Election Day

Attempted to sleep/lounge in and it backfired. I truly believed there would be fewer people in the line this morning because of the early voting turn out. Serves me right. I will now stand in line around 4:00 PM instead. May still take me an hour and a half but at least my day will be behind me rather than in front of me.

Feels hard to say this, but I am less than hopeful to see the outcomes today. The last two years have felt like such a slog to get through it. All of that to say that I am a middle class white woman, I do not have it hard for those reasons. Yes, I'm a gender non-conforming, lesbian, woman, but the white part means that I will always have it better than others for the rest of my life.

Once again, I know better than to read the comments on anything, yet I seem to be drawn to feeling the live wire of people's unbridled opinions on things. They are visceral and sensational, more so than at any other time in my life currently. The fear and anger radiating off of conservative, white people, is so alive that it jumps off of the page. There are fewer coded words and more directly racist things being said by those in and out of the public spotlight.

The correlation of WWII Nazi-ism and today is extremely relevant. I'd be curious what it is like in History class in high schools around the country. What are the teachers saying to students about things like suppression of voters, harmful rhetoric, and the invalidation of media outlets? I know what my asshole U.S. History/Current Events teacher (really just the soccer coach who masqueraded as a "teacher") is probably saying to a classroom full of students in the now smaller county he works in. He showed us Bowling for Columbine then asked to write a paper on the 2nd amendment and we would have a discussion. He did such a poor job at reigning in the vocal conservative kids that one poor girl was scapegoated for the rest of the semester and labeled as, "emotional."

I have walked around with thoughts in my head like, "prepare yourself to see the worst in people" and "it is extremely unlikely that Georgia will elect an African-American woman as governor." I WANT to be hopeful and think that it is possibly to defy the odds, but after 2016 I lost my verve for positivism in this political landscape.