Hello world

Man, last night's Presidential debate has me angsty and ranty. And I can't see any productive outcome for it.

I try really hard not to go on these rants into the void - who am I to talk? My greatest sources of self-loathing center around how far short I fall from my own notions of how to adult.

What I'm rather despondent about after last night is that roughly less than half of America will stand for fuckery - thus proving we're a garbage country high on our own supply.

A disturbingly high proportion of my fellow citizens believe we're divinely ordained as invulnerably great. That we can afford to play stupid tribal grievance games and still have a country in the long run. I don't know how to convince those people that no one "wins" this game.

I have a running hypothesis that Americans have gotten too used to customer service. There's always a manager at whom to throw a tantrum. Someone else to blame.

As opposed to being an adult human. Face the reality. Figure it out. Do the work. Fix your own shit. Build better.

I'm just so tired of seeing supposedly tough-talking hard-nosed folks act like toddlers. Look: Others may be & do things that discomfort you. There's no manager to sooth you. You do not deserve to be coddled. Abide. Fix your own shit. Learn to like it, celebrate it if you can.

And no, I don't mean this in the "fuck your feelings, grow a thicker skin" sense. I mean "fuck my feelings" - us white folks need to get over ourselves. Figure it out. Do the work. Fix our own shit. Build better.

We need to get weird and build a diverse and inclusive civilization. We need to be a heist movie. We need a found-family nation of people whose weaknesses and strengths overlap in a mutually-reinforcing mesh. We need folks in power who are young & queer & colored & fluid, not just old & straight & white & cisgendered. We need to stop humoring fear of change and displacement. Stop privileging tradition and comfy same-as-always.

The entire point of banding together in a civilization is to build a rising floor against the random unfairness of the universe. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, house the homeless. We're the cleverest monkeys and there can be plenty for us all. Fill every brain with the best of we've discovered about the world. Lift each other up so we can defeat death and attain the stars.

We need all variants of the human experience to brute-force the problem space.