Are We Really Doing This?
The plan for the next four years
About 6 weeks ago, I talked with my brother about the election.
My brother is a regular dude, a plumber, who works very hard and lives in the Midwest with his wife and two kids under 10. He didn't vote this year, because in his words "If it doesn't affect me, I don't care. It might make me a piece of shit, but I don't care." Voting is a pain, so he doesn't do it. To him, that feels reasonable.
It probably doesn't help that he has a very liberal mother and a very conservative wife, and he doesn't want either of them to yell at him.
Like my mother, I'm on the left of the US political spectrum. I'm relatively leftist even for my medium-sized Midwest university city. It's not a popular position in parts of my extended family, but I don't have a choice: I am a woman, married to a woman, with a kid who is also queer. If I started voting for Republicans it would be like a turkey voting in favor of Thanksgiving.
I can definitely tell this year that I'm the turkey. I feel like a turkey: I worked very hard to make one side win the election, and the other side won by a small amount.
I'm still pretty upset about it, but that seems reasonable. I did work hard, after all, it makes sense to be upset when your side loses.
It looked like the winners won by a larger amount at first because rural areas in this country are really quick to report their election results, and urban areas are pretty slow to report them, and urban areas are where all the people who like to live near a lot of people live, and those people are much less likely to be Republicans (the side I don't support) for a lot of very interesting sociological and psychological reasons. And also because about 20 years ago the Democrats (the side I reluctantly support) started calling people in rural areas redneck hicks who vote against their own interests and then passed a bunch of laws to protect banks and billionaires.
This is a switch from the Democrats' prior method of listening or pretending to listen to people in rural areas, acting sympathetic, and then making laws to protect banks and billionaires anyway. I don't love the Democrats, I just have to vote for them because Republicans keep electing people who want to kill my friends.
If you're a bank or a billionaire you don't need to worry. The Republicans that got elected are also going to pass laws that protect banks and billionaires.
Banks and billionaires are very safe here.
My brother, the regular dude plumber and his family, are not very safe here, or when they are it's not because the government is working to help them. My brother and his wife and her family and our family all work very hard to keep my brother's family well fed and warm and housed and in a working car, because the government does not have a lot of laws that protect them. For example: corporations (which are usually owned by very rich people like billionaires) are allowed to sell their family products that will hurt them, because if there were laws that protected my brother's family from harmful products, some very rich people might become slightly less rich.
Companies that have to spend money making sure their products are safe are not making as much profit as companies that aren't required to have safe products, so many very rich people spend a lot of money trying to make sure that the government doesn't pass that kind of law. It's reasonable that they would do this. It's in their own best interests.
There was a year or so where the government protected my brother's family a little better, because things were very dangerous because there was a pandemic illness killing a bunch of people. For a while they got an expanded tax credit for having little kids, but lawmakers who are very rich from both of the parties who are able to win power decided that that kind of support might keep him and his kind of people (the ones who aren't very rich) from having to work so hard.
The lawmakers who are rich want the people like my brother to keep working hard. If my brother and other people like him didn't have to work as hard, there's a pretty good chance that some very rich people would have to either work harder or be slightly less rich.
I am also not rich, but I have a college degree and work at a university, so my work is a little less directly valuable to rich people and I get to work less hard for the same or more money. I am told that this makes sense if you are an economist. I am also told that I'm not actually working less hard for more money, that desk work is harder and more important than physical labor or service jobs. That's not been my experience, but I am not an expert. I'm only someone who's had a lot of different jobs.
Experts, of course, are the very smart people who some people trust to run everything. There are experts in any number of fields, although most people who are considered experts are only experts in a few of them. You can tell who is an expert in a thing by looking at how many degrees they have in that thing and also by how many people listen and trust them to know what they're talking about when they discuss it.
Trust is more important than degrees when you want to figure out who is an expert. You can tell this is true because most degrees now go to women, but more people trust men.
One of the ways you can tell people trust men more is this year's election. Remember the election? We started out talking about the election.
In the election, there were two people running for president: a white man who is a Republican and a black woman who is a Democrat. Both of them had experience that qualified them for the job, and both had degrees. The man also had some experiences and resume items that made it so he was possibly less qualified for the job, although people disagree about whether those things matter. The woman was a woman, and also black.
The man had a lot of better media coverage, and worse media coverage, and celebrity supporters who were men. The woman had a lot of worse media coverage, and no media coverage, and celebrity supporters who were Republicans. A lot of very very rich people gave a lot of money to both the man and the woman, although at this particular time the man seems to have gotten more. The woman lost, which is not only because people don't trust women as much as men, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that distrusting women might be some of the reason.
This was this year, 2024, if anyone is confused. It's very reasonable to be confused because except for the identity and race of the woman, we had the exact same thing happen eight years ago.
When the man who ran this time won in 2016, there were a lot of people who voted for him who thought he couldn't do all the things he said he would, or didn't want to do those things, or would only do the things he said he'd do that they liked. This particular man has a history of saying whatever will get him elected, possibly more than even other politicians, who are known for saying whatever will get them elected. The way our system is set up, getting elected is a politician's job.
In a better system, part of getting elected would be helping people who vote, but that doesn't appear to be necessary anymore.
In 2016, some of the people who didn't support the man who won said that he was going to do a bunch of the things he promised to do during his campaign, like ban Muslims from coming into the country and throw a bunch of workers who hadn't properly asked permission before getting jobs here out and appoint judges who would let some states ban women from getting some kinds of health care. I said those things might happen, and that we shouldn't want them to happen.
And everyone said I was unreasonable, that of COURSE he wouldn't do those things, that of COURSE there wasn't a chance that an American politician in the 2010s would close off immigration or appoint judges who wanted to change the health care laws. And then he did.
He also did a lot of other things, like stand in front of the queen in a lineup when he visited England and prevent student loans from being discharged and get rid of the government agency that was supposed to handle pandemics right before a coincidental pandemic that has killed seven million people (worldwide) in the last five years.
I suppose the milk was cheaper back then, because prices got very high during the aforementioned pandemic, and once prices go up it's hard to bring them down.
Everyone said I was unreasonable four years ago, and they say I'm still being unreasonable. Last time I talked about politics to my brother he didn't think it was reasonable that I thought the government would dissolve my marriage, which has only been legal for about 9 years. Everyone said and keeps saying I am being unreasonable, and that I live in a liberal bubble, and it is not fair to decide to stop being friends with people who vote for Republicans.
I haven't noticed people telling Republicans that it's unreasonable for them to keep voting for people who want to kill my friends, but maybe I'm just missing that part.
I've had a lot of people tell me I'm unreasonable over the last eight years, and I believed them, so I shut up. I stopped predicting the future and stopped yelling about my worries. I was good, I was quiet, I stopped writing my upsetting essays in hopes that a little less vitriol could turn down the temperature.
The thing is, the world is getting warmer and I've seen a lot of the bad things I've been worried about come true.
It would be nice if I was wrong this time, but I can't count on that. Quiet didn't work and it turns out I still have some things I'd like to say.
Even if it's unreasonable.
