Day 14 of 1456

Day 14 of 1456 in trump's America.

Has it been two weeks? Years? How many months have we lived like this now? Every day is a clock, now. On duty for the long, wet, hateful winter. Broken bottles and faces, heil salutes and Somali hate crimes on buses. Everything we've ever talked about that we've somehow never prepared for.

What's it like when the concept of "country" has telescoped down and now it's on your lap? When it's not an abstract concept held aloft by Something Else, or Process, or System, but it's a heinous an unstoppable responsibility to decide every second with what you're going to do to change today what it's going to look like tomorrow. Freedom is a zombie black angry bitch, who will never stop asking you, again and again, what you're doing to deserve it, where it's going to go, and what it's going to look like when it gets there.

In the short 16 years since The Century That Will Be Decided By The Internet has begun, we've seen things the human mind couldn't have fathomed with a thousand infinite rooms with a thousand infinite monkeys with too much time and caffeine on their hands who tried to see what the future had coming. I was talking with a friend two days ago, that this election is the first time we may have realized how badly things could go when we underestimated our new toy. We turned our back for what felt like a second, and it swallowed our children and our gay neighbors and our friends who aren't white enough and shat them out into the heart of the black star.

So now we're trying to come to grips with how it all happened. What Rubik's cube of angles and turns could've gotten us this mangled, and we try to straighten it all out. And there's a new awareness for journalistic quality – or lack thereof, to make a hack notice already mentioned a thousand times since Thursday – and far be it from me to besmirch the necessary purge of failed media, but it's still a battle of facts. Those are not the rules of the game anymore. Ignoring the fact that Progressives are literally trying to teach each other how to read at a 9^th grade level again, and all the embarrassment that entails, but it's not a question of straighter facts. Facts have never been hot enough to cook something like Political Victory. Never once in this country's history. It's certainly not going to start working now.

In the Presidential election on 1828, it was John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson. Adams had served in quite literally nearly every government position our young country had come up with at that point, and probably invented a few on his way to the top, and was the Presidential incumbent, which is the closest thing you can get to a guarantee in American politics. He was a storied, qualified, and experienced politician, with a resume that hadn't been seen yet up to that time.

Andrew Jackson was a pretty good war general who liked to shoot his personal enemies in the heart when his hands got tired from beating them with his cane.

Jackson won, and delivered a genocide – on American soil, mind you – to its American Indian inhabitants. To be more technically accurate, he didn't invent it, but he did kick it into fifth gear.

This is the possibility we're left with now. Consider the cesspool of hate we've been aware we're living in right now, just in the last eight years, when we had a black president who actually spoke out against these police killings. Who tried to do what he could to stop them. This shit has been restrained so far. Look over those sentences again, because it hurt me to see my fingers typing it, too. Imagine what racist water-heads will think they can get away with when they know daddy won't yell at them.

This is what cowards do. And occasionally a coward will come along of such ungodly bottomless depravity that he will shock beyond anything a culture's natural immune system has ever had to deal with before. Journalists and academics and politicians and artists and experts will never expect something of such massive magnitude to strike so blatantly at the deep empty nothing that every human being lives with. The Abyss grows legs and spreads asexually to each man, woman, and child, and they cheer for the apocalypse.

Facts are soft weaponry for this fight. We are out organized. We are out motivated. Telling people what's going to happen does not turn the tide of what's going to happen. And if I stopped here, I would be worthless as a writer and most likely a human being. Because that is all I've done so far tonight. Explaining Where We Are. Because I want to know exactly where I stand and what I think the stakes are. Chop off and burn the stump of each head of the Hydra until only one is left and you can look it in the face.

The one and only superiority Progressives have ever actually had is diversity. And I'm not talking something as simplistic as racial or gendered diversity. That's a boring conversation that's been solved, decades ago. We are – without a scientific, moral, economic, on-every-label-and-level-you-could-comprehend doubt – better, stronger, and faster as a species when we allow humanity with different external characteristics to the party. That's an obvious fact. You'll notice I didn't say I was throwing out facts. Just noting their weakness. And you'll notice that fact hasn't gotten us very far, has it? No, it hasn't. Because no one's impressed with that anymore.

The flaw that might kill us all is the idea that We need to figure out A plan to deal with this New World Order. That is dangerous short-sighted bullshit. You need to accept the fact that there are other people with other ideas, and if you expect a banner of mental coagulation around a single spear-headed approach, you will march the entire goddamn human race off the cliff single-handedly.

And don't think for a second I'm talking about "unity" or "calm" or any other wet bullshit about figuring out where trump supporters are coming from so we can bridge that gap. I'm talking about us right now. I'm talking about the only people who claim vocally to give a shit are actually jerking themselves off in public hard enough to kill our children that haven't even been born yet.

Let me give you a clear example, so you know what I'm talking about.

Let's go with the safety pins. The chest flair that was suggested as a public signal that you're a safe ally to sit next to in public, or to contact to ask for help if you're a minority that feels threatened. Let me walk you though every article I've read talking about the pins vs. My Internal Monologue.

"The safety pins are a nice idea."

Yes.

"But they are just a symbol."

Of course.

"They need to be supported with direct action and training."

Obviously.

"So everyone should take them off."

Fuck you I hope you get hit by a bus.

You need to actually explain to me how I'm making it worse. You're just bitching. You don't do things the way some other people do them, so you've stopped trying to fix any problems, you're just trying to come out on top. You're having an angry pillow fight in an alley over an infected mattress while a millionaire who lives in the mansion next door jams his brass knuckle covered fist into something that used to look like a human vagina.

We have a unified purpose, but that does not mean in the slightest that we need to have a unified method of assault. The human mind is and always has been a spectacular tool of creativity and fight/flight. It's pure survival. And we're the best at fighting shit when we come at it sideways from 17 different angles, asses first maybe, arms akimbo to the sky. Do not force a singular approach, because a singular approach only needs to be stopped once. And we do not have time to hit the drawing boards again. This has all already started on us. Our friends whose lives are literally at stake do not have time for that.

The happiest moment I've had this whole last week was from a car crash. I was driving home from dropping a friend off, and I passed a fender bender. There wasn't any damage or smoke. Other than the sight of two cars paused on a merging lane, there was nothing really to draw the eye's attention to the scene. If I blinked at the wrong time, or was staring off in the wrong direction I would've missed it.

Two cars were bumper to bumper on the merging right lane, and the two drivers were already out of their cars. In the 7 seconds I took it all in, I saw them finish a conversation, hug, and break apart. I know they weren't related. The two drivers – a man and a woman – were different races. Races I refuse to divulge to you, because those are useless specifics. But different enough to make my point. Two different lives, leading to two different minds, obviously. But they had at least come to some kind of conclusion of how to face the scene at hand. There would be no force on each other. Just mutually assured confrontation with the scenario. Between the two of them they could take care of it. It was nothing. A speck on two people's lives. But they knew they had something better to do than argue with each other. Something better to do than play the Angry Brain-Clay Molding Game that most people think is a fun way to pass their time with other human beings. These people knew it. Like the bard said, "We've Got Bigger Problems Now".