What The Fuck Can Be Said Today?

What the fuck is there even to say today?

As I sit back in my chair in Monster Children’s Los Angeles office, having spent the night waking up every thirty minutes to check the AP for new data and having a particularly lonely moment alone in bed knowing the end was nigh, I wonder what words I could write to fulfill my self-imposed mandate of daily publication on monsterchildren.com.

Do people even want to hear from me? Is now a time where, out of respect or courtesy or mutual omnipresent bafflement, everyone shuts the fuck up and considers their delicate futures? A moment of silence for the numerous (figurative and literal) deaths of self and community and humanity that is sure to ensue should it all go the way it’s been going for a dozen (and four hundred or more) years? After all, it doesn’t do anyone any good to hear moaning or warnings for a future that is already decided. 

It doesn’t do anybody any good for liberals and moderates the nation over to point their fingers at each other and say, ‘this is your fault, you blew it, you should have known better,’ for a thing that they were heartily on board with just days earlier. Nor does it do anyone any good to throw their hands up in dismay and seethe, ‘see, the system is fucked either way and that’s why I didn’t vote,’ as though their unoriginal identification of a problem is an excuse to not even attempt to participate in its solution or prevention. Apathy disguised as moralim: the same people crying publicly for a genocide to end are also refusing to take any action to elect the candidate more likely to be convinced to actually give a shit about it, not only nullifying their advocation for its end, but throwing out every other cause - the survival of Ukraine, the survival of women, and the general welfare of the nation, to name a few - in protest, like being told you can be punched in the face once or ten times and saying, ‘well if I’m being punched once, I may as well not even say which I’d prefer.’

And to those whose candidate came out on top: to the few in control who are vile and despicable and lack the morality to save their fellow man in addition to their wives and sisters and mothers and their children, I say fuck you. To those whose candidate came out on top who are simply as dumb and confused and angry and desperate as I am - those who feel forgotten and abused by a system and are unsure about but pleading to know why - I am sorry that you were tricked by this man, and I am sorry that you were not well-enough looked after through ways of fiscal policy and educational systems to equip you to see bullshit for what it is, I say that you’re not evil, but you are at best complicit in destruction, and you should look at yourself for that, but you are not my enemy. Apathy is. Idiocy is. Selfishness, gluttony, greed, and morale bankruptcy is. The system that keeps all of our heads in the dirt: that is my enemy.

Or on the other hand, are people perhaps desperate for some respite? Are those same people who FaceTimed me crying this afternoon, my friends in New York who are desperately concerned that they will soon be deported because people seem to believe that immigrants cost money when in reality they contribute more to the economy than they withdraw and wondering about their children’s futures in places that are foreign to them, the photojournalists in Portland who are worried about whether their work during the BLM protests will now be cause for their arrest, my mom and my sisters and my nieces and the women that I depend on and admire and take for granted too often whose rights are now seemingly and drastically and surgically under threat - are they all hoping for something funny to read? An antidote to the madness and stomach aches. 

I don’t know. 

I’m worried about a lot of things. My future as a brown person in America, my loved ones’ futures as women and trans people and brown and black people in America. I’m worried about the cost of living going up because the electorate doesn’t seem to understand that the American consumer foots the bill for tariffs, not foreign entities. I’m worried about the Earth burning and even less being done to prevent it. I’m worried about the children I may or may not ever have lest they be subjected to a life that is worse than my own and that of the last four generations before me. I’m worried about you.

I’m worried about you, and people have told me that they are worried about me and my loved ones, and in a horrid way, that is comforting. That other people - friends, family, acquaintances, who cares who, just other people - care about other people like me, is a comfort. Both outcomes would have been bad, but one is worse, and the worse is now true, but I care and so do others, and so long as that care is put to use every day, I feel comforted, I feel confident. 

A call for unity. Did this fill a page? It did. An anxious page, maybe, but a page is full.