So what now?

I don't know.

I am still processing the events of last night, and I don't know when I will be done, or if I ever will. How would I know? I mean I feel disillusioned, depressed, shocked, sick, and furious all at once, when/if I finish processing is one or more of those feelings supposed to go away and become something new? I don't see how, I mean whatever my own personal process is the reality is still gonna be there.

I am an optimist, but at some point even an optimist has to admit there is no bright spot and that is where we are at right now. The house, the Senate, the Presidency, and soon the Supreme Court will all be under the control of one party, this hasn't happened since the 20s and has never happened with a president like this, there has never been a president like this, but we know that his congress is not going to even try to rein him in, half of them are Tea Party crazies and the other half are Reagan era Republicans who sold their souls for their seats long ago. We also know that he doesn't know enough to know what he can't do. Which means he will try anything.

Off the cuff I see the EPA and FDA getting gutted, Obamacare being destroyed, and the Iran deal being torn up, and all of that happening in the first hundred days or less. Longer term I expect to see the Cuba Embargo restored, terrifyingly strict anti immigration policies put into place, and mass deportations. Plus whittling away at equal protection laws, all of them but specifically the ones targeting LGBTQ people.

I don't expect marriage equality to fall swiftly, that is a Supreme Court decision and even with a replacement for Scalia, if they take the issue up again it will likely fall with the same vote ratio. However Justice Ginsburg can't last forever, and anything goes after that.

We are probably going to pull a lot of support from NATO and specifically our allies on the Russian border, the old Soviet states. We will do nothing to reign in Putin's aggression and will likely be focused on our own new wars in the Middle East anyway, probably with Iran.

Any sort of oversight of the financial sector will go out the window, the poor will get poorer and the rich even richer.

There is nothing good that comes from this, in the best case he is out after four years and the next president inherits the worst mess imaginable, in the worst case he never leaves.

So no, I do not feel that optimism is warranted or wanted at this time.

I can't leave the country for various reasons, but if those didn't exist I totally would, I certainly blame no one else for doing so and if you are then shut the fuck up. America has proven it does not deserve the loyalty of good people, I mean hell it just proved it doesn't even want them! Go! Find a better life somewhere else, stay and fight if you want but don't feel obligated to fight for a country where half the population doesn't want you.

Would you have told those who fled Germany after the Nazis took power that they were "showing their privilege" and if they really wanted change they should stay and fight? No you wouldn't because doing so would probably condemn them to a short life of misery. Why condemn people who feel the same about America? Because that is literally where we are now, that isn't exaggeration or hyperbole, we are at the beginning of a fascist state that could easily turn into a totalitarian nightmare of genocide.

So what now?

I don't think fighting is pointless, although it is a battle that might not be winnable, that doesn't make it not worth doing. But how do we fight?

I don't know, and that is going to be a question everyone answers differently. For my part I am going to keep doing this blog, even though it will put me up against the wall when the Trumpstaffle are formed. Other than that, I need to get involved in local politics, I'll start volunteering with someone and perhaps even try to put together a run for local office myself in a couple of years. Those are general details, I don't know how to specifically do that and am not even sure how to find out, but that is on me.

Do what you can, if you can do nothing, then that is okay, but if you can do something, do it with others, joint action is more effective than individual action.

Get your passport, just in case.

Don't eat your allies, we need to autopsy and find out what exactly went wrong and how to fix it, or if indeed it can be fixed, but turning on each other isn't going to help anything, there is roughly half the country out there to fight against already.

I don't know anything else.

What now?