Arizona’s Anthem Veterans Memorial perfectly aligns with the sun each year on Veteran’s Day. At 11:11 am every November 11th, rays of light pass directly through the 5 Armed Services pillars and illuminate a mosaic of the Great Seal of the United States. Source
Amidst the confusion, and despair, and disbelief, it was suggested to me by a very close friend of mine (I won’t say her name to protect her identity) (Ann. It was Ann) that perhaps a few people would enjoy hearing my thoughts on this election. So I sat down at my computer, cleared my head, and opened a document.
Then I started crying. So I had some hot chocolate, and my close friend (Ann) rubbed my back for a while, and I got myself together, and sat down. And started crying. Then more Ann comforting me, and more hot chocolate, and back and forth like that for about six hours or so, the chain of hot-chocolate-and-back-rubs only interrupted briefly when I had to run to the store for more hot chocolate packets (“Just give me all of them, all the boxes,” I remember saying, through tears, to a very scared stockroom boy) and now I am ready to go.
When I was in fourth grade, my teacher Mrs. Kolphner taught us a social studies lesson. The 17 students in our class were introduced to two fictional candidates: a smart if slightly bookish-looking cartoon tortoise named Greenie, and a cool-looking jaguar named Speedy. Rick Dissellio read a speech from Speedy, in which he promised that if elected he would end school early, have extra recess, and provide endless lunches of chocolate pizzandy. (A local Pawnee delicacy at the time: deep fried pizza where the crust was candy bars.) Then I read a speech from Greenie, who promised to go slow and steady, think about the problems of our school, and try her best to solve them in a way that would benefit the most people. Then Mrs. Kolphner had us vote on who should be class president.
I think you know where this is going.
Except you don’t, because before we voted, Greg Laresque asked if he could nominate a third candidate, and Mrs. Kolphner said “Sure! The essence of democracy is that everyone—“ and Greg cut her off and said, “I nominate a T. rex named Dr. Farts who wears sunglasses and plays the saxophone, and his plan is to fart as much as possible and eat all the teachers,” and everyone laughed, and before Mrs. Kolphner could blink, Dr. Farts the T. rex had been elected president of Pawnee Elementary School in a 1984 Reagan-esque landslide, with my one vote for Greenie the Tortoise playing the role of “Minnesota.”
After class I was inconsolable. Once the other kids left, Mrs. Kolphner came over and put her arm around me. She told me I had done a great job advocating for Greenie the Tortoise. Through tears I remember saying, “How good, exactly?” and she said “Very, very good,” and I said, “Good enough to —?” and she sighed and went to her desk to get one of the silver stars she gave out to kids who did a good job on something. And as I tearfully added it to my Silver Star Diary, she asked me what upset me the most.
“Greenie was the better candidate,” I said. “Greenie should have won.”
She nodded.
“I suppose that was the point of the lesson,” I said.
“Oh no,” she said. “The point of the lesson is: People are unpredictable, and democracy is insane.”
Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried.” That is perhaps a pithier and better way to get my point across than that long anecdote about Mrs. Kolphner. Should I just erase all of that and start with this? Whatever. I’m pot-committed now, and is there extra caffeine in that hot chocolate? Because my head feels like a spaceship.
The point is: People making their own decisions is, on balance, better than an autocrat making decisions for them. It’s just that sometimes those decisions are bad, or self-defeating, or maddening, and a day where you get dressed up in your best victory pantsuit and spend an ungodly amount of money decorating your house with American flags and custom-made cardboard-cutouts of suffragettes in anticipation of a glass-ceiling-shattering historical milestone ends with you getting (metaphorically) eaten by a giant farting T. rex.
Like most people, I deal with tragedy by processing the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. My denial over the election results was intense. My anger was (in Ron’s words) “significant.” My bargaining was short, but creative — I offered my soul and the souls of all of my friends in exchange for 60,000 more votes in Milwaukee, to any demon who cared to accept. (Tom told me it was a terrible deal, but in that moment I didn’t care.) My depression I have already mentioned. Which brings us to acceptance. And here’s what I stand on that:
No. I do not accept it.
I acknowledge that Donald Trump is the president. I understand, intellectually, that he won the election. But I do not accept that our country has descended into the hatred-swirled slop pile that he lives in. I reject out of hand the notion that we have thrown up our hands and succumbed to racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and crypto-fascism. I do not accept that. I reject that. I fight that. Today, and tomorrow, and every day until the next election, I reject and fight that story.
I work hard and I form ideas and I meet and talk to other people who feel like me, and we sit down and drink hot chocolate (I have plenty) and we plan. We plan like mofos. We figure out how to fight back, and do good in this infuriating world that constantly wants to bend toward the bad. And we will be kind to each other, and supportive of each other’s ideas, and we will do literally anything but accept this as our fate.
And let me say something to the young girls who are reading this. Hi, girls. On behalf of the grown-ups of America who care about you and your futures, I am awfully sorry about how miserably we screwed this up. We elected a giant farting T. rex who does not like you, or care about you, or think about you, unless he is scanning your bodies with his creepy T. rex eyes, or trying to physically grab you like a toy his daddy got him (or would have, if his daddy had loved him). (Sorry, that was a low blow.) (Actually, not sorry, I’m pissed, and I’m on a roll, so zip it, super-ego!)
Our president-Elect is everything you should abhor and fear in a male role model. He has spent his life telling you, and girls and women like you, that your lives are valueless except as sexual objects. He has demeaned you, and belittled you, and put you in a little box to be looked at and not heard. It is your job, and the job of girls and women like you, to bust out.
You are going to run this country, and this world, very soon. So you will not listen to this man, or the 75-year-old, doughy-faced, gray-haired nightmare men like him, when they try to tell you where to stand or how to behave or what you can and cannot do with your own bodies, or what you should or should not think with your own minds. You will not be cowed or discouraged by his stream of retrogressive babble. You won’t have time to be cowed, because you will be too busy working and learning and communing with other girls and women like you. And when the time comes, you will effortlessly flick away his miserable, petty, misogynistic worldview like a fly on your picnic potato salad.
He is the present, sadly, but he is not the future. You are the future. Your strength is a million times his. Your power is a billion times his. We will acknowledge this result, but we will not accept it. We will overcome it, and we will defeat it.
Now find your team, and get to work.
Love,
Leslie
—written by a member of the Parks and Recreation writing staff
Leslie Knope works for the US Department of the Interior, Midwest Branch, in her hometown of Pawnee, Indiana. And she believes that optimism defeats pessimism. She asks that, if you have the means, you kindly make a donation to the ACLU, the International Rescue Committee, or the charity of your choice, to help the country and those most in need.
I agree with much of what this article has to say, and I do understand the frustration that folks are having with Trump winning. But people must… no… *NEED* to understand some things:
Donald Trump saw a part of America that was hurting and had been hurting for *decades* and he spoke to them. Who are these people? They are the single mother of 3 who has to work 2-3 part-time jobs to support her family. They are the Latino laborer who sees illegal immigration as a threat to *his* livelihood. They are the black industrial worker who has been unemployed and left behind because his job got shipped overseas and the system abandoned him. They are people who voted for Obama based on his idea of ‘Hope and Change’ and saw none of it…what they saw and got was more of the same. When the economy recovered and the guys up top were raking in stupid amounts of money…they were still left struggling. Abandoned. Ignored. Left behind.
This is the same hurt, pain, frustration, anger and outrage that spurred Elizabeth Warren to start fighting; to become more outspoken and actually *doing* something. This is the same hurt, pain, frustration, anger and outrage that Bernie Sanders saw and spoke to. This is why the man did so well during the primaries (seriously, you could tell that Hillary and her campaign were confused as hell as to why Bernie was a thing during the primaries!).
…Trump won, not because of his platform of hate, misogyny and bigotry. To be quite clear, they were factors! But they weren’t as strong of a factor as you want to think they were.
Why? Because Donald Trump, despite his racism, garnered a surprisingly large number of Latino *and* Black votes. And by ‘surprisingly large’, I mean he got more Latino voters than either McCain OR Romney…despite the fact that during both campaigns a much *larger* percentage of the American population voted!
In addition, a sizable number of the people who voted for Trump *also* voted for Barack Obama! Not once, but TWICE!
How does a significant portion of the voting populace go from voting for a black man to voting for a bigot in just a few years unless there was something more going on?
Ladies, it’s time for us to talk. To each other. Without accusing each other of being men, or having “internalized misogyny”. Comic Book Girl 19 (above) has made an excellent point: It’s time to be HONEST.
There’s something weird, and it don’t look good: It’s called “consumer manipulation”. Not every person disliking Ghostbusters (2016) is male. A lot of us are women, and we are activelybeingsilencedbySony. I know you don’t want to believe that, but this is a thing. You are being lied to, because someone clued in to the fact that outrage on social media spreads a lot faster than praise, especially if it can be labeled as “sexism”.
So, what does this mean to you, the consumer? It means that a studio doesn’t need to produce a quality product if they can appeal to either your sense of guilt, shame, or outrage. They’re using your own emotions to sell you formulaic garbage rather than put in the effort to make something that’s actually decent. That’s BAD for us as women. Lemme explain:
Fans were waiting a long time for a third Ghostbusters film. It had been in gestation for nearly two decades. The film that was just released was someone else’s project being taken from them.
Harold Ramis, who co-created the franchise, passed away shortly before the reboot was greenlit. This hit fans hard, and it felt extremely disrespectful to a lot of us for them to immediately force the reboot through production, especially when Ramis had also been against it.
Sony is building an entire production company around the Ghostbusters label. Why is this important? Because it shows that their interest is far from directed at supporting women. It’s all about selling nostalgia. The only reason they tried appealing to outrage is because their target audience was disinterested. If they can make you angry about it, they can sell it to you.
There are two male reviewers that have come under fire regarding this film, one of whom is WrecklessEating, which I linked to just above. The other is Youtube personality James Rolfe, otherwise known as “The Angry Video Game Nerd”, who made a video of his own in which he stated that he simply did not intend to see the reboot. If anyone actually sat and watched either of these videos, they’d see two men trying to be very fair and honest. Both have suddenly found themselves the targets of massive amounts of hate mail. Rolfe in particular became a target of a smear campaign in the press, wherein his wife was even labelled a “gold digger” for no apparent reason. That is NOT okay. If you want to talk about “mansplaining”, why aren’t you talking about all these white men in Hollywood thinking they know better than we do about what we want to see to the point where they’re willing to silence us when we don’t agree?
Lastly, I keep hearing that women are allegedly “underrepresented” in the media, hence why this reboot “needs to be supported”. The thing is…we’re really, really, really, really NOT underrepresented, and I’m left wondering if you and I are on the same planet.
This is not a film that women should support, because it was NOT made to support us. An underwhelming movie is an underwhelming movie, regardless of who made it. Treat it like a gender issue, and when it fails, people will equate that gender with being a liability, and will be less likely to take a chance on creating new content with female leads. Because Sony chose to make this about gender rather than admitting that the film has legitimate problems, it is casting a negative light on women as potential leads when it wasn’t actually an issue (in other words, they fabricated a problem just to rustle your jimmies…or janies. Whatever).
Admitting that this film is a flop is more beneficial to women than to pretend it’s better than it actually is. Otherwise, studios and the press will continue to think that it’s okay to try to pressure audiences into theaters under the fear of being labeled than letting them choose for themselves.
Welcome to AnimeFreak40K's Tumblr blog of DOOM!™. This is where I put up bits of art, some wisdom, attempt to be socially online (or was that online socially?), random internet bits that find me and generally do stuff that I’m too lazy to do on DeviantArt!
Oh, and this is also the mod-blog for my recent band-wagon jumping onto thing. Want to know more? Then ask Thunder Strike. C’mon…you know you want to.
