This is sort of going up a week late (which is fine, because there’s exactly nothing I can do about any of this in any kind of active sense and keeping my mouth shut in the moment is probably for the best given how many people are absolutely fine with exposing themselves to potential issues in the future by speaking aloud some potentially illegal things (or at least some things that could make them a target should the worst happen)), but what a fucking wild weekend we had. Nothing quite like a former president who is currently running for president getting shot at while he’s giving a campaign speech. Nothing like spending a weekend watching the political party of calls for violence, virulent hate, and increasing violent rhetoric decide to flip the script and blame their rivals for supposedly creating a world in which a hateful bigot gets shot at by another hateful bigot. Nothing quite like watching most of the internet and media either move on from an assassination attempt incredibly quickly or spend an unbearable amount of time luxuriating in the dunks (internet) or endless punditry (media) of the presidential candidate who was shot at and the hateful bigot in the audience who died. Just completely unprecedented times. Genuinely, the only part of this that is playing out exactly as it always does is the fact that this latest instance of gun violence will do absolutely nothing to change gun laws in my country of birth. The United States of America is pretty dang fucked. Not, like, in a hopeless “we’re fully in fascism” kind of way. We’re not there yet. Just in the “shit is so wild that everything just seems normal now” and “guns are more valuable than human lives in the US” kind of ways. Which, you know, are pretty fucked up.

There’s a lot of stuff tumbling around in my head as I write this, but most of it feels like either bitter wishes about alternate futures or platitudes meant to seek meaning in the current chaos. There’s little up there that’s actionable or worth reflecting on other than how I feel about the way people responded to it in the spaces I occupy. Which was either absolutely no acknowledgement of what happened (which honestly feels like the sane response since that means they were disconnected from the news over the weekend and that increasingly feels like the healthy choice in the modern era) or endlessly dunking on it for a day and a half so far. I have a lot of thoughts I won’t voice about the people who were shot at or killed as a result of this assassination attempt, but I will say that this was kind of inevitable. We’ve seen more and more violence become a normal part of political action, from the ultra-right-wing/Nazi marches around Trump’s initial candidacy and presidency to the insurrection attempt on January 6th, 2021. Between those, we’ve got attempts to kill specific candidates or political figures (Nancy Pelosi, her husband, and the hammer guy), endless gun violence with frequent mass shootings (to the degree that The Onion rarely posts the “‘No Way To Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” article anymore), and an absolutely useless media cycle that heads further and further to the political right as they try to stay firmly in the middle between the liberals (which are largely also shifting a bit rightward, pulled by all this nonsense) and the conservatives who are just sprinting as far to the right as they can get. It’s a giant mess and the current atmosphere breeds the idea that violent action is not only possible but acceptable.

I’m pretty left-leaning, as far as my social and political views go. I’m not particularly well represented in US politics as a result. I’ve accepted that as much as I can, though, since it is clear that making compromises right now is the only way to prevent things from getting worse and as much as I’d like to blithely stick to my principles and vote only for someone who represents them, it is impossible to ignore the fact that things could quickly get so much worse if Trump gets elected again (or if the conservatives are not stopped wherever they attempt to hold power despite their unpopularity). Not that things are great right now, mind you, but having idiots with guns running around the country, killing (or even just attempting to kill) anyone they view as an enemy seems like the direction things will go pretty quickly if he winds up in power again. I mean, the US Supreme Court has basically already said the President of the United States gets to do whatever the hell they want while they’re in office and can’t be held accountable for it since they didn’t bother to define what does or doesn’t count as being a part of the president’s duties. Real grim stuff, to be honest. Not a great potential future.

All I can do these days is try to roll with the punches and, as always, try not to lose sight of how unprecedented the times are. I mean, sure, plenty of presidents have been shot at, but I don’t think we’ve ever had an ex-president who is a presidential candidate again (which is pretty rare but not entirely unprecedented) get shot at in the week leading up to said ex-president’s party’s national convention and then have to have the awkward conversation about how the police and secret service can’t do shit about the presence of guns at said convention because the state it is happening in was so gerrymandered that it legalized open-carry despite the majority of the population not wanting it. I just love living in such a unique and new future. Definitely doesn’t ramp up my anxiety to know we’re basically watching an entirely new downfall of a democracy. Rome didn’t have shit on this unfolding disaster…

There’s no real point here that I’m trying to make. I just needed space to react to all of this. I needed a moment to process all of this out loud. To recognize how bonkers things have gotten. How dangerous the world is becoming. I still don’t know what’s going to happen (maybe I’ll have completely rewritten this by the time it goes up since a whole week will have passed and those suckers can be incredibly eventful sometimes) [I rewrote nothing], but I remain hopeful that we can prevent things from getting worse. That horrible vision of the future is not yet inevitable. It’s scary, the way it looms on the horizon, but it can still be diverted. We just have to stay focused on continuing to push back against it, avoid getting trapped in a belief in its inevitability, and the thought that such a violent, horrible future could be wielded for good. I mean, sometimes violence is needed, but political assassinations are never a good option to take, you know? At best, you’re creating a martyr. At worst, you’re fueling the meteoric rise of a dictator who now has even more of an excuse to crack down on whoever they deem are political dissidents. Anyway, US citizens should vote for the Democrats if only because they’re not going to start handing out permission slips to kill people who disagree with them. I’m genuinely not sure the Republicans won’t start trying to figure that one out in the near future.