A week later and most of the election results are in. The heavily gerrymandered places represent huge miscarriages of democracy and, for the most part, weren’t nearly as bad as I thought they’d be in my home state of Wisconsin. I will say that it sucks to see so many people disparraging my state for leaning so heavily toward the facists without considering the fact that more than fifty percent of the population voted for democratic candidates and still wound up with barely a third of the seats in the state government. Which, you know, has been the case for about the last four or more years now (I really can’t remember when the gerrymandering happened, but it feels like forever ago).

Still, we managed to hold on to the democratic leadership of our state, held onto at least the same amount of power in the federal senate as we did before, and the votes are still being counted for the house given how close a bunch of the races were. Too close, if you ask me, given on side is shitty, sure, but the other side are racist, facist, absolutely horrible fuckers who want to take peoples’ rights away while also dismantling the few good things the government currently does so they can pad their wallets, accumulate power, and, you know, do the whole facist thing. It’s really pretty clear to see it all playing out right now.

This is pretty much the bare minimum for things to not get rapidly worse. Sure, the House of Representatives is a toss-up as of writing this and there’s a few shitheads on the democrats’ side of things in the Senate that just love fucking things up for everyone else, but at least things aren’t getting worse. My state is going to stay pretty much the same with nothing of use ever getting done because of horrific gerrymandering, the federal government is going to continue its milquetoast “progressive” agenda, and maybe a few more insurrectionists will get a slap on a wrist that’ll be enough to make some of them feel like martyrs and just stir up that whole collection of fuckers for the next one. I’m upset that this is the world I live in, but I’ll admit that it could have been a lot worse and that I’m glad it wasn’t. All of these can be true at once.

I’ve got a lot of thoughts about what the future looks like (and the fact that the next presidential election being two years away means that election season for that hullabaloo is about to start up, much to the misery of all involved), but there’s so much that might or might not happen yet that I’m hesitant to speculate. All the thoughts sitting at the front of my mind are rather negative, unfortunaetly, which is why I’m choosing to keep them to myelf. There’s little for anyone else to gain from my doom and gloom and I don’t particularly thing it’ll be helpful for me to write it all down. Better to put it somewhere where no one will see it, like my personal journal that I barely use anymore because this blog has mostly replaced it. But I do still use it for stuff like this that just needs a place to live outside of my head.

All we can do right now is continue our efforts to make the world a better place and wait to see what comes of our efforts. I wish I had a more positive note to reflect on other than “we’ve done one more necessary step in the path to things not sucking, only an unknown number more to go!” I really wish we could jot down a real, appreciable victory in the win column, but all we’ve done so far is not lose. Even the small, drop-in-a-bucket that was the student loan forgiveness program has been halted by lawsuits as people who aren’t directly benefiting from it are allowing themselves to be used as pawns to prevent anyone else from benefiting from it. I want to cuss out the individuals involved since they’ve got their names publically available due to the lawsuits they’re bringing, but they’re being bankrolled by special interests and while I’d like to think that I’d turn down an offer of financial support in exchange for my soul, I know I’m actually pretty comfortable compared to most. Who knows what might have pushed them this far. Or maybe they’re just miserable, selfish people. I doubt I’ll ever know.

Anyway, that’s enough of thinking about the election results for today. I’m going to go back to not thinking about anything related to politics for the next twenty-four hours so I can be less stressed, anxious, and miserable than I am now. After all, what’s the point of putting myself through this constantly when I can compartmentalize and only put myself through this once a day when I’m taking a break at work?