Smoke & Mirrors

And there was a very good TickTock about how when people like Trump (incorrectly) say “this group of people is voting illegally”, what he/they actually mean is “I don’t think it should be legal for this group of people to vote.”

So, in retrospect, arguing with these people using facts and data seems kind of useless?

Recently , I saw this Reddit topic about holocaust deniers. That like, we can present mountains of evidence that the holocaust really happened. But thats actually not the argument they’re making. When people deny the holocaust, what they’re really saying is “I don’t think it was a bad thing.”

It’s just slightly more acceptable to say “I wonder if the holocaust didn’t actually happen” than it is to say “I support the extermination of Jewish people, Black people, Romani, LGBTQ people, the disabled, etc etc.” Just as it’s more acceptable to say “we have to tackle voter fraud” than it is to say “I don’t think Latino people should have the right to vote.”

And I just see this everywhere now. Like, what are people actually saying when they show “concern” over trans people in sports, or try to say that chattel slavery in the US wasn’t uniquely terrible?

And there was this white cat I had when I was a kid, sitting on the floor.

Except he looked terrible. Dirty, matted fur, gunky eyes barely open, soft breathing. I could see patches of his pink skin where he was missing fur

And I was so shocked and hurt that I forgot him here. In my childhood bedroom. He looked so small. Picking him up, he barely weighed a few pounds.

I think it’s been twenty years since my parents moved and gave him away while I was in college.

It feels so disorienting to feel genuinely guilty I can’t care for someone who is already dead.

I remember when Macy, my college cat died. For months I felt so guilty that I couldn’t do anything to help her. You can’t help someone who is dead. No way I could physically show her my affection. Feeling guilty that I forgot to feed her, and then feeling guilty because I can’t feed her anymore.

But I do think the US is going to get much worse for minorities in the near and far future.

One of the turning points for the civil rights movement in America was that America’s treatment of minorities was not helping America in the global stage, especially in the global south. Like, why would countries want to do business with America if their citizens would be second class citizens, or even lynched, were they to step foot in America.

Another example is same-sex marriage in the US. Like, other western countries had already legalized it, and the US was one of the last hold-outs. But America did because to not do so would make America look bad on the global stage.

And while I don’t know too much about it, I think this global reputation is partly why apartheid ended in South Africa. Other countries didn’t want to do business with a white-supremacist apartheid nation, and it became obvious South Africa would have to change or be left behind.

So my point with all this is that global reputation is a factor in the hat countries can and cannot get away with. It fucks with diplomacy. (I’m too tired to write this in a more Academic way.)

But one thing is, now the policy is “America First.” I think America is entering in a new era of just not caring about global reputation. We’re becoming more and more isolationist. Tariffs against everyone, etc.

And that does mean minorities lose something that was protecting them.

ICE can kidnap people off the street just for being brown. America can cut off food benefits and raise the price of healthcare right before the holiday season. We’re creating forced labor camps and sending homeless people into them.

And in some ways Israel paved the way for this. Israel bombed hospitals, shoots and starves children, steals land, commits war crimes on the daily, and the world is not stepping up to interject. Israel is the laboratory for all this, and now the imperial boomerang can come back home to America.

And that’s when I realized my grades actually tell a story, and it’s the struggle I was having accepting my sexuality.

The Spanish class in freshman year when I got a D. That was the class where a bully always called me gay and did mocking impressions of me, and the teacher totally turned a blind eye to it.

And my senior year, when I thought I was slacking, that’s when I’d finally made other gay friends. When we had movie nights together, and gave each other rides home from theater, and even started a GSA at the school.