about nothing and everything
i'm having a hard time articulating, but wanted to give you a newsletter regardless
I sat down several times to write a newsletter in the past three days. Each time I got a paragraph in and ended up deleting the whole thing because all I was doing was ranting. I can rant in increments on twitter, which I do. I like there to be more substance here than me screaming about injustice.
So here I am, at it again, trying to put into words how I’m feeling about things. I’m upset, I’m angry, I’m worried, and I hate living like this. I hate being in a constant state of anxiety over the state of our country and our dwindling freedoms. I hate constantly being told that voting is the only way to solve this crisis, when we’ve done that and can not vote any harder. Those are words meant to put the onus on us, when the people in charge should be taking the lead.
I’m weary and I don’t want to spend ten paragraphs telling you why. You know why. You are weary, too. You are outraged, too. What point is there in preaching to the choir here, when I know that anyone who reads my newsletter regularly probably agrees with me. Do I seek solace in the fact that we are in this together? Do I post a screed just to have people say “yes, I agree with you, this is awful” and we nod at each other and then go back to being mad and feeling impotent about it?
We can take to the streets. We can yell and scream and get tear gassed. We can make signs and call our representatives and howl about the injustice of it all. And where is it going to get us? I feel helpless to do anything but watch democracy fall. It’s frightening. The dominos are tumbling and I don’t know what to do stop the trajectory. I don’t want to sit idly by and watch, and I don’t want to hear about voting. I did vote, I will vote. I’ve donated to abortion funds in various states but there’s gotta be more than throwing money at the problem here.
Everything is set up in such a way as to make life miserable for those of us who don’t subscribe to the tenets of Christianity/Catholicism. It’s miserable for those who don’t conform to what other people think normalcy is. Today it’s reproductive rights, it’s the rights of transgender people that are under fire in many states. It’s your Miranda rights. Tomorrow it will be gay marriage, interracial marriage. It will be a war on contraception. We are sinking into fascism, and it’s terrifying.
So I sit here and try to write something cohesive and coherent and discover I can’t. But I wanted to let you know my feelings anyhow. You were due a newsletter and while this is all I can muster to write today, it speaks of my beliefs and desires. I want a better world than this. I want a better country than this. I want better days than this.
I just don’t know how anymore when people with awful agendas are laying down the rule of the land. I’m disheartened and sad and I know you are, too. We’re definitely in this together, but where do we go from here?
I could keep going on about it but I won’t. I’ll go back to writing about music and photography and being depressed while the world burns around me and I realize there’s not a fire extinguisher powerful enough to put it out. If you have constructive ideas besides “vote in November” I’d love to hear them.