This Is Quite A Timeline

I don’t get political on this blog very often. Just a warning, I’m on the left and have nothing good to say about the current administration. I’m an LGBT+ person in a female body that grew up on the Christian right. The Christian right and their teachings combined with my parents’ early brainwashing techniques conditioned me to make the choices that wrecked my life. I feel a hell of a lot of enmity towards the right, and Christians on the right, especially.

I used to be one of those people that said ‘a vote for the lesser evil is still a vote for evil’ but when it came to 2016, I held my nose and voted for the lesser evil – the establishment democrat Hilary Clinton, who I felt was too moderate to be concerned with making the changes we so desperately need in this nation. I really hoped I was at least voting for the first female president of the United States, but having grown up on the right, I very much feared that Trump would win. I didn’t find the polls reassuring – I just had a bad feeling about this.

Sure enough, the craven, insecure, power-hungry, bigoted Christian right won the day and installed an egotistical, ignorant, incompetent, orange buffoon as our president, and it felt we’d been plunged into the darkest timeline. What I saw unfold over the next 3 years convinced me it was quite likely we’d get another 4 years of said buffoon, because the structural inequalities that were in place in 2016 were still going to be in place in 2020, and nothing the orange buffoon had done in the meantime had swayed his base away from supporting him.

I was utterly fucking disgusted with the people I grew up with. I remembered all the moralizing. I remembered the horror, THE HORROR over Bill Clinton’s affair. I remembered all the stuff about ‘by their fruit ye shall know them.’ I remembered what Jesus had to say about the sheep and the goats. I remembered the passage about love and how love does not seek its own. I’d had Christianity rammed down my throat from early childhood on and I sure as hell remembered the Bible. All those motherfuckers had just become craven hypocrites, whited sepulchers, nests of vipers. They promptly traded their much vaunted “values” for a shot at authoritarian political power.

It was a betrayal I’ll never get over or forgive. All the pain and suffering I went through as a child because they needed to teach me how to be ‘moral’ and ‘right with God’ meant jack shit. All the pain and suffering I went through as an adult because I still strived to live up to those ideals meant jack shit.

(This is why I don’t get political very often these days, because I shoot so quickly back to enraged.)

Anyway – so, I was thinking after 2018 there’s HOPE that 2020 might see Trump ousted. Maybe. The chance is not 0, it’s just low. But I watched the world tumbling into chaos as far right movements rose around the globe, fueled by a bunch of scared people that were afraid they’d lose their privilege and ‘in crowd’ status and get treated the way they’d been treating those they deemed unworthy. If he lost and we got a reprieve from the madness it was going to feel like a miracle.

In 2019, I decided I just wasn’t going to think about it too much. I didn’t have the energy to get involved in any kind of activism – I had to focus on my mental health and recovering functionality.

Cue 2020. We’ve got dire warnings about climate change and what needs to be done to save ourselves instead of causing a man-made extinction event, and it’s being ignored by all the motherfuckers on the right around the globe. They’re just constantly making things worse.

We’ve got the threat of nuclear war beginning to take shape AGAIN as long-standing treaties are ended.

And then COVID-19. A global pandemic. An extraordinarily botched handling of an impending crisis that pretty guarantees it WILL be a crisis. A ‘600k+ people in the US could die, and that’s a conservative estimate’ impending crisis. The stock market diving in response.

I did not see that shit coming. This fucking timeline has already thrown everything else at us, now it’s throwing the kitchen sink, too.

In spite of my issues with anxiety and depression, I’m not really having mental health issues over this. I’ve got a kind of nihilistic, fatalistic acceptance of events in place now. I mean, my immune system is shitty right now thanks to stress, long-running sleep deprivation, and having to go on antibiotics 3x in 3 months. That probably makes me higher risk.

But honestly, if I get taken out by a global pandemic at this point, as I’m being shuffled off the mortal coil I’m probably going to be laughing (on the inside) because goddamn, that would make my life some kind of modern rendition of a tragic Victorian novel. Severely repressed woman controlled by the patriarchy begins to awaken, attempts to gain her freedom and dies instead. Okay life, you win.

Hopefully Weird Al makes it through, because I’ll need him to live tweet my funeral.