And they'll coach you in the classroom that it cannot happen here, but it has happened here

[sovay]

I didn't realize how much I had existentially relaxed in the last eight years—how much having Obama in office made me feel safer on some unnoticed level, because I knew the world was getting better in ways that mattered deeply, no matter the turmoil and backlash of working out the routes and means. I thought I could expect it to keep getting better. My low-bar, minimum-clearance definition of better was apparently so terrifying and repugnant to more than half the country I live in that they killed it. Now I don't feel safe and neither do most of the people I love and I know I will have to find ways to fight for them, because the alternative is not acceptable to me (nor would it make me safer: I am not in the demographic of America Trump promises to make great again), but it feels exhausting even to contemplate and any fight of this kind will take the most resources from the people who already have the least to spare. Right now I cannot imagine relaxing again and I spent most of my adulthood working to convince myself that this world was a good place to stay in; now I feel it would be irresponsible to leave it, but I don't expect to enjoy it. This is the tension of the Bush years. Worse, in fact, because then I thought we must have hit rock bottom, surely we must recover, if we just don't blow up the planet there cannot be farther to fall. This is not how I had hoped to feel by today. I don't believe in miracles, but an improbability would have really been nice.

Comments

[sovay]

I don't even know. A dark nightmare.

It is nightmarish. A lot of people made it happen and a lot of people let it happen and I don't believe it will give most of them what they want, because devils' bargains never do, but it will hurt a lot of people in the process of their finding out. And they will be different sets of people, which is not fair.

[kore]

And you know, EVERYONE is spinning it as "A blow against the Establishment! blah blah!" except....it isn't. As Rachel Maddow pointed out right while it was still going on (I love her), if it were "get out the bastards," the incumbents wouldn't've been re-elected, and nearly all of them were. There wasn't any great big sweeping huge extreme change....except at the very top. Typically with a "wave election" after you've had the same party two terms in the White House, the Congress and Senate get shaken up too, except that didn't happen at all. And he had the Establishment up on the stage -- fucking Giuliani, the RNC chairman, Huckabee, whoever. The Republicans cozied up to the far right, and they fucking won, they have the three branches of power and the Supreme Court. IDEFK.

sorry, I'm just babbling.

[sovay]

And you know, EVERYONE is spinning it as "A blow against the Establishment! blah blah!" except....it isn't.

No. It isn't. Electing a racist, misogynist, rich white man to a position of power in America is not anti-establishment in the least. It is an old and well-worn pattern. This was a vote against change, not for it. It is disappointing and dangerous.

They cannot wipe out the last eight years, though. They can turn the clock back on the laws, but not on memory, and it is always easier to deny people something they have no experience of. It is harder when they know what they have to lose.

[kore]

They can turn the clock back on the laws, but not on memory, and it is always easier to deny people something they have no experience of.

That is a really beautiful way to put it.

Man I need to go to bed. I think part of it is I don't want to wake up in a world with him as President.