“Rage at injustice is universal.”

Quellcrist Falconer, Altered Carbon

The Founding Fathers of the United States were some truly brilliant and forward-thinking men.  Despite their philosophical and political differences, they created a system of government that accounted for those differences as well as for differences in the imagined future populations of the United States.  They attempted to give us a framework by which relatively bloodless revolution could occur when the inevitable shifts of society happened by instituting a system of public voting as the basis for governance.

As a supporter of democracy, I’ve always revered this process.  As a teenager, I greatly looked forward to the time when I could first cast a ballot.  As an adult, I haven’t missed a single election and have participated in other forms of democracy, such as conventions and caucuses.  Elections were exciting times during which everyone had an opportunity to voice their opinion officially and do their part in forming social policy.

I’m sure I do not speak only for myself when I say how disturbed I’ve been at the hijacking of this venerated system of preserving choice by a truly malevolent group of people literally bent on taking over the country and imposing their vision of choiceless “freedom” upon everyone.  A vision that is an outright perversion of the intentions of the Founding Fathers which they claim to revere.

Rather than looking forward to elections as I once did, I now brace for them as though they were an oncoming train.  “Oh gods, not another Presidential Election,” I now think to myself.  Congressional elections are the same, now that a single Congressional seat can mean the difference between freedom and oppression.  What was once only the business of states and the districts within them has become a national concern, with the entire country sometimes focused on small local races.

This is how precarious the balance has become as those malevolent forces slowly lose their grip on power and fight ever harder to retain what grip they have, and it is maddening to have to sit and watch and suffer through that balance teetering between elections.  This is the downside to bloodless revolutions based on voting: they take a very, very long time.

In the meantime, regular everyday people just have to deal with the daily indignity of being nothing more than a source of cash for the greedy and the powerful, which they can do nothing about except cast that ballot at the next election with hope.  Hope that someone somewhere will do something about the powers-that-be that are squeezing everyone like oranges, leaving nothing but useless husks and dead dreams behind.

At the same time, we are psychologically terrorized on a daily basis by fascists in power doing everything they can within their cities, states, districts, and Congress to impose their domineering and restrictive vision of “freedom”, with the higher goal in mind of taking over the country.  This plan can be seen on the Wikipedia page detailing what is known as “Project 2025”.  One would be forgiven for dismissing what is detailed on that page as fear-based speculation were it not for the obvious and public attempts across the nation to engage in precisely those kinds of social, cultural, and political activities.  The Nazis really are knocking on the door.

Having to watch what’s happening in the country and suffering through the economic injustice myself leaves me with the feeling that I’m burning inside.  Knowing how things should be compared with how they are fills me with an indescribable, exquisite rage that I don’t know what to do with.  Every time I hear about another law passed against transgender people or restricting abortion, I’m filled with rage.  Every time I drive by the local paper mill surrounded by poisoned trees and spewing filth into the sky, I’m filled with rage. Every time I have to put my kid off when all they want to do is go to the thrift store, I’m filled with rage.  Every time I catch myself somehow criticizing myself for our economic situation rather than the people who have caused it, I’m filled with rage, because I know that’s what they want.  For people to blame themselves instead of the people responsible.

Everywhere I look, I see injustice, and it fills me with rage.

I tell myself that I need to find a way to be okay with what’s going on without accepting it, because accepting injustice is the pathway to tolerating it, which is the pathway to normalizing it, and I will not be a party to that.  But I’m going to give myself a heart attack or a stroke walking around filled with so much anger about things I can’t do anything about until Election Day.

I ask myself if there is anything else I can do besides vote in an effort to alleviate this rage, and other than continuing to pour my feelings out into essays like this one, I don’t know if there is.  Despite my tiny following of approximately 200 people across the platforms I publish on, I consider myself to stand in the long tradition of writers conveying the truth in a society’s troubled times.  Hopefully I won’t wind up in jail like some of them have.  I like to think our society is smart enough not to let that happen.

I have to wait until Election Day to find out, though, and as we discovered after the last Presidential Election, even then the voice of the people is not secure.  I have no doubt that I am not the only person in the nation absolutely scarred by the last two Presidential Elections and everything that has come with them.  We are scared to the bone by a system that is allowing a fascist who tried to overthrow the US government to run for President yet again, and we wonder why he is not in jail.

We are also scared to the bone by the people who want him there and wonder what’s wrong with them.  Even when truth, freedom, and democracy prevail at the Election, we will still have a deep societal and cultural problem to deal with that threatens to shred the fabric of our nation.  We are no longer the “United” States, we are deeply divided in many ways, even if some of those divisions are themselves illusions that are the product of carefully placed lies.

Our nation is at a crossroads at which there are two paths into the future.  One is the path of progress and life and leads to a long and prosperous future for our nation.  One is the path of regression and death and is very short.  Hopefully it’s easy by now to tell which is which and make the right choices.  Somehow the wrong choice was made in 2016, and we paid a terrible price.  We’re still paying it, and it’s going to take a long time to clean up the mess.

To me, there’s a silver lining to the entire situation, though.  Winning that election emboldened the repressive forces of our country, and they felt free to express their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors publicly and openly.  They showed their true colors to everyone with the expectation of being welcomed with open arms or at least not resisted, and that is not what happened.  They were often ostracized, sometimes violently, and rightly so: as the saying goes, “always punch a Nazi”.  Now their numbers are far fewer, though more concentrated in zealous loyalty, and arguably more dangerous than ever.

Their presence galvanized and “woke” the nation, and they now find themselves in an increasingly losing minority.  We’re wise to their game now, which means none of their tricks work anymore, if for no other reason than no one trusts one another or anything anymore.  We’ve all been turned from relatively passive participants in our own governance into footsoldiers for democracy and freedom.  We just carry voter registration cards instead of guns.

I have faith that progress and freedom will prevail in November.  I’m just alarmed that we’re having to fight this battle in the first place.  Like so many, I thought that this question of humanity had been answered with the defeat of fascism in World War II, and I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would be a part of a second wave of resistance against one of history’s most pernicious and horrifying philosophies, let alone in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Now it’s the Land of the Frightened and the Home of the Anxious and Broke.  Every election is now a pitched battle for freedom, one that leaves its participants exhausted.  When all of this is over and the thought of fascists running for office is a laughable dream, we will collectively require a long period of healing and contemplation.  The connections that once bound us as communities and neighborhoods have been shattered, each of our households likely living as an isolated island amidst other households we never talk to.

It will be a long time before we trust one another again.  Statistics say that the post-graduate demographic most likely to vote for Trump in 2016 was healthcare professionals.  Suddenly the reasons for the ongoing argument over what to do with America’s broken healthcare system becomes frighteningly clear: there are significant elements with in it that do not have the people’s well-being in mind despite their career choice.  That is very frightening, going to the doctor and not knowing whether or not that person actually has your best interests in mind.  Not knowing whether they are silently judging you for some reason and therefore compromising their care for you.

I will continue burning inside until these injustices cease or at least ease, if for no other reason than when I contemplate letting the fire go out, something inside me starts to die.  The fire burns me, but I don’t know any other way to keep myself fighting and caring enough to keep fighting.  Otherwise I’m in danger of becoming one of the millions of people who have become crushed by the entire electoral process and its seeming futility on occasion, and so no longer participate.

I feel for such people, although I also feel that they are violating the social contract by not utilizing the great privilege of voting.  There’s no such thing as “throwing away” a vote.  The only time a vote is “thrown away” is when it isn’t cast.  That’s an unutilized key to freedom, both individually and collectively.  As a friend recently wisely said, we face a choice between literal fascism and therefore death, and continuing on with what is an admittedly flawed democracy that still allows life to flourish.  Potentially all life, instead of none.

So I’m gritting my teeth and gripping the wheel until my knuckles are white, anticipating yet another fucking Presidential Election.  I have confidence in victory, I’m just resentful as hell about having to fight the battle and worried about the potential skirmishes that could occur beforehand.  It won’t be an easy fight, the enemy is determined and fierce, and we shouldn’t underestimate them. I buoy myself by thinking forward to the recovery time, when the threat has passed.  Then, maybe, I can stop burning inside.