I struggle to find my words.

I have been sitting with a deep dread in the pit of my stomach since Tuesday night that has only gotten more intense with each day after.
This election is a pivotal moment in human history that is going to have long lasting, global consequences.

There’s a lot of blame being thrown around. People are angry at those who didn’t vote, or those who voted third party, and even at those who held their nose and voted for Kamala Harris but weren’t publicly enthusiastic enough leading up to election day (gross).

For my part, I am sickened and flabbergasted by the hapless normie Canadians around me, acting as though we are entirely separate from what has happened in the US.

As though the insane policies that Trump says he will enact won’t affect us here.

As though we won’t have to watch as millions of people are brutalized and immiserated.

As though we don’t have our own version of Trumpists up here who are watching and learning and already employing the same methods.

It’s a scary time to be anything other than the in-group right now. We have not only witnessed the rise of a truly evil political movement in the last decade, but also the very public failure of the people and institutions that were supposed to protect us.

But, as I said in my previous post on Monday, THEY chose this.

The liberal politicians who claim to stand against injustice, who insisted that they were what stood between freedom and fascism, ran a campaign that appealed to nobody. They continued the unpopular status-quo policies that caused so many people to be tempted by the honeyed lies told by Trump, and many more people to feel like it just didn’t matter to show up. If this truly was the last, most important-est election ever, they sure didn’t run like it.

It’s easy to feel alone right now. Like there’s no adults in the room. Like nobody is going to save you. Like it’s just you against a big, scary, unstoppable world that has it out for you.

But the one thing that has helped me during this time has been simply talking and spending time with friends. Even if we don’t have any concrete answers for one another, just being in another’s presence allows us to feel like someone has your back.

This is going to become increasingly necessary for survival, especially if you are a member of a marginalized group currently on the hit-list of Project 2025. Truly, it was always necessary to our survival. But just as the liberal welfare state post-World War II was a temporary oasis that was always doomed to be dismantled by greedy capitalists once they no longer had to placate an entire generation of veterans returning from Europe and the Pacific, that world’s atomized, individualistic mindset was also a temporary illusion.

The world many of us grew up in no longer exists, and while the future is a foreign land, it may also mark a return to the tried and true survival strategies of our true human nature. Not the false “human nature” that capitalists use to justify greed and exploitation, but the actual observed ways that humans survived both in the past and still today. Humans survived and thrived not just because we were capable of making tools or inflicting violence, but because we banded together and cared for one another. There is all manner of archaeological evidence that prehistoric humans cared for the elderly, the chronically ill, and the disabled. Contrary to survivalist fantasies, one human alone cannot survive in the wilderness. There is a reason why the most common form of severe punishment found past societies and in present day hunter-gatherer cultures isn’t execution, but banishment. By necessity, cultures and societies of the past were far more communal than ours is today. While this could often come with restrictive orthodoxies imposed by the group upon the individual, particularly once patriarchal religion was introduced into the power structure, it also meant the individual often didn’t have to face any significant challenge alone. That has increasingly been discouraged as the capitalist order took hold – it’s easier to control workers with no support, and there’s more money to be made off every individual person paying for single serving survival needs.

In my own experience, nothing is truly difficult if you don’t have to face it alone. Errand buddies, work parties (meaning parties where you get together with friends to accomplish a task, not “parties” at your workplace), and body doubling (no, not like in Dragonball Z) all make difficult things so much easier and less stressful. All of us – but trans femmes, BIPOC, and newcomers, in particular – are going to need to be there for one another in the coming years. If we are going to survive, it is going to be through mutual support networks and showing up for one another. Even if we can only offer meager support, even if we can’t fix the system or solve all of each other’s problems, our world will be that much more bearable, the fear in the pit of our stomachs that much less overwhelming if we aren’t alone. Voice or video calls are great, too, but in-person is better.

And if, like a great many people these days, you don’t have friends, in most places there are all manner of clubs, unions, and societies that can be opportunities for connection – many of which are engaged in charity and mutual aid already.

Even before this election, I firmly believed that the key to expanding trans acceptance in society lies in our participation in the world. If people can meet and see a trans person as just another human being who shares common interests and goals with them, then it becomes that much harder for them to believe the lies that are told about us, because they know a real, live human being.

Which brings me back to the blame slinging. I think it is important to resist narratives that lie in blaming our fellow citizens and voters. If you look at the turnout, Trump got fewer votes than he did in 2020, it’s just that Kamala got even fewer still. Most people don’t even seem aware of what Donald Trump is actually talking about doing. Hell, a large number of people apparently were so checked out that they didn’t even know Joe Biden had dropped out of the election until November! You can call that privileged, but given how many of them will also suffer under Trump, I might call it terminally distracted by a system designed to do just that.

While it is true that there are a disturbingly large number of either cruel or indifferent people who outwardly support what Donald Trump says he’s going to do, so long as they see themselves as benefiting from it, I still believe that most people are fundamentally good. Most people don’t *want* to do “evil”. 60% or Americans were polled as supporting mass deportation, but 60% of Americans ALSO polled as supporting mass amnesty for Dreamers. This tells us that many people just do not understand what they have voted for, and what this terror regime will look like. However you might feel about this level of ignorance or apathy, these people make up our communities. They will be facing many of the same hardships as us, and those hardships will not be made easier by giving in to a narrative of division. I’m not saying that we need to come together with nazis – I’m saying we need to be open to regular people being woken up by their situation and learning from their mistakes. We are not going to get through this by fighting against one another AND an oppressive system. The system is the enemy, and our fellow citizens are its victims as well, even if they don’t realize it, yet. The blame is and must always be on the nazis, and the coward liberals who decided they’d rather compromise with them than resist them. If the way to survive the next few years will be in trusted networks of mutual support, then the long term way to defeat our oppressors will be in a broad coalition of regular people who want change. They can mutate society into a fucked up nazi vision of universal competition, but we can build our own parallel societies of trust and cooperation. You don’t HAVE to buy into their fake delusions about what we are and how we should live our lives.

As an introvert, alone time is basically a requirement for me. But these days I’m feeling like what I need more is to not be alone with my thoughts and fears so much. I know that in the coming era I am going to be making a point of opening my home up and spending a great deal more time with my friends and loved ones.

Because whatever happens in the future, it won’t be so scary when you’re not alone, because you’ll be with your friends.