Day 28 of 1456

Day 28 of 1456 in trump's America.

I'm in a stranger mood in stranger days. We're on a holding pattern now. Again like last week. It makes you understand how hell is a logical fallacy: How could misery stay miserable if it's the same misery everyday for eternity? Eventually you get numb. Pain is entwined with shock. Once it becomes accepted, something is lost.

There's been so many levels of disappointment and horror, for every move that this man has made, every second of everyday for the last month that the entire machinery of Doing Something About It feels like it's died and shriveled. He keeps appointing war criminals to his cabinet. He keeps pissing off countries that have been waiting for excuses to crush us under their boot heels. People yell back at him on the internet and count that as Doing Something. This is not your racist be-gummed uncle at Thanksgiving that you can ridicule with a bon mot that goes over his head anyway that you can jerk off to later because you are just oh so clever. This is the president now. Baring a Christmas miracle, which – as I mentioned last week – won't even matter, since we'd still be dealing with his homunculi minions that he dredged out of the woodwork to win in the first place.

What's drawn my attention the most this week, for whatever reason, is the future that was stolen from us. Do you remember what it looked like? Do you remember what the term "post-scarcity" meant? It was just weeks ago. What would we do with ourselves and all our free time when 3D printers were plastic-crafting every single physical tooled necessity we could need as a society? Probably spend all our time enjoying our electronic self-driving cars taking us wherever we wanted to go while we waited for a Scrabble pouch spelled science genius to make us all free rocket ships to Mars for us, our children, spouses, and a sex robot for each of us. We were talking about Norway and their paid minimum income & progressive prisons which had no death penalty and were nicer than most apartments I've ever been in my life.

Now I feel like we're crossing our fingers and collating our forces to do our best to make sure things only back slide to 1992. I have a lesbian friend whose lover died before marriage equality was passed, and now she's shriveled and hopeless that she might lose the right to it all over again before she's even done mourning, much less finding a soul mate that won't earn both of them getting spit on in public, best case scenario.

Do you remember what the world was maybe going to look like if we just didn't fuck it up for just a little while longer? Now there is no proactive. There is only defense and reaction. We've been here before, as a species. We almost got somewhere different. Like, literally somewhere else. Literally another planet. Rocket packs and free house batteries and free college education and a livable minimum wage and a hundred other things that would've given a hundred sci-fi writers a hundred utopian erections.

Now we're worried about sidewalks. Trains and buses. Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu houses of worship, because fascists are literally the stupidest creature the living world that is mother nature has ever seen and their very existence is an argument against survival of the fittest as something you'd ever goddamn want to take advice from. These people have trouble tying their shoes because the velcro insults their daddies and pappies and farms and houses and jobs. They hear voices.

And I learned something this last week. Apparently my very existence as white man is the only thing that can get them to stop a hate crime in process. It's true. Think of it like this: Cum Stain on Legs has grabbed a hijab off a Muslim woman. Now a lesbian steps in to intercede. That's only going to make him more mad. But if a straight white male steps in, that might be the only thing that can shame him. My friend literally referred to it as "like being the manager who got called in". Think about that. This is not a leadership role, obviously. Nor should it be. Minorities don't need white citizens leading and designing the spaces for them. We've been down that road before. But if white dudes were muscle? If we were the only "species" – white straight allies – who could get the disastrous hordes to think twice before they rushed in and tried to fuck with these people behind us who were trying to make a place for themselves in the world?

Nothing so preposterous as "healing the image of white men in the world". I refuse to bear the responsibility for stupid decisions that people who look like me may have done. I'm only now and have only ever been talking about strategy. I'll be a white ace-in-the-hole in public.

We need to know where we all fit in to this. And the enemy is easy to plan around. They're racist, which is a disphemism for "stupid and predictable". They outnumber us, sure. But the bad have always outnumbered the good. That's not different. We just got lazy. We thought we'd finally crossed the finish line marked "21^st Century" with the rest of the modern world. Well, close but not quite. We're still 16 years behind, and we've got more cleaning to do, apparently. Besides, this should all be easy. They're not readers. We won't even have to speak in codes. Shore up, stretch your shoulders, and prepare your war paint and killface. We know how close we are to being a species. Something the universe can be proud of making. Because we might be all there is. And even if we weren't, it's important to be unique, in the galactic scheme of things. The only greatest sin is uniformity. And these pale, dead ghosts want it all to look the same. Just like it does when they look in the mirror. And there is nothing more boring and stupid than wanting everything and everyone to look and sound and think like you.

Entropy is not a forgone conclusion.