BANNER DAY!!!

January 20, 2021 is going to be a banner day, as we file that creep away in the “Odious, traitorous, menacing orange slimeball” category. DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU ON YOUR WAY OUT, YOU SCUMBAG A**HAT! Go enjoy your ignominy in Mar-A-Lago, where they don’t want you either.

I’m taking bets on how long it will take him to run away to Russia to avoid his creditors and the nearly infinite torts, suits and liens against him. May he live long and in shambles, defamed and defanged, comforted only by his Swiss cheese delusions and whatever sycophants he has left (Ain’t it great how Trump’s got yer back there, Rudy?)

Meanwhile we have work to do to de-program his cultists, along with a metric f*ck-ton of clean-up in our institutions. People, where we were on this day four years ago compared to today… it’s heartbreaking. Demoralizing. But it’ll be okay in the end. And if it’s not yet okay, it’s because it’s not yet the end.

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The only good thing

The one and only good thing that came out of his presidency is the long-term increase in activism and civic engagement. None can forget the scenes of Americans lining up in airports to protest his Muslim Ban, but what is really amazing is how we’ve rallied through four long, slogging years. It’s been like living inside a bell tower, or maybe right inside the bell: every day, another atrocity, atrocities used as distractions from other atrocities, piled on one another like rotting meat.

• The nearly 400,000 who didn’t all have to die from COVID.
• The thousands of kids still separated from their parents.
• The criminal portrayal of our democratic process, and the votes of Black and brown people, as illegitimate.
• The meatpacking companies that lied and falsified so as not to protect their disempowered workers.
• The gutting of environmental protection laws so that corporations could expand further the gaping inequities in our country, and worldwide.
• The polluting, souring effect of hate against non-Whites, non-heteros, non-binaries, immigrants.
• The putrefaction of religious groups who rallied behind such an irreligious, unethical bully.
• The revolting new Supreme Court judges, so out of touch with the citizens and the Constitution they’re charged with protecting.
• The shreds and tatters in which his team has left our standing in the world.
• Cynically pitting poor and less educated whites against the country, their own best interests, and social progress.
• The fetid lies spread on the body politic and the watching public, that will be live like gangrene for years, even decades, to come.

But I could also make a list of what’s arisen against this destruction: the Women’s March and pussy hats, policy ideas as bold as the Green New Deal, commitment to insuring the uninsured, and new lists of priorities like ending gerrymandering and (dare I hope?) the Electoral College. DC Statehood, and that of Puerto Rico. Defunding – or changing the roles of – the police, and ending their impunity. Rooting out the racism in White minds and actions/inactions that perpetuate the White supremacy – and recognizing White supremacy as a building block of our country that must be dismantled. We also have so many new House and Senate members from among people of color, women, people of other faiths than Christianity.

It is far from enough to represent the diversity of the country – paltry, in fact. The picture below lays it out pretty clear, not in black and white, but in purple and “everyone else.” We are still led by mostly rich, white, heterosexual men without disabilities, largely because of the crushing inequities our system builds in anew each morning as it arises, works all day to uphold, and seals with a kiss each night.

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But I maintain:

…that what came out of the soul-crushing experience of having this malicious buffoon in the People’s House is that more people, every day, everywhere, in their hearts and in their workplaces and their state houses, are disdaining, discrediting, and dismantling. Today is a banner day because now we can do it with the full force of the federal government behind us. (We still have to work on the state houses, many of which are still in gerrymander-happy Republican hands.)

I don’t feel great, yet: I feel like screaming. Some moments I want to scream, “BYE YOU IGNORANT PIG F*CKER!” and other times I want to yell, “WE GOT THIS!” and still other times what I’d like to yell has no syllables or phonemes, and just references the four-year flaming shit-show we’ve all just been through.

So, I guess, bear with each other, loves. Enjoy our banner day. We ain’t done yet.