shake the earth. Just you watch.

#2020 election

[johnrossbowie]

LEAVING TWITTER

I wrote this earlier in the fall, before the election, after dissolving my Twitter account. I wasn’t sure where to put it (“try up your ass!” – someone, I’m sure) and then I remembered I have a tumblr I never use. Anyway, here tis.

How do you shame someone who thinks Trumps’ half-baked policies and quarter-baked messaging put him in the pantheon of great Presidents? How do you shame someone so lacking in introspection that they will call Obama arrogant while praising Trump’s decisiveness and yet at the same time vehemently deny that they’re racist? How do you shame someone for whom that racism is endearing and maybe long overdue?

You don’t. It’s silly to think otherwise.

Twitter is an addiction of mine, and true to form, my dependence on it grew more serious after I quit drinking in 2010. At first it was a chance to mouth off, make jokes both stupid and erudite and occasionally stick my foot in my mouth (I owe New Yorker writer Tad Friend an apology. He knows why, or (God willing) he’s forgotten. Either way. Sorry.) I blew off steam, steam that was accumulating without booze to dampen the flames. Not always constructive venting, but I also met new friends, and connected with people whose work I’ve admired for literal decades and ended up seeing plays with Lin-Manuel Miranda and hanging backstage with Jane Wiedlin after a Go-Go’s show and exchanging sober thoughts with Mike Doughty. When my mom passed in 2018, a lot of people reached out to tell me they were thinking of me. This was nice. For a while, Twitter was a huge help when I needed it.

I used to hate going to parties and really hated dancing and mingling, but a couple of drinks would fix that. Point is, for a while, booze was a huge help, too.

But my engagement with Twitter changed, and I started calling people my ‘friends’ even though I’d never once met them or even heard their voices. These weren’t even penpals, these were people whose jokes or stances I enjoyed, so with Arthurian benevolence I clicked on a little heart icon, liked their tweet, and assumed therefore that we had signed some sort of blood oath.

We had not. I got glib, and cheap, and a little lazy. And then to make matters much worse, Trump came along and extended his reach with the medium.

There was a while there where I thought I could be a sort of voice for the voiceless, and I thought I was doing that. I tried very hard to only contribute things that I felt were not being said – It wasn’t accomplishing anything to notice “Haha Trump looks like he’s bullshitting his way through an oral report” – such things were self-evident. I tried to point out very specific inconsistencies in his policies, like the Muslim ban meant to curb terrorism that still favored the country that brought forth 13 of the 9/11 hijackers. Like his full-throated cries against media bias performed while he suckled at Roger Ailes’ wrinkly teat.  Like his fondness for evangelical votes that coincided with a scriptural knowledge that lagged far behind mine, even though I’m a lapsed Episcopalian, and there is no one less religiously observant than a lapsed Episcopalian. But that eventually gave way to unleashing ad hominem attacks against his higher profile supporters, who I felt weren’t being questioned enough, who I felt were in turn being fawned over by theirdim supporters. If you’re one of these guys, and you think I’m talking about you, you’re probably right, but don’t mistake this for an apology. You suck, and you support someone who sucks, and your idolatry is hurting our country and its standing in the world. Fuck you entirely, but that’s not the point. The point is that me screaming into the toilet of Twitter helps no one – it doesn’t help a family stuck at the border because they’re trying to secure a better life for their kids. It doesn’t help a poor teenager who can’t get an abortion because the party of ‘small government’ has squeezed their tiny jurisdiction into her uterus. It doesn’t help the coal miner who’s staking all his hopes on a dying industry and a President’s empty promises to resurrect it. I was born in New York City, and I currently live in Los Angeles. Those are the only two places I’ve ever lived, if you don’t count the 4 years I spent in Ithaca[1]. So, yes, I live in a liberal bubble, and while I’ve driven across the country a couple of times and did a few weeks in a touring band and am as crushed as any heartlander about the demise of Waffle House, you have me dead to rights if you call me a coastal elitist. And with that in mind, I offer few surprises. A guy who grew up in the theater district and was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage or felt you should own an AR-15? THAT would be newsworthy. I am not newsworthy. I can preach to the choir, I can confirm people’s biases, but I will likely not sway anyone who is eager to dismiss a Native New Yorker who lives in Hollywood. I grew up in the New York of the 1970s, and that part of my identity did shape my politics. My mom’s boss was gay and the Son of Sam posed a realistic threat. As such, gays are job creators[2] and guns are used for homicide much more often than they are used for self-defense[3]. I have found this to be generally true over the years, and there’s even data to back it up.

“But Mr. Bowie,” you might say, though I insist you call me John - “those studies are conducted by elitist institutions and those institutions suck!” And again, I am not going to reason with people who will dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their limited world view as elitist or, God Help Us, fake news. But the studies above are peer-reviewed, convincing, and there are more where those came from.

“But John,” you might say, and I am soothed that we’re one a first name basis - “Can’t you just stay on Twitter for the jokes?” Ugh. A) apparently not and B) the jokes are few and far between, and I am 100% part of that problem.

I have stuff to offer, but Twitter is not the place from which to offer it.

After years of academically understanding that Twitter is not the real world, Super Tuesday 2020 made the abstract pretty fucking concrete. If you had looked at my feed on the Monday beforehand – my feed which is admittedly curated towards the left, but not monolithic (Hi, Rich Lowry!) – you’d have felt that a solid Bernie surge was imminent, but also that your candidate was going surprise her more vocal critics. When the Biden sweep swept, when Bernie was diminished and when Warren was defeated, I realized that Twitter is not only not the real world, it’s almost some sort of Phillip K. Dickian alternate timeline, untethered to anything we’re actually experiencing in our day to day life. This is both good news and bad news – one, we’re not heading towards a utopia of single payer health care and the eradication of American medical debt any time soon, but two, we’re also not being increasingly governed by diaper-clad jungen like Charlie Kirk. Clouds and their linings. Leaving Twitter may look like ceding ground to the assclowns but get this – the ground. Is not. There.

It’s just air.

There are tangible things I can do with my time - volunteer with a local organization called Food On Foot, who provide food and job training for people experiencing homelessness here in my adopted Los Angeles. I can give money to candidates and causes I support, and I can occasionally even drop by social media to boost a project or an issue and then vanish, like a sort of Caucasian Zorro who doesn’t read his mentions. I can also model good behavior for my kids (ages 10 and 13) who don’t need to see their father glued to his phone, arguing about Trumps incompetence with Constitutional scholars who have a misspelled Bible verse in their bio (three s’ in Ecclesiastes, folks).

So farewell Twitter. I’ll miss a lot of you. Perhaps not as badly as I miss Simon Maloy and Roger Ebert and Harris Wittels and others whose deaths created an unfillable void on the platform. But I won’t miss the yelling, and the lionization of poor grammar, and anonymous trolls telling my Jewish friends that they were gonna leave the country “via chimney.” I will not miss people who think Trump is a stable genius calling me a “fucktard.” I will not miss transphobia or cancelling but I will miss hashtag games, particularly my stellar work during #mypunkmusical (Probably should have quit after that surge, I was on fire that night, real blaze of glory stuff I mean, Christ, Sunday in the Park with the Germs? Husker Du I Hear A Waltz? Fiddler on the Roof (keeping an eye out for the cops)? These are Pulitzer contenders.). Twitter makes me feel lousy, even when I’m right, and I’m often right. There’s just no point in barking bumperstickers at each other, and there are people who are speaking truth to power and doing a cleaner job of it – Aaron Rupar, Steven Pasquale, Louise Mensch, Imani Gandy and Ijeoma Oluo to name five solid mostly politically based accounts (Yes, Pasquale is a Broadway tenor. He’s also a tenacious lefty with good points and research and a dreamy voice. You think you’re straight and then you hear him sing anything from Bridges of Madison County and you want him to spoon you.). You’re probably already following those mentioned, but on the off chance you’re not, get to it. You’ll thank me, but you won’t be able to unless you actually have my email.

_______

[1] And Jesus, that’s worse – Ithaca is such a lefty enclave that they had an actual socialist mayor FOR WHOM I VOTED while I was there. And not socialist the way some people think all Democrats are socialist – I mean Ben Nichols actually ran on the socialist ticket and was re-elected twice for a total of six years.

[2] The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, “America’s LGBT Economy” Jan 20th, 2017

[3] The Violence Policy Institute, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use, July 2019.

[bustedbernie]

Oh hai. Lately there have been a slew of think pieces about Bernie Sanders being the front-runner, discussing how his movement has threatened to withhold their votes from Democrats if Bernie isn’t the nominee. Hidden between the lines is the idea that Democrats, in general, owe their votes to Sanders if he is the nominee, regardless of the fact that his voters do NOT owe Dems their votes if he is not. So, rather than call them out for using the same tactics that lost the 2016 election, there is a faction in the media that is growing more and more permissive to the idea that Bernie and his Revolution are somehow the victims in all this, and that mainstream Dems have done them wrong time and time again when picking a candidate that appeals to the Dems masses.

Let me let you in on a little secret.

I don’t owe Bernie Sanders or his fucked off revolution of stanerific emo-marxist cyber-terrorists a goddamn bit of shit the fuck all. When these utter fucking geniuses in the media reflect on how energized and dedicated his enthusiastic fans are when engaging in their harassment of the average Dem, they seem to think the people who have been abused don’t fucking matter. These Dems are people who have never done anything whatsoever to deserve the constant bullying, cyber-stalking, targeting, threats, or in my case, being falsely reported to the FBI by fans of Bernie who seek to silence dissent. What these media personalities don’t understand is that the abuse by Bernie fans, in his name, actually causes the gap between MAGA and Berners to shrink to the point where it is non-existent. There is no real difference between the abuse from either side, and since Sanders isn’t the warm and fuzzy type that reaches out to the people who have been abused, often there appears to be no real difference between Sanders and Trump.

Slate:

Still, the Bernie-or-Busters, small as they may be, have spun their position into an argument for why others should vote for Bernie Sanders too, regardless of the platform they prefer. As efforts in political persuasion go, this contingent puts forward an openly hostile argument. Sanders is the only electable candidate, they suggest, not just because of his policies, but because of the single-mindedness of his followers. The reason you should vote for Sanders is that we won’t vote for anyone else. You don’t want Trump to win again, do you?

No. But I also don’t want Bernie Sanders to win. In a case of one not liking either candidate, people look to see which movement they feel most comfortable with, Bernie’s or Trump’s. If it turns out that both movements engage in racist behavior, sexism, and homophobia, it really doesn’t matter what they profess to be in favor of as far as policy is concerned, what matters is how they treat their fellow citizens by and large. We all know that unless we take back the Senate with a large majority that can defeat Republican attempts to stop legislation from hitting Sanders’ desk, nothing will pass anyway. So, if you’re not in favor of Bernie’s policies in the first place, and do not like him or his movement, why would you be enthusiastic about showing up for the guy who leads the movement that engages in attacks on you?

Yes, it sounds like ugly hostage taking—not a brilliant persuasive strategy but a crude ego-boosting exercise for a group of leftists who can’t resist the impulse to lord some power over an electorate that doesn’t normally consider them relevant. But that’s exactly what makes it so normal, even understandable, in a depressing “we’re all human” sort of way. [NO.] Because the truth is this: Every threat these Sanders stans are explicitly making is one the venerated Centrist Swing Voter makes implicitly—and isn’t judged for. The centrist never even has to articulate his threat.

Excuse me, it IS ugly hostage taking, it is NOT normal, and no, it doesn’t make me see them as more human.

Another thing is this: not everyone opposed to Bernie Sanders is a Centrist, Moderate, or a Swing voter. Many of us are as far left or to the left of Sanders, I for one am definately to his left, and had supported him in 2015. That was until his racist abusive Bern Mafia targeted me for expressing concern about his lack of outreach to black voters. I noticed his lack of history in hiring black people (D.C. is Chocolate City, we could not find one black staffer in 2015; I am open to correction on this point; if he had black staffers prior to 2015, please send me receipts because I have been looking for them.), lamented and mocked his poor showing at Netroots, fumed over his constant MLK appropriation, jeered at his white ass crowds, and felt humiliated by his inability to discuss black people in ways that were not centered on Poverty or Prisons. It is HIS FAULT that his voters have no clue how to engage Black people without resorting to stereotypes and outright bigotry, because he does the same thing.

Buzzfeed:

Sanders, seated across the table, a yellow legal pad at hand, responded with a question of his own, according to two people present: “Aren’t most of the people who sell the drugs African American?” The candidate, whose aides froze in the moment, was quickly rebuffed: The answer, the activists told him, was no. Even confronted with figures and data to the contrary, Sanders appeared to have still struggled to grasp that he had made an error, the two people present said.

No. He did not apologize for spreading this stereotype, and yes, it shows how he views black people in general.

Slate:

One of many disorienting factors in this election cycle is the fact that the left is more popular and more viable than it has been in a long, long time. They have not one but two exciting candidates, and both are offering policies closer to what leftists actually want than most presidential contenders in U.S. history have.

I wanted the party to move to the Left towards the direction of where I stood too. I can’t really name my ideology because it’s so far left I am almost hitting the wall. Additionally, I am more Libertarian than Sanders, who trends more authoritarian. Yet, I instinctively know that playing a game of “my way or the highway” won’t lead to a place where poverty programs are expanded up and out, ensuring all necessities of life are provided. It will lead to gridlock and we will make zero progress.

Because folks at the center tend to be wooed by multiple candidates, they’re used to having options, and they’re used to the experience of their vote determining who ends up with the nomination. This means that they usually like the candidate they vote for, in the primary and in the general. Not so for leftists, who get to merely tolerate the candidates they end up having to vote for in order to mitigate the damage from a worse result.

Here’s the rub… I’m Black. None of this shit applies to me, because as a Black person, I rarely even LIKE or TRUST any of the candidates I have been voting for over the years. I also usually, especially in State and Locally, don’t have any say so in determining the nominee of any race. I am always stuck voting for whoever White People choose as the candidate, and as such, am merely tolerating whoever is chosen to prevent a worse outcome, which usually means preventing a racist shitmonger from winning a race.

Speaking of race… Progressives refuse to address race as a factor in anything; they like to ignore race in everything they do and allow Prison Policy to stand in for Racial Policy, so it’s impossible to get them to see my reality. They get this shit from Bernie.

From Buzzfeed:

“The real issue is not whether you’re black or white, whether you’re a woman or a man,” he said in a 1988 interview. “The real issue is whose side are you on? Are you on the side of workers and poor people or are you on the side of big money and the corporations?”

Not much has changed with Bernie, as you know, Bernie never changes, because he was born as a 72 year old yelly man, just like Benjamin Button, but louder and not as cute.

“It’s not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry,” the Vermont independent senator and former Democratic presidential candidate said in a not-so-subtle rebuke to Hillary Clinton”

Bernie’s attacks on Identity Politics filtered down to his base, causing them to feel confident in their attacks on Blacks, LGBTQ, and Women who brought up issues of race, sexuality, and gender over the past few years. They love to say shit to black people online that they would never say to an actual Black person IN PERSON, because they are scared as fuck of Black people. Kinda like Bernie. The refrain of “that’s identity politics, not real policy’ rang out constantly on social media the past few years to the point where pointing out racism, homophobia, and sexism was met with swarms of white men attacking Black people, All Women Who Dared To Be THAT Bitch, LGBTQ, and really, anyone worried about social justice issues that focused on identity. The attacks were and ARE bigoted in the extreme.

This is racist as fuck and is one of the ways the Bernie Titty-Babies managed to marginalize Kamala Harris and drive a wedge between her and Black Voters. Somehow they thought keeping it going would make us like dusty ass Bernie more, but they’re stupid, because we don’t even like that geriatric Bernadook now.

This is homophobic.

Bernie’s supporters are engaging in a hate campaign against Mayor Pete and are trying to convince the world that they are not being homophobic, they are just saying Pete is suppressing his dangerous serial killer nature by being so straight laced. This is fucked up because they are attacking a gay man for being “straight appearing” in spite of the fact that his seeming straightness is how he interacts with a world that hates gay people, and has at times (and Still Does) MURDERED men and women who are gay for not assimilating or conforming to hetero-normative stereotypes. Bernie ignores this behavior from his fans like he ignores all of their nasty hate campaigns. I blame him.

This is misogynistic. No explanation needed.

Racist and fat shaming. Black hair is not your fucking business, bitch. Back the fuck up.

This is just blatantly false and caused people to harass Kamala Harris supporters until they stopped using the Yellow Circles she asked supporters to wear, it stems from the misogynoir his fans engaged in towards Kamala. Bernie has never said shit, so I blame him.

Bigotry. Also erasure of Biden’s Black support in a effort to make it seem as if Bernie is the candidate of diversity. Bernie is at fault, he also erases minorities.

Sexist. Also, damn near all of his fans seem to hate Obama on the same level and with as much heat as MAGA. Why the fuck would we want to join in unity with this man when his fans HATE the first black President. Oh, you think Bernie has nothing to do with setting the tone?

“The business model, if you like, of the Democratic Party for the last 15 years or so has been a failure,” Sanders started, responding to a question about the young voters who supported his campaign. “People sometimes don’t see that because there was a charismatic individual named Barack Obama, who won the presidency in 2008 and 2012.

“He was obviously an extraordinary candidate, brilliant guy. But behind that reality, over the last 10 years, Democrats have lost about 1,000 seats in state legislatures all across this country.”

Bernie doesn’t fucking like Obama either.

Sexism. Racism. Bernie does the worst with Black Women, and is often dismissive when asked a question by one of us. So, his fans see nothing to lose by targeting us in particular, and we in turn are likely the largest group of people willing to sit this one out if Bernie manages to come out on top. The media is no help whatsoever to marginalized people, because they ultimately weave a narrative where Bernie comes out the victim.

We can already see it happening amongst the Children of the Bern, where they have taken to labeling K-Hive, a movement started by a Black Woman (Me) for a Black Woman (Kamala Harris), “Liberal ISIS” for our resistance to Bernie and willingness to defend the other candidates from the attacks levied by the Berner Swarm.

Oh, cry me a fucking river! We don’t dox, cyberstalk, harass, abuse, try to get people fired, engage in bigotry, we learn from our mistakes, and we never make it our mission to ruin someone’s life.

We simply turn the tables on the bros and ask tough questions, like Kamala Harris. If that breaks you down, you were already broken before you found us. Oh, yeah. That’s another thing. We don’t go looking for Berners to abuse; we wait until they come to abuse US and refuse to play along.

Regardless of what poor Peter Daou says, there is no “Unadulterated Hatred” in asking if someone has checked on him.

So, yes, I can blame Bernie for the nastiness of his movement and choose not to ever join it no matter what. Progressives love to play forever victims, even while they engage in their vile abuse, but I do not have to empower their movement or help them elect Bernie. Maybe if enough people sound the alarm and let him know we will not be helping him in November while suffering constantly at the hands of his Branch Bernidians, then he will have no choice but to be a leader and fucking lead these assholes into being decent people. I don’t expect the abuse to magically end if Bernie becomes President or loses to Trump, and I also don’t expect him to do shit about it, so I guess I’m just Never Bernie. What I am now stuck with is the same as always; White States get to vote first and create the narrative that Dem voters are in favor of whoever these powerful white voters choose, and I am sick of it and sick of Sanders. I didn’t become a Democrat to not only be marginalized by the White Moderate, but to also suffer abuse from the punk ass White leftist bitchmade humdinger of a Revolution. I’m not here to empower shitfucks that search me out no matter where I am just to heap abuse on me, threaten me, or report me to the FBI as a possible MASS SHOOTER, all because I think Bernie is an old bigot who minimizes Black oppression to appease the white voters he thinks he’ll need to win the General.

I’m just Never Bernie, deal with it or die mad about it. I don’t care which.

#neverbernie #bernie #berniesanders #bernie sanders #berniebros #bernie bros #notmeus #feelthebern #long post #longpost #faq

[dazedinaphase]

Rant

I love it when people imply that my white (power, privilege, catering world, you pick) hating, black ass, living in one of the most racist ass cities in America (Ferguson adjacent), is a fascist and unwitting, or intentional, trump supporter over something as minor as an, at times, inconsistently written, fictional show, the tptb really thinks is making some grand political statement. A show whose first season is riddled with a bunch of poorly conceived and problematic plot points, and clearly valued shock value over consistent storytelling, and not some throw away neo-liberal trump reference/critique with little substance behind it whatsoever. I voted for the other one, fyi. And I hated that woman. That shit hurtttt.

But, you know, go off lol. I really hope that the people making these posts are not white (or even non-black), because, damn. The irony of that would be astounding. Lol

They and the pretentious ass people that run that show are really out here making asinine statements about people’s real life morals and ideals over a show that’s not nearly as well written as they think it is? The cognitive dissonance is real.

I just woke up after a long ass night and am feeling irritable and catty. Just needed to get this off my chest lol

#uss archangels #uss archangel

[soundsosweeet]

okay so this is just a rant and i’m posting here bc the least amount of people know about my account lol so feel free to skip (it’s more for myself anyway bc it’s so hard for me to discuss with other people since my sister is home all the time)

so i guess this all started this summer (well not technically but that’s when things started to actually happen)... we have a family groupchat on imessage with me, my sister, and laura’s (my sister’s partner) family (laura is white and so is her immediate family...) and this past spring it was brought to the gc’s attention by my sister that people were basically stocking up on guns and ammo as a response to covid by trump supporters bc he called it the china virus. laura’s dad, of course, who tries to avoid conflict at all costs, tries to change the subject to be more lighthearted and one of his other children, laura’s younger sister notices this and acknowledges it in the gc. later on that morning, my sister made a very important observation and brought it to the gc. i have pointed out before that 3 out of 5 children in this family are with asian people to laura and she expressed that the thought didn’t even cross her mind. the other two siblings are 1) not in a relationship and 2) with another white person. anyway, how do you not notice something like this?? something so blatantly obvious. and it’s not like they all JUST got with these people. they’ve been together and/or married for YEARS.... anyway my sister basically said all of this in the gc, and pointing out how laura’s dad was trying to deflect and change the subject. she pointed out how it must be easier for them to not talk about racism, esp towards asian people. laura kinda backed her up but of course, the bare minimum support. she never says anything to her family esp her parents about anything serious ever. unless my sister points it out to her bc laura is just so oblivious. they’ve been together for what like 17 years and my sister only started to speak up about her negative experiences with laura’s parents a few years ago but she has had to endure racist comments a lot over the years. she has told me this and has expressed her frustration to me about laura and her family. i think she started to talk to me about this bc she knew that i’d understand and she wanted me to help her put these things that she was feeling and experiencing into words that would help laura and her family (mostly her parents) understand what they’ve been saying to her these past several years at times were very offensive. going back to the story in the gc, laura’s younger sister backed up their father and was basically trying to say that he wasn’t trying to go against my sister at all, he was just trying to avoid the subject bc of very stupid reasons in my opinion, she said her father was trying to “steer the conversation away from stockpiling ammunition and general doomsday predictions. This is undeniably bringing out the worst in humanity, but we as a family don’t need to be feeding each others’ fears about it.” like okay.... i’m sorry you’re uncomfortable???? but my sister is right. they never talk about these things (as expressed by laura after having to be asked by my sister) and they need to. it’s long overdue. this was the first part of laura’s sister’s message to the gc in response to my sister, before what she said about steering the convo away from the guns and ammo: “We’re all frustrated right now and it is boiling over. Racism is unjust and sometimes fatal and  it’s absolutely justified to be mad as hell about all of this. And you’re right that sometimes we all avoid the topic of race and racism because we can’t find the right words to skillfully address them or we just don’t try hard enough to. I’m very saddened to hear that on top of everything else, some people are having to fear racially motivated backlash right now and in general.” i really don’t think they’ll understand or ever truly try to understand.. they don’t even want to talk about it!! that’s where my other frustration comes in. with laura. i get that in her own way she’s been trying to help my sister and get her family to talk about all of this but in my eyes, it’s not enough. my sister always raves about how laura is this nice, caring, and understanding person. but i feel like that only is true for things that are directly related to her, or things that are only within her comfort zone. and this kind of conversation, esp with her family, outside of her parents, is outside of her comfort zone. she has also expressed that doing these kinds of things (like having serious conversations) brings her great anxiety which is understandable, but in my eyes, she is using her anxiety as an excuse rather than an explanation. idk if that makes any sense but in other words, i feel that she is using the anxiety that this situation brings her as an excuse not to talk about it or have the least amount of involvement in it. but my sister believes that she is the key to open up the conversation that needs to be had, with her family. i think my sister is right. look how quickly they shot my sister down. they’re not going to listen to her. but they will listen to their beloved daughter. so she needs to create that bridge. and she says that she is trying and i guess she is but i feel like again, it’s bare minimum, if that really. anyway after that comment by laura’s sister, my sister left the gc and the convo in the gc was normal by the next day. same old lighthearted photos and comments and white people humor that i never seem to understand. and just recently, laura’s dad added my sister back to the family gc like WHAT LMAO. i just don’t get it. i mean i guess i do bc to them it doesn’t directly affect them, so they don’t care as much but fuck dude, like this family’s shit!!!! i hate it here lol. 

related but also different story, time, place, etc. so we’ve been living in this house for about 6 months now. this city, as big and diverse as it is, we i guess got stuck around literal trump supporters lol like just my luck really. how do we know that?? well when i look at all the wifi networks, “Trump 2020″ comes up as an option. and it is still there even though he lost. anyway. another example, well idk if they’re trump supporters but i’m making an educated guess bc our neighbors across the way have this huge lit up US flag. like it’s the US flag made up of lights and they turn it on every evening since we got here.... in september. idk how long they had it up before we moved in but man, it’s literally been up and lit every night since we moved in in september like ???? i thought they would take it down after christmas like bc it would make sense, bc they were gonna take down their christmas lights anyway but nope. they took everything else down but the flag!!!! not our whole neighborhood is like that though, or it doesn’t seem to be. you know those yard signs (i know this is bare minimum too but it kinda gives me hope after the whole wifi and flag thing) that are like “love is love, black lives matter” and all that?? omg i found it, it’s this:

anyway so i see these around too, in addition to american flags and shit. but i was walking my dog one day in broad daylight, i think it was like around 3pm. i was on my own street like on the way home, and i had just crossed the street bc we live on a main street i guess and there are a lot of side streets, so i was just crossing one of the side streets but still stayed on the same side and everything. this car pulls up to the stop sign that i just passed, and by back is facing them, and this guy that sounds about my age like early twenties maybe a bit older was like “HEY LADY WHY ARE YOU WALKING YOUR DINNER. WHY IS THE DOG EATER WALKING HER DOG. WHY ARE YOU WALKING YOUR MEAL.” and just a bunch of variations of essentially the same thing. i know they were trying to get me to turn around when they just kept on going, repeating basically the same phrase. the guy even yelled at me to turn around but i didn’t. the whole time i was looking forward and just kept walking. i also believe he was in the passenger seat but that’s just the way the car was facing like the passenger seat would’ve been the closest to me. i think i heard whoever was in the driver’s seat like chuckling after the guy’s first sentence. i was so scared. i was so scared they were gonna follow me home. i was almost home like i was already on my street!! luckily they didn’t follow me home, and they turned left after they were done harassing me. if they turned right though, then i would’ve been even more scared that they would stop the car and try to hurt me. this old guy who was in front of his house heard everything that happened though and i think saw the guy who was yelling at me and the car that they were in. as i was passing his house, he asked me if i was okay, and of course i lied and said “yes i’m okay, thank you” and kept walking. what else was i supposed to do. idk. i rushed home after that though. this car even drove by me and stopped just ahead of me and i thought they came back but i think they were just lost bc as i was approaching the car, they drove off, probably looking at directions or something. so how this is related to what i was talking about at first... laura told her family about this. her parents and her younger sister (the one that defended her dad earlier). all they had to say was “i’m sorry that happened to you” essentially. like i grocery shop for her parents bc they’re old and you know less exposure and i don’t mind it at all, but anyway when i was dropping the groceries off at their house, laura’s mom asked if i could talk for a minute on the porch and i said yes and she was basically like “laura told me about what happened to you last week” and i was just like “oh” bc i knew that laura told them but i wasn’t expecting either of her parents to actually talk to me about it bc ya know like they always try to avoid talking about serious shit. but she was like “i’m so sorry that happened to you. that’s horrible. there’s still terrible, incredibly racist people out there.” and i was like yeah bro i know in my head lol like ???? there have been many incidents recently that are much worse than mine surrounding asian people esp the elderly, and she never mentioned any of that. just what happened to me. idk it just bothers me that they only really “care” when something happens. i mean they never actually do anything after the fact but they only say shit like that or wanna talk about it when something bad happens to me?? fucked up.

also just some other problems i have with laura (i’m copy/pasting from my notes app lol and adding stuff to it if i feel like it needs more context or whatever):

(i guess this is more about my sister and laura’s relationship and not just laura...) how do express that i’m not part of their relationship. ofc i wanna help my sister bc i know she has a hard time explaining these kinds of things bc she’s explicitly told me and bc i know she’s had to keep quiet or felt like she’s needed to keep quiet for a long time but i’m not part of their relationship. i shouldn’t have to be this person in the middle trying to relay what my sister is feeling to laura so that it’s clear and easy to understand for her white ass fucking brain. bc also the truth is that laura should already know. she’s only ever been with women of color that i know of and i know she’s not oblivious about the history this country has with people of color. she must know something at least but when it comes to her family making weird remarks about asians, she either doesn’t catch it or doesn’t defend my sister. only recently has my sister been comfortable telling laura that these things happen, that she feels uncomfortable with some of the things laura’s parents say whether they’re directed at her or not. and my sister even left the family groupchat bc she tried to say something to the whole family specifically something laura’s dad said about asians being targeted for “causing covid” (not just her parents but the extended family, two of her siblings are also with asian people) but got a negative response (from her dad and her sister) and so she felt the need to leave. they’ve been together for so long like 17 years?? and all of this is just being addressed now but my sister feels that laura isn’t doing enough to make her parents understand the things that my sister has gone through throughout her life and the racism she’s faced and now the heightened amount of racism other asian people are facing. and she’s also scared bc she’s not straight, obviously she’s with laura but laura’s white. and ofc she’s not straight either but she’s still white and that will always come first bc it’s what people are able to see. so when my sister is “being paranoid” about the people who live around us finding out about them because laura’s parents want to give them my sister and laura’s info just in case something happens, laura can’t quite explain my sister’s reasoning to her parents the way that she wants her too. she thinks that laura is sugarcoating these things for them and she doesn’t know why - does she think they won’t understand?? is she just protecting them?? who tf knows. but my sister knows for sure that if they aren’t told straight up why my sister is so scared, then they’ll never understand and they’ll keep trying to do things like this. and ofc i get why my sister is scared, ofc i don’t fully understand but i can imagine why. 

also i just believe that laura is ignorant (and chooses to be). which really sucks, again bc from what i know she has only been with women of color, her ex and my sister. at least those are the only two relationships that i’ve heard of. but i know she also graduated undergrad with a degree in sociology. i know times have changed and that she might not have learned all of the things that i have learned in my sociology classes but fuck man. she’s really gonna limit herself to learning about these things in a classroom esp when we already know our education is targeted towards and favors white people (esp back then, like early 2000s)?? yikes. i don’t understand how one who is not only with someone esp for this long but also got a degree in this kind of stuff just isn’t interested in keeping themselves informed and educated. like just bc you’re with a person of color doesn’t just give you this pass or all the knowledge that you need to know bc guess what, my sister doesn’t even understand all the things that we do (like at this summer, at the peak of the blm protests, my sister asked me “what about asians, why aren’t people talking about how asian people have suffered during the pandemic”). but i know my sister is at least kinda trying. she reads things every day to keep herself informed and also attends virtual discussions. laura does not. my sister has even told me. she works and that’s it. and she says that she understands that laura has anxiety and that these sorts of topics make her really anxious. but i think she’s just scared. i mean i don’t want to undermine her anxiety at all. that’s not what i’m trying to do. i just think that she’s using it more as an excuse rather than like an explanation, if that makes any sense. i just don’t know what to do bc this really frustrates me. and i feel a lot of pressure bc my sister has no one else to talk about it with. and i obviously want to help her and she talks to me bc she knows that i know these things and can help her put these things into words for her so that she can explain everything to laura. but laura gets reeeeeally defensive. and that’s also really annoying. she just shuts down and closes herself off. bc it’s like she doesn’t even try to understand and that’s what i don’t understand about her and this whole thing about her being “nice” and supportive or whatever. this is what my sister has told me and my cousins. that laura is the nicest person in the world. and she’s the one who has told me many times that “anyone can be nice.” and i’m not saying that laura isn’t nice, bc i think she is but i still think that she keeps that kindness and generosity and caring/compassion within her own circle. like she doesn’t necessarily try to do anything for people that aren’t directly within her circle of things she cares about or directly relates to her. she will only donate to organizations that she has a connection to but not the ones that don’t necessarily relate to her like literally anything that involved black people this summer. it didn’t even seem like a possibility to her. it just angers me so much that she’s painted as this really nice, caring person but she doesn’t even care enough to really understand her own partner’s struggles and stand up to her parents for her when she needs her to without being asked. i know it takes time to notice these things especially as a white person bc it’s not really stuff they’re used to noticing or whatever but shit. it’s the least she can do. really. like it’s about time. 

and an update from the present bc the points i made above were from january (right after the incident walking my dog). laura has a new position now at work. she’s the temp assistant nurse manager bc someone left so they asked her to take on the position. she’s only temp bc she technically could be the permanent one but she doesn’t want to do it since they apparently don’t do as much hands-on patient stuff and that’s what she likes to do i guess. it’s more paperwork i believe than she’s used to with her regular position. anyway, before she took on this new position, my sister told me she talked to laura about how even before, she didn’t really help around the house at all. like she’d come home after work and just sleep or dick around. meanwhile, my sister also works all day, cooks, cleans/does laundry (for the house but also her own AND laura’s which i’ve told her more than once is ridiculous.. that she does laura’s laundry), does grocery shopping, etc. like basically everything else, in addition to me, bc i also do a lot of stuff around the house. i also cook, i clean, and i take care of the dog, and go grocery shopping w my sister too sometimes. but the only thing laura really does (and she doesn’t even do it anymore since she started with this new position) was walk the dog. truthfully, i haven’t had the courage to go out again by myself to walk the dog since that happened to me. and i feel like i eventually will but idk. so my sister basically told her if you take this position, you need to promise me you’re gonna try even harder to help me/us around the house. bc her shift time has also switched like instead of coming home around 8pm, she now gets home around 3pm, so much more daylight and time in general to be helping around the house. but guess what. nothing has changed. i haven’t spoken to my sister about it or how she feels, whether or not she thinks that laura is getting better about helping around the house but at least imo, nothing has changed. if anything she sleeps more bc she gets up so early for work now so she naps when she gets home, and nothing gets done bc she has such a hard time getting up after she takes a nap. annoying. 

and an addition to what i was saying about how laura completely shuts down when we talk about her and her family, like how they don’t do shit about anything: when we were talking a couple weeks ago about what happened last spring in the family group chat, laura said that she had texted her sister about the situation to get her honest opinion about what happened and ask her why she responded in the way that she did (defending their dad). my sister and i kept asking laura to tell us exactly how their convo went. and she would look at her phone and tell us pieces. i could tell she was leaving stuff out bc while she was looking at her phone, she’d pause and not say anything, as if she was reading and not tell us bc it would upset us, and then continue on a couple seconds later about the stuff she thought was okay to say. she just didn’t want us to shit on her sister. i could feel it. i even asked her if i could just read the text convo rather than her “reading” it to us, bc she wasn’t actually reading everything and i thought it would be easier than her trying to explain everything they had already talked about. she hesitated then said no, she didn’t want me to read. my sister asked why and she just stayed silent. laura always says that she says to her family and feels that she “just wants to open up a conversation.” okay then what is this?? she’s not even telling us everything!! my sister asked her again why she doesn’t want us to read the texts. she asks “are you afraid we’ll get mad at her (her sister)??” and laura replies yes. my sister says why?? give us a summary of what she said if you don’t wanna read word for word. laura says her sister is just defending their dad and is angry towards my sister, targeting her anger towards my sister bc of what she said in the gc. laura’s sister feels that my sister was specifically targeting her anger at their dad at the time and she was still mad about that. do you see what i’m saying?? this family is fucked. laura does not want to open up a conversation from what i’m seeing. when we’re against her and her family, she doesn’t wanna talk. if we wanna talk generally about racism and homophobia, she’s okay with it. how can you say you wanna “open up a conversation” and not converse or only talk about the stuff that isn’t as difficult to talk about???? but my sister tried to get laura to tell us more by adding that if she told us, we could help her formulate a response she can send to her sister to help her understand where my sister was coming from. laura still refused to tell us. and i still haven’t seen those texts yet and i don’t think i ever will. and i don’t think laura will even talk to us about their conversations anymore. she’s too scared. and that’s all i can think of rn lol. i might update this later but yeah..

#mine

[theliterateape]

Now Is the Time to Be Gracious and Get to Work Being Honest with Ourselves

by Don Hall

Whew.

We squeaked by with that one despite Biden/Harris winning more votes than any other ticket in history. Donald Trump also won the second most votes than any other candidate in history. In more ways than a few this shit was historic.

As obvious the road is all uphill, I’ll admit to bawling like a child when it hit me that we were rid of Trump and that it was Joe Biden and Kamala Harris taking the reigns. Tears of joy, of relief, of optimism paying off.

Still the Left lost some of the House and might take the Senate but this was not the election we were promised. As I wrote last week, the will of the people has been cast and we are almost 50/50 in worldview here, gang. Bitter as it is to swallow, nearly half the country does not buy the progressive vision. This isn’t just the South. This isn’t just cities vs rural areas.

Trump received the largest percentage of non-white votes of any other conservative candidate — you guessed it — in history. Pretty much debunks the monolithic viewpoint that Trump supporters are all white supremicists, huh?

I’ve heard squawk that Biden won because of black voters. And progressive voters. And young voters. Horseshit. How typical, the jockeying for credit in something historic. The credit goes to a vast multicultural liberal numbers not one demographic category. Forty-five million independent voters (neither affiliated with Blue or Red) voted this year. That’s historic, too. Biden won because of people not in line with either party or ideology. Biden won because so many of us hated Trump.

At this phase, Trump ain’t going quietly. Lots of lawsuits. Recounts. Tantrums. Conspiracy theories. We now get to witness the full madness of our King George, a meltdown so massive it would be good to take serious note of how badly we can get things wrong in our democracy. One fact we need to acknowledge before our nipples get hard and we go running in the streets naked, flogging MAGA hat wearers with our engorged cocks:

If it hadn’t been for a pandemic, he would’ve won.

No. It wasn’t the woke message of the victim classes that sealed this win for us. It wasn’t the democratic socialists dressed in black fighting against fascism. It wasn’t the fat, black lesbian instructing white people that they are all racist that brought out the vote for Blue. It wasn’t the Bernie Bots raging against the one percent. It wasn’t the cultmind of the white fragility hucksters and anti-racism grifters that thwarted the horrible man.

It was a virus that he handled like a demented, angry man who truly believed that only the weak get sick.

We did not defeat Trump. He defeated himself. The man has been accused of multiple rapes, tax fraud, and was impeached by the House of Representatives and skated right on past it all but his inept refusal to humble himself to an act of savage nature was his undoing.

Despite his bumbling incompetence in the face of Coronavirus, seventy million people voted for him. Are you so arrogant and morally vacuous to label seventy million people racists monsters? Are you that stupid?

There will be months of justifying why half the country disagrees with the Left in terms of governance. It wasn’t half. We won by five million votes. It was beyond decisive. There will be thinkpieces in Medium claiming that Hispanics are full of white adjacents and that we should round up all the Trump Enablers and have them shunned and shamed (in between essays about how difficult it is to be black in an Ivy League university and how that guy who ghosted her was actually proliferating a rape of feels). Yes. There will be plenty said and absolutely no self reflection.

We (and I use ‘we’ to signify a collective encompassing all of us who value the ideals of a liberal democracy comprising seventy-five million citizens who voted Blue) fucking blew some serious stuff on this one.

What do we know?

Neither Bernie nor Warren would’ve won (even in the razor thin margins that Biden did).

That the loss in 2016 may have been less about Hillary Clinton or her campaign and more about this fifty/fifty split in worldview.

That Hispanics are not a monolithic voting bloc of similar ideologies. Neither are blacks. Or Asians. Or whites.

That race polarization is far less important than class stratification.

That “Defund the Police” is a shit slogan. And a worse strategy.

That seventy million of our countrymen and women would rather have a piece of shit like Donald Trump in charge than hand things over to the humorless cult members of the Woke.

That calling seventy million people racists didn’t somehow convince them that they were and cause the scales to fall from their eyes.

Most people find some humility when they lose. In 2016, we found none. It was sexism! It was racism! It was that we fucked Bernie out of the nomination! This week we won but we won small. We won because of a natural disaster not because of the strength of our ideas or the compassion for our fellow citizens or for our brilliant communications skills (which is a surprise as so many liberals have degrees in marketing and communication).

We won. And we need some goddamned humility for not beating a hopeless incompetent and morally bereft turd like Donald Trump with a repudiation only seen by the light of damnation and hellfire. We won but just barely given the brazen horror of the man (and, no, you don’t take down a dictator by voting meaning as awful and embarrassing as the man was and is, he was and is definitely not a dictator). In any other reality (except for a Black Mirror episode) we should have beaten him so badly that he, Giuliani, and McConnell changed their names and became dentists in Brazil.

We won but we lost.

I’m thrilled to be rid of Trump although we are not rid of the reality that his stances on immigration, the police, democratic socialism, American isolationism, and the idea that COVID only affects the weak are incredibly popular with just a bit less than half the country. Until the man dies, he will have an undue influence on things.

So what now?

We celebrate in direct contrast to the CDC advisories to avoid crowds. The ‘rona loves this shit and is wholly apolitical. A Trump rally and a Biden celebration look pretty much the same to the virus. Republicans caution us to avoid being sore winners as if the rules change if they lose.

I hope the adults in the national room hear the song being played. I hope that we can listen to but not be bound by the complaints of the fringe. I hope we can reframe our ideas to convince a plurality of Americans that progress is a good thing for everyone not just a select few who hunker down in their guns rights and racial division cults.

We’ve spent at least two decades behaving like Donald Trump — angry, self-involved, namecalling, divisive. It took having that avatar of unselfish-reflective narcissism occupying our highest office for just over half of us to get tired of it but wholly adopt his methods to defeat him. We can be better than that so why not try to be?

#election 2020

[americanbackyard]

Our Rise, Our Fall

One of the most focal things we have been shown in trumpland is his followers, his fans. There is a difference between supporters and fans in that a supporter can be shown reasons why not to support someone or something and there is a possibility that they might change their mind. A fan is much harder to convince that the object of their affection is not worthy of their time or emotions. Trump is one of a million to hold some kind of shine to people and become an icon in the culture of America. Or at least part of America. Not the good part...

A unique thing has happened in the case of trump's popularity in that we can now clearly see that many Americans do not pay attention to anything beyond tabloid type information, regardless of the nearly unlimited amount of real information available at no cost to them. We can now plainly see that there are many stubborn and selfish people out there who refuse to look into things for themselves and choose to join mobs of others who act and react the same way. These are the rabid fans. In the case of donald trump and what they believe him to be, they show us that their lives are not their own, even if they claim to want to be left alone by government and those who are not like them, ie; white christian republicans. The amount of hypocrisy is astounding with these people and there is no way to convince them of the ridiculousness of their ways. Yet they function in society somehow. Amazing how the human psyche works. This is the survival instinct that we see in homeless people who appear to have lost their minds yet still build a shelter of discarded objects and scrounge for food. Rabid fans build a shelter of twisted ideals and scrounge for justification of what really boils down to bigotry and stupidity.

For decades trump has been in the B-level news as if he were the only person with money, surrounded by women and golden objects and living in a towering palace and blah blah blah. Anyone who took a few minutes here and there over the years and actually read anything at all about the man could have seen that this is not the case. What we are able to see now about his history, regardless of seeing his taxes shows that he is a dime-a-dozen developer with no peers and no friends, a multiple bankruptcy failure, a man with dreams but only of himself, which he is unable to make come true due to his own lack of intellect or determination, a con man and a grifter, plus a racist. There is nothing at all to like about this man and nothing to worship as some do.

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions...” - 2 Timothy 4:3 (1)

Even those who call themselves Christians who are fans of trump obviously have not read or begun to comprehend the scripture on which their supposed faith is from. Besides the religious aspect of The Bible there are many practicle warnings to heed and advice to be taken. Rabid trump fans do not take advice nor do they heed warnings. If they did, they would not be rabid trump fans. As we have seen for decades this is nothing new though, as televangelists and now trump's “spiritual advisor”, herself a complete fraud, screw over their flocks every second of every sermon... Why are people so gullible? Why are they so desperate? Could it be the same thing that causes people to worship deities that promise a better “life” after death? Try living in the now for God's sake, so to speak.

For some reason, people are able to overlook things like racism, perversion, fraud, lies, and other acts of diminished ethics if what they see is a shiny extension of the worst part of themselves that makes them feel better about being shitty, for lack of better words. I'd imagine they were raised to be that way as they likely did not learn that as an adult, at work, or in college or church, although looking at the messages of some churches, like the Westboro Baptist Church, or various colleges like Liberty University, it is possible but people were attracted to those places for some reason in the first place, and look at some of the fine people they churn out. Also there are many people in history that are beloved but had things about them that would make a normal person cringe. Historical figures today that are relished, and I don't just mean with confederate statues, which is a fine example of praising the wrong people, but popular politicians, athletes, entertainers or religious figures that were racist, child molesters, rapists, or a variety of other things that if your neighbor were one, you would want to kick their ass halfway to New Zealand.

What it comes down to is that people need to look at the reality of other people around them and understand what is real and what it not and how their own lives and the lives of those around them are more important than the lives of who they are fans of, and how they all connect. It's called “getting fucking real”, something that many forget. “Celebrities are fascinating because they live in a parallel universe—one that looks and feels just like ours yet is light-years beyond our reach. Stars cry to Diane Sawyer about their problems—failed marriages, hardscrabble upbringings, bad career decisions—and we can relate. The paparazzi catch them in wet hair and a stained T-shirt, and we're thrilled. They're ordinary folks, just like us. And yet… Stars live in another world entirely, one that makes our lives seem woefully dull by comparison. ” (2) Again, get a fucking life... But they are unable. Why? And how can we help them to help themselves and not affect us all and the whole planet really by not making stupid decisions based on falsehoods and unreality and believing in people like donald trump, Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Paula White, Pat Robertson, Ronald Reagan, Adolf Hitler, etc. We cannot. BUT we outnumber them. SO why are we not coming out in droves to defeat the insanity which enables them to continue in their relentlessness path of destruction and jeopardizes all of humanity on a daily basis? Sounds intense but let's face it, the more folks let politics and religion rule their world the more the corporations and pontiffs will take advantage of them. History tells of this over and over and over again. It's nothing new folks...

We are beyond the two party system at this point. It is now a puppet show in front of us while we have become a mob of idiots versus a huge living room of couch potatoes. We let in the interlopers and the freaks and some of us gladly accept them based on their excuses or shiny false badges of honor while others of us say “whatever” and go about dong nothing to stop the inflow of assholes into the system that we trust to run things while we are running the rat race. There are herds of people who are fired up over things that they are told affect them when they absolutely do not, yet they fall for it hook line and stinker singly based upon the emotions and simplicities of their personalities that their new heroes have honed in on to get what they want from them. “...why do people repose blind faith in leaders or ideologies? How is it that otherwise sane and sensible people become moronically incapable of grasping reality? The culprit: our brain. Still evolving and still primitive, it readily sacrifices rational evidence-based conclusions in favor of primal ones. And so conformism trumps individual judgement.” (3) So is it because we are still primitive? Racists have their own ideas about who is primitive but let's face it, the worst degrees of thought in this country are coming from the rightwing white pseudo christians, who pretty much measure up, or down actually, in evolutionary thought when it comes to primal instincts.

Then there are those who won't vote, or get up and stand up.

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight! (4)

On the other hand many are prone to apathy and burnout, due in large part to the overexposure of the right's flock of sheep and the constant pressing of their presence by the wolves that lead them into their dens. “We use voting as a tool to transmit to others who we are,” explains Eyal Winter. An economist, he works at the University of Leicester in England and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. (5) So while the crazies identify with each other and go out and do what they can to make themselves known, others are simply distressed or depressed by it enough to give up and not take the same initiative to go make a difference and fight the powers that suck.

Let's face it though, which party is the one using the Electoral College to silence over three million voters and give trump the win? Which party is guilty of voter suppression in over a dozen cities, that we known of? Which party is guilty of vote tampering, voter intimidation, poll violations, and supports racism while arguing to abolish immigrants, even legal ones, and who holds children in cages, separates them from their parents forever, allows them to be raped, become sick, or die, and then traffics them out? It's all happening., and we let it.

When will it become unacceptable? When it becomes inconvenient? The easy way out of a major confrontation is to get out there and vote and let your voice be heard. The numbers will speak and cannot be overturned. Not yet at least. Unless we let it. We can easily see the wrongdoing of the right wingers in the discrimination of those who the right hates the most. The GOP is not christian by any means, nor or they civil servants, nor are they compassionate, ethical, scrupulous, professional, or on anyone's side besides their own. They are not the lesser of two evils, they are the evil. The lesser may be the only thing we have to curb them but we can work on that and turn it around. It all starts now, or it never starts, and the end is already here. Will those in the position to make positive change refuse to do so? Forget those who are fooled by it, this is about you, the ones who can make  the difference.

Perhaps both sides choose the path of least resistance. But who controls the controlling factors introducing us to our supposed paths?  That choice is ours alone. Common sense might dictate which side we take but in the end we should all be on the same side. And politics and religion are constantly used to keep us from doing that, so that they benefit and not us, even though we put them in charge, willingly, when we vote for them to “represent” us.

In the end what is it going to be? Are we all on our own? Is it survival of the fittest? Or of the most privileged? Will the meek inherit the Earth, or will the corporate enterprises destroy it? And will we let them? This is why it is imperative at this point to get things straight and not allow the absurd to flourish and to take command of the things that matter rather than allow the power mad to run amok. It's happening all over the world and has been for a very long time. Is it just human destiny then to drive itself into the ground? Perhaps. But if we are to get to the next level of a civil society then we have a lot of work to do.  We ourselves and our fellow humans need to make things work, and not just rely on some suit wearing zombies with a political label. A progressive party is not just a partisan party but one for all, to do what? PROGRESS. There is an entire side that does not get this yet but might learn from example. OUR example. And again, if they won't learn, it does'nt matter if we make our numbers count. They will survive and even thrive, even if they may never accept who helped them do it. That's okay though because that is what a civil society does. It sees a problem, diagnoses it, and urges those around them to try to figure out a solution together without doing further damage or taking the easy way out.

Maybe we are dealing with cognitive dissonance. Or maybe some people are just fucking stupid. I like  to think that nurture plays just as important a role as nature though, and that perhaps one can keep learning throughout life to see the big picture and utilize common sense, or at least common decency. Of course, that can only be taught. Or can it? Altruistic behavior is believed by some to be hereditary in many species, so hope is not be abandoned. As easily as hope may be offered up in the form of security and salvation in sensible terms, it can be sold too as something entirely different than what it actually is defined as, something redefined and repackaged by untruths and lust for power. Thus, the rabid trump fans. The ultra right wingers. The fanatical conservatives. The crazy republicans. Not all people on the right are evil, many just conveniently go along with their dimensions which they find themselves lazily confined in. We need to agree on a middle ground of decency and intelligence, of fairness and unity, and only voting and voicing will present that to those who cannot or will not see it. They won't change their minds and we can't change it for them, so we have to change ours and let them see what we can do together.

For once in my life I've got something to say I wanna say it now for now is today A love has been given so why not enjoy So let's all grab and let's all enjoy!

If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided

Just take a look around you What do you see? Kids with feelings Like you and me Understand him, he'll understand you For you are him, and he is you

If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided

If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided

I don't want to be rejected I don't want to be denied Then its not my misfortune That I've opened up your eyes

Freedom is given Speak how you feel I have no freedom How do you feel?

They can lie to my face But not to my heart If we all stand together It will just be the start

If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided

If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided (6)

(1) The Bible

(2) Psychology Today, Carlin Flora, July 1, 2004

(3) DAWN, Peter Hoodbhoy, August 8, 2015

(4) Bob Marley, Get Up Stand Up, 1973

(5) Science News For Students, Bethany Brookshire, November 7, 2016

(6) Sham 69, If The Kids Are United, 1978

[leaveharmony]

@nimmenstjer Ah...not really?  My father whom I prefer not to call that at all, is not a good man. 

Cut for...I mean it's not as bad as it could be or even as bad as it may still get, but, some of it might be familiar for people who've had (emotionally/mentally) abusive parents and thus upsetting.  Also, laments about his vicious bigot streak.

To begin with, he's a bigot.  This was less clear and blatant before their grand high wizard took the white house, because he's also that special variety of Trump supporter that has him swallowing lies hook line & sinker; this idiot honestly hand-on-heart believes the mayor of San Juan is “trying to make the administration look bad” by begging assistance for her dying people. He used to operate under a more lowkey bumbling fool level of bigotry which would see him make awful “jokes,” spurt gibberish at me and laugh about it whenever I brought home Japanese food, occasionally go on a profanity-laced tirade when he was having trouble hooking up a minifridge made in China...etc.  it was always unacceptable but easy to...not dismiss, but....it's tricky to articulate.  I always hated it but I thought he was merely fucking stupid, at the time - and you might actually make more progress arguing with a rock, which might have some capacity for intelligent thought.  And don't get me wrong, he IS fucking stupid, holy shit is he ever fucking stupid.   But since Trump announced his candidacy and everybody laughed about it (I never, ever laughed about it) he's been 100x worse because now he sincerely believes that the vile shit spewing out of that walking asshole is what ~everybody secretly believes~ and that anybody who gets upset about it is just performing outrage...pretending to be mad when they're really just as foul, but want to look better than other people. The extent of this didn't become apparent until it really came clear that Trump had a chance.  I was asleep, as is my custom wearing earplugs, but a noise woke me.  With my earplugs in I couldn't figure out what it was at first, so I got up and listened close to my door with the earplugs still in and the first thing I heard was “YOU TELL ME WHAT OBAMA DID!” He'd been pontificating about how Trump had just as much experience as Obama had when it came to ‘being president’ before he took the job, and mum, god love her, this time she tried to very gently explain that the moron had no political experience at all, and he just blew up at her.   Like, my earplugs shave about 30 decibels off and he was yelling so loud that he woke me out of REM sleep on the other side of the house, behind a door and a wall.  Mum, she later confessed, was terrified.  Hell, I was terrified - I was just paralyzed there, frozen at the door and wondering if he was gonna hit her this time and what should I do, would going out there antagonize him further or shake him out of it?

He's always been abusive.  And I've always been afraid of him in a vague way, probably since the one time he did actually hit me as a child (I don't remember what for, only that it taught me that resistance would lead to violence disguised as discipline).  But this was the first time he really made me afraid of what he was capable of if he lost his temper hard enough.

It's usually little things, though, over years. I remember when my brother and I were kids and we all had the big family dinner at grandma's, we had to act totally calm and reserved when opening presents.  This was because dad's brother's kids, my cousins Shawn and Kristina, would tear around like...well, children on christmas...being boisterous and loud and tearing the paper and goofing off.  We had to go slowly and have muted reactions and most importantly, be quiet about it, so that he could prove to his brother that even if we were poorer and he didn't have as good a job or as big a house, that his kids were 'better' and so he was still winning. He shut my wrist in the car door in the parking lot at Zellers, once.   Total accident,  but I couldn't get it out and the door had locked (this was when you actually had to unlock the door manually with a key) and so I panicked and screamed, and so while my wrist was caught in the car door and I was screaming in terror, he was simultaneously yelling at me to be quiet because I was making a scene. Another time when we were camping, I woke up with the most intense pain I'd ever experienced, in my ear.  I thought I was dying, that was how bad it was, and I was crying and begging him to take me to a doctor and he was yelling at me to shut the fuck up and go back to sleep because the other campers might hear me. When he dragged us to this house and my brother got a hampster, he put its cage on the dresser right up against the wall my bed is against...this is why I wear earplugs to this day, because the hampster would be up all night running on its wheel directly next to my head and rather than asking my brother to move the cage, I was shouted down and had to resort to sleeping with earplugs in. To this day I find it very difficult to make noise, or verbally display enthusiasm, or feel like I'm genuinely displaying proportionate gratitude, because I've internalized my training to such a degree that I'm always policing my own reactions (the literal only exception to this was when I was In the Presence Of Nakamura at Takeover and the racists behind me pissed me off so bad that I actually joined in on the chants for him and Asuka just to try to drown them out).  It’s the ultimate shame to let anybody catch me crying, I can’t...I’m not allowed to, I’m not allowed.  I’m not allowed to be angry and I’m not allowed to be sad or upset.

And I can’t...I don’t get mad at them or anything but I have to carry earplugs with me whenever I go out because children crying or screaming or making noise just sets me right off, like 0-60 in no time at all, it’s like a trigger and I have to shut the noise out, I have to plug my ears and get as far away as I can, it upsets me on levels I can’t even begin to articulate.  That one’s...gonna take some unpacking if I ever get out of here alive.

I've developed hoarding tendencies because of all the times he's thrown away, sold or destroyed my property the second I let it out of my signt.  He tossed my wooden clogs in the trash on pickup day when I was in elementary school, presumably because he didn't like the noise they made...I loved those things, but no longer remember what they looked like.  He sold my doll cradle to a lady at a garage sale for $5 while I literally sobbed and begged him not to.  He moved my Jericho standee out to the garage even as I fiercely protested (as much as I dared) because I thought he'd end up throwing it away; not only did he throw it away, but he cut it into pieces and hauled it to the dump, didn't even tell me about it until I went out to get it (he was clearing out the garage and it suddenly occurred to me to move it).  Of course he yelled, when I started to cry.  Laughed about it the next day like it was the funniest thing he'd ever done.  He wouldn't turn around to go look for my Stormer doll when I left her at a campsite...we hadn't even left the park yet, but he wouldn't turn around...I don't remember what she looked like, either, her loss completely eclipsed all memories that preceded it.  ...it was so upsetting that I still catch myself thinking of it as “When Stormer died” rather than “when I lost my doll.”  And then I feel stupid because it was just a doll, they were just things.  I care too much about my things, that have never hurt me, always listen, don’t yell.  It’s one of those unhealthy coping things, I guess.  Stupid.  I built lil-Shin a shoebox house.

So I'm hyper paranoid about anybody being in my space or leaving anything laying around, anybody touching my things.  Cos the second I let my guard down he might go on another raid and I'll lose something I can never replace, so everything, everything is in here.

I remember one time we went to a ballgame and my mother took ill...she literally threw up in a trash can outside Skydome, I can still remember exactly how she looked because her face was just grey, and I thought she was gonna die, and he was just shouting at her like she was faking it to spite him. When we went go Halifax I felt faint on the boardwalk and asked to sit down and have some water and he blew up, calling me Your Highness and and ingrate  and a whiner...again, like I was overstating it or putting it on just to antagonize him or try to trick him.

He comments on everything we eat.  I can't put food in my mouth in his presence without him saying 'eating again' or 'stuffing your face' or making glutton noises....at the same time, he'll finish his own food and then take some of ours.  Anything mum buys for herself, he'll take it. He literally steals from her, he's gone in her purse and taken money.

He polices me right down to the expression on my face..if I don't maintain a mask on the positive side of neutral I've got an 'attitude' and I've got to 'learn some gratitude'

He tells us to 'settle down' if we laugh too loud at something and we're 'stick in the mud' if we don't display enough amusement at something he finds funny.

And that MOTHERFUCKING WOMAN he's been ferrying around....jfc.  About four or maybe even five years ago he started driving this fucking woman he worked with, Joanna, back and forth to work.  I don't mean she lives a block away and they carpooled, I mean, she lives a half hour away in another city and he started driving to Barrie to pick her up, then back here to work, and then the whole thing in reverse again after they were done at work.  He's brought this woman's broken appliances here to try and fix them.  He's helped her move, he's been at her beck and call, he's literally chosen to drive a half hour away to take her to fucking Wal-Mart rather than drive his own wife to the doctor's office.  The real kicker is she's a polish immigrant - and we “don't know how hard she has it.”  Because he can sympathize with them as long as they're white blonde ladies, of course.  I'd think they were fucking if he wasn't repulsive, more likely she knew a sucker when she saw him coming.  He's currently storing her completely inoperable SUV in our fucking garage (the same one that didn't have room for my Jericho standee, hanging on the goddamn wall) because her landlord told her to get rid of it.  He said, one or two weeks, two months ago.  His own not-even-paid-for car is sitting out in the driveway, reeking of cigarettes because he lets her smoke when he drives her.  The urge to pay some kid to heave a rock through his windshield is almost overwhelming...I kick the side of that fucking SUV every time I go in the garage.

I hate him more than I've ever hated anyone in my entire life, and I'm utterly broken from decades of walking on eggshells, enduring the abuse, surviving.  We're trapped here with him because we simply can't survive financially otherwise.  It's like living at the corner of a spiderweb and trying not to move suddenly enough to trigger a reaction from the spider. I'm tense....all the time.  All the time.  My Daryl tattoo will featuring him floating gently in the ether, carrying a banner that says ‘Tranquilo’ not out of any great love of Naito, but as a reminder that constantly tensing my shoulders is prolonging my injury rehab and I need to try and relax.

It's not as bad as it could be.  I should be grateful it isn't. Mostly I just quietly wish he'd die, and then feel guilty about it.

#abuse cw #a messy lil cross section of my personal hell sorry

[justasmallbloginabigklainefandom]

About populism, far right, xenophobia, and racism...

... but not about Trump.

I know that those words are often associated with Dildo Tabletop (rightfully so), but this won’t be about him. This will be about the (somewhat milder but still idiotic) Dutch equivalent of Dudley Tinyhands: Geertje.

Because I am fed-up. I really am. 

For the ones not familiar with Dutch politics (I don’t blame you), last Wednesday was voting day. In the Netherlands, it’s completely different. We do not have electoral college or whatever, but we have proportional representation. Second, we have a multiple party system. Instead of, for example, Democrats and Republican, the Dutch decided to give us the choice between 28 different parties. Yes, you’ve read that correctly: twenty-fucking-eight. Third, even though we have people representing those 28 parties, it is not as big as the whole Hillary vs. Diabolo Tombleroneblok thing. It’s party against party, instead of person against person.

And just like every country, we have the Dinkleberg Tactless supporter. In the Netherlands, we have Geert Wilders, leader of the PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid, Party For Freedom, which is fucking ironic).

Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s the dude who yelled: “MORE OR FEWER MOROCCANS?” and then his followers shouting “FEWER! FEWER! FEWER!”

In the past years, the entire world has been living with growing racism, mostly towards Islamic countries. Unfortunately, these people still have the inability to understand that ISIS is not representative of the entire Islam, but well, they’re not that intelligent.

The other day, I also heard a father talking in a shop about how he feels uneasy, since his wife wears a Hijab and his daughter, despite being born in the Netherlands, have been facing more hate.

So, here’s the thing.

I am Chinese. Chinese-born and adopted into a white family at the age of 11 months. My sister is adopted too. Also Chinese-born.

And I was talking to my fellow Asian Cilla, who is born in the Netherlands, but she had a more Chinese upbringing (I guess). Someone asked her: “Why are you against Wilders?” in which she replied something among the lines of “I am a foreigner, but apparently I am ‘lucky’ that I am the right foreigner. If the colour of my skin were a bit darker, he’d want to throw me out.”

And I feel the exact same. Over the past few months, I had to watch people get more racist and racist, while knowing it wasn’t directed towards me. Sure, I still have teenagers yelling racist slurs towards me, and underrepresentation in the media, and the representation that we get is very stereotyped, and well... racism exists.

But I don’t have to worry about people calling me terrorist.

No one yells: “SPEAK DUTCH GODDAMNIT”

There’s no “Go back to your own country!” 

Or “All men ‘of your kind’ are rapists!”

There are no politicians actively campaigning against my existence.

And really, am I supposed to feel lucky about that? How can I feel lucky about this? Like I said, I walk around knowing that people are being unfairly hated for the same reason that I could get hate for: because we don’t look white.

I am not any better than other people of colour. They are not better than me. White people are not better than us. We are not better than white people. Period.

But yeah, apparently I am one of those ‘good’ foreigners, but things have changed, even for us ‘good foreigners’. I am not even remotely kidding when I tell you I don’t want to go to America (sorry Broadway). Sure, cities like NYC and LA will be fine, but as a person of colour, I would not feel safe there. I might be wrong, but I have the feeling that the amount of hate against poc has risen sooooo much.

Four days ago, something shocked me. At dinner, my sister turned to me and she asked: “Yuè, with all that PVV stuff and the hate towards foreigners, do people hate me?”

Can I say that I was shocked?

That I still am?

That I feel myself tearing up while even thinking about it?

Here she is, my sister, a ‘good’ foreigner, genuinely wondering if people hate her only because of the colour of her skin and the shape of her eyes. Who to blame? 

Wilders. 

Thank you, dude, fuck off.

My parents and I told her some history shit and about how Chinese people are seen as hard-workers and so on, and sure, it is absolutely not okay that other poc are being hated for no reason, but we don’t have to worry about this. We are ‘good’ foreigners. We will be okay.

But you know?

There are hard-working Turkish people. And Moroccan people. And Pakistani people. And black people. And Iranian people. And so on.

And there are slacking Chinese people.

Is this really what those people want? Is this what the PVV stands for? They claim to protect the Dutch or whatever. But is this what they stand for? Making young people feel unwanted and feel bad for being different?

When a little kid yells something racist, we can tell each other: “Just ignore it. They’re an idiot. We will fight it later, but they are just stupd. Their IQ is not larger than their shoe size.”

But when a man like Geert Wilders, a very popular and respected politican, says something like that, we can’t say that he’s just a stupid little kid. I don’t agree with him at all, but he’s not stupid (unlike Diarrhea Triangle).

Ha.

Ha ha ha.

We are the ‘good’ foreigners.

People who are behind the PVV will probably yell: “Oh, no! We don’t mean to hurt your sister, only the bad foreigners!”

Well, a) you did. You hurt me and my family. And b) what about my classmates who wear a Hijab, or my classmate with Pakistani roots, or that girl in the shop whose parents don’t feel happy. They are, in the PVV’s eyes, ‘bad foreigners’.

Then they will say: “No, we don’t mean them either! Only the bad BAD foreigners!!!!” And yet, everywhere in the Netherlands (in the world even), people are being hated for no reason except for the colour of their skin. 

Wilders. Le Pen. Deadzone Triplets. Everyone who shares their point of view.

Fuck all of you.

PVV, I ask you out of genuine curiosity: Is this what your party stands for? Is this an achievement for you? Young foreigners, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, are feeling the hate towards them. Are you proud of yourself now?

No?

Good.

#lb 2017 #rant rant rant #personal #i get political

[chrismaverickdotcom]

On the new Mandingo...

My friend and former wrestling tag team partner Donté posted a link on Facebook to an article a little while ago. Before I share the article I want to share my initial reaction. This is what I commented to Donté: “ oh for…. you’re fucking kidding me…. I mean, wow…..” that was my initial reaction.

My second reaction was to hit the share button myself and not actually write a blog about it other than to say “I am just too annoyed and upset about the idea of this to even write a blog. So I’m just resharing it with a link to what Donté said.” And then I found that I was already automatically writing a paragraph of bitchiness.

Ok, so first, let me share what happened. It seems that because he joined in the NFL kneeling protests this weekend some 25,000+ (at the time of my writing this) Baltimore Ravens fans have signed a petition asking for the removal of Ray Lewis’s statue in front of the Baltimore Ravens’ stadium. Sigh…

To quote Donté, “So he was cool enough to have a statue when he was just alleged murderer.. But, he takes a knee nah dog. Smh.”

I’m going to stick with my “you’re fucking kidding me!”

Here’s the deal. I am not a Ray Lewis fan. I am a lifelong Pittsburgh Steelers fan. I grew up squarely in Cleveland Browns territory. It is fundamental to my identity to just be automatically predisposed to hating the Baltimore Ravens. And that’s even aside from other issues with Ray Lewis. Fuck Ray Lewis.

That said, if you think this is the reason to remove Ray Lewis’s statue… fuck you! Seriously… go fuck yourself. Fuck you so much more than fuck Ray Lewis. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you… and I’ll tell you why.

I’ve been pretty clear about my stance on Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem. I support it. It’s important. If you don’t understand why it’s important, well… you’re not going to. I get that. Keep not understanding and bringing more attention to the issue. For all the boneheaded dumbassness of the President, he did a net good thing by turning this from a protest of like 10 people to a protest of about 200 people. So awesome.

But that’s not why you should go fuck yourself.

No, you should go fuck yourself specifically if you think that THIS was the camel’s back for pulling down Lewis’s statue. See, for those of you who don’t follow sports, On January 31, 2000, four years into his seventeen year football career, Lewis and two of his friends got into a physical fight with two other black men that resulted in the other two men being stabbed to death at a nightclub during a Super Bowl party. Lewis eventually took a plea deal (obstruction of justice) and flipped on his friends, both of whom were tried and eventually acquitted for the murder. He went on to become Super Bowl MVP the next year and kept playing for another decade. In 2014, two years after he retired, the team put up a statue in his honor. Baltimore loves Ray Lewis.

Or loved him.

But no… apparently 25,000+ people think that kneeling down during the national anthem is a greater offense than being an alleged murder suspect. Remember, Lewis’s friends walked. Lewis pled guilty to obstruction. Literally, Ray Lewis is the only person on earth who has ever been convicted of a crime in relation to that murder. But that was forgiven because he was a hell of a football player.

But apparently he isn’t allowed to have a political opinion 5 years after retirement.

Look, I don’t care how you feel about kneeling during the national anthem. Ok, that’s not true. I do care… and if you have a problem with it, you’re a fucking idiot. But really, as I said before, it’s because of your idiocy that this is getting press. You are what makes this an effective protest.

But don’t pretend this is a moral outrage. It’s not. Ray Lewis played 17 years with the Baltimore Ravens. He is a two time Super Bowl champion, one time Super Bowl MVP, thirteen time Pro Bowler, and as much as it pains me to say, one of the greatest linebackers that ever played the sport. He is football royalty. He is an easy first round ballot pick for the NFL Hall of Fame. And because of that, he without a doubt deserves the statue in front of the stadium that frankly, he fucking built. That said, there is not a single fan in that city who doesn’t know that he was a suspect in a double murder. Even if he didn’t kill them himself, he was involved in the fight that led to their deaths. HE FUCKING ADMITS THIS! HE TESTIFIED TO IT!!! But I maintain that the two things are unrelated. No matter how awful a person he may or may not be outside of football, he is without a doubt one of the greatest to ever play.

But no, the petition to remove the statue stems from his protest, not his involvement in a double murder. The petition even says “I will not stand for that kind of disrespect towards our country, especially from a legend such as Ray Lewis.” In other words, the petition writer believes that Lewis has even less right to his opinion because of how good a football player he was.

And that’s the problem. You may not believe in Colin Kaepernick. You may not believe in #BlackLivesMatter. You may have a faulty understanding of what the flag represents or how long it has been a tradition to have the players stand for the national anthem (answer, eight years… in other words, only since the last three of Lewis’s career). You may have such conviction for your misled patriotism that you’re now willing to boycott the NFL (and I don’t believe you… you can say whatever the fuck you want, no football fan is missing their team in the playoffs over this). You may think that #BlackLivesMatter is a racist movement because “all lives matter.” You may think all of this is stupid and you may not understand any of it.

Understand this… if you are offended by Lewis’s statue BECAUSE of his kneeling and not because of the rest of his personal history, then you DO NOT believe “all lives matter” and specifically you think black lives don’t matter at all. What you believe is that you want to see a bunch of dumb giant black men crashing into each other for your entertainment. And you don’t care if they literally kill each other off the field. You just don’t want to think that they might have personal opinions that might differ from what you believe. You don’t want them to have opinions at all. You aren’t mad at Ray Lewis because he knelt. You’re mad at him because the nigger didn’t dance when you told him to dance. You’re mad at him because when you said jump, the nigger didn’t ask how high? You’re mad at him because the nigger reminded you that he might be more than an animal that fights other animals for your amusement.

I have on many occasions said that I completely support the rights of white supremacists to march, to carry their nazi flag, to fly the confederate battle flag. I stand by that. If a white player wants to scream “white power” as they take the field, I actually won’t try to stop him. I won’t be a fan. I might bitch about him. But I support his right to do it. And I mean this. I said before that Donté and I were tag team partners. We were part of a group that we called Affirmative Action, a reference to exactly what it sounds like. And if you’re a part of wrestling, then you need to just accept that there is going to be no shortage of white wrestlers with southern gimmicks wearing confederate flag inspired outfits. I might not agree with it, but I never had a problem with any of them. I STILL support their right to stand up for something I don’t believe in… even in the name of entertainment.

You might say “all lives matter” but if you’ve signed this petition… If you have ever said “they can protest on their own time” (something that clearly people also don’t REALLY believe)…if you have a problem with this at all… then you DON’T think all lives matter.  You DON’T think their lives matter. And you sure as hell don’t think black ones do. Or at least they don’t matter as much as your comfort level of being able to pretend you’re a patriot while stuffing your face with fucking nachos.

Go fuck yourself.

Ray Lewis says ‘racist’ tweet from Colin Kaepernick’s girlfriend kept the Ravens from signing the quarterback

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Spike Lee Promotes Rally For Colin Kaepernick, Spells His Name Wrong On The Flyer [PHOTO]

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On the new Mandingo… was originally published on ChrisMaverick dotcom

#Baltimore Ravens #Black Lives Matter #Colin Kaepernick #Donald Trump #National anthem #NFL #Protest #rant #ray lewis #The Star-Spangled Banner

[casualeclectica]

Why?… (in response to a good friend asking, post-Trump inauguration)

First off, I respect you greatly for calling for clarification.

I do not just heedlessly jump on the liberal train or follow my friends to “keep the peace” or “avoid drama”.

I am not one to unquestioningly follow.

Even in the Army, after basic…I was sent to Hawaii…spent 2 weeks in reception where the SGT there tried to hammer into us, “Keep your head down…keep those uniforms tight…salute and just do what you’re told!” Guess what…my first week in my actual unit, I was promoted and reported straight to my battery officer each day and helped arrange training schedules and duty rosters, why? Because when I went in to speak to the Sergeant Major that first day, I was the only one of the incoming group who did NOT parrot the same reasons for joining the military…”To be the best SM!…To become a Sgt Major, Sgt Major!…To kick ass SGT Major…To serve our country sgt major!…blah blah blah butt kiss Sgt Major!” My answer was simple…”To experience the world as a soldier and see how I can make a difference in this way…SGT Major…”. The next day, my platoon sergeant called me out of formation and told me to report to our Commander…

I was raised by a very strong, independent woman (I was adopted when I was 2) who not only raised me and my brother but also over a dozen foster children, one other who was adopted as my sister. My mother ran the Northwoods Humane Society for many years when I was a child so I was exposed to caretaking of wildlife, environmental conservation efforts, heck I don’t remember it, but she says that when I was a toddler, she marched in a GreenPeace protest with me in a stroller! When I was ten we moved to Eau Claire, WI where I completed grade school. During this time, my mother worked on many community projects, started an after-school kids club, and was on the City Council for 12 years I believe. I, along with school, choir, and other activities, very much enjoyed being involved, even as a kid. I did camera work for the local Public Access TV station for several years learning basic filmography as well as video editing and tv station operation, even aired a fun little craft show episode with an older lady making bead animal key chains. I was involved in set-up and operation of several local festivities, school events, recorded local government sessions.

Now, my mom is a die-hard text-book far-left, liberal, ride or die democrat…and yes, many of my views may be influenced by that…but besides that, I have retained my individual versions of the same views. I do not believe that either side is wholly right or wrong…I do not believe that the system is set up out of concern for you, me, or any individual citizen. The cops, congress, judges, none of them are there to serve US…they are there to maintain and enforce a system (which ideally Should server US)…an outdated and very riddled system, built on old ways, hard-headedness, silly rules and laws put in place because setting an unnecessary law with unreasonable punishment is easier than a judge actually making a common-sense ruling. I am also heavily influenced by the law, morality, and ethics courses which I have attended over the years…as these have instilled in me, what I perceive to be a rather neutrally controlled aspect of right and wrong.

To actually answer your questions as much as I can at this time…

I cannot say that your feelings of support for Trump are unfounded or wrong (this leads to many arguments that I have even with other liberals and activists, many do not look at the other side of the situation with the proper question of “why do THEY think they are right?” as you yourself have asked me)…

I do not wholly know your situation, your upbringing, or your true feelings toward other people or situations…

More than being against Trump, the entity, himself….I am wholly and forever against what has been coined as a small population of Americans who now, influenced by Trump’s campaign and current statements, believe that it is okay to be racist, hateful, un-humanitarian, generally everything, EVERYTHING, I was taught was bad in the world…and now there are people, who because of Trump’s messages and implications, openly express this hate and such that have been termed by nations worldwide to be inappropriate, un-civil, and in a word, bad…

I will not sit here and say Trump is stupid…he’s obviously not! It takes some intelligence to lose several businesses to bankruptcy and still remain one of the most esteemed and valuable people on the planet… one of us misses a mortgage payment and life is hell til we’re paid up!

Borders is a fragile issue for any country…

First, I believe we are coming to an age where borders should be starting fade…with communication, trade, nearly no war as far as national, and relations, til now, pretty good…are countries truly an idea that is relevant now? This administration seems hell bent on rolling the clock backward on this and many other things. My concern is that it seems we are taking a several hundred year step backward with the intentions of the Trump administration.

Besides that, no, I do not believe “uncontrolled” borders are a good idea and I support heavily enforced immigration…but I do support immigration.

Diversity, immigration itself, hospitality are all things that made America a beacon of hope and a symbol of freedom to the world. Closing our doors, cutting ties, halting aid efforts and denying asylum…these are the marks of a selfish, nationalist, country…North Korea does exactly this…to the extreme, but yes this.

The immigration process in place right now, even refugee transference, is actually a very long and arduous process!

My feelings on terrorism being a reason to restrict immigration further? Well, if someone is hell-bent on making a terrorist statement…they will! Any system we put in place will have some kind of hole, sleeper cells from the cold war could very well still be awaiting orders possibly even passed to offspring…nothing but “NO IMMIGRATION” POLICY will prevent such deep convicted action…but as the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, can we righteously shut off immigration and continue to be the nation we see ourselves as?

I am for true freedom, true unity, true equality and the fight and/or progress to those ends…anything besides those, I am against!

This is what I believe is right.

Trump has never lived on the same plane of existence as any of us! I really don’t understand how it can be believed that a man with his name on Towers around the world, who gold-encrusts the rooms of his apartments and homes (all plural), has been depicted as a comic-book “rich a-hole” character since we were all kids, who is having his wife and son stay in their NY home, at tax payer expense, to “ease the transition” for his son and wife because it is absolutely a STEP DOWN FOR THEM TO MOVE TO THE WHITE HOUSE (thus any impeachment or such wouldn’t exactly be a punishment for him since he can just go back to his palaces and money)!!!

How?…How does this in ANY way relate to the common citizen? To the average worker? To those who did or were expected to vote for him (of course it was the very system HE claimed to be “rigged” that elected him…NOT The People, We did not elect him as the popular vote shows…)?

If I am allowed only one statement as to why I did not vote for him, it would be that, sorry, I can’t relate to him in really any way besides, yes, the system needs to change. Yes, I hope, HOPE, he doesn’t fuck things up! I hope he actually flips again (the amount of and the things he has turned on should be alarming to everyone!), and shows true concern for the citizens and well being of the nation…

I watched the inauguration…many said to boycott, but I need to keep an eye on this!

I watched, and I saw a new Soviet Union being announced…I saw North Korea being introduced….I saw a dictator, with his generals lined up behind him, just saying “we are tearing the system apart!” No plans, no assurances, it was a religion weaved, call to arms, war on everyone, Nationalist-Fascist (at least the Nazis had the Socialist facade at first), utter horror show of a national address, I hoped to never witness in my or my descendents existences!

I agree, we need change, we need to truly “drain the swamp”…but filling it with crocodiles and snakes does not seem right…Wall Street bankers…CEO’s…people known to have ties to HATE GROUPS…these are what run the country now…and you don’t understand my problem?!

One of the signs I saw in pictures of the Women’s Marches that really touched me was one held by a little old woman in a wheel chaire, it read, “90 yrs old, and I STILL have to fight for Equal Rights?”

The pussy hats…the burning crap…the insults…those are all people venting…people need to express themselves and what is wrong is that things are SO BAD THAT THESE ARE THE ONLY WAYS MANY PEOPLE FEEL THEY CAN BE HEARD!

Comments of “move on”, “accept”, “he’s your president now, get over it” all show very precisely the problem we are calling out!

Do our voices not matter? Do our opinions have no weight?

Are we a nation that should just cow-tow to whoever is in charge because “that’s just how it is?” (because conservatives sure didn’t during the entire Obama administration…just google “anti-obama signs”).

I post, share, and participate in these things because I will always do what I believe is the truly right thing.

I don’t believe in mob decisions, I don’t believe in trend followings, I don’t even just curb my tongue because “Grandma may have a problem”, I believe what I believe and stand behind what I do and say no matter who I am around or who may hear it. People liike to say “I say what I want!” and “I’m the most straight-forward person you’ll ever meet!” when all they actually mean is, I’ll act exactly as comfortable as I feel like acting and I don’t care about manners…except in certain situations and around certain people. This is not so for me, I have and show a base level of respect at all times, I swear on occasion but not out of “outspokenness”, out of admitted bad habit, and I apologize. I say that I stand for something, and if a real opportunity to support it arises, I do it!

This is how I have always been.

You know, I spent some time in Texas as an adult, I was born there but hadn’t been back since a baby, and while I rode bulls, traveled to beaches, experienced a lot!

The one thing I remember most, was when me and a buddy (who I stayed with a while) were doing a day labor job, just for something to do and some extra beer money. We were on a construction clean-up assignment.

Me, my buddy (who was like poster boy texas white frat bro type) and several men of apparent hispanic influence got to the site. My buddy and the others called the supervisor “boss” or “hoss” while I called him “Sir”…I don’t know if it was a northern attitude difference or what but I couldn’t say “Boss”. I asked what the orders were and was told just to grab whatever wasn’t attached to something else and get it in a dumpster. I said I was on it.

I worked all morning…the others trolled about picking up odds and ends, taking smoke breaks, sitting on phones, working but not working…my buddy spent all morning chatting with the “boss”.

I cleaned out 3 floors of the gutted building myself that morning…the others got 1, and after lunch my buddy pulled me aside and said “you’re workin too hard man, don’t worry about the afternoon, we’re listening to the game on the “boss”s radio, let “them” finish up”…now I looked at him and all I could say was “What? Why?”

…now, you do remember I am not white right? I am of mixed background and have black hair, brown eyes, and light tan complexion…

Well this guy leans in and says…”cuz we’re white dude!…let the mexicans do it…we’re gettin paid no matter what…”

I looked at him and said, “You just lost my respect man…I am not white! I may not be mexican, and I may speak proper english…but I am not going to work or be hanging with you!”

I walked off the work site…grabbed my stuff from his place, and went on my way…THAT is who I am…even though the other men were not even working how I was…I was not about to even think I was better than them, deserved anything different, or thought of the job differently. I was there to do a job and not judge others…that’s what I see life as…

At a very basic level…why is it okay and protected, that acknowledged Hate groups like the KKK (extreme white supremacy) or even the Black Panthers (extreme black takeover from their actions, not the ACLU and not sanctioned by other peaceful groups) have been free to march openly for their causes and beliefs of hate and racism through our nation’s capitol…but it is not okay, and made fun of, for me to walk with a sign showing MY opinion.

What I am against are double standards…mistruths…and things that we can all agree are bad things.

I have walked right by Trump supporters rallying in my town…been yelled at to “Go Home!”…my girlfriend was at one, taking pictures for her photography class, she was spit on because they thought she was “with the media” and would “portray them badly”…which they seemed to do well enough themselves…

No, not all conservatives are bad…not all republicans are bad…but they are being represented by those who ARE bad in their actions and messages and influence! Oh, and yes, supporting them, either actively or passively, will bring you to question in many people’s minds.

We live in a socialist republic with layers of democracy entwined…good business is good…good people are good…really, I believe that if the question needs asked as to whether something is good or not…it’s generally not.

I would be all for Real compromise, Real unity, Real negotiation, Real government…heck I would be happy for our nation to just simply decide whether or not it IS a racist nation…a religious nation…which religion…a war-like or peaceful nation…a productive nation…a cooperative nation…but it’s like everything that could describe a nation, America is in flux over!

Land of the free…except the millions incarcerated for minor offenses and the utter dependency on the credit industry and wall street…

Home of the brave…except many who would be brave are cowed into submission, even our heroes, soldiers, many come “home” to not be able to afford a “home” or even the care they may need to be healthy…

Land of opportunity…really only if your cards fall right, hard work actually gets few people much further than a dead end job, maybe with health insurance and some fragile attempt at retirement benefits which are always changing and the hope of maybe a 1 week vacation out of state once a year…

Land of diversity…We are, but it seems like many don’t want to be, stereotypes are exploited and often encouraged, descrimination is rampant, we spent too much effort learning the word Tolerate, and not enough time learning mutual acceptance and respect…

No, even church go-ers, those who preach tolerance, love, acceptance on a podium, dress up nice on Sundays and Holidays and kneel to a higher power, how are these some of the most judgmental, in a land of the free, practicing a religion of love, peace, and non-violence…?

What IS America? Are we just going to be a maybe-improved-version of old Russia? Are we going to start the American Empire, maybe we are jealous that other societies have such a further history than us and we must play catch-up by making every mistake they did over thousands of years, in a mere few hundred? I don’t know what it is…but I will not stand for it.

I can’t be okay with constants of “Now I’m not racist, but [something racist here]” or “I’m the last to judge, being a Christian, but [judgment of someone else here]”…you are OR you’re not!

America is like the rebel teenager of the world, with the never gonna die attitude and the definatley-not-ready for the big leagues brain…and now with direct permission to “just be an asshole, let it all out, do drugs, be nasty, jump off a cliff” kind of parenting from a leader who has nothing to lose and really doesn’t care about any of us, because in his gold-encrusted Towers, he is not one of us…and never will be. He has never lived by the same laws or the same expectations as a normal citizen, and now he is the figurehead of the nation, the main spokesman yelling to the rest of the planet “I AM AMERICA, I SPEAK FOR AMERICANS, AND I SAY SCREW YOU,WE DO WHAT WE WANT!”

I can’t, I won’t.

I may be ridiculed by many…I may one day, even be arrested…but I can promise you, as myself and how I believe.

I will not harm anyone if it is not necessary.

I will not show unwarranted disrespect.

I will not break any just laws.

My children, and their children will not be able to say our family stood by and did nothing.

I do and will make a difference.

Why should it be a peaceful transition to a nation of discrimination and hate?

Should I just accept that because of our skin color, my son and I will probably have to show our ID if we travel within US borders while others do not?

Should I just accept that statements have been made that those who even peacefully protest or voice opinion may be prosecuted?

While these may not come to reality, they have been stated by current administration, and I cannot respect or follow those who would believe these things to be good.

Take from this what you will…you have your views.

I have to say, share, do, and influence what I believe to be right…

I hope this at least gives you a glimpse as to my stand on the matter.

~D.A. Stanley 1/23/2017

originally posted to https://medium.com/@dastanley/why-in-response-to-a-good-friend-asking-post-trump-inauguration-f6f532bdcf8a#.x5jdotosn

#why #trump #protest #politics #writing

[justanothermaddieblog]

I Marched

Yesterday, it was the morning of January 21st, 2017. I woke wide awake at 8 o’clock in the morning ready for a life-changing event that I had many second thoughts about: The Women’s March on Washington (in MN). It was a misty morning, a bit cold with the rain, and I was unexpectedly not one bit nervous as I drove straight into the mouth of traffic in the heart of Minnesota, the Twin Cities. St. Paul, even though I technically live here and attend college here, is alien territory to me. The cities have always scared me, I grew up in a remote area surrounded by farms and very small neighborhoods, this was all new to me. But when I walked across the bridge to meet St. Paul College, I had a fire in my heart. I marched with pride among 100,000 women in the heart of St. Paul, I marched as a woman for what I believe in, and it felt pretty damn good.

As the march has made progress by covering several headlines and press, I also felt a pull back. I come from a hometown that shares completely different views from my own, who voted differently than I did. I came across a post that was shared by a young man in the Marines, the post stated how the person felt labeled and that all the protesting and hate by liberals was counterproductive to ending the political war that has started since the beginning of the campaign, and it spoke to me. To many, it would sound offensive but I read something else in post, I actually related a bit.

I was there first hand in the wake of the presidential election. As a young woman at an all women’s college, Trump’s election was an outrage. I remember sitting in my dorm, staring at the announcement in disbelief. I, with many others, wondered “how did this happen?”. I thought the choice was easy, that Trump was a racist, sexist, and terrible man but I felt completely shocked. The weeks that followed, many girls were angry and upset. I saw several muslims and LBGTQ communities crying. I was horrorified. Many people turned on each other, creating a divide. It turned into who you voted for was who you talked to, and that horrorified me even more. I was sucked into the madness, feeling as a victim. I was a victim of the election, my candidate lost and I felt like my freedom was gone. But now, after reading the post, I see something different.

The two sides of the political war are both at fault. The people who surrounded me, the outraged liberals and pro-Hillary voters, they grew a hate inside them. Trump may have won by inspiring rage, but he also inspired rage in his opposers as well. I am guilty myself, turning a blind eye to the conservatives and labeling them off as if they were Trump themselves, and I realize now how childish and stupid that sounds. Just because you want to be cautious about immigration doesn’t mean you are racist, and I feel many conservatives were wrongly labeled for reasons alike. Just because you believe you should have the right to bear arms doesn’t mean you’re pro-shootings or that you don’t think security is necessary as well. Just because you voted Trump, that doesn’t make you a racist or terrible person. It doesn’t mean you hate women. Just because I voted Hillary, it doesn’t mean I approved of all her shady decisions and ignorance of her past. I feel like the political war for me, was the false labeling and rage pointed towards the wrong people. I marched mostly because I was upset with the government’s threats of taking away my rights to choose what to do with my own body and taking away grants towards women who have seen violence. I didn't march to tell Trump and his supporters that I am anti-American.

I don’t wish for Trump to crash and burn. I know that he is president, and I may have not voted for him, but others did. I have to be willing to hope that Trump won’t fuck up. I have to have faith in the people I know who voted for him. Some of his supporters are radical bad people, but its the same for Hillary as well. But some is not all. And my assumption of that has lead me to rage and hate, which I believe is completely counterproductive of what this country needs. This is a new president, yes, half the country didn’t vote for him, but how is creating hatred for everyone who did vote for him going to help? This country needs to unite, as one, and cope together. Now this post wasn’t pristine. In one point the conservative made, he said “just because we don’t support gay marriage, you called us homophobic”. Well, why the hell else would you not support gay marriage? Who made you the ultimate decider in who gets to love who, and who gets to marry? No one! Some points must be discussed like that one, but the labeling must stop. I, for one, marched yesterday with thousands of other women because I felt that my rights were being threatened and that is not an insult to the conservatives, it’s a demonstration. I won’t give up my rights, neither will many other americans, and all I have to say is that if we want to end the political war, we must stop fighting and start repairing. What made us give each other labels in the first place? Why are my rights being threatened? We can’t expect to impeach Trump and then have things go back to normal. No, the conservatives will be mad, then another political war. We have to unite as one country and unite as the people of America instead of two sides of the people.

I don’t want a war, I never did. I marched for my rights, I marched for peace. I marched because I’m a woman and I believe this country has a chance as being whole again.

I marched for America.

#Womensmarchmn #why I marched #political war #trump #clinton #presidential election #conservaives #liberals #opinions #peace #no hate