"Just Let Me Have This"
From the many, get some
For the last five years as our new fascist reality dawns, I’ve seen two different reaction posts predominate social media. The fascist megaphone, and the optimistic idiot.
The fascist megaphone is a person inadvertently aiding the chief fascist by pointing out what they did and amplifying it, giving attention to the fascist, spreading his intentions to those who want to see it. These posts offer no new information to people who have been paying attention. They are wallowing in awful to no discernible purpose.
The optimistic idiot, meanwhile, will point out one tiny place where fascism has been pushed back and drop the balloons, declaring fascism ON THE WAY OUT, as it has been, apparently, since Rome, maybe Greece, we just have to be a little more patient, and, you know, BELIEVE.
Not FIGHT, just believe. Because to fight would require the optimistic idiot to make any effort or sacrifice at all beyond moving his lazy thumbs around on the keyboard someone (children, likely, or abused workers) assembled for him in a land far away.
Today’s Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, for example, has spurned a million articles pointing out how this is Trumps FIRST BIG LOSS and how it’s the start of the NEW BLUE WAVE, articles written by (or for) deluded people who do not understand what is happening to our democracy. And watch them celebrate it, all day long! Don’t bring up that it means nothing, or God help you.
It’s Liberation Day, you might say, tongue in bitten cheek, if you’re a sarcastic bastard like me, noting the parallels between our clear enemy and their inadvertent ally.
They’re the person who stands by and watches you barrel roll your car five times with your entire family in it when some fascist in a Tesla nudges you off the road. The car bursts into flames. You pull yourself and what’s left of the dog out of the twisted wreck with third degree burns. The optimistic idiot could help, but they’re much too busy tweeting #Isupportburningneal on X to show those fascists how they won’t let bad things happen to good people while the Tesla speeds off to run another motherfucker off the road.
They come up to you, seeing you burned beyond recognition, your family dead, and they point out that though your dog now has no legs, it’s still alive, and after all, you should put a bright face on it, because that’s the start of your BRAND NEW FAMILY. Today is your NEW LIBERAL DAWN.
I’m not sure which is worse, the fascist megaphone or the optimistic idiot. Both actively help the fascist achieve their goals.
We will not meme our way out of this. We must write our own words, take our own real stands, and open ourselves to the kind of stigma and danger that comes from actively declaring in more than 300 characters what our intentions and beliefs are.
People are disappearing. We’re late to this.
Of all the many people I know, of varying degrees of power and wealth, the one universal truth is that almost none of them are willing to take any kind of public political stand for fear of the very consternation I receive when I say “Maybe we shouldn’t drop balloons and meme. Maybe we should fucking strike. Maybe we should risk our jobs. Maybe we should, I don’t know, do anything.”
I get it. It sucks, being that guy. I am him. Nobody likes you for it.
It doesn’t suck so much because a fascist might bop me on the head. That’s always been true. This is a new dread, the peril of what a liberal friend who you’re an ally to will do to you when you remind them that empty phrases don’t sink fascist battleships.
Optimistic idiots hate that. You’re the problem, after all, for making them see their own inaction and its deadly, ongoing consequences.
Men with their heads shaved, citizens, deported without due process. Measles epidemics. The end of social services. Threats of war and invasion with our allies. These lie at our feet for our inaction, and until we own that, we will continue to suffer it.
Lisa Simpson pointing at a blackboard saying “IMMIGRANTS ARE PEOPLE TOO!” with your little “THIS” above it won’t stop that.
It, in fact, actively ENABLES it.
It’s hard to forgive such casual deriliction on the part of a citizenry. It’s impossible to charitably read their intentions. They know by now it does nothing. Or if they don’t, they should.
I suppose there are people who get to thirty that don’t know that shitting your pants on public transit isn’t okay. That doesn’t mean we should applaud when they’re on the bus with us.
It kinda means we should urge them to get Depends or help them with their medical issue, instead of pretending that a train full of people shitting their brains out is business as normal, or that the removal of one shitting idiot is a sign shitting idiots will soon be gone.
Especially when both the fascist and the apathetic liberal are both shitting idiots fucking up the ride, and the bulk of passengers.
It’s harder and harder to look past this abdication and continue without remark. I’ve been pretty good about it, I think, even though I’ve certainly had my essay moments of fury.
I feel I’ve been measured, given the scope of things.
If anything, I feel understated, considering how many have died and how many will.
I stopped confronting fascists in reasonable debate the better part of ten years ago.
During the Bush years, and on even into the later stage of Obama’s term, I thought that it was just a matter of persuasion. These fascist fucks were merely misled. Poorly educated, but ready to join us in the light. All I needed was the right argument, the correct set of assumptions my opponent would accept.
It was never about reason. You can’t reason people out of positions they weren’t reasoned into.
I got into a roaring argument with a relative where I pointed out that the only reason her brother was alive was a form of socialized medicine, while she was absolutely, stridently fighting to remove socialized medicine of any stripe. I realized that she’d gladly let her brother die to own the libs. I walked her step by step through all of it, she agreed with every single premise, multiple times, then she clicked and went back to the script because that was her comfort zone.
The fascists aren’t misled. They aren’t unaware of reality or facts. They are just cruel and broken and selfish people waiting for their chance to express their damage upon you, waiting for the time you’re unable to stop them, no matter the cost.
And that matters, because that time is now, and we’re posting memes instead of setting shit on fire and fighting.
They’re a problem, but not THE problem.
We’re the problem. Us. The liberals.
The fascists are predictable and easily defeated, if we were to raise even one finger of risk. One month of strikes and they’re done. One real demonstration of “No.”
But like with Covid, we put our haircuts ahead of our grandmas.
As a whole, American liberals are unwilling. At best we’re inadvertently complicit, at worst, we’re voting conservative behind the curtain and telling no one.
We see you doing that, by the way.
It’s not liberal principles or positions. Anything on the side of empathy is fantastic. Anything for a better society, one needs to believe in.
Our issue is that we’re not willing to do shit to achieve that other than talk about what our enemies are doing and drop balloons at token efforts.
If my first revelation was “They’re not good people who have been misled.” for the American fascists, it was “They’re not good people despute their intentions, because they will not lead or act.” for the American liberals.
Last year, when I started warning people that Trump was going to win, and pointed out that minor victories wouldn’t win this war, I lost friends for politely trying to wake them up to this. To prepare them. Close friends.
Many unwarranted choice words were hurled against me, but one sentence I heard repeatedly whenever I said demonstrably true shit like “rich white men never see real jail time in America” is the most insidious:
“Just let me have this.”
As if I don’t want them to have a victory. As if I am not their ally. As if knocking someone out of a delusion isn’t an act of care and aid.
It is, yes, even if it takes you out of your comfort zone.
It’s also my fucking JOB to do that. I’m a fucking writer. Though I admit, not many writers take that job seriously of late. There’s a lot more profit in making people feel comfy and safe as they burn.
I’m not that kind of writer.
“Just let me have this.” is a way of saying, in brief, “I have been having terrible days, weeks, months, years, and I’m very tired, so I need to believe in something. I want to believe today that fascism is losing, and this is my way of deluding myself that it’s so, and I need that for my mental health.”
I understand this feeling. I do sympathize with that. Truly. Everyone deserves that once a month or so. Maybe even once a week.
And yet, because we have mollycoddled ourselves in such fashion for the better part of two decades (arguably five, near six), we have now been taken over by fascists, so my sympathy for your needing a moment is now gone.
You’ve had your fucking moments.
The sympathy left when you made me your pariah. It left when your inaction jeopardized the world my son will inherit.
That world will be no comfort to you when people who would ride with you through the fire, which I am, are gone, and you are so very, very uncomfortable, because all you ever sought was your safest of comforts.
It’s time to grow up and stop living in a fantasy world. We’re all adults here. We know what’s happening. It’s time to address it, not push off addressing it. Not seek good feels. Not pretend it’s all going to be all right.
Everything’s fucking terrible, and it’s terrible right now, and it will be hard to take care of today, yes, but it will be unfathomably harder to take care of tomorrow. Or next year.
You must rip the bandage off and do something. Or you won’t, and I’ll tell you that sucks that you won’t, and bear witness articulately. Hate me for it. Every Fall of Rome needs a man crying out about what shit might go down on the Ides that everyone ignores.
Hate me forever and then act, when you finally realize I’m right.
I’m fine with that. It’ll make it all worthwhile.
And if it doesn’t, I lived by my principles.
That’s worth more to me than having more than one digital preorder of my new book. by a long fuckin’ shot.
Not to be too binary, though America has certainly made that easy, but there are clearly two groups of people in the US, to put a final point on this.
The actively evil people, or those who are perfectly fine associating with them (the same group), whose defining principle is to take as much as they can from everyone else until they’re stopped.
They say, “Just let me have this.” And they take.
And then there’s the actively apathetic people who despise the people from the first group, but aren’t willing to do anything save Jimminy Cricket their way through. To wish upon a star that one day they’ll be a real contributor to a functioning democracy. When they’re doing that wishing, and you point it out, they exclude you from their group in the exact same fashion a fascist might for being black or gay.
They, too, say, “Just let me have this.” And they take.
Do you want to keep being like them, or do you want to finally fucking organize and do something?
I’ll be right here when you’re ready to ride.