What went wrong is everyone can fuck off

The final votes weren’t even tallied before people took to social media, and what’s left of the barren media landscape, to crow about what Harris had done wrong, and the points were many. She focussed too much on abortion, not enough on abortion, genocide!, didn’t support Israel enough, not free Palestine enough, courting Liz Cheney and not leaning into the base, leaning too far left and not taking into account how far right the country leaned, too many celeb endorsements, not going on Joe Rogan….

Everyone can fuck off.

The reason it went wrong is because half the country voted for a fascist with their whole chests.

2024 feels different than 2016, in that I saw the train coming back then, felt he was going to win so wasn't surprised, but I was pissed, furious, on fire with rage because people were so blind to it. In this case, half the country voted for him with their eyes wide open. Now it feels..... lost. Adrift. Gone. Hardened.

Because make no mistake, it is gone.

250 years is not very long. That’s how old the United States and her fragile democracy are. Nearly 250 years old. One thing I’ve come to understand since moving to Europe six years ago is that 250 years is a blip in time, and civilizations are fragile. It’s hubris to think the U.S. couldn’t topple in one blood red night. But that’s exactly what happened. Living in Amsterdam, walking the wet cobblestone streets, standing on the bridges over the canals lined with crooked, skinny houses from the golden age of the Netherlands, which lasted from 1588-1672, puts time into perspective.

The Jordaan is one of my favorite neighborhoods in Amsterdam. It very much feels like a Dutch neighborhood, far less overrun by tourists and tacky souvenir shops than the rest of the old canal ring in the center of Amsterdam. This was Anne Frank’s neighborhood. Where she lived, and went to school, and bought her bread from the baker and played with her friends. I walk past Anne Frank’s house and think about what it was like to live under occupation.

My husband is on a plane right this minute, flying from Amsterdam to the States to be with our beautiful queer, nonbinary kid who is not safe there.

I wonder how people will stay safe. Will they blend in? I think about how women dyed their hair blonde during WWII. I see people shouting on social media to "get your passports!” For what? To take a vacation? Because you can’t just move to another country with a passport. You need money and visas and most people don’t have the means or qualifications. So many people have reached out to me and said how lucky I am to be “safe in Europe”. I want to scream. Europe is not safe. Europe stares war in the face because Trump is aligned with Putin and said Putin can do whatever the hell he wants, and Putin wants to crush Ukraine, and also maybe the Balkans and Poland. Mark Rutte, the former PM of the Netherlands is the head of NATO now. Good luck, buddy. Also, newsflash, the Netherlands elected a far right candidate. Fascism is growing globally and the world is destabilized with Trump’s election. No one is safe.

What about the people who did vote for Trump? Will the trad wives aspiring to what they admired on TikTok find what they were expecting in their visions of farm life that masquerades as simple and rustic but costs a fortune?  I picture them like the wife on The Man in the High Castle, the epitome of pristine domesticity, a mix of evangelical dogma (be cheerful in subjugation) and mandated aesthetics. The women who agreed to shun vaccines and feed their children raw milk, faced with their role in their own children’s death from horrific, preventable diseases. The dogma states grief is not tolerated. Smile.

Or maybe they will suffer the same fate as my friend Maggie, who stopped working when she had kids and has no income or skills outside the home, but lived very well in her beautiful custom craftsman house until her husband divorced her and gained custody of their three children and married their 22-year-old Italian au pair and had two more babies with his new bride, who is raising all his children for him.

I see people talking about “the next four years” as if there’s going to be a chance to turn things around with organizing and resisting and all the other stuff you do in a functioning democracy to change things, and I can’t believe anyone is still so blind to think there’s going to be another free and fair election in four years… or in our lifetime. That’s not how it works under authoritarian rule, which is what the U.S. just signed up for. The frogs will boil.

My heart is a shriveled black muscle, the last of the blood reserved for the people I love, who I want to keep safe, who I desperately want to help, but probably can’t. It could have been beautiful. It should have been. I’m so grateful to everyone who fought so hard. So many people did. Everyone else can fuck off. I have nothing left for you. I’ll probably delete this post.

(Think twice about responding to this post. I’ll delete well actuallies, toxic positivity, and any other thing that annoys me. You don’t have to read my stuff. Be smart.)