Garbage People

I keep waiting for the vitriol to hit, or at least the despair. Something familiar and urgent, to set me on the path to what is ultimately cathartic: a scream, a cry, a punching of things perhaps/perhaps not appropriate for punching, a consuming of glutens and starches in quantities discouraged by modern medicine. You know, the normal stuff.

Maybe it's due to age and perspective or maybe a version of that where it's hard to be surprised by the same bullshit twice, but I'm finding myself way more at the deep-sigh-slow-headshake level rather than the bloood-curse-the-sun-and-moon-and-all-the-humans-beneath-both sort of a pitch. It's not that I'm not mad, it's more like your meth head son getting arrested. The first time, it's a traumatic existential brain-lance that requires you to rethink everything you thought you understood about the world and those closest to you; the seventeenth time, you politely thank the police officer who let you know and you hide the silverware before you know they're going to get out. Sure, at some level you have to deal with who they are, but you learn it's not really about you, not directly. You just want to make sure they don't set the rest of the neighborhood on fire.

Traditionally, if your party lost what felt like an important election, this is the period of time between Veterans Day and Thanksgiving for an intra-party civil war with as many sides as there are people with publishable platforms on which to express them, most of which come down to "well, she woulda won if only she had done exactly as I said." People, you see, are fucking tedious that way.

I'm not going to do that. I liked Kamala Harris and I still like her. I thought she ran a great campaign on short notice. I could see her and her people trying to strike the right balance between an economic message and the anti-Trump message to find some kind of resonance, but you know what, when people can't afford to live anywhere, even if by all other metrics we're doing way better in the U.S. than any other industrialized country since the pandemic, people are going to vote how they're going to vote. Incumbent parties are getting wiped out all over the western world, and this is what that looks like.

It doesn't look like Trump actually flipped anyone, people just stayed home. Maybe that had to do with bomb threats (by Russia maybe?) in swing states. I know I had the worry of polling place violence ahead of Election Day, maybe it was that. My primary guess after seeing the margins county by county eerily reflect the 2016 results is that we're not a mature enough country to elect a woman as president. I don't know. I just know we've done this before and we'll have to do it again: watch a stupid person who doesn't really want the job alternate between golfing and having temper tantrums en route to trying to fleece the country for as much as he can squeeze out of it (including selling classified stuff to foreign bad actors) before his time runs out.

As a chaotic half-asleep doofus, nobody really knows what he's going to do in the next four years. There are only two things we know for sure: he's not going to do the Big Thing he promised to do in his campaign (deporting tens of millions of people would be way harder than building a big stupid border wall, which he also failed at) and he's not going to run again, ever.

It's more a dusky tin than a silver lining, but hope is hope, you take it as it glimmers.

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PS: I more than understand that there's a lot at stake in people's lives, for women, for Palestinians, for trans kids, as a result of this. The point of the above was not to minimize or be glib, it's just a) to express what I'm feeling in the exact moment I'm typing, which is all this space is ever, ever for, and b) a disaster like this can only push is as far as we're willing to be pushed. Don't let the bastards get you down.