Thoughts on a Freedom Trainwreck

It’s been a really really long year, and it’s only January. There’s a ton of reasons for this, but right now I’m focusing on one.

This is America. It’s got me so fucked up lately. And I’m not your standard, garden variety panicked yankee over here. I’m not making preparations to leave, I fucking can’t. Ain’t just that easy, I’m not marketable and my wife’s got Multiple Sclerosis, we’re not providing value, we’d be refugees not emigrants. But I’m already digressing.

I think the best way to put this is that I’m not afraid. I’m concerned. Fear implies a feeling of danger. I’m a straight-passing cis white man with some beautiful baby blues, my bleeding heart is the only thing that makes me distinguishable from the alpha male misogynist and gigachad MAGA maniac. I don’t fear for myself. But i have strong concerns for people I hold dear to me.

I’m also pissed off. Pissed off that my Canadians won’t be coming here because of the bullshit of our leader here and the legitimate danger he puts foreign visitors in stoking fires with his bullshit rhetoric. Pissed off that he might destabilize shit so far it impacts my travel there. But the thing is my feelings don’t matter. This is the reality.

It’s taken too much of my energy. It doesn’t get to, it hasn’t earned it. But it does anyway. I cannot change this. But it threatens to change me regardless, alter my life, if even in small ways, in ones I have not given consent to. And that’s the real “fuck you” of it all: I’m upset for myself first and foremost. And I feel bad about that.

Before I let that happen though I’m gonna give myself some grace. I hate what’s happening in this country, and I hate that it’s happening to people who deserve to live and be free in this or any goddamn country. I’m allowed to be hurt at the implications on things that are going on in my life, these are not mutually exclusive things. I am learning how to do this, and I’m whining about it in a place where you have to opt in to listen, you came here, I’m not stealing the voice of someone with a real problem.

So I’ll say what I feel and I feel hurt, and I’m emptied out because it feels like all my moving forward as a person is gonna be worthless in the context of the country and perhaps world just fucking collapsing. It’s tough to think that “yeah I got my shit together and I’m taking a trip to Canada with and to see friends and and a concert. Now, the world could take that away from me because the people that run things are insane people. Totally seems like a life worth living, doing everything as right as I can and still getting fucked.”

Im gonna keep going because I am worth it. Even when I feel like the world isn’t. But damnit America, we should be better than this.

If somehow you’re a Trump supporter that decided to read this, first off, congratulations on sticking around this damn long in my vicinity. But it’s probably the end. Because you will point to the last guy taking rights away without providing examples of such, I didn’t lose a single right over the last four years for example. And you will say it was the economy. Trump has filed so many bankruptcies, it’s his strategy for dealing with debt, it’s documented. It’s not the economy.

It’s because he doesn’t like the people you don’t like.

It’s because he makes you feel like it’s okay to just not accept something you don’t like.

It's because when he says he’s gonna make everyone else pay tariffs, which means we will pay their tariffs in our consumer prices, you don’t care that it makes everything cost more because “fuck everyone else were swinging dicks,” and that you do like.

It's because you think we don’t need the rest of the world for anything and that we’re being pussies by cooperating with others, and you think this is all a competition, and he wants to beat everyone else, which you really like.

But at the end of the day it’s because you really don’t give a fuck about what’s right, as much as you do about what you like, or don’t like. And that’s why it’s not immature to tell you to hit the road.

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