Ask Lemmy

"Loosen your shoes
Don't listen to news
That keeps you up at night."

• Chris Smither

https://youtu.be/djzR7594I1U

I used to be worried about having to idle on a hill while driving a manual transmission vehicle. Like backsweat.

But I got used to it. Time and practice. You start to see all the subtle motions and patterns; you start to know what you didn't know you didn't know.

Now it is just a basic part of the driving experience. It's a road condition, like weather. Voting, especially in federal elections and especially the general one every four years for president, is not the only or even the main course of politics.

Same story with parallel parking--which would be, I dunno: primary voting in this metaphor. Where the promise of a better way gets crammed between two other poorly parked cars and you always end up a few inches too far from the curb.

Compartmentalization. I only focus on what I can control. I read local news and mostly ignore national stuff because it is beyond my ability to affect change.

There's no stress. There is zero that I can do about any of it other than vote. And where I'm at my vote really doesn't mean anything. I'm still going to vote, but my state isn't going to even come close to turning red.

If he wins I need to make an ernest attempt to find a quiet far away place to get the fuck out.

We're honestly just kind of stuck in the track we're in. With the current state of affairs we need billionaires who are okay with being taxed to send sufficient amounts of money into campaigns and fight off corporate entities on our behalf to no benefit of their own. Back in the Nixon and Reagan days we had a chance to have voices heard and run protests and stamp out some of the corruption but we're well past that now.

We need to put laws in place to stop the propaganda engines into wrest power from the oligarchs. But even the left doesn't truly want all that to happen.

I'm playing a lot of pinball, but that really hasn't changed.

Stay busy. Get your to-do list done. Take overtime shifts. Spend the angsty energy so it doesn’t turn inward and render your gut into sieve.

I’ve made my peace with either result. If Harris wins, I’ll assume it’ll be relative status quo and a continuation of the last four years, a slow-motion decline. If Trump wins, our deaths are assured and everything falls to shit that much sooner. There may be some personal benefits and opportunities I can try to take advantage of before we all die, but none of it will really matter in the end. My personal romantic life is in such a shitty spot right now that I honestly don’t really care anymore.

... That said, I’m part of many groups that the right-wing hates and is openly threatening, so feeling unsafe doesn’t feel unreasonable either.

i'm at the intersection of several groups that right wingers hate and all of them are fodder for this election when it comes to immigration; lgbt rights; the social safety net; and neuro divergence visibility. the goal is to make you feel unsafe and, to be clear, you should ALWAYS be aware of your surroundings in this country if you're any kind of minority.

How are you all holding up out there? And tips for me to deal with this better?

i'm doing okay because i've seen this playbook used multiple times since the 1980's starting with biden and now with trump. minorities have always been excellent political fodder used to invigorate voting bases for as long as elections have existed and; up until recently; it had only been used for scapegoating. starting in the 2012 election, it was used for liberal virtue signaling and now the harris campaigned has REALLY perfected it as a cudgel to attack both the left and the right. they use it against the right to show how regressive the republicans are and they use it against the left to paint them as selfish/stupid for throwing minorities under the bus.

i was scared too the first time i heard biden's anti-gay tirade in 1988 and then when clinton did anti-gay marriage in 1996 it started to dawn on me that it was a political ploy. they trot us out like show horses when they think it'll help their cause. so i think that the best tip i can give you is to read up on the history of the last 40 or so years worth of elections to help you get a broader perspective of our political system so that you can manage that fear you're carrying around inside you and also to see how the only thing that's different about it this time around is the STAGGERING amounts of difficult to trace campaign donations (thanks citizens united) and all the fuckery it's enabled.