Oh, You’re Not Into Politics?

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Extra content notification here for mention of brutal abuse, rape, drug use, and abortion.

I have mostly been trying to hide from this election, distracting myself and hiding in my fantasy worlds. But sometimes the fear and chaos breaks through my walls.

I don’t want this blog to be a place where I’m pretending to be “nonpolitical”, so that my “brand” can be widely acceptable to all. That’s not a reality in today’s world, or in any world. Because, while I may be personally accepting of a wider range of political beliefs than a lot of people, and able to empathize with a lot of political attitudes, we live in a world where some people’s lives, their fundamental right to exist, has become politicized. There’s no way to “stay out of it”, because staying silent in that situation is accepting that some people will be sacrificed for your own comfort. That’s not neutrality.

It's not a simple thing for me to speak out about this stuff. I have complex views because of complex life experience—experience that most people around me have not had, and frankly can’t understand. And I have a lot of difficulties with conflict. I have PTSD because of decades of abuse, and years of treatment and inner work definitely hasn’t cured me of it. Suffice to say it’s intensely difficult for me to say shit when I think I may get yelled at for it. The only thing that helps me here is the fact that, no matter what I say, I half suspect someone will yell at me for it. When you’re my flavor of neurodivergent, people will yell at you for looking at them wrong, or not looking at them at all, when you were barely aware of their existence before they started yelling.

Anyhow.

I don’t pretend that I have much to add to this general conversation. But I’m feeling really helpless and terrified right now, and sometimes writing helps me with that. If nothing else, maybe that will help me feel better.

So, I had never voted until 2008. Part of that was because I was a felon, and felons have to jump through a bunch of hoops in my state if they want to be able to vote (and they don’t make it easy to figure out if you’re eligible). Another part of that was that, before that point, I didn’t feel like voting did much good. Neither side really seemed to represent anything that I felt was worth voting for.

That attitude was wrong back then, and it’s even more wrong now. The only consolation I have is that, in the 2000 election, I actually was not eligible to vote, no matter what I did.

When I was in college, I dated (and later married) a self-proclaimed anarchist of the type that thought “direct action” meant breaking windows, pissing in the gas tanks of logging trucks, and antagonizing cops that had never looked in our direction until then so that he could claim that we were being oppressed. Some of the stuff he did was funny as hell and, it could be argued, served some wider purpose. But, over time, his praxis expanded to stealing from the “rich” to support his heroin habit (the rich, apparently, being a group that included me, who was working a minimum wage job) and berating and smacking me around if I dared question his beliefs. I’m not saying every anarchist is like this. I still consider myself, fundamentally, some flavor of anarchist. But I’m also considerably more pragmatic now.

Around the same time, I went to live in Nicaragua for a short time, as part of a sister city organization. I lived with Sandinista families and helped on an organic farm that raised food to supply a kitchen that provided free meals to kids and adult volunteers. This was the mid and late ‘90s, so not long after the end of their civil war. The people I was living with had lived through and fought in that war. This radically influenced my ideas about violent revolution and whether it was okay to purposefully create conflict and division to spark a civil war as a means of creating social change.

I was relatively well versed in history at that point. And my experiences in Nicaragua really drove home the fact that violent revolution rarely, if ever, accomplishes much, if anything, in the long term. Any lasting changes are gained incrementally, through changing hearts and minds, changing the culture.

Revolution doesn’t change hearts and minds. All it does is traumatize and brutalize people. It destroys the infrastructure and installs new leaders that are now beholden to the foreign powers that supported them materially in their bid for power. And then those new leaders have to rule oppressively, because even if the enemy was defeated, they weren’t completely wiped out. Just a few more of them died than on your own side. And now, since your side has likely killed a lot of their friends and family, they’re probably not quite ready to stop fighting yet.

Get the picture? Unfortunately, a lot of you don’t. I do, because I saw it firsthand. I soaked up those vibes bigtime, comrades. It can happen here, and we need to prevent it at all costs.

So, now we can argue about what course of action is most likely to prevent violent war. And I know the big talking point here is going to be Palestine. One of the reasons that’s a big talking point is because what’s happening there is fucking disgusting and indefensible in any way. But I have to tell you, it has been that way, to a greater or lesser extent, for my entire fucking lifetime. I marched in “free Palestine” marches before 99% of the people making Palestine their single issue in this election were even born. This isn’t a new issue. That war may be in a super awful phase right now, but it isn’t the first super awful phase it’s been in. The fact is, the only reason a lot of people have become aware lately of that conflict is because Putin is pushing that conflict as a way of dividing the electorate and making Trump win. That may be insulting to some people, but it’s objectively true. It’s just something to sit with.

Politics isn’t ever a fucking simple thing. I’ve learned over the course of my long life that no important choices are simple, that you’re usually left with an array of options that may have ambiguous outcomes and you have to just do the best you can in the name of damage control.

I don’t like Kamala Harris’ stance on Israel. I don’t like some of her other stances. But this isn’t one of those difficult choices with ambiguous outcomes for me. Because Trump’s camp has not only said they want to completely exterminate all Palestinians and build resorts on the West Bank. Trump has said he wants to build concentration camps for all the “immigrants” in the United States.

I don’t have the space or energy to get into all that, or all the reasons that we have to do anything and everything practical to prevent Trump from coming back into power. So many people have made those arguments already better than I could, and if you haven’t listened to them, you’re not gonna listen to me. I’m just here to vent my personal experiences that have led me to where I am today.

So, let’s talk about abortion. I’ve had abortions. Plural. The first one was when I became pregnant from rape at the age of 14. When he found out I was pregnant he kicked me in the stomach and face until I wedged myself under a bed where he couldn’t get at me anymore. But it didn’t make me lose the baby.

In some states, now, because of Trump, I would have to have that baby. If Trump is elected again, that will be ALL states in the country. You have no reasonable arguments against that fact if you’re paying any attention at all. Even people who think there should be an exception for rape, they have no knowledge of the practicalities behind such an “exception”. My parents shielded and defended my abuser at the time. I would not have been able to access such an “exception”, which would be the case with at least 90% of people who get pregnant by rape, especially at that age. Because few people get pregnant in their early teens without someone in their family being involved. It’s just facts. Sit with those facts.

Another abortion I had was when a condom broke, I got the morning after pill (before it was OTC) and took it within 24 hours, but I still got pregnant. I was with the anarchist guy at the time and in active heroin addiction. Trump would want me to have that baby, too. I made objectively 100% the right decision in not having that baby. I am Christian (that’s a whole other tale) and I can tell you Jesus did not want me to have that fucking baby.

And then there was my first daughter. I was married, not on drugs, and trying to get pregnant when I got pregnant with her. Then, at my 20-week ultrasound they told me she had a heart defect that was incompatible with life. I could wait for her to die, suffering myself and perhaps letting her suffer, and perhaps risking my own health, or I could have what is so compassionately termed a “partial birth abortion”.

I chose the latter, because I’m not into pointless torture. Under Trump, I would not have that choice. In some states, people are not having this choice as we speak, even if it means they fucking die. These lives matter and if you don’t take that into consideration in this election, that’s on you.

I could go into how the republicans are all about privatizing prisons and healthcare and how they’re all about supporting the insurance industry, because both of those things are stuff I have intimate personal experience with, and which I personally know are other ways Trump and his cronies have caused and will cause more widespread death, oppression and suffering than Harris will, but I’m really out of energy at this point.

I don’t think I’m going to convince anyone with this essay, but I just didn’t want anyone to think I was sitting this out or trying to not be about politics. My books are inherently political, because I pull from my personal experience in writing them. They’re all about surviving abuse, navigating a fucked up and imperfect world as a disabled person, and fighting to help and protect the people around you in any way you can. They’re ultimately about how the only thing we can do in any given situation, the only way we can actually have an effect on the world around us, is by choosing compassion, each and every time.

Choosing compassion isn’t always easy and it’s not always simple. It’s not always straightforward, because knowing what you and others need, what the most compassionate path is for all involved, isn’t readily apparent in every situation. But I think, in this election, with the choices we are offered, the practical compassionate choice is stunningly obvious.

We can’t and won’t make the world perfect in one day. We have to be prepared to fight our whole lives. If we’re lucky, our personal part in that fight won’t need to involve guns and blood. Some people aren’t so lucky, sure. We don’t need to feel guilty about that to the point we end up expanding that conflict to our backyard. That isn’t helping anyone.

I’ve been fighting this fight for more decades than I want to admit, and I’ll keep fighting until I die. I don’t need to personally win all battles, but I need to fight the ones in front of me. I don’t need to save all people, but I can help the ones I can. All we can do is our best. Every day, we can wake up and do our best, and keep striving to do a little bit better. This is how the world changes. Not in a bloody revolution, but in one act of compassion at a time.

You can either buy my books or write false angry reviews for them here.