So I’ve spent the last day or two in a cloud of simmering fury. Only just cooled down enough to really think, and talk, about the election.
For the last few years, I’ve been trying to explain to people outside of SFF that the various dramas playing out here — self-aggrandizing bigots; self-righteous “movements” to make petty, exclusionary gestures with the Hugo Award; discusssion wars in which the fandom finally explained to the establishment that bigotry was unacceptable — were a teapot version of what’s happening all over the world, throughout every medium of expression. And I took heart from the fact that in most places where these battles were playing out, the surge of bigotry was failing. Gamergate drove a few women and PoC out of games criticism, but others dug in and refused to be moved, while new voices have begun speaking up and everyone is now much, much more vocal about representation issues. People complaining about diversity in comics is why we’re seeing more old characters revitalized as PoC — not unproblematically, but still — and a few more women and writers of color finding opportunity in the field. And of course, the Puppies’ latest efforts to take over the Hugo probably contributed in some way to me winning the Best Novel Hugo this year. While they, once again, took home only Noah Wards.
I took heart in those victories because, well, if this genre is a microcosm of greater society, then progress here reflects progress there. This is true. But what I said earlier applies, too — that some of these motherfuckers are so terrified of losing a bit of power that they would rather see the world burn than see it shared.
And now we’ve elected a president who is… shit. I really just can’t think of anything to say about him except that he is shit. I can define and expound upon the shit, if you want: he’s a racist, a rapist, an ableist, a shitty businessman, a cheat who steals the wages of his workers and the labor of small businesses, a pathological liar, an elderly child utterly lacking in impulse control and the ability to admit when he’s wrong, and an incompetent who is very likely now to fob off the job of being president onto the people around him because he’s never done a day’s real work. But that’s a mouthful, so “shit” will do. The fact that a substantial portion of the American people would rather have shit as president than a competent human being — whatever reservations you may have had about Hillary Clinton, she is at least that — is nauseating to me… but not entirely surprising. The fact that we are giving veto power, intelligence access, crisis response, SCOTUS nomination power, and the ability to negotiate on our behalf internationally to shit, is horrifying. But I know what it means.
These motherfuckers really do just want to see the world burn.
Because of bigotry. Because electing someone endorsed by the KKK is so important to 63% of white men and 53% of white women voters that they are willing to overlook all of his shit. Seriously, white people, what the fuck? More than half of you want your neighbors deported. More than half of you want Obamacare repealed — and I’m on Obamacare, as are most of the authors you know who do this for a living, so that’s a direct slap in the face to me. More than half of you have chosen to encourage hate crimes and blatant discrimination.
Cowards. Are you so afraid of a world where everyone gets to dream that you would rather impose a nightmare on us all? Apparently so.
Well. This changes nothing for me. My ancestors helped build this country, so I’ll be damned if I let a bunch of whining, shortsighted fools either run me out of it or destroy what they spilled blood to achieve. And I’ll be damned if I let Trump or his ilk threaten the lives and opportunities of my friends and neighbors without fighting back by every means at my disposal.
Comments off. I’m calm enough to blog now, but still burning with anger; I don’t have the patience necessary to endure any sort of equivocation or excuse-making or “It’ll be ok” rhetoric. It will not be okay. A lot of people are going to suffer now, and a lot of American lives will be lost — along with a lot of the progress we’ve made towards becoming a 21st-centuryt nation — because of the cowards who put this man in office and then gave him a Republican majority in Congress to enact his will. Those of us with some fucking sense are going to have to look out for each other in order to survive this shit that our selfish, bigoted, stupid fellow Americans have burdened us with. But this has always been our burden, hasn’t it? To save this country from itself. So here we go, again.
America. Goddamn.