No, You Can’t Sit with Us

It’s now over 24 hours after the national, and international sigh of relief post the Biden/Harris win.

I personally feel lighter, hopeful, and the least stressed I’ve felt in about four years. From November 2016, my stress level has gradually risen, and at this point I feel like a rancor has been lifted from my shoulders. I know I’m not alone, friends in other countries have echoed my statements of relief.

Now that America has been pulled off the precipice of fascism, those who were willing to give Uncle Sam that final push into the abyss of totalitarianism have found their standard talking points.

There are two I’ve been hearing repeatedly; “Count every vote”, which is just fucking stupid, and sounds like a child whining. Of course every vote will be counted. No more evidence is needed that every vote is being counted is as I write this Alaska, Georgia, and North Carolina have not finished counting and are continuing to count. If every vote wasn’t intended to be counted, they would’ve stopped when Pennsylvania — my home state — went to Biden, and he surpassed the required 270 electoral votes.

The second point I’ve been hearing is some variation of “I don’t care who you vote for we all need to be respectful to each other”.

This sentiment is something under normal circumstances I would agree with; democracy is messy, it’s about debate, disagreement, and is over all an incredibly slow process — but these are not normal circumstances.

The man who was voted out of office yesterday is a fascist; though I don’t believe he’s a fascist like Hitler or Mussolini, as they were true believers in that evil ideology, he is what I referred to the last four years, as a “Lazy Fascist” — not a believer he just found that fascism is an easier way to govern a country he couldn’t be bothered with.

Regardless of how he practiced, he is a fascist, and a white supremacist. Someone with no empathy for anyone who wasn’t white, cisgender, heterosexual, and male. His policies hurt LGBT+ folks, women, Muslims, Jews, and people of color. Hate crimes have steadily risen in the past four years, embolden by the fact the man in the highest office in the world never condemned them, and told groups of them to “stand by”.

All this reads like Orwellian fiction, but it was our reality for the past four years.

So no we do not need to be respectful to each other, not when you supported a man who is such a blatant racist, not when you supported a man who doesn’t care about those who don’t look like you. You may not hate people who don’t look like you, but over 70 million of you have cast a vote which has said that ideology is not a deal breaker for you.

This is a statement which is not easily forgiven, if at all.

America is becoming more diverse — it is already diverse, and that fact is not going to change. White interests are not going to be the only interest anymore period, full stop. The sooner you come to terms with that fact, honestly the happier you’re going to be in your day to day life.

I do believe we need to heal as a nation, but the first step to healing is when those who were in the wrong ask for forgiveness. It is not the burden of those who were hurt to reach out and mend those divisions. You don’t ask the family of a murder victim to forgive the murderer, do you? If they do, that is for them to decide, but not one of you out there, especially those “law and order” folks who voted for that man, would blame them if they never gave forgiveness.

So if you want us to be respectful to each other, if you want to truly heal this country, I only have one thing to say: you first.