Artwork tonight was on a street corner the SAME DAY that I had been talking to someone about the old TV show (or, maybe it was even direct-to-video, because I know that we’d rent it…) M.A.S.K. – my brother Scott was really the one who loved it the most, but I have fond memories of watching it with him and my other brothers. It was about these cars that would transform into other vehicles, and they’d all wear masks when they were driving their cars, and they’d fight crime. Like, a car that turned into a jet plane, and a motorcycle that turned into a helicopter. Awesome stuff like that.
I *do* have real shit to talk about tonight:
Tomorrow, Donald Trump is going to be sworn in as our president.
The billionaire businessman who hasn’t served a single minute of public service before taking the highest office in the nation. The billionaire businessman who’s filling his cabinet with other billionaire business men and women to run the nation’s bureaucracy.
I don’t think this is going to go well.
My fellow liberal friends and family would call that an unbelieveably massive understatement. My conservative friends and family would roll their eyes and say we needed change anyway.
But, I’ll repeat my prediction anyway: I don’t think this is going to go well.
I don’t think a billionaire businessman should be running our country. He’s out of touch. He thinks he can do anything, and we’ve now enabled that feeling. It’s that same mixture of entitlement and real power (read: money) that enables Trump to talk about sexually assaulting women, or mocking disabled people, or attack minorities…the are no consequences for such behavior when you’re a billionaire. Clearly. We, as a country, elected a man guilty of exactly those things president.
I’m not okay with that.
I understand that our country is upset about disappearing jobs, disappearing wages, and rising costs for things like healthcare. I AM WILLING TO HAVE A CONVERSATION ABOUT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE ISSUES. Those issues are important to me. We can have a debate about how best to solve those issues, our plans can be different, we can argue over how to fix things; that is REAL politics to me, the politics that matter, the politics that get things done. Those are issues that need fixing. We’re on the same side with all that.
Trump hasn’t offered any solutions. And he won’t. He’ll do exactly what he did to get elected: he’ll appeal to anger. He’ll appeal to xenophobia and blame our problems on the “OTHER” — the people that don’t look like he does, or fuck like he does, or speak like he does. He’ll appeal to testosterone and “old values.” But mostly, he’ll appeal to fear. He’ll feed into fear and make it look and sound like a solution, make it look and sound like he has our country’s interests at heart when really, he only has his own.
Just look at the other countries in the world with billionaire businessmen presidents. Now, or in the past. Autocrats. Oligarchs. We know how this ends. We’ve seen it happen this way time and time again. Trump will use the presidency and us to benefit himself. He will use us.
My conservative friends, you and I can definitely agree on one thing: change was needed. IS needed. I really do agree with you on that point. I just think you’ve made a terrible mistake on exactly what change was necessary.
Tomorrow Trump will be president.