Day 21 of 1456

Day 21 of 1456 in trump's America.

Waiting for the clampdown. Trying to push the tide before the inauguration in under two months. Acting like that's when it'll start. "We have to do something before then."

So now we've put all our hopes in two things: Jill Stein running a recount in three states that would swing the electoral points in Hillary's favor, or the electorate themselves choosing our next president – which they legally and constitutionally could do, saying fuck-all to the entire process of democracy – but something tells me the entire singular sources of heroism, courage, and counter-revolutionary bravado for the country as a whole doesn't reside in some odd-hundred electoral college representatives. They'd probably all be dead before the next morning show.

And that's the issue at hand. I don't feel like it's conjecture to point out that even if Jill Stein's bargain gets Hillary in the White House, the point for this blog will still stand: that there's a lot of angry, racist, hate-filled Americans out there who want to hurt other Americans, and even more Americans who want to ignore it while it's happening. And those things began percolating during the campaigns, and they got their green light 3 weeks ago. The inauguration is just the store's Grand Opening Celebration, with the streamers and parade. But they've been running business well beforehand.

But far be it from me to be a hypocrite. As I mentioned last week, we'll need a multi-pronged attack everyday for the next four years. I'm not about to shit on openings and "maybes". We can cheer on multiple possibilities and concerns. Shit, we'll have to. Everyone has to multitask now. Inviting queer gendered friends to your lunch table, learning initial first impression greetings in a thousand different languages, knowing how much & why we're protesting for a higher minimum wage, better college assistance, environmental concerns, medicare and medicaid, gas prices and renewable resources, indigenous people's rights, deportation practices, arguments for immigration amnesty, gun control & mental health, food stamps & government assistance, safety nets for returning veterans, and literally 8 million other things that I could not finish listing here before the sun comes up in another 12 hours from now. Anyone who expects a mere human being to take care of those things themselves is asking for violent anarchy.

The government's only real necessity at the bottom of everything is to help get you things you can't get yourself. I'm not going to use words like "need" because that's an ironically subjective phrase. But if we're talking highways, electricity, health insurance, clean water, natural landscapes, street lights, stop lights, sidewalks, shoes that fit, gasoline, cars that drive, restaurants where you can actually eat without playing "spin the wheel-a diarrhea!" – all these things require an oversight ability the likes of which could only be maintained with millions of boring drones being paid billions of boring dollars to do trillions of exponentially boring chores.

No one elected who will take power on January 20^th is interested in keeping those things going – they're just going to get them small and useless enough just before they get so bad that we start setting things on fire – and no one who voted for those people is interested in improving those things, just narrowing the list of people who get to use them.

I've been thinking a lot about methods of knowledge this past week. Why does reading & teaching work on children, and it's failed in adults? There's some point in the development where a human being will go "Prove it", and then that's the only thing that will work. Words come up short.

And whereas I'm a proponent of skepticism for the most part, that doesn't apply to wondering whether or not my brother is my equal. He is. I don't really need to be convinced of that. But if someone is not taught that, and they get old enough to do something with that hate, how do you make them turn that corner? You clearly can't simply tell them – with words – that people different from them deserve the same rights as they do. We've established as a given that that does not work.

There's very little I can think of doing besides getting out in front of these people. The only thing that can shock a brain out of its own rut is a visceral experience. Even then, it's a crap-shoot. You don't know how one interaction could be taken over another one. There's biases, blind spots, literal physical hallucinations that spring up just before the brain sees something it doesn't want to see. Our social systems are stacked against us, and our literal physiological bodies and brains are stacked against us ever getting along.

So what is the point? It certainly can't be for opportunity. There's a hundred other countries out there. Some with provably better social mobility statistics. It can't just be that This Is Where Home Is. Every single person here is either descended from immigrants, or – just to include the American Indians on this list – have been forcibly emigrated from their land. So locale has very little to do with it. What is there worth standing for in this stupid gross land made and run by teenagers in suits who can't stop jacking off over everything they get their hands on and their gizm runs like black oil over the hair and face of the trees and the rivers and the homes of people less white and straight than them? Why am I even writing this garbage?

Because I saw some stupid little words, written by stupid little men, who said some stupid little things. Something about saying fuck you to kings. Something about taking rights from their creator. Something about refusing to give somebody a head start over somebody else. Something about telling you that it's okay and important to yell about something. Something about telling you what you can do to the government & telling the government what it can't do to you. Something about people.

And somehow that turned in to something about being able to learn 7 languages just because you fucking feel like it. And somehow that turned into something about being able to eat at a different continent every meal everyday for a week, just because you fucking felt like it. And somehow that turned in to something about being able to watch a movie or hear a song in every goddamn dialect you could or even couldn't possibly imagine. Something about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Something about traveling to 5 separate climate zones and distinct cultural areas without even needing a goddamn passport.

There's something about a place with so many goddamn questions about itself that you suddenly realize people are coming up with some very interesting answers to it all.

America. The Great Zen Experiment.

The only rule of the game is that you're not allowed to tell someone else they're not allowed to play. That's called fascism. And that is not welcome here, thank you very much.