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Okay, I have to come back around to Swarzennegger's video because as much as the first half is moving, and I admire him for revealing these experiences he had with living down the national shame of fascism, and how hard that was for him, the second half is The Problem.
No matter what American politicians, and a lot of plain old Americans, have gone through or observed, they seem to come back to this dangerous fantasy of the "shining city on the hill." They want to go back to normal, post-Trump, but "normal" was horrifying.
Normal was toppling foreign governments and installing cronies to get access to tropical fruit. It was supporting dictators for cheap oil. It was SCUD missiles hitting schools. It was US military attack helicopters gunning down journalists. And that's just foreign action!
Domestic normal was keeping Black Americans and Latinx immigrants as poor and desperate as possible to maintain a cheap workforce. Normal was pretending Indigenous people didn't exist at all. Normal was controlling every part of women's bodies they could wrap their claws around.
The last four years should have taught everyone that Trump was an emergent property of the status quo, which was shockingly close to fascism the whole time: symptom, not cause. The Republicans have been going that way for decades, and the Democrats are *mostly* onboard.
The "back to normal" crowd wants desperately for him to be an aberration so they can enfold themselves in the illusion of superiority, exceptionalism, "leadership" of the world. It's imperialist thinking, the story you tell to convince yourself you deserve power over others.
I know I'm preaching to the choir. If you're reading this, you probably agree with me or at least have heard me say it before, but for the sake of everyone on Earth who has to live with you: America, LEARN FROM THIS. Change.
And I don't mean those of you who are under your country's boot! I mean the ones who happily go along with it, who think s'all good. You can make your leadership change if you force them, but you have to *do* it.
Join an activist group. Listen to women. Listen to trans people. Listen to Black and Indigenous people. They're really good at this. They don't "need" us. We're not saviours. We're the drag factor, and we have get out of the way at the very least.
That's all I've got. No pithy ending. It's been a rough coupla days, my friends.
