I saw somebody speaking about a topic fairly tangential to politics, saying “at this point, anybody who’s confidently predicting what the future will be like is a fool.”  That’s real.  One big spoiler on prediction is the media bottleneck.  Even with so many of us getting our window on the world colored by social media, corporate control of the centralized media outlets can’t help but shape the view of reality itself.  Like we get that social media is feeding us agreeable opinions with a sprinkling of fascist propaganda, but news still feels, on some foolish level, true – and so much of it is just not.  So when Shitler got his electoral mandate – and there’s no denying he had that – all the corpos felt like it was go time, everything fascism everywhere forever!, and they successfully made me feel like this was the end of it.

Like I understood that the law wasn’t completely rewritten yet, that in theory, the opposition could pull some rabbits out of some hats.  But I just had no idea it was like this.  It also really doesn’t help that far and away the people most likely to express their opinions to me are conservatives!  If I heard a political opinion from a caller at my day job, it was – and usually still is – american-flavored nazism.  This just made me feel there’s no way anything like reality was reaching the masses, no way anybody felt enough hope that anything could ever be any different, and that the hopelessness itself would be self-fulfilling at the ballot box.

My husband was calling swing voters “dorito voters,” because they were swayed by immediate concerns with no eye at all to more important issues, and he still feels this wave was from the dorito voters losing faith in their boy.  Maybe.  Maybe it was more than that.  I have to think the shock of witnessing how fast the institutions of the government could be dismantled instilled a fear that no amount of accurate prediction of such could achieve.  Many people’s lives were touched by that in unexpected ways.  They wanted cheaper gas and groceries, they didn’t want to see tens of thousands of scientists, park rangers, and food inspectors crying about how they were out of work two days after homie took office.

I just don’t pay much attention to news or social media, so my view of it all was osmosis at the day job, in the grocery store.  I’ve never seen anything to suggest there’s a massive amount of people feeling the horror, the disgust of naked fascism and corruption, and feeling able at all to do anything about it.  Bill Seymour had no reason to think his district could flip in any way, but kept voting for years.  This time, a lot of his neighbors got up and did the same.  How?  Who?  Why?

There’ll be a lot of analysis but most of it is going to come from the cheerleaders of the end of liberty, heralds of the eternal night.  Nazis and all their little friends, from the media pundits to the creeps like Palantir, running the math to ensure we’ll never know anything but hell for the poor, gold fortresses for the rich, until the world chokes and dies.  Maybe it’s better for us to not know how this happened, so those people will never know how to keep it from happening again.

Anyway, as usual, long live the fighters!, and thank you to everyone who voted for what’s right, whether or not your reasons were wrong.  I just don’t give a shit.  This was at least as big as it needed to be, to keep the idea of freedom alive.  Next comes fighting the dems to make sure they’re doing this moment right, but I’ll worry about that another day.

For now, tears of weary joy and a moment of rest.  I’ll do my best to feel this and to keep feeling it.

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