The sunniness of the day doesn’t match my mood, though I’m sure that’s apparent. It’s Veterans Day (looked it up, no punctuation) the day, this year, we will celebrate the people who gave their lives to fight for democracy and defeat fascism by defeating democracy and installing fascism.
Told you my mood hasn’t improved.
I just saw people are googling how to change their votes, now that they finally understand they’re not only going to be audience members of the Face Eating Leopard Circus, but participants. I don’t feel a thing for them, they were fine when it was somebody else.
Someone else’s spouse, someone else’s children, someone else’s mother, someone else’s father. Someone else’s job, someone else’s healthcare, someone else’s social security.
Before they realized that they too would be subject to the giddy aspiring rapists crowing “Her body, my choice.” Along with their daughters and sisters and mothers and cousins and women they nod hello to in the hallway.
But now, now they realize they too will pay the higher prices because of tariffs. Will I care when they can’t afford insulin because it went back up and then up again?
Why should I?
For too long, there are people who assume their welfare is our responsibility. Maybe they thought they could vote against the highly qualified woman–AGAIN–and we would fix it for them. So they could happily grumble away while enjoying clean water, unpoisoned food, and plausible dreams of retirement.
Well, that world is dead.
They killed it. Like people in the UK after Brexit, there are no backsies.
There’s no practice exam. They took it and they flunked it and now it turns out the entire stadium is a Kitty City for leopards. Audience participation is mandatory.
I want no entreaties that they are “good people.” Good people are not OK with concentration camps so long as they’re not in them. Good people are not OK with inflicting misery upon misery on others while smugly believing they’ll be just fine.
Good people don’t vote for someone who likes to fantasize about the brutal deaths of people he doesn’t like during public speeches.
I had an exchange with a patronizing man who told me this isn’t a “monster movie” and explained to me that people are “complex,” and I’ll tell you, I’m not letting that kind of enabling and normalizing go any time soon.
It’s worse than a “monster movie” because there are no silver bullets, there are no wooden stakes, and the monsters are the very same people you see each and every day.
People aren’t complex. They either care about others or they don’t, and suddenly realizing that that leopard is growling at you isn’t a humanitarian epiphany. They don’t deserve credit or understanding.
They are not “good people.”
It’s better to understand that now so you expect less of them, expect exactly what they’ve shown you they are. What happens to them as the consequence of their own actions is their problem. They wanted an individualistic society?
Give them one.
Focus on the people who didn’t ask for this and will have a hard time protecting themselves from it. It’s OK if community means something different and gets smaller.
They had their knives ready for our backs anyway. They just didn’t realize they were two sided.
Have the Monday of your choosing.
A Bit to Read 
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