I kind of expected shit to go sideways as soon as Trump took office. I’ve been readying myself for it for a while, after all, so I had a pretty good idea of what his government would do, how’d they do it, and how that would go. I didn’t expect it to be as grand and sweeping a shitstorm as it is, but we’re still within (the admittedly far end of) my projections. What has surprised me, though, which maybe it shouldn’t have given how the election went and how the party behaves over all, is how the Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything at all. And not only are they not doing anything, but they’re actually supporting some of the confirmations of Trump’s horrible, unqualified, and incredibly disastrous government. They’re not trying to reformat themselves into an opposition party. They’re not even trying to PRETEND to be acting against him! What they’re actually trying to pretend, with a few exceptions, is that this is a normal governmental transition. Which is whack! It’s fucked up, even! This shit isn’t normal and the fact that they literally made a goddamn vote deal so they wouldn’t have to work on the weekends is abhorrent, ESPECIALLY after the first aerial crash that came as a likely result of Trump attempting to gut the FAA. This isn’t normal! They should try to do fucking anything at all! Literally anything! People’d be lining up to support them if they did! No one likes this and even the people who like this are going to stop liking it as soon as more air traffic accidents start happening, disease via food contamination runs rampant, and the next plague breaks out! The first two are a foregone conclusion [I wrote this on the morning of the 31st, before the second collision, so I feel kinda bad but also very justified in writing this, even as SOME Democrats have begun to do something that still falls short of what feels like the minimum I’d expect from an opposition party] but the last thing seems increasingly likely as bird flu and fucking tuberculosis start to pick up and the systems that might have warned us they were coming are being dismantled by a mixture of pettiness destructiveness and incompetence!

It’s suffocating and I’m having a more difficult time than I expected, even as I try to stay active and take what actions I can to push back against all this chaos and horror. It sure would feel a lot better if literally any of my elected officials would get out and start opposing this shit in any way beyond fielding calls with a mixture of donation solicitations and vague platitudes that Something Must Be Done [turns out that the time the bare minimum would have felt better has passed]. This is their whole goddamn job. If I can anticipate a regime like this one picking apart the government because they’re all shithead tyrants with a pathological inability to feel anything but misery they must then inflict on the world around them, then a politician should be able to as well! All the warning signs were there! They literally had a whole goddamn plan that got leaked called “Project 2025” and they’re literally doing that entire thing despite Trump swearing up and down that he wouldn’t! I’m not saying that he’s a hypocrite (because that accusation does nothing for anyone and it never has since they’re all just fine being hypocrites so long as they get to stay in power), but that maybe media companies and politicians shouldn’t have been gullible fools for swallowing that obvious lie hook, line, and sinker! Come on! This shouldn’t be surprising anyone with the capacity to reason! “Shouldn’t.” It clearly is, though. I don’t know. I want to say I can’t believe that my representatives are this foolish, this blind to the events of the modern day, and that maybe they’re planning something huge, but they’re all probably going to be fine no matter what happens. They just want to play pretend that everything is just another day in the office, collect their government paycheck, and then collect campaign donations as the US desperately does anything we can to unseat this awful government.

It’s exhausting. It’s impossible to keep up with all this. Too much is happening and I just don’t have the energy to do more than catch whatever glimpses land in my path during the brief moments I’m online. Looking up everything that happened on any given day would wreck me, given how staggeringly exhausted I am. Because not only is all this shit happening–all this exhausting, awful, and outrageous shit–but I also had to work long days (more on that later, I’m sure) to get my work project done on time. I can feel myself slowly starting to fall apart because there’s no escaping any of this. I wish I could lose myself in hour after hour of Final Fantasy XIV or Dragon Age: The Veilguard, indulging in reckless escapism with my most recent favorite video games while I block out the world for at least a little bit, but I’ve had to work my first weekend (a thing I’ve specifically avoided for over a decade now, after all my other work/life balance/barriers have been eroded by time and necessity) to get this project done due to someone else’s fuck up (again, more on that another day, probably the same day as above) and I put in thirty-eight hours in three days even prior to that weekend, so I can feel the point of collapse rapidly approaching. I don’t have the time to get any kind of rest or escape right now. I work, I sleep, and I work again, all while trying to find any kind of micro escape at work without subjecting myself to what I’ve taken to just referring to as “the horrors” every single hour of every single day. I am fighting a losing battle here.

I know we’re in the middle of it all. We’ve had just enough time for things to start falling apart, for orders to be given and for the cronies to leap to the fore in carrying them out, but it will still be a little bit longer before all the resistance that has begun starts to hit the surface. The lawsuits, the countersuits, the malicious compliance, the bogging down of bureaucracy by people who have committed their lives to the healthy functioning of our government, and so on. I just wish any of the politicians who style themselves as our “leaders” would actually do any kind of leading. That it didn’t feel like there was some kind of vacuum as the public begins to surge against this tide of fascism and finds itself without support from the people we put in office to do just that. Sure, there’s a few standing out, who are speaking up and calling a nazi salute a nazi salute, but there’s just too much for one person to handle. I really can’t believe (well, I really don’t want to believe) that not one political party or organization seems to have had a plan in place for handling the rapid destruction of our government. It’s entirely too believable and yet still disappointing all the same. I mean, we all watched the massive momentum of the Harris-Walz campaign get absolutely hobbled by a return to “politics as normal” a couple weeks into the campaign, so why would the rise of the regime they failed to ever once effectively oppose push any of them to act? They still get their paychecks, go on their speaking tours, and retire to the boards of fortune 500 companies or whatever it is the wastrels who actually leave elected office wind up doing (as opposed to the dinosaurs who seem committed to dying in office).

I’m never been one to have faith in the system. I’ve been failed by systems and “the way things are supposed to be” my entire life, so I have never had much trust that things will work the way they’re “supposed to” just because they’re supposed to work that way. This cynicism has been correct pretty much every step of my life, but I’ve always tried to give people and systems a chance to actually deliver. Also, it’s not like I’ve ever had much of an different choice. It’s always been a choice between voting for a milquetoast Democrat or not voting at all, and it’s better to try to exert what pressure I can than to just stand around cursing the darkness. Something major needs to change. I’ve got plenty of thoughts, but none that I’m willing to commit to a written format like this one. My name is tied to this website, as is my billing information through my host and while I’d like to believe that a technology company would demand a warrant, I’m not sure any exist who will demand that or even how much longer a warrant is going to be needed. There’s a whole lot of “the breakdown of the rule of law” going on after all, so what does a flimsy piece of paper matter to anyone? Anyway, I’m jaded and distrustful of anyone who might finally take action at this point, given the absolute void of leadership and action that has been the Democratic party these last two weeks, but I know what I’m going to be doing in the meantime. Whatever I can. Out of the public eye, for the most part. Just know that if I don’t write about it (but I’m sure I will, given how much of what’s on my mind tends to make it to these posts), I’m still doing at least as much as I ever had, if not more. I’m not about broadcasting my actions, just acting, especially these days, when even the most normal protesting might get somehow criminalized. Hopefully enough individuals doing this kind of action will be enough to eventually make some kind of change happen.