Government

A Rant About How Much Things Suck Today

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I’ve got more coming on this on Friday, but the Supreme Court has once again decided that people need fewer rights, not more of them, by ruling on some absolute bullshit. Normally I say that because I’m too mad to go into detail or just don’t have the spoons to run through it all, but this time it is actual bullshit. They ruled on an entirely fictitious situation that had no place being in front of the supreme court and, as a result have not only removed protections from the LGBTQIA community, but basically signaled to all the bigots and their astroturfing financial masterminds that they can take whatever the fuck they want to the supreme court because having an actual legal case doesn’t matter anymore. Throw in all the other dumb shit that’s happened, the absolutely bananas-pants rulings this body of unelected partisan hacks has passed down, and the great issues the right-wing asshats are pushing in every single state, and maybe this country we live in isn’t worth celebrating. Maybe this country is bad. Why celebrate independence day when my freedoms, the freedoms of people like me, and the freedoms of so many people who didn’t have the privilege of being born white, masculine-passing, and (well, probably “lower” at this point) middle-class are being slowly stripped away?

I mean, hell, children are being “allowed” to work in factories because this capitalist machine is breaking down its populace into a bunch of cogs meant only to perform labor. Can’t have people getting an education or improving themselves. Gotta trap everyone in a cycle of poverty so the ruling class can stay seated at the top. Fuck, this country sucks. And it’s not like we’ve got a monopoly on this, either. So many countries are chasing profits and the capitalistic pipedream that is eternal growth by allowing themselves to put GDP and corporations ahead of doing right by their people. It’s disgusting and disheartening. Maybe we should just put a whole moratorium on celebrating countries until they actually get their shit together and stop making the world a worse place for everyone.

Originally, I wasn’t going to have a post for today. I was going to take a day off and continue the resting I’ve been doing since this is one of the few breaks I get to disentangle myself from the capitalist machine of constant labor. After Friday, though, I felt that this day can’t go unremarked. So yeah, fuck the bigots. Fuck your religious defense of bigotry. Every single one of you should be ashamed of yourselves. Fuck independence day specifically, because there’s going to be a lot of people out there celebrating this country who see the actions of the supreme court as a victory rather than the symptom of an ill and failing government that is allowing the wealthy few to rule the masses. A majority of whom, at worst, are totally willing to let people live their lives however they want so long as it isn’t endangering other people. Just as properly Good people are rare, so are Evil people. Now if only we could get all the Neutral folks to take a stand for letting people live in their harmless truths.

I’ll celebrate independence day again when I no longer feel ashamed of my country. Until then, fuck it, fuck the bigots, trans rights are human rights, and your religion isn’t worth shit when it comes to deciding the value of other people.

Election Reflection as Things Stay Mostly Blue in 2022

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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).

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A Normal Amount of Election Day Anxiety

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I spent most of today trying to avoid spiraling. It is election day as I’m writing this, though this is going up a week later, and this election feels particularly fraught. Perhaps more telling, though, is that this level of anxiety is starting to feel normal for elections. After all, the past four major elections (two presidential elections and mid-term elections, specifically, since there’s been a lot more of the local ones than just these four) have been either a step directly toward fascism and authoritarianism or a desperate attempt to move further away from it. I know that the situation we’re currently in is the result of decades of effort so it’s not like any of this stuff came out of nowhere, but that’s not really comforting to know that given how much of it happened before I had any say in the matter. What would be comforting would be knowing that our elections are fair and safe from a bunch of far-right facist fuckers worming their way into enough positions of power that they can thumb the scales by disenfranchising voters or outright meddling in the elections. What sucks the most about that thought is it feels on the same level as all of my “what if I won the lottery” fantasies.

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