The Privilege of a Politics-Free Life
The Chimes of the Failed
Currently playing: Clair Obscur. I’m slow. If I wasn’t trying to write every day, I would’ve finished it ages ago. And I’ve now taken on more work, so I’m probably never finishing a video game again. More on that later.
The actual stuff: Pardon me if this newsletter gets a little more ranty and less composed from time to time, but sometimes it warrants it.
On Election Night in the US, I got a message from my brother that was sent to our entire family giving a milquetoast paragraph about hoping the loser of the election can come back next time and try harder, and that they aren’t cast aside to go sulk in a corner. He’s one of the only conservative R’s in our family.
You can guess who he voted for. Needless to say, given his treatment of politics as a spectator sport and not something that actually impacts lives, you can also guess he’s a straight white male. Thus, he lives an inherently apolitical life. A privileged one, where he never has to think about how his elected officials can take away his rights.
On BlueSky, I’ve seen my follower count dip a few times after I post something political. And I get not wanting to have that on your timeline all the goddamn time. It’s exhausting. If I didn’t have to use social media for marketing, I wouldn’t even be on there because of how bad it is for my mental health! So yeah. Totally get it. But to those who complain about the people they follow posting political things: maybe they’re posting it because their lives are inherently political.
If you’re a woman, your life is political, thanks to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, or the SAVE Act that makes voting difficult for married women. It also makes voting difficult for trans people, whose lives have become VERY political. Well, they’ve always been, but the spotlight has never been brighter than this moment. Bathroom bills, military bans, elderly white men determining who’s a man and who’s a woman with wonky pseudoscience and a 2000-year-old fantasy anthology as their guides, and a pantload more.
If you’re a POC, a legal immigrant, an undocumented immigrant, the child of an immigrant, your life is inherently political. If the government has either mandated you have the same basic rights as everyone else - or has done everything it can to take those rights away - you live a political life. And not by choice. I didn’t choose to be bi, my son didn’t choose to be biracial, my spouse didn’t choose to be not white. But because we’re all in America, our lives are political because of those immutable characteristics. It fucking sucks.
Naturally, then, it’s the straight white males who, having lived in a white-dominated, hetero-normative patriarchy their whole lives, are uncomfortable discussing politics. They’re uncomfortable seeing it anywhere, because it forces them to see how they’ve benefited from said society, while the rest of the country suffered from it. In turn, they have to confront the idea that the country they were told over and over again was the greatest and was the democratic ideal of an equal society may not be so great and equal. It wars with their ingrained American exceptionalism. It’s uncomfortable. But their discomfort can be brief. All they have to do is turn away. The rest of us can’t. That discomfort is our everyday life.
If you, dear reader, are a straight white male who isn’t uncomfortable with political posts and have some understanding of how unequal America is, then congratulations, this rant isn’t about you. You’re free to go about your day unoffended. If you do feel maligned, though, then I believe that may say more about who you are than you’re comfortable confronting.
Writing update: I may have fallen into an author pitfall. While juggling two writing projects, I volunteered for a third. My current WIP is in the homestretch, and will probably be done in the next month or two. But in my hubris, I decided I wanted to GM a TTRPG campaign. There is something wrong with me. I floated the idea to my gaming group and most seem to be on board. They’ll be deciding between either Mothership or Delta Green, but either way, I’ll get to inflict horrors upon them, and I am so excited!