The other day I saw my brother-in-law on Instagram gloating about the richest man in the world illegally cutting off funds for millions of people in poverty. That was the moment I realized I officially hate most of my family. The cherry on top, of course, is that today he went to church and pretended to worship Jesus. I'm glad my church doesn't make sociopaths feel comfortable. This realization hurt like hell, but I got high and got over it by the next day. It's not like I had real relationships with most of my family in the first place. I currently feel closer to the great-grandmother I saw for a couple of hours every other year before she died in 2010 than I ever have to my parents. And it's not like I'm the first person who's experienced this. The civil war tore lots of families apart. I know my dad would have supported the confederacy because he's obsessed with states' rights and doesn't let marginalized people's suffering bother him. On a more positive note, this past week I got to participate in two protests against everything most of my family stands for. Thanks to my self-determined work schedule and proximity to the Capitol, I can go to protests whenever I want. Here I am on Wednesday with my "White Dudes for Harris" cap. I had to get more use out of it somehow. Of course, not everyone there voted for Harris. Not everyone there was in perfect agreement on everything, I'm sure. But we all agreed that fascism, oligarchy, and bigotry are bad things, which should be the bare minimum for decent human beings in 2025 but for some reason is an impossibly high bar for millions of Americans and most of my family. So this crowd felt like a real family. Chanting "FUCK DONALD TRUMP!" and "FUCK ELON MUSK!" in harmony with them made my day. We chanted lots of other things, of course, but those were my favorites. There was some unfortunate division after the protest had officially ended and most people had left. A transgender person got up and complained about all the American flags they'd seen, and they said they thought the only reason to bring American flags to a protest was to burn them, and they said we shouldn't be proud to be Americans, and they said the US has committed genocide against transgender people, and they chanted "FUCK AMERICA!" Two girls with American flags were still there, standing in the back, and they looked at each other awkwardly and soon left. I regret not talking to them to assuage any embarrassment they may have felt, and I hope they haven't been alienated from activism for good. I won't say the speaker was wrong to feel the way they did about the US. I understand. My faith in its fundamental goodness died on November 5. But my feeling is that this country exists, it will probably continue to exist for the foreseeable future in one form or another, and it will either get better or worse. Chanting "FUCK AMERICA!" won't make it better but will alienate people who would otherwise love to help make it better. Countries suck, all right? That's just how they are. Oh yeah, and this picture went kind of viral. In case anyone is wondering, it's chalk, and it got washed off. As soon as it was discovered, the event organizer chewed us all out and said that vandalism is unacceptable and makes us look bad. It made for a badass picture, though. And the Venn diagram of people who will be outraged by this and people who think the January 6 rioters did nothing wrong is almost a perfect circle. In case it's not obvious, the main reason protests usually take place on weekdays is that's when the legislature is in session. But I estimated that the crowd on Saturday was ten times bigger, which kind of deflates the right-wing assertion that none of us have jobs. ("I don't see many work boots," one dumbass commented on some pictures from Wednesday's protest where nobody's feet were visible.) The pictures I took from the back don't adequately convey the size because you can't even see the steps of the Capitol building itself. After a couple of hours there, we marched through the city to Washington Square Park. Again, my pictures don't do it justice. Try a video clip where you can see the motion and hear the chants. The legislature might not have noticed, but the city sure did. As I left the Capitol, I passed by like five counterprotestors, two of whom were filming us. I'm sure the footage of me and others flipping them off is now on Twitter with the caption "sO mUcH fOr ThE tOlErAnT lEfT." I don't care. They're owning themselves by showing the size of the anti-Trump movement in one of the reddest states in the US. I also knew as I marched that there was a non-zero chance of a MAGAt plowing his truck into us. That didn't happen, but at one point I saw someone drive really close and heard a thunk and a "That's what you get." I thought the driver had run over someone's foot, but apparently what actually happened is that someone punched his mirror off. My old college friend Cece was there too. I hadn't seen her in... ten years? I don't remember. Many of us returned to the Capitol afterward. I got a picture of my second-favorite sign. My first, which I regrettably didn't get, was "Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi POTUS." So yeah, that was pretty great. Solidarity is how we'll survive the foreseeable future. (I want to say "the next four years," but that may be too optimistic.) We won't obey in advance. We won't be silenced. Nothing short of death will stop me from proesting again on March 1. Also, to get there and back, I rode the city train for the first time, and that was fun. I feel blessed to be able to ride a train.
On an unrelated note, this piece of shit came at me on Facebook the other day with "Democrats don't even know what a woman is" etc. etc. I contacted his fianceé and his employer. This is North Carolina, so probably neither of them care, but fingers crossed.
0 Comments
This week has been a long year. I got high instead of watching the orange taint's inauguration, and then I got high the next day for good measure, and it was all downhill from there. The only part of the inauguration I've seen is the clip of President Musk giving two very obvious Nazi salutes. I'm old enough to remember when presidential inaugurations didn't include Nazi salutes. Anyone who says they weren't Nazi salutes knows they're lying. Anyone who says he didn't know better knows they're lying. I'm on the spectrum too, and I haven't given a Nazi salute since high school. The context was that I said "Guten Tag" to my Spanish teacher as a joke, and my hand just went up by itself, probably because I'd watched Indiana Jones too many times. I didn't realize it until she gasped in horror, but she hadn't even noticed the salute; she just thought I'd said a bad word. I don't have the energy to recap everything the orange taint did this week to ruin people's lives, and if I make a habit of doing that, I'll never have time to write about anything else. My exhaustion is by design, of course. His blitzkrieg of executive orders was intended to overwhelm and demoralize people so they won't resist his administration. Many if not most of them will face legal action, which will slow them down for months or years and stop some of them altogether. Even the Supreme Court, with all its derangement and corruption, isn't guaranteed to rule in his favor every time because two of the conservative justices aren't complete pieces of shit. His absurd attempt to overrule the 14th Amendment with an executive order has already been halted. But legal processes take time, and he's trying to weaken the resistance up front. We just have to grit our teeth, remain optimistic, and keep resisting. It's inevitable that innocent people will suffer for the foreseeable future, and I won't downplay that, but things aren't hopeless in the long term. I do want to highlight one egregiously stupid executive order from the Republicunt party's leg-humping obsession with making transgender people's lives miserable, though. It says that "'Female' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell," while "'Male' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell." So there you have it. Republicunts are so goddamn stupid that they think zygotes produce reproductive cells (and have more rights than actual people, but that's another story). This is yet another reason why I don't accept lectures on "basic biology" from people who believe our species descended from a man made out of dust who boinked a woman made from his own rib six thousand years ago. Some people suspect this text was written by AI, but the chatbots I work with for a living rarely make such stupid mistakes. I said last week that religions shouldn't be politically neutral but rather should stand up for human rights and social justice. We saw a great example of that in Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who triggered the orange taint and countless other sociopaths this week by asking him to be nice to people. Let me be clear: if you found anything objectionable in her remarks, you are a piece of shit, and you would have been first in line to crucify Jesus. The stunning lack of self-awareness in people who call themselves Christians yet base their entire worldview on being assholes isn't funny anymore. Here's a former Capitol police officer reacting to the orange taint pardoning the insurrectionists who assaulted him. I've said many harsh things about cops, and I apologize for none of them, but I've never supported assaulting cops who aren't doing anything wrong - or trying to overthrow the government because your candidate lost. Republicunts are rewriting history before our very eyes. Since January 7, 2021, they've been telling us that we didn't see what we saw on January 6. Kind of like they're doing now with President Musk's Nazi salutes. Here's a fun and educational podcast interview between Jon Stewart and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I feel more hope for the future knowing that Jon is still doing his show and AOC is still in Congress. I wouldn't complain if they both ended up in the White House. Here's a text my aunt sent me. I could be much happier for the foreseeable future if I, like most of my family members, stopped caring about the people around me. I would still suffer a lot from the orange taint's policies, but I wouldn't feel pain for the marginalized groups he's deliberately targeting. But my principles are more important to me than happiness. This is my blog and I can virtue signal if I want, dang it. I've become closer with my aunt because I relate to her a lot more than most of my family. I certainly didn't learn this empathy from my parents. They taught me to be nice to people, of course, but they've spent my entire life demonstrating that they're incapable of empathy for anything they've never personally experienced. They couldn't comprehend that my brain worked differently than theirs, even after mental health professionals told them, so they responded aggressively and callously to my "negative attitude." My dad empathized with my inability to swim due to my low body fat because he had the same issue, but he never had chronic insomnia, so no matter how many times I explained that I did, he would judge me for not getting out of bed before 8:30. At the beginning of the orange taint's first term he mocked an NPR interview he heard with people who were afraid. My mom mocked me for having to talk to a suicide hotline after this last election night. And my parents don't even like him as a person, but they think they deserve gold stars for acknowledging that he's a piece of shit (my words) and then voting for him anyway. His overt bigotry and discrimination aren't dealbreakers for them because they aren't the targets. They would have voted for Hitler if he ran as a Republican and promised to secure the border (which, incidentally, has next to zero effect on their lives in the Midwest). They aren't hurting right now like I am, and of course they'll just see my current pain as another symptom of my "negative attitude." This is my blog and I can rant if I want, dang it.
On a happier note, "Star Wars: Skeleton Crew" is a fun show. It's about a group of kids who have an adventure with space pirates. Watch it before the anti-DEI fuckwits ban it for having a Black lead character. Months ago, my great-aunt told me that my great-grandmother loved me so much and said I was a good listener and had a deep soul. That came as a surprise because I saw my great-grandmother for a few hours every other year, I don't remember ever having a conversation with her, and she died too young to read my blog. She wasn't wrong, though. Since that revelation, I've become more intrigued by her. I prayed to her once to see if anything would happen, I tried to communicate with her telepathically while I was high, and this past week I read a scrapbook that she made probably in the early 1960s. Kept on a shelf in my grandfather's house alongside several binders full of her journal, it's an unusual scrapbook with far more text than pictures. It doesn't contain a single picture of her. It doesn't so much as mention her own wedding, though it contains invitations for other people's weddings and baby showers. She spelled her name, Geraldine, as Jeryldeane or Geryl Deane, and sometimes people addressed her as Deane, though I remember my great-grandfather calling her Jerry. Since she was far from illiterate, I can only assume this was either some kind of joke or an attempt to mimic Shakespeare's inconsistent spelling of his own name. Also, sometimes she used her parents' last name, and sometimes she used her mother's maiden name. I don't know if that was some proto-feminist thing or what. Those names are hyphenated in FamilySearch. I took the liberty of photographing a few pages. My ReligionHer testimony touched me so much that I decided to return to the LDS Church and share this faith-promoting story with an apostle so he can share it in General Conference. Just kidding. As far as testimonies go, though, I like it. She acknowledges that her first reason for being a member of the LDS Church is that she was born into it. Most people who aren't born into it didn't and don't ever join, especially now that they can debunk its foundational historical claims with a few minutes of internet research. Then she says "I believe" and "I feel," not "I know" or "I know beyond a shadow of a doubt" or "I know with every fiber of my being." Throughout my life I've heard hundreds of Mormons say "I know" about things they didn't know just because they got the same warm, peaceful feelings in their church meetings that people get in every religion on Earth. I probably did the same once or twice. And in her third and fourth reasons, she basically just says that it works for her. She doesn't talk about its actual truth claims at all. That's respectable enough. Nowadays, of course, fewer women and girls are satisfied with the opportunities for self-development that the LDS Church gives them. The secular world, at least in theory, allows them to do anything men do - we'll see in a little over a week whether that includes being president of the United States - while the church won't even let them pass around a tray with little pieces of bread. WritingI'm now itching to find this manuscript, edit or finish it if necessary, and publish it. I hope it still exists. I can think of few things cooler than helping an ancestor posthumously fulfill her dream. It's kind of like the book/movie Holes. But what name should I put on the cover? Geryl Deane? Jeryldeane? A LetterA letter was like an email, but on paper. Equality for NegroesShe would have been 17 or 18 when she wrote this for school. I have to say, it's dang impressive for a white girl in the 1940s who had probably never seen a black person in person. It makes me very proud of her. It gives her something in common with her future husband, who, I'm told, befriended a black man in the army after the black man walked into the mess hall and all the other white men got up and left. Here, she recognizes that segregation is inherently discriminatory, twelve years before the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that and at least thirty-six years before her church did. Even when LDS prophets and apostles paid lip service to racial equality, they opposed racial integration because it could lead to marriages between white people and black people, which would contaminate the white people's children with the curse that God had placed on black people. I'm dying to know if their bigotry ever caused her cognitive dissonance. Speaking of caste systems, Bruce R. McConkie was so racist that he included an entry for that term, which wasn't in the Mormon lexicon before or since, in his first edition of Mormon Doctrine in 1958. Nature's Little Joke |
"Guys. Chris's blog is the stuff of legends. If you’re ever looking for a good read, check this out!"
- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
January 2025
Categories
All
|