The dems, at the end of the day, tried to sell this election to us with fear.  A lot of people felt very afraid, so why did it fail?  Because what gets one person to the polls gets another person hiding under their bed with a shotgun, not daring to go out in public.  (of course there are multiple factors, but this is one.)  This is why Abe Oceanoxia says climate despair is the enemy – if you think you’re all fucked forever, that carries the implication there is nothing you can do about it.  No matter how much you yell “unless you vote!,” people’s hearts and minds shut down after the first part of the sentence.  I’ll talk about that more another day; here the observation is preface.

Over the next week or so, I’m going to expand on the thesis in the Momma Mia post, and this post is about the reason why.  I feel the need to do my part to heal the damage caused by this climate of terror, because barely anybody else in a position of responsibility is looking at it this way.  We got skullfucked, and as long as we want to survive, we gotta get unfucked.

There are legit reasons to feel sad and battered.  Every human right and human need is going to take massive hits, starting before the end of January next year.  People are already dying because of Fascism Part One’s supreme court appointments.  It’s gross; it’s sad; it should never have been like this, let alone as bad as it’s going to get.  BUT.

People have been overselling how bad it will be, and badly.  While everybody will have their lives diminished in some way, at least tangentially, the vast majority of people will survive!  And I mean you, my transes!  If anything, the lack of immediate goose-stepping murder parties will probably leave people feeling lied to, feeling like the dems were full of shit, which also leaves them open to facilitating that gradualism HJ wrote about.

Also, it was already bad here!  The USA – and most of the world at this point – have been run by short-sighted and callous greed for a long time.  By discriminatory laws used as bait to get bigots to vote against their own interests.  The democrats themselves are rich people protecting rich interests, which is exactly why they fight so half-assed:  they profit from losing.  Just hang out in the wings being the “reliable opposition” and paid for tut-tutting while republicans make them and their families fabulously wealthy off tax cuts and raiding the public treasure.  They are very much the lesser of two evils, and we’d be in a better position to fight if they’d won, but at the end of the day, most of them don’t give a flaming fuck about you and me.

So, bad as it has been under both parties (always measurably worse under the elephants), when it gets worse now, how noticeable is the difference going to be?  For the most vulnerable people, it will be.  But me: queer enough to not be emotionally damaged by manmoding to survive the daily, good job security, a mortgage i can afford (for now), living in a nicely blue state?  Don’t cry for me Argentina.  And that tells me that a lot of you can survive as well.

We have been royally burned, and in turn, the entire world has been burned.  But you still have every day of the rest of your life to live, and you can live it well.  For some of you, it will involve grievous challenges.  For some few of you, it may be cut short unnecessarily in any of hundreds of ways that conservative policies increase our odds of dying.  BUT.  Within that time you have, there is room for love, friendship, video games, violent radicalism, anything that brings you joy.

I am on this rampage because there has to be a realistic middle ground between foolish hopes and suicidal despair.  Do not let the terrorists win, my friends, my comrades.  Do not take yourself out for them!  Live, like a motherfucker, live!  Survive.  You might even thrive.  The world will be a sadder place, and we’ll all be sad about it, but within that, life is possible.

And I need all of you to do this.

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