Post-election 2020 reactions and resolutions in the Post-Trump era

I have been hoping to get back to writing about films and I am working on something but I wrote this on the night of the election and want to post some of my political thoughts

I've been tuning out the news because it's so stressful. I'm praying that this country did the right thing and put in a president who respects the law and his fellow human beings.

I believe there generally can be a silver lining to every tragedy, but the universe simply has to even out this way if it makes sense.  There's really no silver lining to more years of Trump: It doesn't mobilize good people more than they've been mobilized and it doesn't serve more people in a good way. I've been begging to see how exactly this makes sense.

 

Additionally, I'm not much of a futurist and sadly so little of what people do every four years matters that our voice really only matters every two or four years in this system. 

 

I accept that some people might be better served by a Trump administration, but there are a lot of people who aren't and campaign strategists consciously misled those people into thinking that Biden represented socialism which was the root of all evils and used every smear in the book. I welcome Arizona and Wisconsin and hopefully Michigan and Pennsylvania to the side of reason, while several  other states have let us down as a nation.

 

However, this is also a wake-up call for us that democratic messaging isn't well-received by many in this country for some legitimate reasons. and that sense we had in the immediate aftermath of 2016 of outreach was lost by some of the more extreme fringes of the left in the years after 2020.

We've spent a lot of the last four years not just fighting for the rights of the "disenfranchised" but turning into bullies ourselves. It's one thing to advocate for transgender or gay rights, but it's another to want to destroy anyone who attends a church or has advocated for people on both sides to speak up about these issues. It's one thing to want to uplift black people, but it's another thing to actively rail against anyone who doesn't share your platform on affirmative action. I've been banned from forums on movies simply for having the views of a white male or for having a view on the merits of Thomas Jefferson that differed from the people in my board.

People talk about the disenfranchised in historical terms as if they're permanently affixed labels that work 100% of the time on a macroscopic level when every interaction and inequality needs to be taken in context. The terms "People of Color" and the "Patriarchy" are inherently alienating terms to disenfranchised white people and for a few years, the language of liberal people in certain self-segregated spaces has posited the world through an over-simplistic "white straight men verses everyone else" as if the source of Hispanic, South Asian, diaspora African and African-American struggles in this county are all traceable to the same root causes and consciously created by white people who wanted to maintain supremacy. 

A lot of these people think my problem is with the "disenfranchised" but it's really against jerks. Being a caped crusader for your narrow definition of the "disenfranchised" does not give one liberty or recuse from being a jerk. It was my treatment in this spaces that caused me to contribute roughly eight or nine articles to right-wing publications (alongside people I don't agree with politically) on the topics of intellectual exclusivity and misunderstandings of racism: https://thefederalist.com/2019/02/20/wont-solve-racism-blacklisting-liam-neeson/

This does not mean in any way it is acceptable to vote for someone who ignores facts, demonizes immigrants, never accepts personal responsibility, promotes incivility, and acts like he's above the law.

But it does mean that the responsibility still falls on us as the disenfranchised or as Democrats to explain our views to others if we want them to be convinced, even if that constitutes a micro-aggression or two. It also means that civility and allowing a climate of free speech still applies.

I wrote this a couple days later on how much I'm willing to forgive and forget

 

For the last four years, if you voted for Trump in 2016, I didn't hold it against you as long as you weren't still riding the Trump train. If you weren't calling out a dishonest lawbreaker who was scapegoating Americans for being dishonest, breaking rules, and scapegoating Americans, than that was a problem with me. 

 

Now, whatever you feel about Trump doesn't matter. You don't have power, so I don't have a grudge anymore. You just held some batty ideas during an incredibly unnecessarily dark period of our national history. 

 

Unless you are going to be excessive in not respecting power now (in an extreme version: hatch plots to kidnap Democratic governors or whine about how you feel scared under an administration that I'm guessing won't deport you, defy UN laws to not accept your rightful refugee status, or institute a religion-based ban, I'm not going to care about you until maybe 2024.

 

Yeah, you can tea party all over the place, and I won't like your views, but I don't think the government is in a place of existential crisis. 

 

However, if you were a politician who directly enabled this reign of terror, I will hold it against you. 

 

Every senator, representative, cabinet member, governor, campaign advisor (looking at you Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani) and especially white house spokesperson who enabled Trump or didn't oppose him loudly enough is responsible for turning us into a third world country.

Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Rod Rosenstein, the McCain family, Jerome Mattis, Sally Yates, James Comey, Michael Cohen, Rex Tillerson, and Justin Amash get passes. There might be a couple others I'm forgetting but the rest don't deserve to hold public office.