I’ve had the flu since last Friday and have been home recuperating all week. Yes, I’m vaxxed, but that doesn’t prevent infection like some magic forcefield that rebuffs errant sneezes. It just means that if one does get infected, one can fight it off better.
Anyway, yesterday the illness broke. I was tired but definitely had rounded the corner and was starting to feel human again when I VERY STUPIDLY decided I was well enough to handle Threads and other sources of public discourse and news. And there I was in the wee hours, calling out Jill Stein supporters for selling out women, children, people of color, older people, the poor, LGBTQIA+, and immigrants in THIS country to throw their little political hissy fits.
Oh, my good GAWD, I am so tired of the trope that voting for Kamala Harris was a vote for genocide. Ever notice how so many of those types going on about that are men, usually white ones, who will not be affected in any way by Project 2025 who expect the rest of us to sacrifice our safety and reproductive, civil, and human rights to take a side in a conflict between two groups of people 10,000 miles away who have hated each other for 1,000 years and will hate each other for 1,000 years more? Nah, brodudes. I didn’t vote for genocide when I voted for Harris. I voted to protect my own country from fascism. I voted to protect my fellow Americans from Project 2025 and exactly the crap that’s happening now. Domestic policy matters. And right or very, horribly, disgustingly wrong as it is now, the U.S. will always support Israel to one extent or another because the U.S. gets a lot of intelligence from Israel about entities in the region who are hostile to the U.S.
Well, if you were Palestinian- or Arab-American you would–
VOTE THE SAME DAMN WAY I VOTED THIS TIME. Look, if Gaza were Italy, I’d still vote for Harris. I say that even as my sister is headed to Messina to meet cousins we didn’t know we had. My father fought for the Allies. My mother, who was part German, supported the Allies in WWII. My paternal grandfather, who was direct from Italy as a first-generation immigrant, was all in for the Allies in WWII. They were American first, tied to the old countries second. That’s my attitude, too. My goal in the voting booth was to do right by my fellow Americans—my friends, loved ones, neighbors, colleagues, and myself, right here in the U.S.—by trying to stop Creamsicle Caligula.
Furthermore, Stein is nothing but a shrill cicada who comes up out of the earth every four years to make noise, only instead of having the good graces to fly away and shed her mortal coil after giving everyone a headache for a few months, she goes back into the earth to await the vibrations of a campaign speech so she can re-emerge and do it all again. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would see how some feel she’s a right-wing plant because she does nothing but deflect and siphon votes away from the Democrats and then she drops off the face of the earth. She’s useless, her candidacies are hopeless, and voting for her, or not voting, makes one partially responsible for what is happening in the U.S. right now. Those who threw their votes away—votes that millions of Americans have fought, killed, and died to preserve—have no moral high ground, and they’re about to find out as much as the idiots who voted for Apricot Pol Pot thinking he would lower the price of eggs. As I told one transgender man who was nattering on about how the Democrats weren’t much different than Republicans and who will likely be screeching an octave higher from a beardless face in six months when the regime takes his hormones away, “I voted for the [candidate] who would not take away your gender-affirming care AND who had a chance of winning. You threw your vote away. That’s on you.”
And don’t get me started on all the Drumpf-humpers who are now going on like, “Well, I didn’t vote for THIS. He betrayed me.”
Yeah, you voted for this. You just didn’t think it would affect YOU. You were fine with it as long as it happened to someone else. So you, too, can sit down and shut up.
As for the regime, holy hell, someone needs to do it soon. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Yes, you do. And, like the punchline of an old joke, whoever does it needs to take no chances and do all three.
