Trump’s first week in the Oval Office was purposefully provocative, attention-seeking, destructive, sloppy and chaotic. And he took us all with him on his crazy-ass ride through the Thunderdome. Normally, I am not an anxious person. I am not much of a worrier. I don’t forecast disasters where there are none. I am not overly dramatic or histrionic. Well let me tell you, last week I was all those things. Last week sucked.
I walked around in circles, experiencing anxiety like I’ve never experienced before in my life. I’m pretty sure I lost IQ points since I was in such a fog of horror and couldn’t think straight. I was ineffectual at every task I attempted and so, I hid at home, eating sugar and carbs like it was my fulltime job and now…I have TrumpButt.
TrumpButt is weight gain brought about by stress-eating due to the insane antics of our new POTUS. I’m pretty sure it’s an actual medical condition, newly recognized by the AMA. Friends have started an intervention: I’m being dragged to all sorts of exercise classes, plus I have 24/7 text-thread support group encouraging healthy eating and ways to exorcising our Donald Trump demons away. Fingers crossed that it works: I’m worried I’ll soon start wearing ill-fitting, unbuttoned suits that only further emphasize my TrumpButt.
I don’t even know what to say about all of this. For someone who is as…verbose as I, it is a very strange feeling to be at a loss for words. Way to go, Donald Trump, you have managed to strike me mute. I haven’t been writing either, so thanks for that, too. I have had trouble sitting still long enough to write, or being calm enough to have a conversation without sputtering.
“Oh Gosh, can’t we stop talking about politics already? I am so sick of all the political posts on Facebook, too. I’m just going to put up puppy pictures until everyone cheers up.”
Trigger Warning for those of you sick of politics and only want to look at Instagram pics of pretty meals: stop reading and instead, as my Mom used to say when she was really, really angry, “go take a long walk off a short pier.”
I’m sick of people who don’t want to talk about this. I’m sick of people who are annoyed by the many, many protests. I’m sick of how sick and bored these people pretend to be. Yes, I said pretend because I don’t think they’re actually tired of it or bored of the subject as much as I think they don’t have a fact-filled, logic-based, calm rebuttal with which to engage in political discourse.
If you don’t have facts, all you have is “Ugh, can we just not talk about this?”
If you don’t have logic, all you have is your fingers in your ears, singing “la la la, I can’t heeeearr you.”
In other words, all you have are childish defense mechanisms.
We are now in a new frontier, in uncharted territory, flying blind: we are now beyond politics. This is so far past Democratic vs. Republican we can’t even see those two categories in the rear-view mirror anymore. We are now in the realm of Right vs. Wrong. American vs. Un-American. Moral vs. Immoral. To not engage in this discussion is like not discussing the tsunami that is about to hit the small island you’re living on: it’s weird. It’s ignorant.
My imaginary conversations with Trump supporters goes something like this: You understand that our children and grandchildren will be studying today’s current geopolitical climate in their future history classes, right? You understand the magnitude of what Donald Trump and his merry band of thieves are doing to our country, right? You understand what the rest of the world is saying, right? If you don’t understand, start reading.
Google is your friend! Read, read and read some more from a multitude of sources. Turn off your TV and read. You can even skip Fox News and CNBC if you think they’re too slanted in either direction and use this handy guide for fact-based, unbiased news sources: https://soapboxie.com/social-issues/A-Real-Need-for-the-Real-News
What’s already happening is exactly what I feared would happen since November 9. I am not surprised, I am horrified. I am the hysteric in the room, proudly. To everyone who told me not to worry these past two months, or told me to relax and that everything would be okay I want to shout, “I told you so. I FREAKING TOLD YOU SO.” What is currently happening is exactly what I was worried about. This is why I was crying the day after the election; not because I’m a sore loser, but because I was actually listening to what Trump was saying and threatening; watching the debates where he was an incoherent madman; and reading fact-based articles and books. I was paying attention. And because I was doing all those things, I was terrified. And I was right to be terrified because here we are.
I have been binge-reading WWII history books since the election (which is another reason why I’m not shocked at what is happening). I wanted to learn as much as I could about how WWII started. To learn what the signs were, how regular people reacted. Who saw it coming? Who was in denial? Who lived, who died? I really like this one: Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account because it is written extremely clinically and dispassionately. One of my favorite parts of this book is the introduction, written by Bruno Bettelheim, where he talks about seeing the writing on the wall and taking preemptive action…and what horrors happen when you don’t. Read it. (Also, take note that on last week’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump and his administration willfully and purposefully left off any mention of the six million Jews killed because they didn’t feel it was important. Let that sink in for a moment.)
This past weekend was beyond the beyond. (There I am at a loss for words again.) It’s time for all of us to stop being coy. Open your mouths and speak up. Denounce this Muslim ban. Denounce Bannon. Denounce everything Trump is doing. For those who refuse to denounce all these actions, and still support Trump, then please, at least stop doing these things:
Stop sitting in the front row at church. You don’t look pious, you look like a hypocrite.
Stop talking about abortion. You don’t care about life if you are against refugees, you just have a bizarre fixation and obsession with embryos. Cool Pope Frankie is saying that loud and clear. If you support Trump’s stance on refugees, shut your piehole about abortion and the “sanctity of life” forever.
Stop crying and complaining when your kid is picked on, marginalized or treated unfairly or unjustly. I’ve never seen a situation more unfair or unjust to kids in my entire life than this refugee ban. If you support these efforts of Trump to ban refugee children from the safety of America, it shows you don’t really care about other people’s kids and kids in general, just your own special snowflake of a child. If that’s the case, we don’t want to hear about your kid’s problems ever again.
Stop pretending you’re Christian. You’re not. You have to choose between Christ-like behavior or behavior that would make Beelzebub blush. Seriously, right now even the actual devil is all, “Oh SNAP, I never had the nerve to pull the kinda crap in the first ten days of my existence that Trump’s camp is doing!”
Stop saying, “well, that could never happen. That won’t happen.” When someone says that, I automatically start to distrust everything else they say because it means they don’t know their history. It means they are ill-informed about current world events. These things Donald Trump is doing and is planning on doing have absolutely already happened before and therefore, there they could happen again. There is the potential for history to repeat itself.
I’m going to shake my head out of the nightmare soup it’s been marinating in and I am going to fight, fight, fight. Don’t tell me to stay calm, to just pray or to wait and see. The alarm for “All Hands On Deck” has been sounded. You have to choose your side right now. What will you tell your kids and grandkids when they ask you about it in the future?
I miss my Daddy Obama like nobody’s business but he isn’t coming back. I’m thinking of running for office because why the hell not. You should run for office, too. That’s what President Obama told us to do. We need to run for office and we need to win and make sure history never, ever repeats itself. It’s time to get off our TrumpButts and get to work. Join me?
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