I don't have alot to say about the election, because much of it is complicated and I just don't have the energy to lay out everything that's happened in US Politics between September 12th, 2001 and today, but I'm disappointed and not that surprised. I am also not the smartest, politically, so while I have alot of thoughts that make sense to me specifically, it's possible I'm mistaken on quite a few things, and I'm also simply not great at explaining my thought processes.

There are a few things, in my IMO, that are important to say, because they concern how I'd like to address some things in my personal life.

One is that I think the time has passed for us to be silent at family gatherings - I called my mom yesterday and she seemed to have no idea that if you stop taking puberty blockers you go through puberty. The general populace is ill informed. It's time to be the loud and obnoxious family member. It's not a surprise that the people with hearts are conflict averse - fighting with people feels bad, to me, physically. But you gotta do it sometimes.

Another is that I'm fucking sick of the democrats shit. They've been letting me down my whole life. The two party system is broken and incentivizes the dems to never do anything while the republicans actively make things worse. There are two potential paths, one of which is sort of a pipe dream and the other is also sort of a pipe dream but is a little more realistic. The two ideas are essentially mutually exclusive. The first is that people with leftist ideals need to start running for offices. You don't actually need to be the next AOC, Kori Bush, or Radisha Tlaib, it can be something small like board of education or city council. The idea is to push out the old guard who have become out of touch. The other option is start voting third party.... in a presidential election this is, as it stands, not a realistic solution. But, using the strategy I just laid out- run for local offices, start small. This has a very long tail on it, and likely won't see anything meaningful in a presidential election for a while, but I do think it may be work worth doing. Ideally enough people stumble over this post and end up splitting the difference, with some people taking either path. I was on the city's website trying to figure out how to run for office. I don't know if I will. It's likely that I won't, I have a good cushy job with what I percieve to be job security. I'm not sure how to run a campaign, really, let alone an effective one. I may not be the right person for this. You might be? Who can say.