At first it was that I couldn’t open the windows at home for three days, wildfire smoke blown in from what could be any direction, at this point. Which had been preceded by four days of building demolition one street over, the sound of wood and plaster crashing to the ground when it had been NOT too smoky to open the windows at home. Au revoir, rent controlled prewar! Hello $2000 a month student efficiencies! And I know. Know that the smoke and the noise could not have been nearly as bad as it was wherever those fires were burning. Still though, after all the things, the continuing things - it really has become a challenge, not letting that aggro get me down.
Because I have to be honest, I just haven’t been able to shake this feeling. Of just. Not feeling all that hopeful of late - about the climate, the fascist GOP, about trans everything, and the propensity of some of our elderly elders to refuse their graceful retirement. If only I were referring to, say, your friendly neighborhood corner grocer, a key figure in one’s day to day life, sure, but of strikingly less consequence compared to that of say, a sitting US Senator or the President of the United States.
Well, Feinstein croaked so that takes care of one of the problems to which I refer. Sounds harsh, I know, but you know what else is harsh? Your current local weather, probably, not to mention the prospect of the GOP confirming another federal judge to the bench and a second term for Dump Truck Donnie. Which gives me pause, friends, along with this acute, ongoing infection of existential dread. Over what is to come. And apparently I’m not the only one. Did you know that White House staff are now so concerned that Dank Brandon will slip and fall that he’s no longer allowed to walk down the longer, front steps of Air Force One and now takes the shorter back stairs.
Which brings to my mind his campaign of just five or so years ago in which he stood in front of the nation proclaiming to all his want to serve as the bridge for the next generation of leaders, shepherding their new, progressive ideas with his steady, guiding hand of experience, in response to questions asked THEN about his age, lol. And just four years later, he’s convinced himself that it is HE and only HE that can stave off Dump Truck Donnie and his magats, thus rescuing American democracy at the very moment of its demise!
Remember last time the dems, oh, the dems, ran a candidate so unenthused by much of the electorate? Against the same candidate? Of his potential win the media as skeptical then as they also seem now. The party had four years, four years in which they could have found, molded, however the fuck the candidates are made, THEE person to take the reins, lead us forward, thwart the magas. And with the very future of the country at hand? We get Joe again, who, I’m sorry to have to mention this, could very well drop dead long before this coming September ends. Show him trotting around in his aviators all you want, does not change the fact that it could happen. Or maybe he lives and just loses to Donnie. Cause I don’t see a Clyburn Hail Mary working for him this time around.
Which is why it is all so infuriating these people can’t dry themselves out off of the power they’re all so clearly drunk on. With, you know, democracy. Not to mention, like, lives in the balance. Because the whole fucking country’s become unhealthy for sensitive groups. Least of all - me. I’m just trying to save my sanity by engaging with our current political landscape in a healthier way, which is to say very little. It’s not only that I no longer watch cable news like more hours per day than I am actually going to admit here, it’s that I no longer watch it at all, pretty much. I’ve detoxed off of the speedball that is media in our late stage capitalism hellscape to just the PBS News Hour every morning. I was still watching Maddow’s Monday night for a while, along with Velshi on the Weekends, but now I’m just down to Ali. It truly is amazing what you’re able to see when you get here.
Away from the terror headline scroll and the arguing, with no corporate agenda, no shouting pundits, what you’re able to see when you get here are different points of view, seldom heard in the mainstream. Have you ever seen a maga interviewed on MSNBC, other than to make an example of? I haven’t either. But I have on PBS. And, look, I’m no saint, the thought of bridging the divide with some of these folx makes my stomach turn just like it does the next trans guy.
This division is destroying us, though, and we’re letting it.