I spent about six hours on my couch yesterday in a catatonic freeze response and after some journaling and a deep tarot meditation I came to the central conclusion that the dagger driven the deepest into my mind from this experience is that the lives of queer people are still not seen as worthy of saving.
From mainstream centrist normies to far left accelerationists, our voices were dismissed, sidelined, minimized, and in some cases, when we kept speaking anyway, bullied and threatened and cut off from community. I'm not going to get into the abandonment trauma / mental health angle because at the end of the day, it's my job to guard myself in ways that keep me safe, I choose not to burn in the firestorms you set for me and that means I will always do the self care labor required to quench them. But I will say, doing that to other human beings is not loving and not liberatory and a lot of people don't have the tools to do that kind of emergency wellness work so they just suffer an open wound until the sharp pain passes but the unhealedness remains, and that's a primary reason queer people suffer from such high rates of addiction, loneliness and poor mental health. And if that makes you feel ashamed then that shame is your bag to unpack, not mine.
What I want to focus on is just a zoomed out tactical assessment. Leftist ideas are obviously sidelined to the far extreme right now. The United States is so far to the right that Kamala Harris running to the right of GWB, aligned with the Cheneys was a breath of fresh air compared to Trump. The window dressing of equality felt like safety, it felt like hope, it felt like refuge. And importantly, it felt more loving than what we heard from accelerationists.
I know our ideas are beautiful because I fell in love with them in a time when the existential threat to my life wasn't embodied by an actual flash list President and administration. But most ordinary people don't even know ideas *can* be beautiful, much less how to discern between them. Do you remember what it felt like to be an ordinary normie voter? Do you remember having no sense of the connection between political theory and policy, hearing a list of candidate proposals and simply picking between them based on vibes?
This is what parties do (one thing, anyway) - they help ordinary people conceptualize ideas in buckets. They help them simplify the vibes and find similarities. They help people pick sides in a binary system and this strengthens all of the candidates running on that platform by shoring up loyalty. There are practical reasons for doing this, for better or worse, reasons that matter.
So while I wouldn't suggest we copy everything that's wrong with partisan politics, I would say it's OK to take what we need and leave the rest behind. And what we need, at least from my point of view, is a sense of cohesion that acknowledges the reality of peoples' confusion. Life is really complicated and overwhelming, especially politics, and the average person is really confused and they're mostly looking around and copying each other, hoping no one figures out they're faking it, and deciding who gets the nuclear codes based on vibes.
This is what democracy is in a nutshell, and those of us with the awareness and education to understand that need to put on our grown up pants and accept that challenge. Our job is to shift the vibes, to help confused people figure out which direction is the most wholesome, and give them the confidence to walk in a new direction after many years of following each other the wrong way.
If you came out of this election like me, nursing a wound to your self worth that could fester if left untended, you are not alone. You deserve to be told that your life matters, you deserved for your neighbors to vote as if they meant that when they said it. You deserve healing, and the love of community, and everything good in this world that comes so effortlessly to everyone else.
You deserve these things, and it is a beautiful idea, and it is worth figuring out how to pass the vibe check. Our lives matter enough to me to face the challenge of doing this. Thanks for being along for the ride, things might get bumpy for a minute, but we're in this together, and there is nothing we cannot achieve together.
We write the future. And that future is made beautiful when it includes you.
