Deviant Rambling

On Tuesday evening, a 1,500 page continuing resolution proposed to fund the government through March of 2025. As is tradition, rather than sit down and hash out the direction we might be heading for the long-run, it was yet another panic to avert a shutdown.

Our oligarchic overlords, the billionaire class, cried foul at the contents of the continuing resolution. Shortly after, the soon-to-be president Donald Trump chimed in to agree that the legislation should not pass. By Wednesday afternoon, the continuing resolution was dead, and by the end of the weekend, we will be facing yet another shutdown.

Elon Musk was the catalyst for this shutdown, and it was then exacerbated by Donald Trump so he could look tough to his favorite oligarch. All the while, they painted it as some wild spending spree proposed by Democrats, when it had a good deal of bi-partisan support, including from the speaker of the House. But Johnson got railroaded once again, and the confidence in him is at a new low, even within the party. His days as speaker are numbered, and the next one will be a 100% loyal plant of the MAGA faithful.

Democrats immediately pinned the shutdown threat on the Republicans, and we are once again back to business as usual in Washington. Nothing gets done, but they want a raise and a pat on the back for doing so much for all of us. Fuck all of these people.

The 2024 election cycle showed all of us how broken this system is, and that we shouldn’t place our trust in either one of these parties. As someone who spent the entire cycle on the left of the aisle, I saw how quickly the principles went out the window when it looked as though they might lose. When they did lose, they turned on the progressives for fracturing the vote and avoided the conversation about how the establishment plan was terrible. The establishment buddied up to the centrist Republicans in an attempt to sway them to the left, but it garnered nothing but a complete waste of resources. There was no way to win this one. The American public was concerned with the status of the economy, and they pinned every single one of their woes on the Democratic Party. Replacing Biden with Harris but offering no solutions for working-class people’s problems doomed the campaign and that is solely on the establishment.

The memory of this fickle population is incredibly short, and they couldn’t bother to remember that just four years ago, we had a world-stopping pandemic. The inflation that peaked in 2022 was a direct result of this pandemic, and the party that was in office at that time was going to feel the full brunt of it. If Donald Trump had won in 2020 and had to be saddled with the highest inflation in decades, he’d be out now and it would be a moratorium on the Republican party for an entire term. It would have been a blood bath. But that isn’t what happened.

Instead, Biden ran in 2020 and won and adopted a timebomb that would go off in 2022. He could have been fiscally conservative and even bordered on a traitor to his party and it still would have blown up in his face. The fuse was lit when the country shut down in 2020.

No one is to blame for the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Regardless of the origin of the disease, the world-shattering effects will resonate for decades through our politics domestically and internationally.

The most alarming aspect of the pandemic was not the death toll or the economic instability that still exists. It is the explosion in the wealth acquired by the highest net-worth class on the planet. Billionaires saw their fortunes explode during the pandemic, and with this explosion, the wealth inequality that followed became insurmountable. It was already a sickening gap between the haves and the have-nots, but now it’s hard to even comprehend the math at play. The ten wealthiest people on the planet have fortunes totaling just under $2 trillion dollars.

2,000,000,000,000 fucking dollars just in the top 10. The rest of the billionaire population push this number to 14,000,000,000,000. This is more than the individual GDP of every country on the planet except China and the United States. It would account for the full GDP of Japan, Germany, India, and the United Kingdom. Around 2,700 hundred billionaires are worth about 14% of the global GDP. They have the power to control more than they ever have before, and now the guardrails have been removed to give them direct access to the levers of power through bought and paid-for politicians.

Revolution isn’t optional now. Our hands have all been forced into action. So much so that we all celebrate when a vigilante guns down the CEO of one of the largest companies on the planet because he represents an evil we all know in this country. Luigi Mangione is hailed as a hero for executing a man, and no amount of browbeating by the equally bought and paid-for media on both sides is going to make us feel guilty about it.

A war is being waged against 99.9% of us, and this many people can only be trampled on for so long before using violence to solve problems. If we’re going to get treated like classless savages, then we should act accordingly. We aren’t influential enough to win through the legal or political system, but anyone can pull a trigger if they’ve reached their limit. Money doesn’t stop bullets.

It is time for an expanded class consciousness in this country. People need to see how insane the divide is between the bottom 99.9% and the top 0.1%.

As the most severe example, we will take Elon Musk’s ludicrous net worth into consideration and compare it to the average working class American.

Elon Musk is worth around $440 billion on December 14, 2024. To put this absurd number into context, it is best to list it as a full number:

$440,000,000,000.00

I know that actually does nothing to contextualize such an insane sum, so we can look at it from a different angle.

If you are a wage earner, you’re familiar with the concept of an hourly wage. The average hourly wage across the United States is around $35 an hour. In most of the corners of the country, this is considered a pretty good hourly rate. Where I live, it puts you among the educated high earners. I live in the rural Midwest, so it’s mostly dead-end retail and the like.

Elon Musk makes $650 per second. This equates to $2,340,000 an hour. This is equivalent to 66,857 average hourly workers.

Now imagine the work you do for a living. If it’s a 40-hour work week, you can expect around $1,400 before tax at $35/hour. Elon Musk’s 40-hour pretax total is 93,600,000.00.

1.1 million to 3 million is the average LIFETIME earnings of folks in the United States. In one week, he made more than anywhere between 30 and 90 people will make their entire lives.

So potentially everyone in your family for several generations could work their whole lives and still not make what this man will make in a single 40 hour week. All of the work they do, all of the things they helped to create, all they build, improve and tear down. Do you honestly believe that Elon Musk puts more good into the world in one week than everyone you have ever known or will know for their entire lives? Because you can’t make that scenario make sense and it is all a fact based on current averages. This level of wealth should not exist and it should not be aspired to.

You have literally nothing in common with the billionaire class. You enrich them with your worship and further widen the divide we can never hope to close. It is the largest case of Stockholm Syndrome ever.

It feels like a symptom of some greater social contagion. Like the majority of people will willingly give up their autonomy for the most remote chance at the spillage of the riches of their captors. It is the worship of wealth without doing the math to see they will never experience what they are so devoted to promoting.

The average person can’t hope to make a fraction of one percent of what any one of the Forbes 400 currently owns. The average person would have to work between 300 and 900 lives just to join the list of over 2,700 billionaires across the world. These numbers don’t take into account paying anything out to live, you’d have to save 100% from every lifetime.

2,700 billionaires in the world that currently has a population of around 8.025 billion.

1 in every 2,972,222 people are in this club, accounting for a fraction of 0 percent of the global population.

99+ percent of us are on the wrong side of this equation and can do very little to improve our chances because we weren’t born with the winning genetic lottery numbers.

Revision:

As of 12/17/24, Elon Musk is now worth $460 billion. He has gained $20 billion dollars in three days. In three days, his net worth has gone up as much as 6,666 to 18,181 lifetimes of average peasants. To put that into focus, he has gained enough that he could pay the entire town I live in a lifetime’s worth of average income and have money to spare. The work that he may have done in those three days is not more valuable than the people who live in the town I call home. These are boring, ordinary people with boring, ordinary jobs and lives, but I will defend their work over his literally any day of the week.

I honestly feel we are living in an alternate universe where the bad guys win and we are just starting to realize it even though it’s been happening for decades.

Among the many uncertainties that come with the second Trump presidency, reproductive rights will be near the top of the list. There is cause for concern given how proudly the man strutted around the country during the campaign talking about how he single-handedly got Roe overturned.

Republicans want to outlaw abortion completely and this includes every form and under every circumstance, without exception. The conservative wet fever dream includes banning birth control, the family planning and reproductive health services provided by Planned Parenthood, and making privileged information about women’s health public. All of this is under the guise of protecting the sanctity of life, represented by the unborn in this case.

This will include an attack on the FDA’s approval status of mifepristone and misoprostol, the cocktail typically administered to perform a medical abortion. The idea here is to revoke the approval so that the drug will no longer be manufactured, and hence, one avenue will be effectively closed for good. Or at very least until sanity is restored or states use the right forced onto them by the Supreme Court in its decision to overturn Roe. Many states have already seen the writing on the wall and gone to the necessary lengths to codify abortion rights. I commend these states and envy living in a place that allows ballot initiatives in the first place. I do not live in such a state, so the odds of codified abortion rights here are essentially non-existent.

In the same way that women in the past had to resort to insane means to terminate a pregnancy, the women of today will also have options. There is already a section of the illicit drug scene that will happily cater to the needs of women who might not be able to find a prescription where they live to terminate their pregnancy. The dark web has markets selling generic versions of both mifepristone and misoprostol that are shipped in from overseas. The countries of origin for these medications consider them to be over the counter, so they are fairly easy to source. The premium is substantial over what a person might have to pay domestically for these drugs. But when foiled against the cost of raising a child to adulthood that you simply do not want for whatever reason, it is money well spent. We are talking about a few hundred dollars versus hundreds of thousands to squeeze out a human and raise them.

The difference between what was available to women in the past and now is night and day. Abortions by medication now account for roughly 63% of all abortions in the United States every year. These medications have been proven safe and effective in producing the desired results with minimal side effects. The horror stories of clandestine surgical abortions at shady practices can be an urban legend from the past. Modern women can have the medication delivered right to their home and enjoy the privacy they deserve and peace of mind that they might not have otherwise.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and we may soon find ourselves in such times. Women should feel empowered to use whatever means necessary to tend to their health, and if they live in a state that has taken away those rights, they should have the option to cross the Rubicon of criminality and take back those rights.

It has never been the government’s business what women do with their bodies, and that will always be true. When the law is wrong, fuck the law.

We have never been more divided as a nation than we find ourselves in 2024. I do not come by this observation lightly.

Instead, I have felt the tension rising steadily over the past 8 years until it became a part of every day life. This year brought the most contentious election cycle I have ever seen. Instead of staying within the confines of the party machinery and the diehard supporters, it spilled out into the general population. It could arguably be traced back to at least 2020 when the combined forces of an election and a pandemic caused unprecedented tension and hostility.

We have now become so entrenched on our sides of the divide that we address the opposition with open hostility. This is a completely untenable situation that can only end poorly. We all have the ability to stand down but everyone refuses to.

I am guilty of this 100%. I have felt a visceral anger towards Donald Trump since 2016 when his victory undermined any faith I might have had in our institutions. This has evolved into a general sense of contempt for anyone who openly embraces the cult of personality that follows the man. It has names like MAGA and Trumpism, and it represents every value I disagree with in one movement. The people who have been swept up by this behave like members of a cult. This includes but is not limited to a series of handy, easy to remember mantras, a uniform that is unambiguous and immediately recognized, and a blind, unyielding faith to their glorious leader. These people have placed their future in the hands of one of the worst human beings to exist. They have gone so far as to pledge their service to him in an attempt to undermine an official proceeding and steal an election on January 6, 2021.

Now, every time I see the uniform in any configuration, I make a mental note and the person registers as a threat until I’m no longer in their presence. This used to be confined to seeing people online on videos and whatnot but as the Trump contagion spread, all of the swag started to show up in my hometown. Flags started going up, red hats galore, ridiculous slogans on shirts sported proudly, and I began to take notes to myself. These people were proud to support what may turn out to be the first candidate to run on an openly autocratic playbook.

It’s more than that now, too. I feel sick when I see houses flying the American flag or people wearing overtly patriotic clothes.

We are not a country worth bragging about or celebrating any more. At this point I struggle to remember a time when we were. But I don’t struggle at all to remember the attempted indoctrination we all experienced growing up. The pledge of allegiance, god included in every classroom. The “yay America” feeling around national holidays. None of it stuck with me. I had my suspicions from a young age that none of it made any sense.

I have since determined that I am very much anti-patriotic. To me, it is obvious. If a country is to be revered enough to be patriotic to, it should inspire reverence. My country deserves suspicion at best and contempt at worst. The best I have ever felt about the United States is indifferent or neutral.

The events of my late childhood, early adulthood, and through midlife have proven to me that my assessment was correct.

As much as I hate bureaucracy, it may be the only thing standing in the way of the potential chaos of the second Trump term.

Congress likes to flex on presidents and I suspect some of this will even happen to Trump. The first few cabinet selections will let us know how contentious things may be because they will test what little moral fortitude remains in the Republican party. Words still matter and many of the Senators in charge of confirming cabinet positions have signaled doubt about several of the proposed candidates.

Whether or not this doubt proves useful or not is a different story. Trump has been going out of his way to apply pressure personally to anyone who has questioned these choices publicly. He is still in the honeymoon phase where he is trying to be subtle but the threat of who he has been in the past remains. Anyone who disagreed with the man in the past quickly had their career torpedoed and I am sure it’ll happen again. Senators can reliably do one thing and that is whatever it takes to keep their job. Some days it involves pandering to their base, and others it involves placating a moody, childish president who throws a tantrum when he doesn’t get his way.

When a child throws a tantrum, it’s all flash. The dust settles and by the next day they have completely forgotten.

When a man-child throws a tantrum, he can do serious damage to those around him. If the man-child is the president, he can hold the country hostage.

The House introduced a bill specifically to ban transgender women from using the facilities used by biological women in Congress. (What is the best term to use for bio women? If I’m off, I sincerely apologize.)

If you need to know what the priorities are, this gives you a glimpse into how much of a fucking joke this Congress is.

This bill was essentially one giant fuck you to the first ever transgender representative in Congress, Sarah McBride. It is a completely unserious piece of legislation that every one of these maggots was on the clock for. Taxpayer money funded this attack.

But we are that country now. The kind of country that looks the other way while Congress engages in a culture war through enacting policy proposals for pet issues.

In the interest of (trans)parency, I have literally zero skin in this game. I think that transgenderism has no effect on my life whatsoever and it is yet another issue that I believe falls squarely in the category of “None of the government’s fucking business”. I still feel compelled to call out a bully when I see one, though. The government has become the means for the vocal minority to have serious power for issues that fly in the face of outdated and what should be dead beliefs.

Earlier today, I was in the middle of one of my tasks for the day when I received a text from Mom and a picture was attached. She routinely sends random pictures, memes, etc. so it wasn’t unusual until I opened the message. What I saw infuriated me and reminded me that the world we live in is similar to the one I experienced as a child.

A thousand words:

I can remember a time not that long ago when the Klu Klux Klan showed up in our town to have a loud demonstration on the steps of our courthouse. To be clear, it has been decades, but I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was a child and we were driving through town for errands and there was a group of white-hooded thugs flying their Nazi flags, Nazi saluting the passing cars, and flipping off anyone and everyone who appeared to be not white. At the time, the total non-white population in our town was probably less than 5, so the middle finger was rarely used.

But I have this image seared into my memory because it was a moment when part of my innocence died. These purveyors of hatred murdered it, and I didn’t know at the time how I could live in a world that allowed this kind of thing to exist. I was a child, and hateful messages were being yelled at full volume for all to hear through a megaphone. In the MIDDLE of our town.

I consider that moment as much of a blow to that innocence as the moment I learned about death. I have experienced so much life since then to help soften the blow of bigotry. I have been lucky to lead a happy life, all things considered.

But it is now 2024. I am in my 40s and the wound I sustained as a child reopened with this image. I was reminded that no matter how many things change, some terrible things remain true. Hatred is alive and well and it has a public sympathy I have never seen before in my life.

The white, Christian Nationalists will soon have a strong man in office and the floodgates of hatred will fly open on January 20, 2025. I suspect it will be the beginning of a truly dark time in the story of the United States of America.

Nothing feels outside of the realm of possibility in this version of the world. It feels like it is only a matter of time before hate groups are freely lobbying in the once-hallowed halls of Congress. They will have no one left to stop them, and a leader who encourages the worst instincts in them.

On January 6 of 2021, we had a preview of what this might look like if it were a drunk and disorderly force of ill-informed rednecks and out-loud pieces of shit. The next time it will be men dressed in suits who are cordially invited.

We aren’t better than this and it is a reckoning we will all have to have. I have had mine and I will counsel others when they have theirs. There is no coming back from who we have become as a nation. There is only a chance to rebuild once it all inevitably collapses.

I live in a small town in the Midwest with a population around 6,000. I was born and raised here and I know a lot of people just by a factor of being here over 40 years.

Throughout my life I have traveled and I’ve visited every state except Hawaii. I’ve also visited 18 other countries and counting and I feel my consciousness grows with every addition to the list. Travel has made me better as a human being and gave me an appreciation for the quiet part of the world I live in.

This is a preface to say I have seen many countries and other ways of doing things so that I can make a comparison to where I live. I have visited countries that were far worse off, and I’ve visited countries that I’d move to tomorrow if opportunity presented itself.

With the recent re-election of Donald Trump and the clear and present danger he poses to American Democracy, it has me reexamining the place I live with a fresh perspective and a heightened cynicism. Just for the sake of transparency, the county I live in voted 75% for Trump.

The real life bind I find myself in is now clear. If I see four people I know by name but not close enough to know their political affiliations, I have to assume that three of them voted for Trump. It means that I have to reconsider any interaction I may engage in from now on, and this feels like a violation that I will never recover from. I didn’t choose for my life to be like this, but over the past 8 years, our divisions have become so severe that we have to realign our entire lives to accommodate.

I hate Donald Trump to the core of my being because he makes a mockery of our institutions. It is hard to prioritize which adjectives to use to describe him and there are dozens. None of them are good. I am part of the 25% who can’t see a positive from this outcome.

The quality that concerns me the most is his neverending thirst for power. He has fooled millions of people into believing it is just bombast but he is saying exactly what he intends to do when he is in office again.

Project 2025 and Agenda 47 are the precursors to the American autocratic movement. These insane policy proposals hope to bring us back to the earliest days of our nation when the wealthy owned people literally. It is hard to overstate how bat shit these proposals are, but it would make the country inhospitable for anyone who isn’t a white Christian nationalist.

So three out of four times I see someone, I have to operate under the assumption that they voted for autocracy. I can never look at people the same because it makes me suspicious of everyone equally. I have only been in public a few times since the election but every time I have felt myself on edge like never before. I genuinely hope I don’t see anyone I know who I might have to do the math before I greet them.

And then I visited the store and was confronted with this exact issue. I saw a person I am on a first name basis with and it had been friendly in the past, and I want to keep the relationship intact in that memory. So before he saw me, I made sure he didn’t, so that we didn’t have to reach an impasse. My gut tells me he is one of three and it would have been a full-throated approval of Trump and the coming shift. 

I suppose that eventually I’m going to have to start ripping off bandaids and confronting the topic, but I am still determining how to best handle that. I don’t want the decision stripped from me in the way that Trump foisted it upon me to reconcile. I want to hope that the world will not stand for the threat of an American autocracy and that our institutions will hold but I have serious concerns that they can’t.

Trump won the Presidency.

The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative super majority, 3 of which were elected by Trump. They are in his pocket and they don’t even bother hiding it any more.

The Senate has returned to Republican control, where they will sit and await Trump’s marching orders.

The House remains to be counted but as I write this, Republicans only need to fill 6 4 more seats to retain control.

This represents a full sweep of the apparatus of the federal government for the Republican party, which is now led by a potential dictator who intends to weaponize these institutions to exact his vendetta against all who have wronged him, real or imaginary. He spent all 4 years of his time off letting us all know this is exactly what he would do and now he has every possibility to get what he wants. The party spent all 4 years helping to carefully orchestrate the takeover and go further into debt to Trump politically. Every one of the man’s worst instincts will be encouraged by his sycophantic coterie, and his ego will grow to a size never encountered in any democratic leader. Because he isn’t one of those. He is our Hitler.

I have been hesitant to apply the label to Trump because this is not a small charge to levy against anyone’s character. But Donald Trump has no character. He is whatever people want him to be for the right price. He is a conman that has just scammed over 74 million Americans into believing he is their savior. Their honest to fucking Christ savior. He has gone so far as to say that he survived two assassination attempts because the perfect, blonde haired, blue eyed Christian god wanted him to rule. He desires unwavering support and flattery, and expects obedience always. If you do not possess these characteristics, then you are the enemy within. He has given every indication that he will use his now vast resources to exact his revenge on this roster of people, which numbered around 70 million when the dust had settled at the polls. 70 million of us are in completely uncharted waters now as we consider that we may become targets of the federal government and the unfathomable power it wields.

So now a trip to the store triggers a real-time threat assessment of every person I see, regardless of whether or not I know them. 

• Three of four people support the violation I experience as I assess them.

• Three of four people support the willful violation of people I know and love as family because of their identity.

• Three of four people support the wholesale violation of women’s rights. 

• Three of four people are indifferent or complicit in the violations that over 70 million of us will experience in the coming years. An additional population of immigrants numbering in the 10s of millions are also being threatened, but they can’t speak because they are the first official targets.

• Three of four people support the most insane, unplanned, mass deportation that the country has ever seen, too ignorant to look into how that may affect them.

• Three of four people support the candidate who has indicated his full cooperation in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

• Three of four people support Russia’s fight to conquer and absorb Ukraine.

• Three of four people are willing to hand their government to billionaires who have nothing in common with them and are using their endless wealth to gain further control of the world.

• Three of four people are willing to allow a convicted felon to evade justice entirely through his duly elected position and his ownership of the highest court in the land.

• Three of four people have become more like the man they voted for: completely concerned with themselves and their bottom line.

• Three of four people couldn’t bother to take 2 minutes to look up what a tariff is and deduce that they will have higher prices on everything if tariffs are imposed across the board.

• Three of four people sold me and the rest of the 70+ million out for cheaper eggs, which the conman convinced he could deliver with those regressive tariffs and by eliminating unnecessary waste like the Department of Education, the CDC, and the FED.

But he was lying about his intentions. He wanted power. And three of four people I see where I live bought the lie without bothering to read any of the fine print to see what it will cost them. The cost is democracy, and all 335 million of us will pay.

I spent the entire day Wednesday, November 6th wondering how more than half of the country decided on four more years of Trump. I heard all of the reasons given, chief among them the economy and the border, and none of them were sufficient in my mind to justify the risk we have just taken.

I am well aware of the typical Democratic stances on things and I understand the frustration of these people. But they have been sold a series of lies yet again by the most inexplicably successful conman.

They want the economy to improve but he will destroy it with regressive tariffs, reigniting inflation and shoving us directly into recession territory. He has literally said how much of his platform relies on these tariffs and has a fundamental misunderstanding about how they actually work. It is now public knowledge that importers almost always pass the tariffs on to consumers in raised prices, meaning the favorite argument they made for him will actually harm them instead. They were so desperate for change and relief that they chose a man who has zero regard for their struggles and is actively railing against them with this policy.

They want the border closed and a great deal of them support the truly insane mass deportation plan he is proposing. I completely understand the necessity for a better solution to the border problem, but the deportations will destroy the American economy overnight. Nevermind the massive debt that this will incur at the expense of… wait, who will it be? Yeah, the fucking taxpayers. The estimates for this backwards, racist, xenophobic policy start at $315 billion all the way up to just shy of $1 trillion, and you’ll get the bill every payday in the form of higher taxes. You know, the high taxes that they said they’d never levy against the working class? That’s who pays for all of this shit, you.

He promised to take America to a new Golden Age, harkening to the Gilded Age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the world. He didn’t bother mentioning the explosion of wealth inequality that occurred during this period in history and how all of the wealth consolidated near the top just before it all imploded in the Great Depression. Within the first two days of his victory, the top 10 wealthiest people on the planet gained almost $100 billion in net worth and far as I can tell, those of us on the bottom just got to watch the divide grow exponentially.

The policy positions that had Americans voting will also open the door for potentially permanent changes in the way our government functions at the federal level. As usual, the concerned voters could only be bothered with surface-level details about who would probably be better for their checkbook, and they went with the Republican because they thought it was better than what the Democrats could do. This opened the door for the Republican party to sweep all three branches of the federal government and with the Supreme Court already on the payroll, they can make changes that will take decades to undo. The most hyper conservative among them used the playbook from 1981 and updated it for modern times and it will be on the desk of President Trump the second he sits at the Resolute Desk. The team assembled around him is an all-star cast of the most dogmatic conservatives the planet has ever seen, and they will hand him a stack of dozens of executive orders to sign on day one. Any action that requires Congress will have zero argument because Trump has battered the entire party into playing ball or having their careers extinguished. If the Supreme Court needs to be called upon, it will only take a free vacation or two to get the votes necessary. But the fact of the matter is, the justices would have done it for free, because they are no longer afraid to break the oath they swore to uphold the Constitution.

The people have spoken, and they said “We can’t be bothered to look beyond the surface level details of a candidate who has promised us the world. We take him at his word unless it is about how he intends to become a dictator, then he was just kidding.”

And maybe those of us who tried and voted against him are just raising alarm bells and nothing will come of his presidency. But why the fuck would you risk the alternative?

Another Trump presidency pushes our country closer to authoritarianism and it is more important than ever that good ideas are allowed to exist.

Resistance comes in many forms, and in keeping with the spirit of how our country got started, it doesn’t always have to involve violence. It is always preferable for peace to be the overarching theme and I believe that is still the case now.

But our words can serve as the fuel for our never-ending fire for the American Democracy. The flames may dwindle in the face of the harrowing years ahead, but so long as one ember remains, so must our commitment.

Our country is sick and it will require a combination of treatments to return to the health we have known in the past. It is incumbent upon us as creatives of all kinds to administer the sort of life-giving medicine the country so desperately needs.

In this time of uncertainty and with the potential abyss we see before us, we must stand firm and create with reckless abandon. Our protest is in the work and the world will know the spirit of America is alive and well in the hearts, minds, and talented hands of creatives.

If ever there was a moment to protest it is now. We must do so in our work and become fearless in our expression. The task is daunting but you will enjoy the unlimited support from other creatives who will not stand for injustice.

Use the First Amendment as the weapon it is. It’s placement atop the list makes it hard to touch no matter how brazen the threat.

We all have the power to bring our nation back from the brink but we must be bold and refuse to accept defeat. This isn’t some coded message about the validity of elections. Harris lost, conceded, and guaranteed a peaceful transition of power from the administration. Because that is how it has always worked with one huge asterisk next to 2020, a year filled to the brim with asterisks.

I speak instead of the kind of relentless conviction we need to cultivate in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.

There is darkness in the uncertainty, but the light we possess is as the sun: infinite, life-giving, and illuminating. Shine this light for all to see. It may be the only way to see us through whatever comes next.