i do think the brainworms are sort of, hate to say it, a social contagion
my mom's always loved the midwest, idealized it really... she moved to indiana as soon as she got the chance, is now in assisted living in ohio... the thing is that a lot of it, i think, really is isolation. she's close to her sister now, and her sister is, i mean, i fucking love her sister, she's so completely amazing. which helps a lot. but also just... not being isolated, you know, helps.
i got an uncle who's a opus dei sort of catholic, latin mass and the whole thing, swore up and down he hated trump but voted for him because he was the "lesser evil". at that point he was dead to me. what on earth he thinks of my transition i can only imagine, lol. that's a lot of why i'm suspicious of "lesser evil" thinking, because i've seen people use it as a pretext for abandoning their beliefs, their principles, even if they're not _great_ principles. and a lot of this uncle, you know, a lot of why he turned out different from the rest of the family is his wife, who's just kind of an awful person, a racist, all that stuff. like, "go along to get along", it has some consequences.
anyway the thing is, he had a stroke, lost his job as a real estate lawyer in '08 when the market crashed, lost his house, but the thing is he went into the deaconate. and people who know him say it's really done him good. being more involved in religion has genuinely helped, has _softened_ him, has made him less strident. and i'm, you know, not exactly a huge fan of the roman catholic church, but he's not _isolated_, with his primary influence being the awful racist he married. you're isolated and the shit you see on tv or on the internet matters a lot more.
i'm horrified at people who value the shit they see on the internet more than they value their own children, but i guess, you know, they see and think about the shit they see on tv or the internet a lot more than they see their kids. i can and do judge them for that, but i also judge, you know. the world we live in. it's not _reasonable_ to expect better of them. is the sad thing.
i'm talking about all this stuff because for me, a large family, it's a system, and america, i think of it as kind of a system as well. all of this stuff happens on both a macro and micro level, but the only way we can deal with it is on a micro level. on the personal level. so if you look at cute cats, that's good, but if it's interspersed with war crimes, that's tough.
so my mom, the one in assisted living in ohio. she's terrified that she doesn't have enough money. she does, probably, she has lots more than me, and i'm not broke, but i am worried that i don't have enough money. i'm precariat. she's precariat. the complete dismantling of the social safety net from reagan on, a process assented to by clinton and obama, i mean, that matters. that's where trump comes from. people are desperate and we're pretending not to be but yeah a lot of us are desperate and at some point, you know, "quiet desperation" just stops _working_.
my mom has never been quiet and she's never been... i mean she's always been abusive and awful but she's become _more_ abusive and _more_ awful to the point where everyone around her notices. and i guess, you know, that's something that happens as one ages. and i think it is the isolation of being old. nobody visits. one feels abandoned by god, perhaps, whether one believes or not.
my dad, he wouldn't be down with any of this, he was a communist. at the end i guess he became a born-again christian. i mean he was dying. nobody visited him except for this christian lady. hispanic, i think an immigrant. probably voted for trump. does that make sense? on a personal level, no, but when everyone around you says something...
i don't think... i don't think my stuff is a "social contagion" the way the "gender ideology" folks say it is. another word for "social contagion" is _role models_. they're not just for kids. who are the role models we have? i mean moving to portland from indiana.... on a personal level, my role models were suddenly very different. and i think that's a good thing. mostly.
and it's not, you know, it's not really about _trump_ i don't think. he's not special. he's not unique. he was just... i mean, inevitable. frankly in a way i'm glad it's him, because he's so blatantly incompetent... it could have been so much worse if it was someone like reagan. if i was to compare him to any past political leader it'd be more likely to be charles le fou than hitler. history doesn't remember charles le fou as a tyrant.
and frankly i feel like i have about as much choice in who's president as i do in who's king. and i think, probably, a lot of us feel that way. learned helplessness. desperation. you know, voting for someone who wants to eradicate transgenderism.... on some level i gotta treat someone like that as an enemy, but it's not _personal_, none of it is _personal_.
i got a friend who says i'm blackpilled, because of the fucked up shit i've seen, here in portland. certainly i've been really isolated. again, it's not _trump_ per se. covid happened and honestly, i hate saying this, but honestly i was more or less ok with my ex sexually abusing me until covid happened and i was trapped in a house with my abuser and never saw anybody else. that wasn't good. and i did wind up leaving but it took a lot out of me, and i'm in a situation now that is... i've seen a lot of fucked up shit. my role models, frankly, aren't great. even though i'm not a trump voter, i feel like i _understand_ them, _understand_ how they got that way. i'm just trying like hell to not go there, to not end up like that. doing that and _also_ not, like, dying. that's challenging.
anyway that's kind of a long ramble but i guess i needed to say that stuff at some point.
― Kate (rushomancy), Wednesday, 3 July 2024 13:56 (three months ago) link
when i think about my own life, a lot of times i think about a writer named robert walser. a lot of y'all probably know him, i probably know about him from ilx. folks here have a level of literary knowledge far beyond that of anybody else i know. he wrote these... delightful little short stories. if there's anybody i'd like to be like, as a writer, it's walser. he didn't have an easy life, though, and he wound up in an asylum. it was a nice asylum, though, and he did these really fascinating little miniscule... like, incredibly tiny writing, almost impossible to decipher. anyway later on they transferred him to another, less nice asylum, and he stopped writing. he said "i am not here to write, but to be mad." the way i think of it was that it was a vocation, like writing, his _job_ was to be mad.
being mad is the job i'm most qualified for. being mad is even less valued as a job than writing. it's really hard to get into that field, and once you do, people treat you like shit. even aside from that, the job is unpleasant, and the working conditions are terrible. my dad, after he got divorced, worked hard for years and eventually landed a job being mad.
when i look at trump voters, i do see people who are doing the job they're qualified for.
― Kate (rushomancy), Wednesday, 3 July 2024 14:21 (three months ago) link