“I’m Sick Of Politics”

A grayscale image of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Johnson, and Ron DeSantis from Salon.com.

Take yourself back in time five years. Do you remember where you were, what you were doing? Maybe not. But there’s little doubt that you remember how you felt.

As of when I post this, it has been precisely five years since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. The rest is history - over the course of three years, more than a million people succumbed to the virus in the United States alone. There were days when more people died than perished on the day of the September 11 attacks. 

And yet, despite losing a 9/11 worth of people a day, the pandemic seems to have vanished almost entirely from the public consciousness. If you lost a loved one to COVID, you probably still remember the pandemic, but if you didn’t, it’s easy enough to memory-hole that period. Hell, it no longer holds the same space in my memory that it used to.

We can have debates about why this is, but one thing is worth remembering. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Lots of Americans right now have decided that they are going to check out of current events. “I’m sick of politics”, they say. And honestly, I get it. Having every bit of news you hear be related to what that orange asshat said or did yesterday…it’s exhausting. The other day, I went to AskReddit, and seven or eight of the top ten questions were related to the infamous Trump-Zelenskyy press conference, a humiliating moment for the United States indeed.

So yes…you might be tired of politics. But the German people in the early 1930s were probably also tired of politics, and look where that got the world. 

In other words, we can’t afford to check out. We just can’t.

I mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic above. It’s often said that Trump is responsible for making the outbreak far worse in the United States than it needed to be. And that’s true, but what many people don’t realize is that if Hillary had won in 2016, the pandemic could have likely been averted entirely.

Look at it this way: Trump disbanded the entire pandemic preparedness team in 2018. Maybe I just want to be bitter, maybe that wouldn’t have actually prevented the outbreak from reaching US shores, but I want to be clear about one thing:

When John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, speaks out against his former boss on CNN, I don’t respect him any more than I did before. Bolton was the driving force behind that decision, and over a million Americans (and at least eight million worldwide but maybe a few times that) paid the ultimate price.

And we elected him AGAIN.

People demonstrating in support of abortion rights outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in 2022. Image taken from the Center for American Progress.

Now let’s talk about another direct consequence of Trump’s first election. The people in the above image (or at least, some of them) no doubt believed that they were doing something productive. Never mind that protests never accomplish anything in this country. 

Truth be told, however, the day to protest that decision was November 8, 2016. Hillary Clinton warned us. The President elected for the 2017-2021 term could fill as many as four Supreme Court seats, and in the end Trump filled three with Injustices. I call them Gorey Gorsuch, Gang Bang Brett, and the Contagious ACB, just because I need a modicum of levity to stay sane.

These three Injustices have gotten to work quickly. The Supreme Court is on a warpath, and it’s gonna be a bloodbath of rights dying in broad daylight.

Abortion was first. On June 24, 2022, five Injustices, including the three appointed during Trump’s first term, handed down a decision worse than Dred Scott. Women are essentially slaves to men now - how can someone be a proper citizen without bodily autonomy? I say that not because I want it to be true, but because it simply is.

I don’t need to list the number of reasons why a woman might need an abortion, medically speaking. Those are widely available wherever you get reliable medical information now that the CDC is gutted. Here’s one more qualified source.

I consider myself pro-choice, but my opinion doesn’t really matter, because I am not a woman. I will never need to bear the cross of pregnancy and all the health risks it poses. But five Injustices on the Supreme Court wanted to get in the way of a woman’s decision, and the consequences are horrific. Just ask the family of Amber Nicole Thurman, whom Trump mocked. What a depraved man.

Here’s the thing: Abortion was only the beginning. Japan might be the next country to legalize same-sex marriage, but the USA will probably be the first to take it away after previously legalizing it. What’s next? Cameras in every bedroom to make sure people aren’t having the wrong kind of sex? There’s every possibility that Trump’s election in the face of Dobbs will only embolden these theocrats to make more horrendous rulings, some of which even I can’t imagine right now.

An image, probably AI-generated, that Donald Trump posted on Truth Social to promote an invasion of Canada.

Now let’s talk about our neighbors and former allies to the north. Canada has a new Prime Minister, and his name is Mark Carney. Carney seems like a cool, decently progressive guy - I’d certainly vote for him if I lived up there. And part of me wishes I did live up there.

But you cannot ignore the fact that Trump clearly wants to invade Canada. He keeps calling for them to be made the “51st state”, and referring to outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau.” And the horrifying thing is, I’m not sure anyone can stop him if he really goes for it.

I’m having a hard time being friends with anyone from Canada on Discord. I feel responsible even though I didn’t vote for this shit. But when the tanks start rolling into Toronto and Vancouver, “I didn’t vote for him” won’t be a valid excuse from my fellow Americans. 

Truth be told, however, I don’t know what American civilians can do to oppose the war. It’s easy enough for me to say I’ll defect and fight for Canada if that happens, but I don’t know if they’d have me, or if the U.S. would let me leave. What I am confident about is that if Trump actually invades Canada, he won’t lose a single supporter he currently has.

Almost nobody in Canada wants this. They. Will. Fight. Back. It’s going to be World War Three, since the rest of NATO will be obligated to come to their defense. Millions of people on both sides are going to die needlessly all for Trump’s ego, making the hockey brawls look like absolute child’s play.

But the worst part? This was all unnecessary. If some Americans had just been willing to have a black woman as President when the alternative was a convicted felon with nothing to lose, we’d still be close allies with Canada. We wouldn’t have alienated the rest of the world, and we wouldn’t be pariahs. I don’t even know if I feel comfortable traveling abroad when everyone, rightly or wrongly, associates American civilians with Trump.

But no. Harris was too pro-Israel, so we had to collectively fuck around and find out anyway. I have immense sympathy for the people of Gaza and Canada, but I have immense hatred for the people of Dearborn who sat this election out (or worse, actually voted for Trump). You have the blood of Canadian civilians and American soldiers on your hands.

The point of tonight’s post is this: After a long, contentious election cycle, you might be tired of politics. I know. I am too. But politics isn’t tired of you.