harrismaxxer

[harrismaxxer]

Hey all.

This sucks. It sucks to care so much and have it all fall apart. To believe in a campaign literally built on hope, and have it, quite literally, lose to hatred.

But we've been through this before, and we will get through it again. You stay here with me, okay? You stay here with me.

Nobody knows what the future holds. The thing to do now is to prepare - not to despair. Physical safety, medical needs, physical needs. I'm not talking big community-organizing. Not yet. I'm talking about getting-through. Having your insurance covered, having extra medications on hand, doctor referrals, plans to move to safer states, renewing your passports and ID's, having planned surgeries now. Simple, practical steps.

You have to secure your own mask. You have to be okay in order to help everyone else be okay. Sometimes being okay is all you'll be able to do, which is also okay. I know it's scary. I know it fucking sucks. But being stressed out of your mind is not going to help - nor will doomscrolling, nor will entertaining the terror of an imagined future.

If you don't plan on taking community or political action, it might be a time to start thinking of what it might look like for you to become more checked out of politics for your well-being. Social media activism isn't real, as in, it rarely creates material change in the conditions of the world - but it is endlessly, horrifically stressful.

If you don't want to or intend to take action-- actual, involved-in-local-or-national-politics action, this is your invitation and your excuse to step back. Breathe. Get to 'okay' first. THEN, only once you have secured your own mask, act, if you can. You don't have to. Voting is enough. Existing, existing bravely, is enough.

Your only job, your foremost job, is to survive. You do what it takes. Secure your own mask.

[harrismaxxer]

Hey all.

This sucks. It sucks to care so much and have it all fall apart. To believe in a campaign literally built on hope, and have it, quite literally, lose to hatred.

But we've been through this before, and we will get through it again. You stay here with me, okay? You stay here with me.

Nobody knows what the future holds. The thing to do now is to prepare - not to despair. Physical safety, medical needs, physical needs. I'm not talking big community-organizing. Not yet. I'm talking about getting-through. Having your insurance covered, having extra medications on hand, doctor referrals, plans to move to safer states, renewing your passports and ID's, having planned surgeries now. Simple, practical steps.

You have to secure your own mask. You have to be okay in order to help everyone else be okay. Sometimes being okay is all you'll be able to do, which is also okay. I know it's scary. I know it fucking sucks. But being stressed out of your mind is not going to help - nor will doomscrolling, nor will entertaining the terror of an imagined future.

If you don't plan on taking community or political action, it might be a time to start thinking of what it might look like for you to become more checked out of politics for your well-being. Social media activism isn't real, as in, it rarely creates material change in the conditions of the world - but it is endlessly, horrifically stressful.

If you don't want to or intend to take action-- actual, involved-in-local-or-national-politics action, this is your invitation and your excuse to step back. Breathe. Get to 'okay' first. THEN, only once you have secured your own mask, act, if you can. You don't have to. Voting is enough. Existing, existing bravely, is enough.

Your only job, your foremost job, is to survive. You do what it takes. Secure your own mask.

[harrismaxxer]

This January 6th, Kamala Harris has the opportunity to do the funniest thing of all time.

[harrismaxxer]

Polls in America have opened. Good luck American pals. Don’t vote for the Orange cunt. See you on the other side🫡

[harrismaxxer]

🇺🇸🦅ITS ERECTION DAY🌭🗓️ 🖊️IN THE UNITED✨ SLAY-TES 🇺🇸⭐️ WILL YOU🫵🏼BE SERVING🫡💁🏻‍♀️YOUR CIVIC BOOTY🍑👅BY CASTING🎣 😩YOUR ✅VOTE 🗳️😏IN HER BALLOT📥 BOX👅👀 WILL SHE🫣GO BALLZ 😈🏉TO THE WALLZ 😼😮OR WILL SHE J 🧎🏼‍♀️🫦ON YOUR D 🫢🥵TILL YOU VANCE ✊🏼💦THIS NOVEMBER 5️⃣TH WE CELEBRATE 🍾OUR RIGHT 🤤TO STAR 🌠SPANK 👋🏼AND BANG 💥🫨IN THE LAND 🏔️OF THE FREAK 😛🔥AND THE HOME 🏠OF THE GAYS 🏳️‍🌈 LIKE THE 🐱CUNTSTITUTION 📜SAYS IN 🕊️🙏🏼GOD WE THRUST 👉🏼👌🏼 SEND 📫➡️THIS TO ALL 🔄YOUR KAMALATOES🐫🦶 IF YOU GET 1️⃣0️⃣ BACK YOURE A 💫🇺🇸NATIONAL TREASURE 🇺🇸👑IF YOU GET LESS ⬇️THAN 5️⃣ YOURE A 🤡😵DONALD FRUMP🎺👎🏼

[harrismaxxer]

All y'all fuckers when you say you ain't gonna vote

[harrismaxxer]

Tonight, the night before Election Day 2024 in the US, I am thinking about my stepkid.

I am thinking about the phone call they made to us earlier this year, the one where they told us they'd gone to the hospital thinking they had appendicitis and found out, instead, that a zygote - a tiny splodge of cells - had taken up residence not in their uterus but in a fallopian tube. The one where our kid said they were waiting for their partner to arrive, hoped that said partner would get there before the docs took our kid back to terminate that pregnancy, & assured us that they'd be okay.

After all, our kid lives in a state with choice measures embedded in state law. That pea-sized blot of tissue doesn't have more right to their health than they do. Nobody is standing between them and their doctors. They made a decision, and that was that.

In this tiny tragedy, the kind that plays out dozens of times a day at minimum across the country, we only had to worry about the small risk of surgery complications. We didn't have to worry about Ken Paxton threatening to charge their doctors with felonies. We didn't have to think, "What if the hospital's legal team doesn't think an ectopic pregnancy - which is never ever viable and must be terminated before it kills our kid - is really that big of a deal?" We didn't have to worry that they live in a state where ob-gyns are fleeing, leaving few experts behind, as has happened in Idaho.

We didn't have to watch our kid vomit up black blood before dying the day after their baby shower the way Neveah's mom did. We didn't have to pray in a waiting room (while doctors took our kid apart until their heart stopped because the doctors waited too long out of fear of anti-choice laws) until a doctor came to tell us we'd have to bury them the way that Amber's mom did. We aren't having to pick up our lives after fully treatable miscarriage-related sepsis took them from us the way that Josseli's husband and daughter must.

I could go on for far, far too long.

Listen. If you are a single-issue non-voter and have already decided that "both parties are the same" or whatever other thing you've told yourself so you can sleep at night, smug and secure, then I can't reach you and I can't help you. But if you genuinely think that your votes don't matter, if you're just suffering from a bout of overwhelm or apathy, if you're too young to remember the 2000 election and can't see that Dobbs is a direct result of that election and every one that's followed, please, I am fucking begging you.

I didn't really talk about this when it happened. I mentioned something briefly, maybe. The posts I've started writing about it are still in my drafts. It was too fresh, too frightening. It's not any less frightening now, honestly - because if this week doesn't end with President Kamala Harris, we're headed for a national abortion ban, at the minimum - but it's not about how fucking frightened I was or how sad and bewildered I was to realize that my kid was going through this crisis in a nation more hostile to them than when I needed a D&C for an abortion at 21, in 1998.

It's about stopping this chapter of this fucking bullshit and at least finding some new fucking bullshit.

Vote, dammit.

Do the other work on Wednesday. Tomorrow, the work is to vote.

[harrismaxxer]

[Image ID: A screenshot of three folders which have been labeled 'memes if Donald Trump wins', 'memes if Georgia turns blue again' and 'memes if Kamala Harris wins' respectively. /End ID]

I am prepared.

[harrismaxxer]

[harrismaxxer]

ik it's not a small thing to vote for kamala this election but also. consider. that if Trump loses he is OVER. he can't run in 2028 he'll be in his 80s. he'll have lost most of his political power. and he will be going to JAIL. yes fascism will still be in the US and something we need to fight. but that old bitch will be ruinedddddddd.

[harrismaxxer]

*Who actually moves? Maybe three percent

[harrismaxxer]

A friendly reminder to USians: if you are planning to vote on Election Day, your mantra is "Nothing I see today convinces me not to go vote."

Exit polls suggest DT cannot be caught? YOU STILL GO VOTE.

Exit polls suggest KH has it in the bag? YOU STILL GO VOTE.

Pundits are saying the country is swinging overwhelmingly red? YOU STILL GO VOTE.

Pundits are saying the country is swinging overwhelmingly blue? YOU STILL GO VOTE.

Polls can be misleading (intentionally or not). The methodology can be biased (or simply poor). Early results may not reflect what the full count will show. There may be a red mirage. NOTHING YOU SEE CONVINCES YOU NOT TO VOTE.

The biggest Democratic win in swing states means nothing if democrats don't turn out everywhere to keep the reliably blue states blue.

VOTE. Wear appropriate weather gear if you think you may have to stand in a line outside (coat, hat, gloves, umbrella, sunhat, whatever, you know where you live). Bring water and a snack and something to do (book, game on your phone, podcast and headphones, whatever, you know what you like). GO VOTE.

NOTHING YOU SEE ON ELECTION DAY CONVINCES YOU NOT TO VOTE.

[harrismaxxer]

And today you, leftists and protest-voters, have to ask yourself: Will you be complicit in the destruction of Gaza? Of Palestine? Or will you take the option that gives us the capacity to call for ceasefire?

I know what I'm doing. Because any other action is unconscionable.

Vote.

[harrismaxxer]

[harrismaxxer]

I've been thinking about the "burn it all down" rhetoric used by a lot of the individuals on this website. Like, the people that are waiting for the violent, glorius revolution to overthrow the United States so they can finally rebuild it as a better, functioning society.

The idea being that if everything keeps getting worse and worse, eventually somethings gotta give. It's gotta break, and then the rebuilding will begin.

This seems to be closely related to the desire to withhold votes for Harris/Walz, because all they will do is maintain the status quo. And while Trump is arguably worse, he will take them toward the desired "breaking point."

But something that I learned during the height of the Covid pandemic is that this is not true. Or at least, not in the way we think it will be true.

Covid, to me, felt very much like a kind of apocalypse. It was definitely the kind of thing that would have been an apocalypse, if real life was the like the movies.

Society collapses, mass panic as all our systems fail and the world returns to disorder and chaos and life starts to become purely about survival. Streets are empty, you're scavenging for food, the world of polite society has ended for good.

Obviously that didn't happen. It was like, this horrible disease tore the world apart, the apocalypse happened... but nothing really changed. I mean, it did. The whole world changed, and it will never be exactly the same as it was before.

But everyone just kept going, too. There was a stop for some people (white collar workers whose jobs could be done remotely, mainly) but not for everyone else.

And everyone kept having to pay bills and taxes and do their laundry and walk the dog and buy groceries and whatever. We were just doing that all as the world felt like it was ending around us.

Like that's what movies don't tell you about the end of the world. It doesn't end. Not in a big way, a huge explosive way. It's just a whole bunch of little endings where the world just gets shittier and harder to bear in all these ways. Your job becomes harder, your life is literally threatened every time you leave the house.

Certain services just shut down and don't come back, new mandates that make everything harder and shittier are put into place, people die in masses but you're still expected to get on the bus to work every day at the same time.

But all those little endings and the all the ways the world got worse and worse and worse, they never add up to the one big explosive apocalypse that the movies promised.

Where life stops being about paying taxes and scheduling dental appointments and paying bills and starts being about learning to shoot a gun so you can kill your dinner and then take shelter in an abandoned Cheesecake Factory before the zombies show up.

In the real world, the zombies are eating your friends and family and your boss still expects you to clock in at 9 am like usual. And you do it because what other choice do you have? The zombies didn't get you today and you still gotta pay all those bills.

And I think that's just what the world is. I think that's just life, to an extent. The world as we knew it ended forever with Covid, but it also kept on going (not to be like "we were the zombies all along" but the comparison is tempting).

It seems logical that something can only bend so much before it breaks. That the world can only get so much worse before it blows up completely. Capitalism, at least. It's a self cannibalizing system, it's not sustainable forever.

But I don't think it will die the way you'd think it would. With the big satisfying explosion, the absolute end where it all burns down and paves the way to rebuild.

The big revolution, the huge overhaul of it all.

What's more likely is it will just get worse and worse and worse in a bunch of smaller ways, until we redefine our tolerance for suffering to accommodate it.

Because that's what we do. We think "this is rock bottom, it can't get worse." But it does, because it can, so we get our jack hammer and go lower because the bus is waiting and we've got bills to pay.

I think we could do that for a long time. Not forever maybe, but decades more? Almost definitely? Another century? Who knows. I won't.

"Burn it all down" may never come. Just smaller deaths, little apocalypses happening all around us every day.

I see the appeal of burning it all down. It almost feels like it would be a relief, at times.

It's much, much more tiring to try and find all the little ways we can build it back up right now. While it's still standing, maybe a little worse than it was yesterday, but functional. To find the cracks and seal them up, plaster over the holes and find a way to repair the little deaths.

Because it gets worse in little ways all the time, but it can get better, too. And it does. In small ways, every day. Good policies are passed, bad ones are repealed. People make connections and campaign for positive change and there's no big, splashy "we saved the day and ended all evil for good!" resolution like the movies, but the little wins do exist.

The thing about real life is that there is no big apocalypse. Not for everyone. And there is no happily ever after.

But there is small happiness, small victory. Small change, small fights that can be won. And just like the little deaths add up to a world that always seems to be getting worse, the little victories add up too.

The trick, i think, is to not get so caught up in the way it's worse that we stop seeing the ways it's better. That we get so entranced by the romance of burning it all down that we forget all the smaller ways we can and should be fighting to build it back up.

Because at the end of the day, you're still gonna have to go to work tomorrow. Might as well do what you can to make it better in some small way, instead of waiting for it to all get worse.