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Because reasons

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There are situations in life that raise questions that are so fundamentally outrageous that at some point in your adult life all you can do is look quizzically and say “But why…?”

There have been a lot of those questions in the last four years. And a lot of them for me have centered on Kentucky.

Voters in Kentucky have elected Mitch McConnell to the U.S. Senate 7 times including the 2020 election. That means if he serves out the term he will be sworn into in January 2021, McConnell will have been a Senator for Kentucky for 42 years.

Think about that for a minute. What does it take to hold the same job for an entire lifetime? Despite being vastly disliked, McConnell has been especially effective at building himself up and campaigning.

My in-law family lives in Louisville, which is a blue spot in the sea of deep red that is the Commonwealth. None of them are especially fond of Mitch and yet, even though the Democrats ran a war veteran, Marine fighter pilot moderate who at one point actually endorsed Donald Trump, against him, she couldn’t get any traction with them either.

Kentuckians seem to consistently vote against their own best interests if you just look at the facts.

In 2018, US News & World Report ranked Kentucky overall 40th based on quality metrics in 8 categories

  • health care (#44)
  • education (#38)
  • economy (#39)
  • infrastructure (#26)
  • opportunity (#20)
  • fiscal stability (#45)
  • crime & corrections (#11)
  • natural environment (#12)

That Kentucky ranks 26th in infrastructure doesn’t surprise me. Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell’s wife, is secretary of transportation. Draw your own conclusions. Though according to this commenter on Quora, Kentucky gets a D grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers for its infrastructure.

With these stats you would think that voters in Kentucky would look at their federal representation and make changes. But they don’t. And they don’t consistently.

Go ahead…ask “But why…” now. I’ll wait.

There are a lot of those “But why…” questions floating around in the world.

We can write off some of the increase in numbers from 2016 to 2020 simply to increased voter turnout. More people = higher percentage in every category.

But that increased voter turnout doesn’t explain the existence of those numbers to begin with in the face of the actual words coming out of the candidate’s mouth.

At our house, one long boozy afternoon this summer, we decided those “But why…?” questions come down to any one or a combination of the following reasons:

“Because people…” – Fill in whatever reason you like here: Because people are lazy, short-sighted, emotional, contrary, unable to see systems. Because, as James Cameron so aptly wrote in 1991: It is in our nature to destroy ourselves.

White supremacy – This one should be pretty obvious. Racism and white supremacy are woven in the fabric of American culture at so basic a level getting them out is going to be like untying the Gordian Knot.

The patriarchy – This one is holding the hand of the previous one in that fabric of American culture. Black political activists, at least those in the circles I observe, tend to say that white women vote the same as white men. The almost total failure of second wave feminism shores up this arguement.

The next time you have one of thos “But why…” questions come up pause and see if any of these answers apply. I’m betting they will.

Zero Year

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Do you remember where you were 20 years ago today? I’m betting probably not. I do.

I spent the last day of my 20s wandering around Manhattan with a Minolta x-570 loaded with black and white film. I wanted to do something daring to usher in my 30s, and while it wasn’t my first time visiting New York it was my first time visiting alone.

The ticket home. Today $115 buys you one way on a slow, regional train between DC and NYC.

I splurged on seats on the Metroliner, which was Amtrak’s fast train from DC to NYC in the pre-Acela days. Three hours from Washington to midtown Manhattan. And when I got there it was, well, New York.

Crowded, loud, not as hot as I expected it to be but then nothing was as hot 20 years ago as it is now. And no one cared one bit what I did.

I wandered around the financial district and took a lot of arty photos. I went to the top of the Empire State Building, and I had a very patient security guard look kindly at me as he explained that the observation deck at the Chrysler Building hadn’t been open to tourists for decades. I had lunch in a park near the Wall Street bull. I got on a train and came home.

I was on my own in the most hyped, potentially scariest city in the world and I survived. Looking back the idea that I couldn’t seems charmingly naive.

The next day I turned 30 and not much was different.

The company where I worked still floundered, and soon was bought and disassembled in the most horrible way but I wouldn’t know that until a few months later. TGF still loved me. My family was still as intact as it had been since my grandmother died.

In other words: stasis.

The last day of my 40s isn’t anywhere near as interesting which makes up for the fact that I’ve spent the last year learning that I’m not really who I thought I was.

I’ve spent the past year taking a long, hard look at my life and how I live it.

I have a job I mostly don’t hate. Mostly. It pays me a ridiculous amount of money for a staggeringly low level of required productivity. At a corporation.

Me. At a corporation. Me wearing grown-up clothes every day. Nary a t-shirt or pair of cargo shorts in sight.

Kind of a shock for someone who took a massive pay cut to stop feeling like I was stealing my salary from the American public.

The community I jumped into feet first after I finally kicked open the closet door in my mid-20s is in complete disarray.

Lesbians are fighting with each other and with the trans community, which can’t take a single question or lick of criticism without acting like you killed someone’s dog and enjoyed doing it.

We’re sitting on our haunches like marriage solved everything (hint: it didn’t), and gender-conforming gay men still don’t seem to give a fuck about anything except that they get to party. And now that AIDS isn’t really a thing to worry over, all the more partying for them.

Oh, and I don’t seem to exist there any more.

It’s a double shock: I’ve aged out of American culture and my marginalized community which has also in some subtle and not so subtle ways told me that who I am isn’t OK.

The bars are packed with people in their 20s and 30s and showing up in them is like getting the side-eye from little old ladies in the restroom and yet there don’t seem to be any outlets for anyone under 65 in my city. Yay for elder programs! Not so yay for being edged out of the community.

Menopause happened. My body has gotten rounder and more feminine at exactly the time when I don’t want it to and when doing so serves no purpose in evolutionary biology. It’s changing in ways that the medical establishment reacts to almost literally with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At the same time, I’ve let my inner butch out of the closet. My hair has gone from long to short. My wardrobe has gotten more and more dapper. And yes, I’m aware that butch is more than how you dress. Signifiers matter, though.

My social media feeds have filled up with groups and people that have helped me accept that for whatever reason that feeling I don’t belong in the community of women nor do I want to be one of the guys is a viable way to live.

And Brené Brown has helped me understand that I got all the pressure.  All. The. Pressure.

My sex caused society to shove the feminine messages about perfection, appearance, desire, and effort at me while my gender orientation caused me to absorb the masculine messages about weakness, failure, fear, and emotion.

And yet…it’s still not really OK to be who I am for one simple reason.

So much of who I am, how I act, the way I view the world roots in those #metoo moments, all of which happened before I was in double digits and one before I needed two hands to show you my age.

My distrust of people, my risk aversion, the black and white thinking, the always planning for the worst case scenario, the anxiety, all of it goes right back to how trauma changes the brain. And all of it, every single behavior, every coping mechanism, has shaped my life.

Which leads to the question: If everything I do and everything I am is just a vestige of trauma, when do I get to be authentically me?

And who is that exactly?

Zero year. Time to find out.

Don’t look at the dogs, work the lock.

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Fuck the 2020 Presidential race.

That’s right. You heard me. I said fuck the 2020 Presidential campaign.

It may feel good to post countdowns to the next Inauguration on your Twitter or Facebook page, and while I get the value of feeling good, what good does it actually do? Maybe it makes someone else feel good briefly. But here’s the truth about 2020:

It’s fucking distraction.

Take a good hard look at the last four years. What did the Obama Administration actually accomplish?

Between 2009 and 2016, President Obama signed 1,340 bills. A significant number of those were things like this gem “To provide for the award of a gold medal on behalf of Congress to Arnold Palmer in recognition of his service to the Nation in promoting excellence and good sportsmanship in golf,” which he signed on September 30, 2009.

Granted, he did a couple of amazing things, like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (January 29, 2009) and the Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2016 (July 29, 2016).

But the truth is, a lot of the good stuff Obama did – like expanding the marine sanctuary in Hawaii – he did by executive order. It wasn’t legislation passed by Congress. And you know why?

Because Congress was too busy trying to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to create any really meaningful legislation.

Congress was too busy trying to make Obama look bad to do its fucking job, which is, to refresh, send the President legislation to either sign or veto.

That is Congress’ job: to make legislation.

And this is why the 2020 Presidential race is the dove flying out of your pocket.

You need to ignore the 2020 Presidential race because without a cooperative Congress, the President only has so much power.

You need to ignore the 2020 Presidential race because 2018 is right around the fucking corner time-wise. In fact, if we didn’t start working on 2018 on say, oh, November 15, 2016 we’re already behind.

And here’s another reason why you need to ignore the 2020 Presidential race: there is a Census happening in 2020.

Half the states in this country are trifecta – Governor, State House, and State Senate – controlled by Republicans. Thirty-two states in all have Republican controlled legislatures, and another six have split legislatures.

You know what that means if we focus on getting a Democrat in the White House in 2020 and continue to let state governments run like this?

It means the Republican party controls redistricting after the 2020 census.

That means more voter suppression, more disenfranchisement, and an ever deepening hole for us to climb out of. It also means an increasing reliance on the Electoral College.

How well did that work for us last time?

We need to focus on getting more people into Congress who see this country as being for all of us not just for the 1%, the white, the heterosexual, the able-bodied, and the church-going.

And just as importantly, we need to focus on our state legislatures before they stab us in the back again and gain the right to shape politics well into third decade of the 21st century.

There’s this great scene from the pilot episode of Magnum P.I.. Magnum is trying to steal his benefactor’s Ferrari as part of a series of security checks on the man’s estate in Hawaii.

After getting through the lock on the security fence, luring and trapping the dogs outside, Magnum goes to work on the car itself even as the “major domo” of the estate has let the dogs back in and sent them to find the intruder.

Fuck the 2020 Presidential race.

It’s the dogs. Congress and the state legislatures and ensuring everyone gets to vote…that’s the Ferrari.

It was losing Carrie Fisher that did me in

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Oh 2016…what a year you turned out to be.

I had to summon up the courage to walk away from my abusive boss and my job with no where to go in the Spring.  Yeah, I was unemployed for four months but I managed to find something more lucrative.

I did a lot of really intense professional development and have spent the last 10 months trying to pivot my career while studying and constantly applying for jobs putting myself through the application-interview-don’t call us/we won’t call you grist mill of self-promotion and epic rudeness.

Then there was the election which was less about the disappointment of not seeing the first woman President get elected and more about the abject fear of the slow slide into fascism picking up speed endangering me and my friends who diverge from Steve Bannon’s neo-Nazi ideal of the world.

After a certain amount of intellectualizing denial and lots of strategic research into gun ownership where I live, I found I could handle the election results. After all, I’m a Washington DC native; we’re used to living in occupied territory. I lived through the Reagan years and the Dubya years, how hard could the maybe 18 months of Donald Trump and the rest of the Pence administration be?

Uncharacteristically for me, I’ve been trying to look on the bright side.  I’ve been making an effort to see opportunities in challenges, to learn from negative experiences, and to let things go and move on when things don’t turn out the way I want them to.

So, for the last several weeks, I’ve been looking for some clever way to skewer the dumpster fire, shitshow of a year 2016 turned out to be.

Exchange I had with a friend who lives in the UK. My comments are in green. Little did we know.

And then Carrie Fisher died.

Author, actress, mental health advocate, all around loud-mouth unafraid to speak the truth about herself no matter how socially unacceptable it might be. She was a fearless feminist who stood up to the internet trollery. She was Princess Leia the most kick-ass woman in space ever…that Carrie Fisher.

Yeah, my brain said, she’s been living on bonus time since 1985. After all, is there any other way to view the time after you recover from a drug overdose except as a gift?  She made the most of moving between screen and page in a way that seemed effortless from outside but it was bonus time nonetheless.

But the rest of me reeled, gut punched.

Carrie fucking Fisher.

I want to write something clever about 2016 but the only thing I can come up with is inchoate rage and sadness.  It sounds something like this:

fuuuuuuuuuuucccccccccckkkkkkkk

The thing of it is I can’t sit paralyzed.  If I sit by and keep letting life roll over me the bastards win.

Somewhere in the last four days I decided use 2016 as fuel, and oh was there so much fuel. So much rage, so much fear, so much shock.

If nothing else, Carrie Fisher dying is a kick in the ass for me. It made me realize I am tired of waiting for my life to start.  I am tired of not doing things because I’m afraid of being judged.

2017 is probably just the beginning of the coming debacle (Hello, January 20th and beyond) but I plan on burning brightly this year.  It won’t be easy but it’s the only thing I can think to do besides hide under my desk and stress eat chocolate.