Five Days In.

                                            

I’m going to invoke “the personal is the political” mantra here to excuse my departure  from my avowed stance of being a-political.

Not only because I find that the elephant in the room is becoming uncomfortably intrusive; but because we are all, actually, shit-scared. But most people don't want to say it out loud.

Because right there, last Wednesday morning, was when the  political  cast a huge dark cloud over my personal.

On Wednesday EVERYONE , including the contestants, was at Stage One – total shock. On  Tuesday people everywhere had that euphoric moment on first awakening: - thinking it had all been a nightmare or that JR wasn’t dead. They all experienced the same cold chill when they realised it wasn’t a nightmare; or a game show.  The world had changed.

Now, five days later, people have, as people will, begun to work out their own strategies for coping with this change. And  American politics has quietly slipped from the front page.

But I really don’t believe this is a grin-and-bear-it situation; nor a pious reference to people getting the government they deserve; nor is this one going to yield to the let-them-get-on-with-it and havva cuppa school of thought. Because this time, the situation we’re discussing didn’t even happen in our own country. Yet, in a very un-British way,  we are going to have to learn that ‘Mind your own business’ isn’t the panacea to cure all.

I should like to stand up and say that this election in that country is – through no connivance of my own – my business.

 Already we’re seeing people in different countries making it their business. Women marching for rights they’re no longer ‘asking’ for, but demanding; communities launching their own businesses co-operatively...people have had enough of b.s. everywhere and 8/11 has galvanised many into action. So many of the response to events in the USA have actually had positive effects outside of that country.  BUT...

The person who is the President-elect is not fit for purpose.

 That’s it.  There is no doubt about it.  Morally, temperamentally, historically, unfit.

 As I type those words I understand that in the dystopian future we are all dreading, the very fact that I wrote them could, conceivably, come back to bite me on the bum. Legally! And I hate having to even wonder if it’s paranoia or prescience that makes me think like that.

I don’t think I can stand back while all the things we’ve worked for over so many centuries become debased. I don’t think I would be capable of keeping quiet while women get wrapped  up in tissue and put back in their boxes again. I don’t want any girl born into this world to have to normalise the things millions of us were told to normalise when we were kids.

But we have come to the point with which SciFi writers have been terrorising us for years: we have let one country have the power to end life on this planet.

 And instead of respecting that point, we have  allowed a situation to develop where, by legal process, we have handed over the keys to our continual sustainment or oblivion to an avowed man of violence; a man of little understanding and even less knowledge; a man to whom honour is a quality for losers. And, most disturbingly, to a man devoid of all empathy; nor ability to think through the affects of his actions;  or feel remorse:

to a pathological degree.

I have no intention of turning my online presence into a political hub, but neither am I ‘going to have to learn to live with it’. I absolutely refuse.

 I haven’t been able  to do much on Twitter these past few days because I was too choked up with this burgeoning feeling of being coerced into adopting what seems to be starting to be the default position, i.e.: it’s happened. Nothing we can do. Learn to accept it.

Now I’ve finally grown a pair. And even if only a handful of people ever read it, at least I’ve gone on record  to show I will NOT accept. I refuse to go quietly into that dark night. I shall rage and rage to stop the dying of the light.

I just won’t keep doing it on Twitter.