Onward, Forward

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to move forward after what happened earlier this week. I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling angry, depressed, helpless, and like I’m not in control of my own life. So, unfortunately, these feelings after the election are not new to me. But I’m slightly comforted in having a clear objective and clear enemies to fight.

I refuse to let apathy take hold of me and, come inauguration day, I will let my full malicious self shine out the clearer. Anyone I know who voted red, or just failed to vote, will not experience my help or grace. Need help with something? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, asshole. Need a document? Prepare for sideways, uneditable PDFs. To any coworkers who need my help, you can learn to work Excel and one note on your own. To any cars with a Republican-related bumper sticker: I will run you off the road before I let you merge, blinker, or not. Turns out the zipper method doesn’t work for Nazis.

I’m ready to make frequent anonymous reports to the IRS so they investigate megachurches, Musk companies, and any businesses that my cousins, aunts, or uncles run. The same goes for the Federal Bureau of Labor. To my mother and any other GOP-supporting family members, I hope your vote against Social Security and Medicare saves you when your kids choose to leave you homeless since they won’t be able to pay for in-home care or nursing homes. Not that they’ll care to do so anyway since you voted to rob them of their future. When a man with a Hitler-youth haircut, khaki shorts, and oversized veneers asks me for my number, I will make sure to take his phone, delete Truth Social, and Venmo his entire balance to myself. If you voted for the party of “your body, my choice”, the obvious correlation will be “your savings, my account”. No more donating to your GoFundMe pages, you did this. Get fucked.

Conversely, I pledge to be a safe place for all the women, people of color, immigrants (legal or not), and LGBT+ people in my life. I will donate more time, energy, and money than before. If we ever have the chance to vote again, I will do what I can to ensure more people vote for what matters morally, and I will do what I can to make sure anyone in my life thinking of voting red, doesn’t vote!

If we want to be on the right side of history, this is our new social contract. I will happily roast some harshmallows on all the bridges I’ve burned while fighting fire with fire. As hopeless as I feel, what is the other option? Every generation must know its own suffering, and this racism, sexism, and phobias (homo and xeno) are not confined to the flyover and southern states. California almost flipped red. That means we are officially in the Fuck Around and Find Out era, and I will do my level best to make sure that I can spend the foreseeable future preparing the world’s largest “I told you so” seen in my lifetime.

If my family couldn’t beat me down, then little Donny John and his couch fucking friend can’t either. Join me in donating to the legal defense funds below, and let me know about any other ones you can think of (after you update your passport). We’ve got a lot of work to do.