proteanme

Tuesday night and Wednesday, I just felt sick to my stomach. Despair splitting my heart open and filling up my gut. Today I am so angry. So fucking angry.

The are 1000 thoughts running through my brain, but before I spill a few of them out onto the page, I wanted to get to some links first:

White Won

The Audacity of Hopelessness

Election 2016 and the Collapse of Journalistic Standards

Two NBA Coaches Call a Foul on Trump’s Power Play

Radical Pragmatism (from the Bush years)

Here, in no particular order, are some of my thoughts.

.1

To elected Democrats – obstruct. Filibuster. Filibuster. Filibuster. Get your talking points together. Support Obama appointing Merrick Garland to the supreme court. Remind the public of outstanding lawsuits http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/10/75-lawsuits-against-president-elect-trump.html against Trump. Call for an investigation of his abuse of women. Call for an investigation into his ties to the KKK. Call for the designation of the KKK as a terrorist group. Remind the public of the more 500 lies he told on the campaign trail.

Also: Don’t go to the inauguration. Don’t go to the White House. Don’t have a meeting with him, unless his ass will come to Senate or House and then the agenda is resist, resist, resist.

.2

To my people: Love is resistance.

.3

To the silicon power people, you are not seceding. You are staying right here. If you have a bunch of money to fund a campaign: Fund a fucking campaign to do away with the Electoral College. Set up life time funding for the ACLU or Planned Parenthood. Fund Black Lives Matter and National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Fund services for trans and queer youth. Fund the free press. You get the idea. Do something that matters with your precious elite power and all the money you’ve made off commodifying our social lives and need for work. You are nothing without us, so fucking do something real for us.

.4

To all the people that couldn’t be bothered to vote. What the fuck, man! There is no magic candidate that is going to fix everything. Not Obama. Not Bernie. Not Nader. Not Lincoln. Not Kennedy. No one.  So what. Our job as citizens is to hold our leaders feet to the fire. Make them do the right thing. Sometimes, like FDR, make them do great things. If you’re all boohoo, they are both fucked up, let me tell you that the lesser of two evils is really fucking less evil. And Trump is troll and bully with the heart of despot and soul of a dictator.

I was reading Ty’s commentary on Hillary Clinton. And frankly his comments got under my skin. I’m not saying I’m a Hillary fan, but calling her Bush light is a cheap shot (or at least not very nuanced), and echoes of the whole 2000 election rhetoric about there being no difference between Bush and Gore. Thinking about this I was reminded of an interview with Tony Kushner where he said something like the lesser of two evils is really less evil.

Me, I want a democrat president, imperfect, probably compromised, needing all of us to hold his or her feet to the fire, and certainly not ideal. But I’ll take anyone from election’s crop of democrat candidates. Tony convinced me.

I don’t see how anyone can read that history and then turn their back on the system — how anyone can think it’s not important who our justices are, who the president is, who’s in Congress . . . Listen, here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this . . . The system isn’t about ideals. The country doesn’t elect great leaders. It elects fucked-up people who for reasons of ego want to run the world. Then the citizenry makes them become great.