2024 U.S. Election Thoughts

aka, I don't want to do this, but I think I have to

This isn’t a technical post. I live in the U.S.A. where a right wing candidate recently won the presidential election on a platform of isolationism and somewhat radical social conservatism, threatening both women’s, queer folks and transgender individual’s medical care. This is a political and personal brain dump.

I don’t know how I’m feeling. Which isn’t true at all - I’m feeling far too much to say I’m feeling any one thing. Sometimes it feels as though I’m part of a social movement - becoming a new kind of person who is more realized, and more authentic, than has been possible for previous generations.

I like that idea of America - of a nation so adept at welcoming immigrants and tolerating others that we accept as queer folks live their authentic lives in public. After all, they’re not hurting anyone, right?

It turns out America isn’t that tolerant of differentness. We have our excuses - we’ve been whipped up by an angry leader who promises to fix all the ills of our experience if we’ll just give him the rights to do anything, and we’ve all been paying more for food and goods. It’s scary, and we got scared.

I’m scared too. I depend on HRT (Hormones, prescribed by my doctor) to function. If they are removed from insurance, my costs go up to survive. If they get banned somehow, I will need to take action to stay alive.

I didn’t know we were scared enough to go along with taking away the rights of minority groups. Of hurting kids. I thought we were better than that, that no matter how much pressure we were under, we’d become more undivided than ever, and turn coal to diamond.

Instead, we fractured.

It’s hard to grow up and see that our parents aren’t perfect - they’re not the strongest or the most beautiful people that we thought they were when we were small. And in the same way, it’s hard to grow and see that we’ve grown beyond our country, beyond the politics of the generation trying to lead us.

I don’t want to be the one to fix this problem. I’ve spent my adult life being an engineer, understanding computers, and helping people learn them.

I don’t want to be the one to fix this problem… but I think I’m needed. We’re louder when my voice is used, too.

So I’m going to do what I know how to do. I’m going to start building. I threw my hat into the ring of a few city city council boards. They meet quarterly and advise the government on how to best function.

I’m volunteering at a startup that’s trying to build a safe social media space away from the increasingly unsafe social media landscape that exists today (related: is linkedin now the safest social media space for queer folks? Who saw that coming?).

It’s a small start, but that’s how movements build, right?

To be clear, I don’t want to do this. I want someone smarter, or better equipped, to take care of this. To protect the rights of my community and others that don’t have the money and connections to keep the government from looking at them.

But I think we need to step up. I think we need to do this, together.

Let’s do this.
kyler