It was election night. All the polls pointed towards a win for the first female president in history. A flawed woman, so it was, but a woman that was far more qualified than her male opponent. I looked forward to telling both my daughters when they were older that they were born just in time to see history being made; to tell them both that they too, can be president someday.
My wife and I watched the results of the election on CNN. She doesn't follow politics as much as I do, so I showed her the states where Hillary Clinton was expected to win. That includes my state. Michigan. A state that had been reliably blue for over two decades.
We watched the election results unfold. I laughed when I heard that Florida was turning red. Clinton's firewall was strong enough to withstand our craziest state going red. Yeah, great. "Florida Man" is going to a guy that brags about molesting women. What a shock.
And then, I saw Michigan going red. And with it, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Prior to that moment, I didn't have the slightest bit of fear over this election. Donald Trump had revealed himself to be the most unqualified candidate to ever run for the highest office in the land. Over the last year and a half, he showed that he not only doesn't know how our government or Constitution works, but he didn't even care to know. He says he wants to register Muslims? Fucking great. It goes against the First Amendment and is racist as fuck, but he's not going to be president, so who gives a rats ass? Seriously...
"America, what have you done?"I know now that the majority of America didn't choose this, but it doesn't matter. It happened. After watching the whole block of reliably northern blue states fall, my fight or flight response was activated, and all it said was, "RUN!"
The next two months were awful for me mentally. Jesus Christ, I was doing so well before election day, but my fear of what's to come caused me to go into panic attacks routinely. My anxiety was through the roof. I pleaded with my wife to take the kids and run away to Australia.
I fell into a deep depression. This kind of depression is a new mental illness for me. I've had depression in the past that masked itself in anger, but this is far new. This is what classical depression feels like.
Where I had depression in the past and it manifested itself in anger, this classical depression came with the symptoms of non-stop sadness and a severe lack of energy. I stopped going to the gym, not because I no longer had a desire to achieve maximum fitness potential, but simply because I had no energy. I could barely force myself to get out of bed, let alone hit a gym. I felt hopeless. I ate very little, but I drank A LOT. It was those eating and drinking (booze) habits that caused me to lose much of my muscle mass and still keep my weight the same as it became replaced with booze-calorie infusing fat. All the time, I wanted to run away to a place far away from the damage that's about to consume this country.
Why run, you might ask? Well, if I wasn't a white man, I could say that it was due to Trump's desire to put Muslims in camps. I could say that it was his desire to use racism to convict innocent black people of a crime they didn't commit. But I am a white man, so as horrific, racist, and unconstitutional those stances are, they don't affect me.
But no, here I am, a white man in his 30s, scared of a Trump presidency for this reason:
He thinks nukes should be used as conventional weapons.
Seriously, he had briefings with intelligence workers, and openly wondered why he can't use nuclear warheads as conventional weapons.
On top of that, Trump spoke favorably about dissolving NATO, the greatest military alliance the world has ever had, and the one alliance that kept us from nuclear war.
In a reasonable, sane world, that would have been enough to disqualify this openly stupid piece of shit from holding the office of dog catcher, let alone the presidency. But apparently, we are not living in a sane world anymore.
These things are what have kept the Western World from falling into chaos. They're what protects us from a nuclear war, and Trump has declared that he just doesn't give a shit about any of them.
That's why my "fight or flight" response told me to run. I spent the next couple of weeks trying to convince my wife that we need to leave America for Australia.
She refused, so here we are, still living in the United States.
So if I still have to live here, let me ask those that voted for Trump (or who voted for Gary Johnson but now support Trump now that the election is over) a few questions:
1. Why didn't Trump's stance on nuclear weapons (based on all the links that I showed above) scare the ever loving fuck out of you?
2. If you're not racist, why did Trump's history of racism not offend you? Why did his Hitleresque talk about registering Muslims not disgust you? Why didn't his hiring of Steve Bannon, an honest-to-gosh, card-carrying member of the white supremacist movement, not piss you off enough to vote against him? Why in the goddamn, ever-loving fuck, did the KKK's endorsement of Trump not be enough for you to be like, "Fuck this shit I'm out" as far as his election was concerned?
3. If you're not sexist, why did his comments against women not offend you? When multiple women came forth and said that Trump had molested them, after he had admitted that he molested women, why was that not enough for you to vote against him? Why, to any man that has daughters, was that not enough for you to want to send that piece of shit to the dustbowls of history? I know that if any man grabbed my daughters like that, I'd douse gasoline on them, set them on fire, and gladly do the jail time. Where the fuck were you, dads?
4. When Trump openly mocked a disabled reporter, why in the fucking hell did you not decide that Trump is a worthless piece of shit that should die of canceraids?
My good friend Charles Gaba posted a tweet that sums up all that perfectly:
Yeah, you might not be personally racist, but you decided by damn sure that you weren't offended by it. Congrats on coming to terms with knowing that you aren't offended by racism. Do you feel great (again)?
And for those fragile snowflakes that might feel some white fragility from that line, let me throw something else in to make you see the sickening reality of what you voted for:
Yeah, you sold the rope and looked the other way. Fuck you.
You gave a madman access to our nuclear stockpile and looked the other way. Fuck all of us.
And it's with that line above, I'm going to address something that's pissed me off royally the past few months.
I'm fucking sick of being gaslighted. I'm sick of people acting like I'm the weird one for worrying that Trump is going to get us killed. I didn't come to this because of some stupid, irrational thought process (you know, like the one that wingnuts came to when they claimed that Obamacare was going to lead to all our rights being taken away).
Jesus Christ, you shitbags were protesting against people having HEALTH INSURANCE!
No, this fear is rational. This fear is based completely on the things that Trump has said he will do if elected president. He talked about using nuclear warheads as conventional weapons. He's said that he will disregard the Constitution and discriminate against people based on religion. He has said he would go after the media in a blatant violation of the First Amendment. He has shown a complete and utter disregard for what the Constitution says, and for how our checks and balances system of government works. So yes, I am afraid, and that fear is completely rational, so any attempts to claim that I'm paranoid are simply a refusal to either admit that you voted for a psychopath, or from a desire to normalize what isn't normal.
None of this is normal. I refuse to be gaslit, and I refuse to normalize any of this.
And for those few that might be whining that I got all political on a blog that's supposed to be about weight loss and fitness, just eat a fat dick. I constantly post my love of the Starting Strength program. The founder of that program, Mike Rippetoe, constantly posts videos of right-wing extremist James Yeager on YouTube (go ahead and search it, I won't link to any of that shit). Rippetoe constantly lets little right-wing zingers into his videos as well as videos with right-wing extremists, and I let that shit go because I want to get better at fitness.
If he can make videos with right-wing extremists, I sure as fuck can post on MY OWN FUCKING BLOG our political situation that is currently scaring the ever loving shit outta me!
I will end this blog on a hopeful note, though.
I hope that I'll be wrong and Trump doesn't do a bunch of shit that causes us to all get nuked into oblivion. If that happens, I can say that all of the forces against Trump - all of the anti-racists, the pro-women's rights people, the LGBTQ rights advocates, didn't and aren't going anywhere. We were around long before the election, and our presence was made known at every protest, and in every piece of pop-culture that has been around in the past few years (yeah, racist shitbags, we even have a black superhero in the mainstream now, and he's awesome as fuck). Black Lives Matter isn't going anywhere, and neither are those that fight for the rights of any other minority group.
We're still here, and we will resist.
I've also gone back to hitting the gym, so to all the white supremacists still fighting for Trump, come at me, fuckers. I'll be ready.
I'm also armed, and better trained than you.
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