Last night, right after I checked my phone after a joyful happy hour with friends on a rooftop bar, my buzz disappeared and I went immediately from chilled out to furnace-on-full-blast rage and gut-churning sadness about the death of Supreme Court Justice and genuine giant of American jurisprudence Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I thought about how I wanted to get on Twitter and savage anyone on the left who didn't vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I wanted to blame them for everything that will come from a Supreme Court that is firmly conservative. I wanted to go on a tear about people who didn't vote at all, as well as those who voted Green Party. I was gonna get all righteous about it, telling everyone to fuck off who blamed Hillary Clinton as a candidate.
Then on the walk home I started to think about Trump voters and how fucking furious I was at them for being so fucking shitty and dumb. They're to blame, too, I thought, and to let them off the hook if the Affordable Care Act or Roe v. Wade or Obergfell or Brown v. Board of Education is overturned is to not treat them like the fucking shitty adults they are. Yeah, I thought. They own it.
And then I started thinking about others that deserved blame. Yes, obviously, mob boss Mitch McConnell and the hypocritical Republican capos in the Senate, but others, like former Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is generally a dickhead conservative but swung left on a number of key issues and who retired under dubious circumstances at best, were swinging through my intensely pumping brain. Hell, what about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Senate Democrats who didn't go to war with McConnell and the GOP over blocking the nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 because they all anticipated Clinton would win and that McConnell would just play ball then, as if Republicans were ever going to allow Antonin Scalia to be replaced with a liberal justice.
But that wasn't enough. I started to get angry about all the Democratic voters who stayed home in 2014 and allowed Republicans to take over the Senate. I was pissed at those who allowed Republicans to gain seats in 2010. And, again, at Republican voters who are so filled with religious and culture war bullshit that they vote against their own good. And on and on.
By then, I remembered that 2016 didn't happen in a vacuum, that everything wasn't hunky-dory and then Susan Sarandon tweeted something mean and it ended up fucking over this country for generations to come. I will always blame Al Gore for everything that came after he punked out on fighting for his election in 2000, including Justices Alito and Roberts. I will always blame the media for allowing 25 years of Hillary Clinton hatred to become the narrative about one of the most qualified people ever to run for president. I will always blame Joe Biden for fucking up the Clarence Thomas hearings and not allowing other women to speak against that skeevy motherfucker.
It never ends once you start this questioning. It goes back to the creation of the Senate, and the failure to amend the Constitution to deal with the fundamental unfairness that goddamn Wyoming has as much representation as California in that body. It goes back to the Electoral College, too, that brings us to the point where a president elected with a minority of the popular vote will have selected a third of the Supreme Court with the votes of senators who represent a minority of the citizens of the country.
When I got back to my joint, I realized that I was done with 2016. Yes, it shouldn't have happened. Yes, it's enraging. But lots of shit shouldn't have happened or should have been changed, and it's fucking all enraging. Welcome to being an engaged citizen. We should learn from all of it, including, for Democrats, how to fucking fight when your opponent doesn't give a fuck about the rules of combat. But 2016 was four years ago. Fuck 2016.
So instead I tweeted about 2020, which I think you have every right to be pissed off and energized about. It's simple. If you don't vote for Biden, you have damned us. If you don't realize that, you are the problem, whether you're a Trump voter, a leftier-than-thou voter, or a non-voter.
I don't give a fuck if you think Biden needs to earn your vote. He's earned it by being not-Trump. If you don't see that, fuck you. And I don't give a fuck if you don't like Biden. I don't fucking like Biden (see above). But I give a shit about my country. I give a shit about everyone who is gonna be fucked for good if Democrats don't completely take over. You know what the right thing is. Don't fucking delude yourself into thinking otherwise. Your vote has consequences. Act like it does.
This isn't about what you did in the past. It's about what you do now. I'm gonna vote for Biden because I don't suck. We have a shit-ton of work to do. It doesn't even get started until we get Trump out of there.
(Note: "Vote-shaming" is a bullshit phrase that people use when they don't like being told their vote is wrong. If you don't want to be challenged for your vote, don't say who you intend to vote for or not vote for.)
(Note: I do not have news alerts or Twitter alerts on my phone. It's what allows me to enjoy an evening before seeing that the shit world has turned shittier.)
