This Is a Nightmare

Insisting an authoritarian takeover can't happen here is not an effective response to evidence an authoritarian takeover is happening here.

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) October 25, 2017

Hillary Clinton warned us what would happen if Donald Trump were elected. She was right. And today, the political press is chasing bullshit stories about...Hillary Clinton.

Shaker SKM said earlier today (which I am sharing with her permission), "The reflex to run off after the latest bullshit Clinton story will be the end of us."

To which I replied, "And let's be clear about what that really means: Misogyny will be the end of us."

I can't put into the proper words how it makes me feel that my country is going to end as I know it because there are so many people who refuse to listen to women.

One woman, especially.

I keep feeling like this has to be a dream this has to be a dream this isn't really happening this has to be a dream.

In all my 43 years, I've never had the feeling of being in a dream from which I can't awaken. I've read about it. I've heard other people say it. But I've never experienced it myself. I now feel like that all the time.

There hasn't been a single moment that felt normal to me since the evening of November 8, 2016. And many moments have felt far worse than that.

I don't know if there's anything any of us can do about it. The time to stop this was before Election Day. (And far even before that.) But I feel obliged to keep writing and speaking about it, even if all I'm ultimately doing is documenting what's happening, with no meaningful influence to prevent it.

I keep coming back to the thing my dear friend Maud once wrote: "There are times when you must speak, not because you are going to change the other person, but because if you don't speak, they have changed you."

Sometimes that is true of circumstances as well.

I am resisting a lot of things. Among them is resisting the pressure to change who I am, levied by forces who are changing the world around me.