2016 Fucking Happened

The idea behind this quote was also super-racist:
 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/21/sanders-identity-politics/94221972/

"There is no question that Sanders was central to their strategy. He was clearly used as a mechanism to decrease voter turnout for Hillary Clinton," Darren Linvill, associate professor of communications and one of the researchers who worked on the study, told The Post. 

Linvill said the tweets analyzed as part of the study "give us a much clearer understanding of the tactics they were using. It was certainly a higher volume than people thought."

Sanders was "just a tool" to the Russians, Linvill added, and "a wedge to drive into the Democratic Party." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-russian-effort-to-target-sanders-supporters--and-help-elect-trump/2019/04/11/741d7308-5576-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html

Painting the painting above was meant to bring me relief, but it made my blood boil over and over again. It brought back all of the physical sensations of fear and abandonment and shame, tensing up as the notifications rolled in, as stranger friends-of-friends lined up to tell me how stupid I was, what a liar, how if we lost the election, it would be Hillary supporters’ fault for wanting representation—Oh, sure, a woman, just not THIS woman. The horror and sadness and moved-to-loudness I felt when my friends and then even Roxane Gay said they’d been afraid to speak up for Hillary. All this was before it had really sunk in that Trump could be our rapist-in-chief. Before the regrettable, inarticulate fury with which I ruined Thanksgiving and then rage-drove five hours, only able to find comfort in the new Gilmore Girls episodes.

Since then, I’ve learned to use my anger mostly-constructively. I’ve been so heartened and lucky to be in a city with progressive values and frequent marches, so glad that it’s only a day trip to yell directly at the White House or the Supreme Court. I’ve come to rely on visits to the Hope Diamond or long stretches of phone-games-in bed to calm down after protests. I have written every strongly worded letter that came to mind. I made a chart in case I can’t pick what to write to congress about on any given day:

And I’m very happy to be going as Rose Quartz for Halloween, because it means I’ll be ready with a DON’T MAKE ME GET MY PLANT ARMY sign come the Women’s March.

 Over the summer this year, my BFF and I listened to the Lawfare Blog’s Mueller Report podcast (https://www.lawfareblog.com/introducing-report-podcast-series-lawfare) on family trips and on dreamy drives home from the beach. The jazzy music that plays to indicate direct quotes was our song of the summer. It was a weird comfort to listen because so much of the time we’re gaslit into forgetting our election was stolen, but it was. As paranoid, panicked, as fight-flight-or-freeze as I’ve always been, even my anxious imagination could not have come up with THE SHIT THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

As outlined in the epigraph, a tyrannical enemy leader was able to exploit Bernie supporters’ misogyny to commit an act of warfare, to steal our election, and somehow this contingency still thinks they have the moral high ground. And it’s not just bigoted white men on his side—plenty of badass women who have NO ACTUAL NEED of obedience have joined the #BernieSquad rather than supporting any of the wildly qualified women who are running. AND YET I STILL FEEL BAD FOR NOT BEING NICE ABOUT THIS.

Sometimes Bernie/Russia rage comes out when I don’t necessarily want it to, especially when it comes to my better-behaved straight white lady friends. They do plenty of activism in their own ways, but I’m honestly sick of them guarding their social capital by outsourcing their anger to less-gender-conforming women like me. I found myself on a tear during a lovely Longwood Gardens brunch, during a beautiful walk in the autumn woods that is supposed to be abut other things.  I want to ask them to stop being so obedient, so diplomatic, to stop hiding in the shelter of their agreeableness and appeasing the men and the institutions they serve. I seriously hate it when people blame women for Trump, but I also seriously need these ladies to be braver, to close their empathy gaps, honestly to be just better friends to me and to America.

As these conversations progress/dissolve, I become conscious of the other lady’s “civil” moral high ground. Why does everybody have to argue, they ask. Why couldn’t you have been more diplomatic? Just be in community and everything will be okay. Perceiving their assurance of the innate superiority to my unhinged self, I feel more unhinged. I apologize a thousand times for being so mean. I don’t want to apologize any more.

My Wonderful, Magical Day of Yelling at Nazis, Part One

I spent a good chunk of last week working on my protest sign and panicking. I had terrible dreams. My best friend/ex-wife can’t walk very fast and I dreamed that we got separated in a crowd—I have recurring dreams of us getting separated and me screaming out “Amy! Amy!” because she’s lost, then getting in trouble for screaming. So you can see that as much as I tend to drag people for being afraid to protest, I was scared of this one.

For anyone who might have missed it, a group of white nationalists planned a rally for Unite the Right II on in Washington, DC on Sunday the 12^th, the anniversary of last year’s tiki-torch hatefest. On the anniversary of a white supremacist murdering Heather Heyer with his car. When I heard that facebook was taking down some of the counter-protesters’ event pages, I sought out a couple that hadn’t been taken down and RSVPed YES. My BFF agreed to go with me and I made her promise not to get lost or murdered. I asked a favorite neighbor to be my check-in person so someone could feed the cats and call my mom if anything happened to me—since the March for Out Lives, this has been my routine, and I’m grateful to have a neighbor who doesn’t mind!

Aside from my #sayhername series, (http://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2018/06/say-her-name-street-art-abolish-police.html) this was probably the saddest protest art I ever painted. I had to put it in the closet for the second half of the week to stem the rolling panic attacks it inspired.

The other side was cheerier, and I was happy to devote some time to my favorite new (to me) cause:

(For more info and the other unratified states, check here: https://www.equalrightsamendment.org/states.htm)

I sproinged out of bed at 4:30 AM on the 12^th, but only so I could read my book for a while before getting ready to go. Amy and I packed water, snacks, and sunscreen. She packed more phone batteries than we could ever need, that’s a very comforting thing about Amy.

Next: Soothing Art and Pondering Antifa