This Should Have Been a Happy Post About 2016

This should be a post about how my 2016 went.

It should be a post about how despite the multitude of tragic celebrity deaths, the majority of the year was truly wonderful for me. I should be writing about my wedding. I should be writing about moving to Lakewood, falling in love with the city, how we’re considering saving up for a house. I should be making jokes about my baby fever being the Plague of 2016 (well, next to ebola…bad joke.) And I should be posting about how I accomplished or failed to accomplish my goals for this year, and summing up my hopes for 2017; eating better, exercising, maybe a big life change or two.

But I can’t write about those things just now.

Instead, I have to get something off my chest. Something that has been festering within me, infecting my every thought, destroying my appetite, and keeping me awake at night.

Up until November 8^th, I had been looking forward to 2017 for a multitude of reasons. It will be my first full year being married to the love of my life, possibly the year we decide to get started on a family. It was supposed to be a year to look forward to, even down to the silliness of the number 17, which happens to be my favourite number.

But then November 8^th happened.

It felt like a death. Doubt and denial at first, but with the growing sense of dread creeping beneath the disbelief. Then came tears, and with them, fear. The fear has grown into terror since then, and a rage the likes of which I haven’t felt since I was a small child with no control over my emotions. The sense of hopelessness is absolutely suffocating, and all the while met with jeers and dismissal from people around me. I weigh 110 pounds right now, a very unhealthy weight for me. I haven’t been 110 pounds since I was in an abusive relationship. Unfortunately, stress takes a very physical toll on me.

Every defense I had built up over the years against my GAD was obliterated that night. Everything came back; the panic attacks out of nowhere, the reasonless terror at night, the nightmares, the inability to brush off awkward social moments, real or imagined. Meditation no longer quiets my racing brain, nor does keeping busy physically. Focusing on the bigger picture, which used to work when I worried about little things, now brings more fear instead of reminding me that, all in all, life is wonderful.

You don’t need me to tell you Donald Trump and the Republican party will damage everything about our country, from healthcare to the economy to foreign policy. The intelligent people of this country have been publishing articles, think pieces, blogs, and making speeches about the damage they are going to cause since before the election was over.

I have a message for the few surviving Trump supporters that have stayed on my Facebook page and therefore have a link to this post.

In Mad Max, Fury Road, a question is written on the walls of the enslaved women’s prison, and asked multiple times throughout the film: Who Killed the World?

Now we know.

In the coming years, when the tyrant who calls himself the President Elect constantly defies the Constitution, spits in the face of everything you and your pathetic party claim to hold dear, know this: I blame you. For everything. I blame you for every hate crime committed in the next four years. I blame you for every war started, every bomb dropped, every life lost. I blame you for every poor teenager who is shoved back into the closet, and for every suicide for those who cannot live a life where they are not accepted for whom they love. I blame you for every right lost to our Muslim brothers and every person of colour, for every women’s right kicked into the dirt. I see you in every white supremacist’s backwards rhetoric.

And know this: I have lost all respect for you.

In supporting a man who so obviously means destitution for this country, you have proven yourself to be an intellectually stunted sheep who proudly bends over for every false news story, for every corporate manipulation of media, for propaganda and every bullshit excuse billionaires and zealots make up that never adds up (the Chinese are stealing our factory jobs, raising minimum wage will destroy the economy, climate change is a myth.) You are all idiots. Uneducated, ignorant, and pathetically proud of being so.

You are all sad, scared little children. You desperately cling to the way you think things ‘should’ be, and couldn’t care less about whom it may hurt along the way, so long as the status quo doesn’t change for you. So long as you’re not made uncomfortable by the fact that systemic racism is still a disease in this country, or that transgender people have a right to exist and to use the bathroom of their choice. You poor, delicate little snowflakes, so frightened of the real world, you throw tantrums and wreak havoc the moment anything remotely changes. Fuck everyone else, right? So long as you still have your shitty maintenance job that a computer should be doing, and you don’t have to admit the fact that you’re not smart enough to get through college, or so long as you can say nigger without getting the punch to the throat that you deserve.

I don’t want to hear you tell me that “I didn’t mean you” when you post something hateful about millennials being in crushing college debt, or supporting Bernie Sanders. I don’t want to hear, “I voted for him for [insert bullshit ignorant reason here.] I don’t like the Muslim stuff anymore than you do/you know I support abortion and gay marriage. It’s not about that.” You do mean me when you post that bullshit. You can’t exclude me because you like me. And you trampled on my rights and the rights of people I love by voting for him. You don’t support jack shit. You voted against it all. And you gave me a fat middle finger in doing so, no matter how much you claim you love me.

I blame you for being terrified of 2017 instead of looking forward to it. I blame you for the fact that instead of looking for a house, we’re wondering if we should save that money we have stored away instead just in case we have to flee this country that you capsized with your utter stupidity. I blame you for every couple I know who has rushed to get legally married, because they very well may not have that right soon, so recently given to them after decades of oppression.

As for you Republicans who have spent the entire year saying, “Don’t look at me, I’m not voting for him!” Fuck you, too. You know why? Because your party has been sick since the 60s, supporting racist ideology, white supremacy, tribalism, backward gender dynamics, failed economic policies, and religious oppression the entire way through. I don’t care if you personally support gay marriage. You vote for people who don’t. I don’t care if you have a black friend. You vote for people who look the other way when they are brutalized. Your party has been on the wrong side of history on every issue for nearly a century. So fuck you. You let this happen. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t vote for Trump. Every single political ideology you adhere to led to his rise. And when this country that you claim to love with your idiotic blind patriotism becomes a palace for cronyism and corruption at least and goes to dangerous and unnecessary war at worst, the blood is on your hands.

I have always thought of myself as a warm and loving person, an open minded and accepting person. You have killed my tolerance for people like you, people who hold ideas that are against science and against the betterment of our species. Living with this fear, this rage, and this hatred of man is killing a lot of the kindness and faith in humanity in me, and I will never forgive you for the compassion I have lost, for the pieces of me that I have lost, and for the happy bits of my future that I have lost, because of you.