It’s difficult to overstate just how worried I am about the looming presidential election. Yes, yes, I know Uncle Joe blew it at the debate, that isn’t in question. I’ve been shocked and disheartened to see the hair-trigger response from prominent dems calling for the old man to step aside.
Um, excuse me?
It’s not as if Trump is exactly a strapping young buck himself. And it’s not as if he doesn’t demonstrate clear and obvious signs of dementia every time he opens his pursed lips. And it's not as if he hasn't repeatedly displayed his penchant for lawlessness.
Let' not mince words: Donald Trump is a festering orange pustule on America’s anus, but he hasn’t gone away.
The next few months are going to be very, very difficult for this country. That alone is worrisome enough, but if Trump again seizes the White House? I don’t think it’s being alarmist to say it's Game Over for whatever was left of America if Trump is reinstalled. He and his followers are a clear and present danger to us all.
Will there be violence? Should I be planning an escape route? Should I vote early and plan be somewhere else on Election Day? Where, exactly? Out of the country?
It's no wonder I don't want to interact with anyone or spend too much time “out there.” But for once maybe it isn’t just my fucking “social anxiety” or my trust issues, or any of my long list of self-diagnosed personality disorders helpfully listed in the DSM-V.
No, maybe it’s that a lying, bullying, convicted rapist, who has also been convicted on 34 counts of criminal fraud, could plausibly find himself squatting in the White House again.
Maybe it’s the slow moving coup we've watched unfold since Mitch McConnell started cramming drunken frat boys and true-believing Jesus freaks into the Supreme Court, starting before Trump was even president. Maybe it's because we now have a court that is so blatantly corrupt that they’ve more or less placed themselves over pretty much every government agency in the administration, and have also declared themselves perfectly fine with accepting bribes, no I mean fee-for-service rulings, no that’s still not quite right, ah yes, here it is: Tips.
Maybe it’s that virtually every norm and precedent established over the last 60 years is being rolled back with breathtaking hubris, and that the Nazis and KKK and bigots of every stripe are emboldened to march openly in our streets again and white christian nationalism is infiltrating all levels and branches of government.
This nation is a powder keg waiting to be lit. Nowhere is that more true than right here in Florida, where pudgy tyrant and Trump wannabe Ron Desantis is busy waging his culture war against Disney and the scourge of drag queens. We're ground zero in the revolution, but it feels like a metaphor for our nation. We are all at ground zero now.
In this environment, what sane person wants to leave the house?
* * *
There was a moment late in the 2016 campaign, maybe August or September of that year, when I was working in a nursing home physical rehab center here in Florida.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign was going strong, and it seemed clear to any sane mind, even then, that Donald Trump was nothing but a malignant clown. It seemed inconceivable that this nation could be so dumb as to elect such a loser.
But a few days before the election, as all the polls and all the pundits were holding their noses and giving Hilary’s campaign what seemed to be a fairly strong lead, something happened: All of the hispanic workers on our unit showed wearing bright red MAGA hats. The spent the shift smiling and whooping it up for Trump.
I felt a chill go up my spine, and I thought: No fuckin way.
I think it was the night before the election that Springsteen played at Hillary’s pep rally. It seemed like a sure thing. She was gonna win it, right? It was late on East coast time and I had to work the early shift. I went to bed thinking, She’s got this.
We all know how that turned out, and everything that’s happened since. But I never forgot that moment on the unit. I think about it now, on the heels of Biden’s dismal debate performance, and weigh it against other pivotal moments in presidential politics.
Bob Dole, anyone? Do kids today even remember Michael Dukakis? Has anyone checked on Dan Quayle lately?
I nearly barked out loud this morning when NPR trotted out Howard "The Scream" Dean to reassure us that no, Biden's debate flame-out won't have any impact whatsoever on the outcome of the presidential election, tut-tut, what a silly thing to even ask.
Right.
Bumpy times are coming. That old survival bone is acting up, telling me that something bad is about to come down. Maybe really bad.
* * *
I know what you’re thinking:
Dumbblog, you’re wondering, if you’re so deeply conceeeeerrrrrned, why don’t you get up off your FAT ASS and do something???”
It’s a fair point. A couple of weekends ago I was helping to staff HUMTC’s booth at the Port St. Lucie Gay Pride Day event. My partner is VP of the HUMTC board, and I'm fairly active with the group as a "board-adjacent" member at large. But, admittedly, we hadn’t done much to help set up the booth.
One of the more recent board members, Ralph, asked tactfully if Drew and I were “still as active in Pride events these days.”
I'll pause here to point out that Ralph is a really wonderful person, very smart, with a great wife and an adorable little daughter. There isn't a doubt in my mind that Ralph and Mrs. Ralph have a million other competing priorities than Gay Pride, and yet, as part of his broader commitment to HUMTC and its mission, Ralph had not only shown up with his family, and had helped set up and run the booth.
The point wasn’t lost on me. But how to explain the very millennial Ralph that I’d shown up for thirty years in DC, I’d helped drape the first AIDS quilt on the National Mall, I had marched for change in the military, for marriage equality, for fair and equal treatment in employment, in housing, in law. I had ACTED UP and protested and marched and written articles and letters and manifestos and screeds.
I love you bro, but goddammit.
Don’t speak to me of activism. I was there for the revolution and I saw what happened. Look around. The bad guys won.
Progress? Sure, there's has been progress. Gays can marry now (though it’s a sore subject around here), and yes we can openly fight in America’s endless wars. Yay us.
Meanwhile, the GOP is back to hatin’ on the gay again, leveraging humanity's innate fear of drag queens to drive an election that’s already set a new low bar for bigotry and xenophobia.
Progress? Sure, I suppose. But while we were all bickering over whether or not Jesus approves of Gay wedding cakes, the Supreme Court gutted Roe (50 years precedent), killed off Chevron (40 years precedent), and overturned Affirmative Action (60 years of precedent.)
Roger Stone and Steve Bannon are walking free (oops, sorry Steve!) and yet, somehow, the all powerful Antifa hasn’t burned the country down yet.
This court doesn’t need your precedents or your norms or your traditions or your standing, or your fucking progress. They're crooks and grifters at best, and malignant operatives who are interested only in cementing their own power.
And anyway, it’s not as if I’m do nothing. I am a writah after all, do I not chastise you, the comfortably righteous, on a daily, weekly, okay occasional basis? Am I not the last of the wandering prophets, here to foretell of our impending doom, lest we repent our sinful ways?
Lol, as if. We're all fucking doomed.
* * *
So. Yes. I'll still show up when Ralph organizes the next rally for the Humanists of the Treasure Coast, and I'll keep showing up for Pride Day, and to the different protest, and the next school board meeting.
I'll try to catch some of his optimism and energy and his young man's faith that this wretched country can and will do better. Showing up is the least I can do (no, really, I mean that: It really is the very least I can do for The Resistance, given what's at stake.)
But I'm not gonna lie. I'm angry, and I'm disheartened, and I'm fucking tired. I've been fighting in these trenches, in one way or another, for my entire life. This ain't my first time at the rodeo, children, but I can't lie: it feels like they're winning.
No comments:
Post a Comment