The atmosphere is so heated, and the statements are getting more and more extreme. Let’s just assume Harris wins the election. After a campaign like this, how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?
Honestly I’m as agoraphobic as they come so, since I hardly ever leave my residence, I find it quite easy to forget that it’s an election year, aside from many of the news outlets and media posts dictating it. My life outside of the internet has hardly any political interference.
Yes I still vote, but I keep my political beliefs to myself, but As Marcus Aurelius said, “You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control”
I take a lot of solace in that. I know certain things and have certain opinions but I am absolutely not a politician and it’s not something I’ll wreck my soul over. Life is short enough as it is.
hope my older relatives fucking die or figure out it’s time to change. on a more serious note, protest and try to help build coalitions against this but idk it seems quite grim.
I’ve cut out all Trumpers after Jan 6 2021 basically except for maybe my wife’s parents. I’m afraid to ask them. All of us have a spoken agreement to not bring up politics because we all have to see each other and don’t want to fight. A major caveat to that is that we see them as little as we can though.
That’s been a growing issue for the last 15 years. The answer is community groups but they haven’t been very successful.
This is the new normal. It’s everyone angry all the time until something snaps or the culture changes. Personally I believe you have to wait until the older part of Gen X is dead before we get relief.
There hasn’t been any normal for 8 years plus now. Somewhere between 30 and 45% of the population are openly trying for fascism.
Realistically it’s only a matter of when unless we make some pretty damned sweeping changes which they are going to fight tooth and nail.
We need to unrig the judicial system. We need to unrig the voting system. We need to put guardrails up on media disinformation. And we need to start holding some of these fucking politicians accountable for openly lying in campaign. We need to roll back the dictator privileges they managed to shove in at the last moment for the president. We need to hold some of these oligarchs accountable for crimes.
They should lock Musk up for a month. Go ahead and have him shit himself that he’s not above the law.
I don’t know who the next Republican president will be. But you can bet money there’s going to be plenty of bloodshed once they decide to do whatever they want with complete and total immunity.
Way longer than 8 years. Depending on your perspective and level of privilege, it’s been decades, generations, or the entire history.
Things got bad after Obama got elected in 2008 and the racists lost their shit. But they were also bad after Bush started two wars, or when Bush got installed as preznit in the first place in 2000. Or when Gingrich went after Clinton’s penis in 1998. Or when Gingrich took over the Congress in 1994. Or when Clinton first got elected in 1992 and the racists and militias lost their shit and started bombing things. Or the year before that when the other Bush started a war. Or when Reagan broke multiple laws and got away with it, thanks to Ollie North. Or when Reagan got elected in the first place in 1980. Or when Nixon broke enough laws flagrantly enough to get impeached in 1974. Or when he bombed the shit out of SE Asia. Or when Johnson started a war in Vietnam. Or… I mean it just keeps going endlessly. But that’s just my lifetime. If you are Black or Native American the fuckery goes back as far as when white people first stepped foot here.
If you just tweak what you’re looking at a little bit you can easily move that statement back to all of recorded history.
I’m sure the sentence for everything Musk has done has to be far more than a month (the election stuff aside, he has some shady financial stuff surrounding the purchase of Twitter and probably Tesla stock, etc). They need to lock him up as long as they would lock up the rest of us if we did that.
They are just politicians and it is really not that serious. The race is tight and whomever wins is fine. There will be another election in two years and another two years after that for as long as you live.
Boomer generation will be dead soon. And Gen X isn’t too far behind. This bullshit is already time-limited.
We’ve expected that for over a generation. It’s more than just the boomers doing this. If you’re waiting for Gen X, you’re going to have to wait for Millennials too, because we thought the same thing.
It wasn’t boomers that were influenced by r/the_donald and 4chan.
Isn’t it most Gen-Z men are Trump supporters now?
Whoa, where did you hear that?
Of course it’s more than just the boomers. But once those two generations are dead and gone, they take their lack of empathy and their unfettered narcissism with them.
And I know a few boomers who got plenty of their bullshit from those sites because those sites were just a circlejerk of Fox News lies.
I’m not saying younger generations won’t also have a collection of morons as well, but those generations grew up with this nonsense and they will forever remember the kind of country and world that was left to them.
I think you’ve got an admirably optimistic outlook. I hope you’re correct. However, I am afraid that you may be underestimating human greed and selfishness. Those aren’t unique traits to any generation. Maybe it’s human nature, maybe it’s learned through existence in a capitalistic / hierarchically organized society. In any case, I am not confident that youth alone will prevent people from seeing the kind of country and world that was left to them, as you put it, and not desire to possess as much of the remnants as possible in an outburst of self-interest.
For every person that sees the ice caps melting and wants to fix it somehow, I’m afraid there’s almost certainly at least one other person who thinks, “Hell yeah, new oceanfront property just dropped, how can I own/sell it?”
I’m optimistic in the future generations, yes. And you’re right, at any given moment, there’s a bell curve that can describe the way people are for an event or a trend or an age. I suppose I see the younger generations as moving the curve along an axis toward a better world.
I may very well turn out to be wrong. But I’ll be dead by then.
I was the generation we were hopeful for. All we’ve done is stall. We got Obama elected… and that’s about it.
We need a plan that’s better than “wait it out”. That one tends to fail.
I didn’t preclude continuing to take action. I voted for Harris and will continue to vote for the most sane candidate in each election, primary and general. Same for down ballot.
Never once said the plan was to wait it out. I simply said the insanity perpetrated by the previous generations looks to be on borrowed time — an obvious assertion probably, but an assertion nonetheless.
Maybe my intent is cleared up now.
And who will they blame? Probably others.
how could you ever have a normal relationship with your pro-Trump neighbor/father-in-law/Uncle/Barber or what ever again?
…Why would I want to? Seriously, why would I want to have a relationship with people that have shown me that the things they value are antithetical to the things I value? I don’t give a fuck if people are nice to me; I want people to be kind across the board.
Our inability to compromise is deliberate.
We can’t organize if we can’t compromise.
We are supposed to hate our neighbors. That makes any kind of organizing impossible.
There are some things that you just can’t compromise on.
That’s the funnest part of all: we don’t
I think it’s fantastic because know it is very clear who I need to exclude from my life.
You don’t. Most of us have already either fully cut-off contact with Trump supporting family members or limit our interaction with them heavily. Our country is rotted to the core, and this election won’t be the end of it. Even if Harris wins, there will be contestion of the results. There may even be a successful coup by the Republican party. A civil war is not out of the question.
There is no normal. There won’t be ever again.
This has been the norm since 2016. Until the GOP unilaterally rejects Trumpism, this will be how it is every four years.
You sure there is a ‘every four years’ then?
You’re right, the other side of the coin that I forgot to mention is, “Trumpism wins and turns America into a fascist dictatorship”.
Only on day one he said
Ah, so we’re only going to be subject to the whims of a fascist dictator for the first 24 hours? What a relief! And it’s a good thing he’s got a track record for voluntarily and peacefully giving up power, or else I might suspect he wouldn’t think twice about holding on to that power until his dying breath. /s
Hmm due to text based communication, what I said was in no way meant to be pro trump, I wanted to clarify
Ah, your comment reads to me like you were emphasizing “only” day one, implying that he would relinquish that power the following day. Happy to hear you elaborate on what you meant.
Yeah, I see how it could have come across as making an excuse for him. Of course being a dictator for a day would be all he needs to make it eternal.
deleted by creator
Yes, things tend to calm down. If you read history books about US history, there were times in the 1800s where brothers were killing each other over slavery and where people were killing themselves in the 1950s over their children’s sexuality. Time heals wounds, and people tend to swing in a pendulum from progressive to conservative and back again (the 50s, the 90s, the 10s).
I recommend The Lavender Scare by David K. Johnson. It’s a fascinating book back when the US government shared a frightening similarity to the CCP. It shows how a community develops in the postwar period, how a moral panic gets set off, how people are affected, and how a social movement starts and heals the country over time. It is almost a word for word copy of what is happening in the US right now, and how people in the past defused a situation that was even more loaded in some ways than today’s world. If you are looking for reassurance, it’s a great read. Many of the landmarks in the book are still standing, by the way :)
I’m reading Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington by James Kirchick. It’s also about the Lavender Scare but the author dives deep into several cases of great government aides whose careers were ruined. The chapters are separated by each presidency, gradually construing a narrative as public opinion shaped the politics of each era. I just have to warn that, as a reviewer puts it, the book is both “exhaustive and exhausting” with a whopping 800+ pages but I think it’s worth reading every word. It’s so good.
this is normal. half the country is composed of backward degenerates.
24% is backwards degenerates. That’s the percentage of the population that voted for trump in 2020. No where near half, no matter how much they may claim to represent half.
Non-voters are complicit in what is happening. Maybe saying they are as bad is a stretch, but they clearly either don’t care or are ignorant about it.
Yeah. I was sloppy in my choice of words.
