What the Actual Fuck, America?

What the fuck, America? What… the actual… fuck? Even if Biden scrapes a win and Trump is dumped like he should be, it shouldn’t be this close. It shouldn’t be anywhere near this close, not after everything Trump has said and done.

How can you want four more years of this man?

The man told you coronavirus was no big deal because he survived it, and it only took a helicopter ride to the world-class hospital where his horde of doctors treated him with an experimental drug cocktail that funnily enough didn’t include hydroxychloroquine or UV light or even some form of injecting disinfectant into the body, like a cleaning. Apparently, Lysol doesn’t knock it out in a minute after all.

The man who “likes this stuff and really gets it” because his “super genius uncle” went to MIT yet has shunned a world-renowned epidemiologist for having better likeability ratings than him and is now taking advice from a radiologist who thinks that “herd mentality” is the best policy for ending the pandemic.

The obese man with the neck fat bulging over his collar and the stupidly long tie and the fake orange tan and the Propecia combover and the lifts in his shoes who refuses to wear a face mask because he thinks it’ll make him look less macho.

The man who pledged to drain the swamp but instead just mated the corporate swamp with the political swamp and birthed a whole new brood of hideous swamp monster babies.

The man who pledged to build a wall with a crocodile- and snake-infested moat and force those criminals and rapists in Mexico to pay for it so they couldn’t swarm across the border and infest America, who has described the 1619 project as “poison” and “child abuse”, who told four congresswomen of colour to go back to the “broken and crime-infested places” they came from, who thinks Nazis marching with tiki torches are very fine people, who thinks telling the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by is condemning white supremacy, who calls Black Lives Matter a symbol of hate and thinks those kneeling sonofabitch NFL players should be fired for their peaceful protests, who attempted to ban an entire religion from entering the country, who calls covid the China virus and kung-flu, who referred to Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas while “honouring” WWII veteran Native American codetalkers in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, who wants immigrants from Norway not the shithole countries in Africa… yet claims to be the least racist person you have ever met.

The man who tore thousands of children screaming from the arms of their parents and put them in for-profit child prisons, locked up in conditions we wouldn’t inflict on dogs at the pound, left hungry and thirsty and dirty and weeping and wailing and shivering with cold, some of them getting so sick that they died and others who got raped and molested by staff and guards probably wishing they were dead.

The man who promised he wouldn’t have time to play any golf yet to date has spent 281 of his 1384 days in office at his golf courses and another 97 days at other Trump properties, taking it to a grand total of 27% of his presidency on holiday.

The man who doesn’t get up until late into the morning and spends hours every day watching coverage about himself on every news channel and then rage tweeting about it like an insane old codger yelling at a cloud.

The man who attempted to smear his political rival for his son’s appearance of impropriety while his own daughter and son-in-law are actually working in the administration, in positions for which their only qualification is nepotistic, and have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars and over a dozen trademarks from China including for… wait for it… voting machines.

The man who sold out the Kurds and left them to be hunted down and massacred, either to stop Erdogan releasing proof that Jared Kushner helped Mohammed Bin Salman cover up his involvement in the murder of journalist Jamal Khahoggi or because he has financial debts to Turkey that he needed help with.

The man who kowtows to his Russian handler Vladimir Putin at every meeting, who believes an ex-KGB pathological liar and psychopath over his own intelligence agencies, who he colluded with to steal the 2016 election and got away with it by firing the FBI director and then obstructing the special investigator.

The man who “fell in love” with mass-murdering dictator Kim Kong Un of North Korea because he sent him “beautiful letters”.

The man who is a credibly accused serial rapist of both women and minors and whose involvement in paedophilia at Epstein’s mansion has conveniently gone away since Epstein was “suicided” in prison at a time when the cameras weren’t working and the guards just happened to fall asleep.

The man who has fired over half a dozen inspectors general across multiple governmental departments, completely emboldened after being wrongfully acquitted by an utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt senate in the face of overwhelming evidence of his withholding government-appropriated taxpayer funds for military aid for an ally under invasion and occupation to force him to announce bogus investigations into his political rivals, a move which completely coincidentally greatly benefits Russia.

The law and order president who had peaceful protestors gassed and assaulted so he could hold a bible upside down in front of a church, who has pardoned war criminals and tax cheats and insider traders and Roger Stone, who had his attorney-general go on the real witch hunt of trying to prosecute those who started the investigations into him, who had the charges against confessed criminal Michael Flynn dropped, who threatens judges and jury members and defendants in every court case that in any way affects him, who has turned the White House into a cash cow that he’s milking for every last cent, who gave himself and his rich cronies a huge tax cut that was especially beneficial to every one of his remaining businesses.

The great dealmaker and billionaire businessman who inherited over $300 million from his father and made a lifetime career of grifting investors and bankrupting companies and tying up all those who he stole money from in endless litigation, and who is going to extreme lengths to hide the tax returns which show just how destitute he is and which countries he is most indebted to.

The man who called a young Black pregnant gold star widow a liar to cover up for the fact that most of her husband’s corpse was still lost somewhere in Niger and incited his rabid cultists to make death threats against her, who berated and denigrated war hero John McCain both while he was dying of brain cancer and long after he had died, who berated war hero Robert Mueller while sitting in a Normandy WWII cemetery during the D-Day commemorations, who said that the soldiers who suffered traumatic brain injuries during the Iranian attack provoked by his assassination of a top Iranian general just had “headaches”, who has cynically used soldiers and the military as political props more times than anyone can count, the man who has lost all of his “generals” from the cabinet and denigrated their characters and berated their performance… yet no one respects the military more than he does.

The man who threw paper towels at devastated Puerto Ricans before leaving thousands of them to die from neglect and then called the death count fake and blamed it on the “nasty” San Juan mayor.

The self-described very stable genius who thinks windmills cause cancer and doesn’t understand the difference between climate and weather and thinks people are flushing toilets fifteen times and can’t pronounce words such as Yosemite or Thailand or Namibia.

The man who has zero empathy for anyone except other credibly accused sex offenders, such as prolific serial rapist Brett Kavanaugh who he awarded with a lifetime appointed to the Supreme Court. 

The thin-skinned, inconceivably insecure, attention-seeking man-baby who is constantly crying and whining and tweeting about how he’s always the victim and everyone is saying mean things about him and all the lying news media are out to get him while directing hateful bigoted attacks at his perceived enemies every single day and making up juvenile nicknames that would have third graders rolling their eyes.

The pathological liar who has told so many lies every day since entering office that he has seriously eroded the whole fabric of reality for tens of millions of his cult base of braindead worshippers, who relentlessly projects onto his opponents every crime and corrupt act he has committed, is committing or is planning to commit by accusing others of what he is very obviously guilty of doing or being himself.

The unhinged narcissist who is driven so entirely by his ego that he has no thought for anyone or anything else, even his own welfare and well-being, moving through life one transaction at a time and doing or saying in the moment whatever he thinks will make him the winner and everyone else the loser.

The lecherous creep who sexualises and lusts after his own daughters while showing nothing but contempt and disdain for the sons that he doesn’t want to molest and sees only as rivals and sources of weakness and embarrassment.

This is who you want, when offered the alternative of a moral, decent, compassionate public servant who has dedicated his entire life to working to make America a better place for everyone while caring for his family through unimaginable tragedy and showing deep empathy for and interest in every single person he meets, who goes to great lengths to reach out to his political opponents and get things done for the American people, who is preaching love and equality and unity instead of division and bigotry and hatred? Joe Biden isn’t perfect, and you may not like all of his policies – but given the choice between a good man and the abomination I just spent the last God knows how many paragraphs describing, you want the abomination?

How fucked up do you have to be to choose that?

And in the answer to this question could lie my salvation – because for the past three and a half years I have been so angry. Angry about the constant lying. The rank hypocrisy and gross double standards. The evil done to so many innocent people and particularly to little children. The hate. The bigotry in all of its forms, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia. The science denial. The smearing and name-calling and denigration and crudeness and rank stupidity and astonishing ignorance. The damage done to human rights and equality and the current world order and the alliances in the West that keep demagogues and dictators like Kim Jong Un and Putin and Xi at bay. The indifference of the majority of people that allows all of this to continue unchecked and unrestrained, because as long they’re okay, most people are content to turn a blind eye and carry on with their own little lives.

I have raged against those ignorant, stupid, hateful Trumpite cultists, and the borderline sociopathy of all those people who seem normal and decent yet point blank refuse to even take an interest in the rise of hatred and evil in America that is mirroring what happened in 1930s Germany, the self-important arrogance of the so-called progressives on the left who somehow think that because the voters didn’t choose Bernie Sanders as the candidate they’re better off with Trump than Biden, that the regression of Trumpism – the return to the 1950s or earlier that MAGA is really all about – is somehow going to get them closer to their Green New Deal and healthcare as a human right. What a fucking joke all these clowns are, they’re all as bad as each other.

But my rage hasn’t done any good. It hasn’t done me any good and it hasn’t done anyone else any good. It hasn’t changed anything, and it never will. You can’t hate and yell people into agreement with you. No, my rage only had one purpose, and that was to vent the endless pool of unbearable emotions I had swirling around inside of me, the anguish and the self-loathing. I have been in a very dark place for a very long time, so I actually know what it’s like to be really fucked up.

If we stop for a moment and ask, what causes bigotry? In my view, it comes down to a combination of ignorance and hatred. These are learned behaviours. No child is born in ignorance, they are born in innocence and an absolutely pure and insatiable curiosity to make sense of absolutely everything they can see, hear, touch, taste and smell. And no child is born with hatred in their heart, only love. We do it to them, as individuals and as a society. We ruin them. We pass down toxic beliefs based in tropes and stereotypes and myths and lies, instead of teaching them to seek out empirical, verifiable facts and encouraging rational, logical thinking. We damage them and hurt them until the sadness and the anger and the hate begin to take shape inside their broken little hearts, if not in childhood then in adolescence or beyond. That hatred is a hatred for the self, directed outwards at a target – and that target is picked by whatever false beliefs based in ignorance most resonate with the indivdual.

We learn to be ignorant and we learn to hate. And if we can learn it then we can unlearn it.

As someone who has suffered with extreme self-loathing for much of my life, it’s pain that I can empathise with. So perhaps there’s a way that I can use my empathy to let go of anger and judgement, and learn to love those with hate in their hearts, and understand that they’re just people in a lot of pain who are directing that pain outwards because they don’t know any other way to deal with it. And if I can do that, maybe there’s some small chance that I might be able to get through to some of these people, and help them to heal. I believe this is the only way to break the endless cycle of violence and hatred and bigotry; don’t change minds, change hearts.

There’s an African American named Daryl Davis who I saw an interview with last year and he’s a truly incredible and inspiring man. I urge you to look him up. He’s spent the last three decades making friends with KKK members – and he doesn’t just pretend to befriend them in an attempt to get them to renounce the KKK, he really does offer genuine friendship and become their friend, for as many months as it takes. And he has gotten over 200 Klan members to give him their robes.

Now, if a Black man can reach out with love and friendship to hundreds of KKK members, then surely I can find within myself just a fraction of that grace and do the same thing for a bigot… even one who supports Trump.