“We”, in a much larger sense than this community here. There is so much preaching to the choir here that one would think there’s a much larger movement than there really is, but what proportion of the electorate at large is properly informed even about Palestine, let alone everything else, beyond the processed shit they’re allowed to consume by the mainstream media [christ I’m so sick of that term] and social media? The public at large is ignorant as hell because they’re being lied to, progressive policy is popular and yet so many don’t even fucking know it.

This needs to go beyond voting, there needs to be actual outreach instead of this endless internet posturing, and it needs to be more than sanctimonious finger wagging, on both sides (not in the blue vs red sense, but referring to our own infighting). We need to dial back on both the “paving the way for the fascists to win” and the “you support genocide” rhetoric. I cannot seriously believe that anyone who argues in good faith wants any of this to happen, but we’re I, for one, am goddamned terrified and know full well that no matter who wins, we lose. It’s just that one route to fascism is the autobahn and the other is a backroad with a slightly reduced speed limit, by which nobody abides anyway.

Again, maybe I’m wrong. I hope to high hell that I’m wrong, both that everyone outside the terminally online is as distracted and ignorant as I think they are, and that the redhat ghouls will be less incompetent and succeed in turning this into an authoritarian dictatorship. My wife, who has been on the left but fairly hands-off as it relates to activism, is charged up as hell over this disaster, as are the vanishingly few people with whom we still actually socialize. The craven overreach on women’s rights is bringing more people into the fold, has actually made a small difference, and could continue to do so so long as everyone avoids becoming complacent. I desperately want to be wrong but I am a terminal pessimist and my hope was murdered a long, long time ago, as was my faith not only in our institutions but also in society as a whole. Nothing fucking matters anymore.

Mostly unrelated and entirely tangential, we could learn a few things from that fucking scumbag Trump, in that we (again, the larger population “we” and our useless nonrepresentative representatives) aren’t loud enough, we’re not nearly vicious enough, and we don’t brag about our victories enough. Enough of this “when they go low we go high”, Patagonia vest-wearing, tepid granola-in-oatmilk horseshit. I don’t believe that sewage golem has the charisma everyone says he does but [a] his fucking rubes are certainly in his thrall and [b] I’m a terrible judge of charisma anyway because I have absolutely none of it myself, otherwise I’d be running for something here. But we need someone like that, except not a murderous tinpot.