Rage

It’s selfish, but what I mind most about the election, aside from the outcome, is what it’s done to me. I suppose ‘what I’ve let it do to me’ is more accurate, but this is like saying I let the tsunami wash away my home.

I have spent my life trying to help. Raised by wolves, I was a child without a champion, brave but scared and foolish, who learned everything the worst possible way. Once I’d climbed out of that and scraped enough of the mud off, I couldn’t not try to spare others the swamp.

I was about to tell stories of things I did, but those fucking blue bracelets some white women are donning to prove to Black women they’re not those white women, not the 57% of us or whatever who voted for Trump, but instead among the 43 percent¹ who want recognition for not being traitors to the sisterhood… (Faint, waning cheer.)

So I won’t tell too many stories. But through AIDS, when holding a dying friend’s hand or changing their diaper was terrifying; through times that were very lean financially, and very fat, very broken and relatively healed, unbearably stressed and standing on a mountain of perspective, I have helped people. I’ve supported people emotionally and financially beyond what’s fair or reasonable to me. I’ve insisted on inclusion and the uplifting of all in communities so pasty pale you’d think anemia was a requirement of membership. I’ve fought for people even as they’ve ducked behind me and mean-girled with their bullies against me. I’ve fought for women, and for my friends in the LGBTQ+ community. I’ve persisted in conversation with white friends who think they get it when talking about race or prejudice or bigotry but don’t do the labor of learning, don’t read the books, or listen to and learn from the people who actually live it beyond sound bites and YouTube clips.

I’ve paid the price for standing for things. It has cost me money, peace, time, and a lot of sleep. It has cost me people I thought were friends. I’ve learned over and over again that few people are really willing to fight beside you when the chips are down. That is always the most painful lesson.

But this election has brought up rage that I cannot manage, cannot find a place for even with all my thick hide.

This election is making me rot from the inside with putrid resentment and a need for revenge.

The spoiled entitlement of many Americans, regardless of their wealth, color, or privilege, is on full display, and perhaps only those coming to this country from deep hardship can see it, along with those of us living eyes wide open.

“The Dems needed to do better if they wanted my vote” will really help next natural disaster when you’re getting paper towels thrown at you instead of troops and aid. If you need to be appeased to vote for your best interests, I’m sure your neighbor will admire your high standards when they’re left without even the less-than-perfect help they might have gotten.

If the price of gas and groceries are worth more than the safety of your friends and relatives, and if you think they will improve with a Republican administration, you may have eaten too much of the lead that will now be allowed in our children’s toys due to lack of regulation. The children that survive school shootings to play with toys, that is.

Those of us uninfected by religion understand that a Trump is only possible if deities are possible: if you can believe in the second, you can believe in the first. Once the indoctrination of nonsensical belief is normalized, anything goes. But those of us who’ve had to sit silently, or be shushed in the name of politeness as religion of all kinds has smeared itself across society are being caught in the deluge not of our making.

Religion, and the purity annihilators, hold chasms of blame. What are we to do about a genocide perpetrated by monsters? Not giving them bombs would be a necessary start. Not electing more voracious monsters to provide them is an even more necessary one. The obliteration Non-Harris voters have just brought down on what’s left of Gaza, on Ukraine, on Lebanon, on every suffering nation and soul in the name of being anti-genocide quite literally pulls the air out of me if I let myself think on it.

“If you don’t like it, leave,” is the taunt of the Right. I think otherwise. I think if you’re choosing to enjoy the relative privileges, freedoms, and safeties of a country, then work to preserve and improve those rights for yourself and others. If you choose not to, then choose somewhere else to live. To risk sacrificing those rights for others in the name of anything at all is simply reckless, self-regarding petulance.

I know people of color and LGBTQ+ Americans who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Harris, and who are now worried about their futures. You don’t say².

Franchesca Ramsey’s song, “I never though the leopards would eat my face” is about to be played hourly in this country. Because of her I know I’m not alone in my fury.

How could I think thoughts like that? How could I wish that kind of thing on anyone?

I don’t, really. But whether voting for Trump, a third party, or not at all, those selfish, damaging actions may be felt by my sons and father, who are naturalized citizens. I am a “birthright” citizen as my parents were immigrants. My friends and my family are LGBTQ+, are people of color, are Black, are women.

Women and Black people are especially going to suffer more, now.

Black middle- and high-schoolers and college students in at least 25 states received terroristic text messages in the last couple of days that read, “Greetings! You have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation. PLEASE be ready by 12 am November 15, 2024! NO EXCEPTIONS !! Bring all of your belongs our Exclusive slaves will be there by 11:45 to pick you up in a Large Brown van, Be prepared to get searched and patted down once inside of the plantation A 1st cabin to your right ! -Thank you.”

Meanwhile, social media is filled with men and boys posting, “Your body, my choice” in gleeful celebration of what they can now do to all girls and women with impunity.

"To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep. This is not the land of the free; it is only sporadically the home of the brave" ~ James Baldwin

I cannot help if I am raging, and I cannot live if I’m not helping. It’s fundamental to my beliefs.

I’ve called a couple of my closest friends in despair. Both have asked, “What can you do to get rid of that feeling, or channel it differently?”

When I suggested to one that murdering people might help, she talked me out of it by reminding me I just got into this house, and it would be a shame to have to move again so soon, especially to prison. That she thinks I’d get caught is annoying, but in my state who knows what careless mistakes I’d make?

To the other one I just said, “I have no idea.”

The late, great Madeline Kahn understood.

The last time Trump was elected I did massive amounts of organizing. I formed nonprofits, I dedicated thousands of hours, I talked to strangers and friends, and I educated younger people on nonprofit leadership and practices. Through those first couple of years I learned how little most people were actually willing to do beyond wearing pink pussy hats and posting on Facebook.

We won’t get off the couch, won’t take to the streets, won’t shut down roads, businesses, and the economy to make a point. We have been too comfortable for too long. We don’t believe the worst can happen because it never has, to us. This time, even more people voted for him.

I’ve heard people who refused to vote for Harris say, “We’re already living under fascism/a genocide here. Being a Black person/person of color/Muslim/ gay/ uninsured/white/male/female/trans person in this country isn’t safe anyway, so what difference is it going to make?

Albert Einstein said, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”

It’s nice these people don’t understand what it really is to live under those conditions, because it means they’ve been spared. But it also means their delusional, spiteful thinking has opened the door to horrors that will affect people who don’t deserve it, even if they now do.

Tonight I stopped at a store across the street. The middle-aged shopkeeper tried not to cry as she said to me, “I don’t know who to trust anymore. I’m a lesbian, but I know gay women, even gay women of color, who didn’t vote for Harris. More than half of the white women in this country were willing to sacrifice me³, but so many other people were, too, and I can’t trust anyone any more.”

Alice jumped up on her leg. Her hand reached down to pet the dog.

“You can trust me,” I said. She looked at me.

“I know I can.”

“I’m across the street. I’m there for a cup of tea, or an ear, or a safe place if you need one. Or I’m just there, so you can know that.”

I left her closing up, and walked Alice to the beach. It is the theft of trust that is the deepest outrage, the false promises of allyship and understanding that crumbled so easily under individual demands and expectations.

“I know I can,” she said, and for a moment I felt like myself again.

Maybe all I can do is that: be someone to trust, because, as a friend texted me tonight, it’s become apparent that Mr. Rogers didn’t exactly prepare us for who the majority of our neighbors really are.

1. I guess it really is hard to be judged by the color of our skin rather than the content of our character.

2. Did they think they could keep their hands clean and the rest of us would vote them into safety?

3. I did not bring up that she is now likely much safer than the primarily straight women in this country who will die of childbirth, pregnancy complications, miscarriage, and back alley abortions.