[1168] All Aboard

I'm really struggling to believe in anything. This is a fairly longstanding tradition, but it manifests as anxious butterflies during what I perceive to be key inflection points. I’m familiar with being constantly, chronically, fucked with. I am intimately aware of what it feels like to feel absolutely helpless indefinitely. It taught me how to become a bully. It showed me I can functionally black out and numb all pain during a violent reaction. It rendered everything worthwhile and good about me as something to pick at, ridicule, or resent. I’ve teetered on the edge of ending up in prison or hospital before I figured out how to put words to what was happening in me.

None of us can predict the future. I don’t think anything is predetermined, nor do I believe in fate or karma. I might invoke them jokingly or colloquially, but I think at bottom, so much of the best and worst things that happen to any of us are a direct result of choices. They might be choices made under duress. They’re almost certainly choices made with so little information it’s hard to conceive how it’s appropriate to invoke “choice” at all. A choice, by definition, is going to be a binary proposition. You affirm, or you deny. You bring into your awareness, or you eschew further contextualizing. Our brain automatically shortcuts most information in service to this process.

I can tell an extremely damming and deliberate story about how I’m in a decadent 2024. I can point to instances from history that kicked off the degradation of “the middle class,” our education systems, our sense of civic duty, etc. I can point the finger at the internet and the technologies we can’t wrap our ape brains around. I can cite heart-wrenching story after story of the consequences of being intellectually lazy, personally indignant, and in denial about the depth of hatred and fear. I can blame. I can explain away. I can hedge. I can intellectualize and attempt to stomach how all of the stuff “out there” isn’t really what we are or who I am.

And it would all be a lie. It would be a lie that others around me would be eager to celebrate and expand upon. It would be the kind of lie that would keep me divorced from the nature of how I utilize my hatred and my exhaustion in service to taking less accountability than I could. Because my shock and horror are too intense or morally righteous, when I condemn, when I seek to destroy, it would be okay. This is the mind of a fascist.

It’s 12:30 AM on Wednesday after election day. Again, millions of people have sat out. Millions of people have celebrated rape, racism, greed, pride, indefinite 4chan-esc detached irony, and the wholesale lack of accountability. It’s the rot everywhere. It’s the one thing that truly unifies us all. We’re all correct. We’re all entitled to our tears, our hatred, our means of acquiring whatever we want in whatever way we discover. Steal? Why not, I’m just smarter. Kill? Negligently ignoring something is soooo many syllables.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the women who have already died from the abortion rollback. It’s peak insanity. It’s peak Christo-fascist power and control. The smartest, most empathetic and best-equipped people and healthcare tools sit idle as those in power threaten prison and fines for helping. It doesn’t get worse. It just gets more frequent. That’s something I don’t think really sets in for people who wish to point at any individual tale of woe or absurdity. It’s already, right now, as bad as it can get mentally, in how we talk about it, and how we aren’t approaching fixing it.

I remind myself regularly to not be a reactionary. I don’t want to just sit in my fear and pain and speculation. That’s what was happening as I watched the country maps turn red. As I watch the numbers in support of detached yet vigorously hateful and spiteful ignorance march its way forward once again. Pride comes before the fall, and I can think of no one more proud than the people who apologize for belief systems and representatives that mask and hide the broader reality of consequences.

Van Jones famously said Trump was a “white lash.” I think he was dead wrong. The whole country was denying the story of how their needs weren’t being met, denying themselves a chance to own their complicity, laziness, hatred, and insecurities. You’ll hear often about “the extremes” of “either side.” I would put to you that you exist as an extreme of what those people put into action. You can be extremely lazy and feeling intellectually inferior. You can be extremely entitled to your “small town” views that don’t concern themselves with anyone but you and yours. You can be extremely angry and indignant that something didn’t go your way. The story of how your extremes manifest are as individual as it gets.

If we need a heuristic, you can look at voting. I’m the kind of person that can literally never justify endorsing Trump. Him as a person is antithetical to everything I try to be. I don’t want to be “rich” like him, slap my name on everything, sexually abuse women, fuck my family, lie with every breath, provoke and incite violence, pretend to be ambiguous about my relationship to explicit hate groups, cozy up to dictators, find myself getting supported by people like Ben Shapiro or any sycophant building their brand on the right. The “reasons” people use to vote for him are overwhelmingly incoherent lies. He is their representative.

I mention Shapiro because he’s the fanciest dancer claiming to support Trump’s policy independent of everything he’s ever said or done otherwise. This, again, is how fascists, apologists, extremists pretend to think. Provided there’s something “bigger” or “practical” or “the real goal,” everything, your death and ruin included, gets sublimated in service to it. Why protect the planet when Jesus is on his way back? Why quibble over poor people having rape babies or women controlling their bodies when we’re gonna return to the ways of God? Why trust the science of vaccines when I have a right to kill you when I’m in power? This is the conclusion, the unyielding ambivalence in service to selfishness.

We get Trump because we deserve Trump. We’ve been trying to have a mythical future that refuses to directly combat the forces that broke our government. We’re suffering the fissures of recycled propaganda. We don’t teach in compelling ways. We don’t hold people accountable. We don’t model behavior. We don’t reign in our worst impulses. It’s all wish-fulfillment. What was Kamala going to do with a broken Senate and wholly corrupt Supreme Court? Trump faced no consequences for encouraging people to kill people. What do you think is really and actually going on in your country? You haven’t conceded what’s really been lost anymore than Trump did the last election.

Hope is fickle. Change is arbitrary. We’ve only demanded the performances of each other, not the work. We’re all addicts at the group meeting carrying on like its fun and games and our lives are going so smooth since we found each other. 5 seconds after we leave we’re screaming at the people in our lives, crying over our circumstances, and building more chronic conditions for which to seek an addictive fix.

You hate as deeply as any fascist Trump supporter, as any “Christian,” as any “religious” nut job talking a million miles an hour like Shapiro constantly justifying justifying justifying because the fact of their limited, scared, irrational beast at the heart of their behavior can’t be contended with. They don’t own it anymore than you do, it’s just their time to be attaching language to the nature of the self-destruction. What did the Left do? Reacted with DEI, defund the police, and trigger warnings. They didn’t figure out how to get Bernie in charge, they looked for the next coolest victim narrative to attach their identity to.

It’s hard not to feel like we deserve it. We deserve to keep dying for no reason. We deserve to keep talking in circles with fanatics. We deserve to eat the scraps of oligarchs and submit to wage slavery. We are addicted to the grind, consumption, excuses. We want to hear the same story every day and feel proud and confident in each recitation and share. We want the awkward, evil, rich bullies to win, because those are our gods. That is who we wish to be in a world that’s treated us so unfairly by asking for anything accountable.

I’m not giving myself to the fear, ignorance, and hatred no matter how often it’s on offer. I own the hatred I have for fascists of any stripe and era. I will never be okay with the patterns of thought and behavior, so, so smug, and confident that bring nothing but shame and embarrassment and death. I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand or feel like they do. I’m going to take what I feel, and choose to operate like someone knows his power and responsibility, even in the maddest of worlds. Maybe in a generation or two, if I last that long, my example will mean enough to be of better consequences than the ones I’m suffering.