The day after Trump was re-elected, I wrote on Facebook…
Like a lot of Never Trumpers from across the political spectrum, I feel more than a little helpless at the moment. What exactly are we supposed to do now? Tossing with sleeplessness a few hours ago, I at one point thought to myself, I should start a blog that…
It’s laughable. Start a blog. That does what? Maybe a podcast, too. That’ll turn the tide, you betcha.
And yet, here I am, writing my first non-puzzle-related blog post in many years. Why? A couple of reasons.
For one, I fear that my main social media outlet, Facebook, is falling to pieces. Much of what Facebook feeds me nowadays is slop, probably written by AI, from groups I do not subscribe to and never asked to see. Sometimes I even see posts from friends, but not all that often. I’ve been asking myself for a while now, “Why am I even on this site?” — and Zuckerberg’s recent shotgun wedding to Team Trump doesn’t seem likely to improve things much.
So maybe when I find myself with something to say, I should say it not on Facebook, not on Twitter (which I fled from a while back anyway), but right here in my own tiny online front yard.
I still have a hard time shaking the futility expressed in that quote up there. What am I going to say about anything happening in this country that thousands of other people aren’t already saying? Do I really have anything productive to add to the national conversation? And if I do, who is even going to hear it?
Well, talking into the void may not be a huge improvement on silence, but it is, I think, an improvement. At a minimum, writing things about what is going on will help me get my own thoughts in order. And who knows, maybe every once in a long while I’ll phrase something in some way that moves someone’s political compass needle the slightest bit.
So, to begin: Women and black people are not to blame for every problem in creation, no matter how many times the MAGA wing says “DEI.” Trans people exist. A woman should have the right to have an abortion. Jaw-droppingly unqualified people should not be installed in positions of great responsibility. Immigrants are one of this country’s greatest assets, and they always have been. Corrupt politicians are bad.
There, that’s a lot of my chest already. Let’s see where things go from here.
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