The Unbearable Weight of Reality

Photo by Photos of Korea on Unsplash

Before the election, lots of people were frantic. Many kept a hyperalert baseline from the river of lies flowing from the man trying to regain the presidency he lost four years before. They were also extremely concerned that there wasn’t enough support, and likely too much misogynoir, for an experienced woman of color candidate to win the White House. I tried to maintain my composure, doing my best to temper my hunger for information with intermittent fasts to promote sanity. I even wrote a piece in the leadup to the election advising people to try tempering their concerns to cultivate calm.

Then election night hit and it’s been all downhill ever since.

I cannot lie, or rather, I will not lie about this. The election results crushed me. As a fellow child of immigrants like Harris, a minority and someone whose family scrapped to carve out a life here, without the benefit of generations of established settlement, the cold rejection VP Harris received on election night stung. It was more than just a loss. It wasn’t only denial of breaking the seemingly impenetrable glass ceiling for women to win the presidency.

This felt intensely personal. I felt this country rejecting me as well as her. I heard the hisses and the derogatory nicknames for President Obama when he won both of his terms. I took note of the nasty, naked racism in the comments about him on websites, and no, not all of those were GRU bots. I watched him be disrespected, not only by FNC bobblehead hosts but sitting legislators and some world leaders, all while he did his best to thread the needle not to be accused of being “the angry Black man.” It wasn’t this usual racist invective that made Harris’s loss worse either.

Obama won his first race against a decorated Naval vet, principled prisoner of war and longtime senator in John McCain. He went on to defeat a former Governor, successful businessman and longtime Senator in Mitt Romney for reelection. I’m glad he won both times, but had he lost I could have bitterly accepted it, as both of those men were qualified, whatever I thought of their politics.

VP Kamala Harris was rejected for a candidate who mishandled a pandemic the last time he was in office that led to about a million people’s deaths. The man this country chose, bragged about being a success, after filing bankruptcy six times. Harris’s victorious opponent tried to bribe another leader with money Congress already approved for his nation, to manufacture a scandal to hobble a proposed opponent. The man that supposed Jesus-lovers voted for, mocked a disabled reporter, stiffed the charities he collected money for, cheated on all three of his wives, was found credibly guilty of sexual assault, and convicted on 34 felonies.

VP Harris wasn’t rejected for a good candidate. She was rejected for a lying, unprincipled, diabolical turd of a man who failed as a president before and had only gotten worse. America declared that it would rather be plunged into a burning Hell at the hands of an incompetent White man, than give a highly qualified Black woman a chance to try to make it decent, or maybe greater than before she took office.

For every woman, person of color, immigrant, or anyone from any disadvantaged group who’s been passed over for “not looking the part”, this was every one of your experiences magnified and broadcast to the nation. The message was loud and clear: Obama was a fluke. No matter what you do, we’ll never think you’re good enough, and we’ll keep choosing the worst of us over the best of any of you.

So, all of the above leaves me conflicted. I’m a citizen here. My parents are naturalized citizens here. My wife and I have our lives built here and our dog is used to living here too. On one hand, I want to see this country right itself and I feel compelled to fight for it to become what it promises it can be. On the other hand, I watched its voters hand the entire governmental apparatus over to an easily irritated, mercurial megalomaniac. That man then handed the entire thing over to an unelected South African billionaire with numerous conflicts of interest. If that weren’t enough, the interloper is against any government spending for public benefit and talks of terraforming Mars, when some cars made by one of his companies spontaneously explode into flames.

In the space of a couple of weeks, they’ve issued orders that circumvent Congressional action dictated by the Constitution to do away with whole agencies, gave unlimited computer system access to a brat pack of college aged guys who haven’t been vetted, gave Elon Musk control of the Treasury Department’s payment system, and ousted faithful career employees unceremoniously, in one case dragging a woman out of her office and out of the building.

They’re not only doing loyalty purges in the government but they’re aiming outside of those buildings too. There are attempts to revoke birthright citizenship and proposals to require citizenship proof to vote. ICE dragnets indiscriminately fill with Black and Brown people who get labeled illegals, and possibly win and all expenses paid deportation to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Rollbacks of rights for LGBTQI, additional attacks on women’s healthcare, and efforts redoubled to subdue the latest right-wing bogeyman, DEI, and proclaim all POC unqualified compared to White applicants. Theocrats have a stronger influence in governmental policy than ever before, and that influence is responsible for driving lots of what is noted above.

While all of that is happening, we’ve returned to the breaking news per millisecond infotainment cycle from the last time around, but new and improved! Now, with more domestic and international chaos per hour than ever before! It even works great in cold water! They’re flooding the zone with more shit now than the cumulative production of every industrial hog farm over the last twenty years. And they’re doing it every day. Every. Single. Day.

If these were normal times, I’d insist Republican legislators take a stand, stop these actions immediately and reel in this unprecedented and illegal overreach. These aren’t normal times. The preceding would require a Republican party with at least one or two pairs of balls left that haven’t been handed over to Trump in tiny, little jars. This party either completely agrees with Trump or is too cowardly to say they disagree, which essentially becomes the same thing.

All is not lost, though, right? We have an energized opposition party already at full throat, snorting and grabbing for traction with their hooves to take it to the Republicans, don’t we?! With the exception of a few vocal young firebrands, the Democratic Party has been, for the most part, caught flat-footed and ambling about gamely like someone woke it suddenly from a nap. Schumer and Jefferies have done a terrible job at leading a unified opposition, and their members have rolled over and conceded a lot more than they’ve resisted.

I definitely feel that the Republicans are against me, so I supported the Democrats. Now that they Republicans are ramming through all of the stuff I disliked or feared, things the Democrats said they were against too, some Dems are working with them on passing a good deal of it. The enemy of my enemy may be my friend, but the friend or accomplice of my enemy is not.

If the Presidency is against me, SCOTUS gave it full reign in their unitary executive wet dream ruling, and the Republicans in Congress are running wild, with very little Democratic resistance, who’s fighting for me? If all you have to do is be rich and White, and you can just push your way into any government office with a dweeb squad, accessing secure systems with the personal data of millions of Americans, how can I compete with that? If over half of the people empowered to stand for the Constitution they took an oath to uphold, wipes their ass with it afterwards and does what they want without a challenge, how can I counter that? If the rule of law doesn’t apply to those in power, while they apply it to those they’re sent to govern, what is left?

The above looks hopeless. However, I would like to be wrong. Maybe some of the lawsuits I hear are being filed will be upheld by courts. Maybe those courts will find support among those in enforcement circles to put teeth to those rulings. These glimmers of hope, notwithstanding, it is difficult to fight off a growing nihilism about the whole American project.

Even if this country can be saved, is it actually redeemable? Roughly half of participating voters in this nation consciously chose leaders who ran on platforms to harm me, mine, immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ community. A nation built on slave labor and genocidal expansion, continually villainizes desperate immigrants and worships at the altar of more money for the rich, while laborers work all day at wages that leave them unable to afford basics. Even if it gets back to running on the rails, is a nation with a sizable portion of its populace supportive of those abusive stances worth trying to save?

Right now, the US is well on its way to officially becoming a failed, nuclear-armed theocracy. Yes, America is about to become Pakistan under a cross, but with a lot more “goes boom” power, and a frighteningly large portion of its residents is ok with that. An unforgivably large number of people here gorge on misinformation, and continually make flawed cause and effect associations about economics, international relations, domestic policy, education, security and defense. They remain incorrigible because the flow rate of nonsense keeps increasing, it appeals to their established biases and they are committed to rejecting your information, all while hurling insults and schoolyard names in response to your points.

I’m halfway to my death, and I’m debating whether it’s worth it to fight like you would to save a loved one, for a place that chooses to hate you back, no matter what you do or how you try. Looking at all that’s happening, although unprecedented, the response from the appalled onlookers is that it’s not who we are. What if it is and we’ve been telling ourselves fairy tales all this time? What if we’ve just been applying coats of paint over rust, rot, mold and corrosion, and it’s gotten to the point where no amount of it can cover up the hidden degradation from ignoring real repairs over time? What if this nation, as a schoolmate said insulting someone’s car, is now completely made out of Bondo and there’s nothing solid left?

I’m debating but I’m stubborn and haven’t given up…yet. I’ve reached out to my legislators, along with millions of others nationwide, and actually got through to one’s office. He’s having a Town Hall in the upcoming weeks and I’m invited to go. I’ll be there and will try to lean on him as much as a working, middle-class person struggling to save for retirement effectively can.

Maybe this is our moment, and everything happened to remind us how personally we must take politics, because its effects are personal. I hope that’s the case and I keep trying to nurture that hope into contributing to preserving a healthy democratic republic. If successful, it would be nice for this nation to show love back to those of us it’s routinely attacked throughout its history. It can demonstrate that love in durable lasting protections not subject to the whims of whoever happens to sit at a desk for a four-year span. That would truly make this America the beautiful.