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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I was different about this the first time around; too raw, too new.  Now I know just how bad that energy is for people who need protection and encouragement the most, so my doomerism policy remains, and I am committed to tempering all my political posts with hope.  Because when did we need hope?  When Obama won?  A lil’.  When do we need it much more?  Times like this.

And so, my main points about why we are not all gunna die:

The majority of conservatives are not monsters.  That’s all it takes to prevent the worst things people fear from coming to pass.  To get the death camps and the red dresses and bonnets, you need more than just the levers of power: you need people to enforce them, and outside of the most twisted fucks in the world, who is going to want to enforce all these laws Pisstake 2025 is trying to enact?  People who voted for fascism this time around were, by and large, not voting for fascism.  They were voting for illusions that were sold to them by billionaires who have basically bought the entire fishbowl they swim in.  Reversing inflation, saving freedom, pure nonsense.  They were not voting for death camps, and they will not man those trains.

Having all the power means they get everything they want – legislatively.  But.  Every monstrous thing they favor is a nail in the coffin of their power, the inspiration for the fucking fools that voted them to work against them the next time around.  Now, will they prevent any future elections from happening?  Part of the reason this was possible was because of four years of concentrated voter disenfranchisement and suppression.  OK, but you don’t need an election to get your ass fought.

We have fighters.  A lot, a lot of fighters.  People who every day are doing their best for women’s rights, trans rights, black lives, native americans, immigrants, etc etc.  They will do what they can until the end of the line.  No matter what oppressed group you are in, you have allies, including some people for whom your particular cause is their entire reason for being.  Long live the fighters!

State’s rights, lol.  But seriously, blue states are the economic fulcrum of the country.  They can make it hurt to do evil, and they are likely to do so.  Anybody thinking shitbird’s sentencing is going to go as scheduled is bound to be disappointed; don’t go for false hope when you have a lot of other things you can hope for.

As much as I despise accelerationists, they are sometimes, in a nasty way, right.  Things have to get worse before they can get better.  That is gonna be terrible for some people, which is why that’s an evil philosophy to hold.  But it can be effective.  More people are against Israel than before Hamas’s big terrorist funtime, and when Americans have to live under the kinda laws these guys are going to pass, they are going to rebel against that in a way that the fascists are not going to weather.  They are going to fucking lose, some time, mark my fucking words.

It’s just a question of time, of doing your best to be alive so you can smile as they fucking burn, burn, burn.  And to temper that anger too, because living with constant anger ruins people.  Live for what’s good in your lives.  It’s still there.  It is still there, and you are too.

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