Not with a bang…

Well yesterday happened and wasn’t some weird fever dream I thought I was having. For those of you who aren’t in the US right now, good. For those of you who are and live in some underground fortified bunker with only internet access to my blog, weird, but we had a coup attempt. As in a literal attempt to overthrow the government. It’s okay though, because they were white supremacists and in the US we give them special treatment.

Well it’s official Joe Biden won the election yesterday… again… for the sixtieth time or so (no really, there were about 54 lawsuits alone). This of course made the “fuck your feelings” people very angry. Because let’s face it they were saying fuck YOUR feelings, not fuck THEIR feelings! They are a very sensitive group, the white supremacists. So sensitive in fact that the white supremacist police force handled them with care and escorted them into the capitol building (seriously).

We have a bloated military and defense budget, one that overtakes funding for education, infrastructure, sciences, research, medicine, healthcare, and space exploration combined by orders of magnitude. We have a police force that “needs” military grade equipment to “protect” and “defend” (seriously). More importantly the capital building was designed and redesigned, and re-redesigned to be a fortress. The winding halls are like a labyrinth designed to confuse and limit invading forces.

Yet yesterday people walked right in with minimal resistance and overtook the little security in place with the intent to not only disrupt democracy because they weren’t happy with the result, but to overthrow the government at the behest of Trump. Who by the way has yet to condemn or speak out against the mob he himself supports. This is a stark contrast from the “traditional” response that say the black lives matter protests saw (more here), but that sounds about white. I mean it’s not like they have a history of being trigger happy racist murderers or anything (oh wait…).

This is what happens when you have a white supremacist police force “guarding” the capitol building against * checks notes * other white supremacists. You get terrorists taking photos with the police (again, seriously). This isn’t a bug in the system, it’s a feature. This is exactly how the system is supposed to work and why it needs to be changed. You shouldn’t be able to half-assedly storm the capitol building in an attempt to overthrow the government, no matter what color your skin is.

This right here, what happened yesterday, that is exactly why the black lives matter movement is so important and why the “all lives matter” white supremacist group is so toxic, or the other white supremacist “blue lives matter” group. Yeah, there’s a lot of white supremacist groups here in the US in case anyone didn’t already know that. But surely not all republicans support Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government to stay in power? Well you would be mistaken, today for example republicans cheered him when he joined into a RNC conference call (read more). We’re stuck in a two party system where republicans (the conservative party for those not in the US) are disregarding the law and are more concerned with staying in power.

I would like to say that yesterday was a dark day for democracy, but that would be negating the last four years and the decades and decades leading up to this (hopeful) climax of racism and hatred. I say hopeful climax because I genuinely don’t want to see it get worse, but at the same time I would be foolish to think that this is as bad as it could possibly be.

I’ve said it for the past four years, Trump is a symptom of systemic racism not the cause. He wasn’t the end or the beginning of something, just a small step backwards in a long road of backwards steps we’ve taken as a country. Rarely do we get such glaring examples of systematic racism, examples that are hard to explain away without completely divorcing reality. People demoned black lives matter after a target who implemented racist policies was broken into by rioters (and probably a lot of people not with the movement, but trying to take advantage of the situation).

You all cared more about a target then the capitol building. Sounds about white to me. It was never about the target or the capitol building, it was about the color of the people who were doing those actions. Black lives matter made racists scared, which is a problem in a country that is founded on racism. Trump was a hard shift toward white supremacy because we had the audacity to elect a black man. Obama was about as center as they come, but that didn’t matter because he was black. The shift is a feature, not a bug. No one cares that the capitol building was stormed for the same reason you never see police breaking up white supremacist rallies, they are the same fucking group.

As I always say, it’s hard to predict the future. I couldn’t tell you what will happen with any degree of certainty in the next four minutes much less the next four years, if I could I would be a very wealthy person. However, it’s not hard to see where we’ve been, where we are headed, and where we are now. We are standing on the edge of something terrible and the scary part is half the people in charge and Trump are all supporters of this. The next two weeks or so will be very delicate. The next four years or so will be even more so.

Biden isn’t a left leaning solution, he’s center right if anything. The right just keeps shifting further and further right so center becomes skewed to the right. But to be perfectly clear, there’s nothing virutious about center politics when one side is made up of racist assholes who want power above everything else and it doesn’t matter how many people die for them to have it.

I don’t know where we go from here, but it isn’t up to me, it’s up to us. A democracy is a fragile thing and it takes all of us to tend to it and care for it. I think that’s something we’ve forgotten over the years. We weren’t perfect when we were founded, far from it. We’ve barely moved the dial to equality and even that small shift was enough to face this Trump driven backlash. What I’m saying, if I’m saying anything at all, is that we have work to do. I just hope that we as a whole, those who care about equality and democracy, are up to the challenge.