Winter lasted two weeks, and spring is already well underway, and yes … it’s lovely, and yet.
And yet. Oh, yet. Regular followers of this blog know I am a fan of winter, of long dark nights and cold days and even snow. And even though all of that stuff wears out its welcome after a while (sometimes after a short while), I still love it. It makes me feel balanced and whole; and if we have a “mild” (nice euphemism you got there) winter, I feel like a washing machine that can’t make it all the way to final spin. Everything feels off and wrong.
People love spring, and there are good, solid reasons for that. It’s the season that reminds us that life returns after things die in the fall. It is the brilliant light at the end of the Long Dark Tunnel of winter. Days are longer, nights are shorter. Flowers are showing up, trees are budding, bugs are bugging the crap out of us (gnats are useless and maybe the food chain would be okay without them?), Papa Blackbirds are checking out all the fine Mama Blackbirds, squirrels have the zoomies … and it’s currently March 6th and all of that is already very, very happening.
The past few years, winter has drug on until at least half-past April. We haven’t had 80 degree days in February – especially not several in a row. I don’t know about you, but yeah, I am more than a little creeped out by this extremely unseasonal everything.
And into this miasma of angst drops possibly the most important presidential election of our lifetimes.
Yeah, I think I said that about the last one, too. Anyway. It’s fuckin’ essential that we pick the right Old White Man. Just to be clear, I mean the one who isn’t actively trying to wreck the planet, start WWIII, and make women property again.
Honestly, I am sick to death of voting for Old White Men and I never want to vote for another one. But I will vote for the Old White Man who is the least likely to blow up the planet, just to keep the other one from getting anywhere near the nuclear codes. The one who isn’t a serial rapist in love with his own daughter, who can’t tell the difference between Joe Biden and Barak Obama, or Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, or a cheese sandwich and a baseball. The one who isn’t facing 91 charges of fraud, election tampering, etc. The one who isn’t proud of the fact that he, personally, ended Roe. You want the credit for that, dude? Take it! Yes, you did that! Good job! You absolutely did it and are 100% responsible for it. We’ll gladly give you credit for that, you and that hand-picked bunch of grifters on the Supreme Court. Please, take 150% of the credit, you dementia-ridden piece of excrement masquerading as a wannabe mafia kingpin. Go for it. All the way.
So yeah, the planet is burning and we’re about to elect another Old White Man. Glory be. What more can we ask for?
I think that the future belongs to people younger than me, and they should be the ones deciding what they want their country to look like and feel like and be like. A lot of people talk shit about Millennials, but they are some bright-ass people with good ideas who believe in science and subscribe to a spirituality that is personal and not institutional. They don’t care whether you are gay, straight, genderqueer, trans, non-binary, or any other possibility and combination of love and self-expression. They literally don’t care. I’m early Gen X and I’m ready to GTFO of the way and let them drive.
But Alma, you say, how do we endure this bullshit?
Figure out what you can do, what kind of resistance you feel you can actually handle, and resist with all your heart. Vote like your life depends on it, because if you’re not actually a frozen embryo or an unborn child it does (especially if you’re a woman or if your skin happens to be some shade other than White or you don’t identify as the made-up gender you were assigned by some doctor at birth). Choose love and joy, because they are ultimately acts of resistance. They want you weak, depressed, sluggish, incapable of action. Be deliciously pissed off and gorgeously enraged instead. Speak up for yourself, or if that’s too hard, speak up for people who have no voice. Learn how to say a new word: No. Nope, not gonna play that game. No, I’m not going to allow you to treat that person like crap. Nope, you don’t get to tell me how to think or how to live. Nope, I’m not going to go home and change my appearance to make you less uncomfortable. Are you going to open your mind to make me less uncomfortable? No? Okay then. We understand each other.
Get your snark on. Use sarcasm like a scalpel. Be nasty. Go for the jugular. We’re smarter and funnier than them, let’s use smart humor to destroy their every lame-ass argument. Make people laugh at them, hard, and with awful glee. Bully the bullies right back, only do it with such biting wit that they don’t even know they’ve been had. We want to be kind and nice and gentle, but it ain’t workin’. There’s a time for nice, and there’s a time to say enough. I think we’re there.