Why Do We Fall?
Remembering The 5th Of November
This post was rewritten numerous times. It’s not necessarily positive, but it’s honest and introspective.
Like many, my emotions after the election ran across a varied spectrum.
Ultimately, I don’t think one lone white guy has any more to contribute than what has already said by far greater minds, and I’m certainly not going to be the most harmed under the incoming administration.
I voted for Harris.
A vote for Harris was the correct moral, ethical, responsible and just choice, and I’ll die proudly on that hill.
I was fairly young whenever my family acquired our VHS copy of Pete’s Dragon, and growing up in Maine, it wasn’t hard to relate to someone with a similar initial having an adventure in coastal Passamaquoddy.
One of the film’s main villains is the dastardly Dr. Terminus, a LITERAL snake-oil salesman, recognized in his opening number by local townsfolk for being a reputed charlatan.
Despite their vocal displeasure at the Dr.’s prior lies, the sweet-talking grifter easily warms his way back into the community, only to be thwarted later BY the titular dragon, being sent off with an appropriate Goofy sound bite.
I don’t mean to be rude, but I learned not to trust the deceitful loud mouthed con-man before I entered pre-school…
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve felt what I did on election night since the day my mother walked into our living room 26 years ago, and informed my sister and me that,
“Dad’s dead.”
Looking at the electoral map around the 2:30 AM hour on Wednesday November 6th had me feeling more instantly sick than any death I’ve ever experienced.
It was like I turned my phone on, and the lock screen simply said
“Nothing you have ever done has mattered, and everything you’ve ever wished to do is now impossible.”
The only genuine advice I feel appropriate in giving is that, the way I see it, any one of us could quit. There’s an infinite multitude of ways we could take a shortcut to the end and skip the life that seems to be staring us down..
I’m FIVE YEARS sober.
Five years past counting every insurmountable day that seemed impossible to reach without a drop of aide…
But I’m still here.
I have a home when I thought I’d never be able to afford an apartment, and I’m employed. I have a partner I wouldn’t change a thing about, and my black lab gives me more love than I know what to do with…
There are MANY who have more to fear than I do, and there are far more struggling from disabilities and disadvantages that make voicing my discontent feel selfish, but I cannot deny that I’m overwhelmed with every realistic emotion one could have in this moment..
For several weeks, in 2017, as my grandmother lay dying in hospice, my daily routine saw me exclusively at her bedside every waking moment not at work.
During the last days she couldn’t speak, and she only ever shifted her eyes.
Watching my favorite person in the world pass before me took everything inside me that made me human in order to walk strong.
My daily mantra at that time was little more than humming the first few notes on piano to Hanz Zimmer’s “What Are You Going To Do When You Are Not Saving The World?”
Some days you don’t have anything. But what you carry, you do for those around you.
Superman as an idea, has pulled me through more dark corridors than life than I imagine I could recount, and I reckon I’ll be humming a few themes again before this is all over..
I’ll never know the proper motivational words to even pull myself through most days, and my ego has won over often enough that there’d always remain a certain aura of hypocrisy, but it doesn’t mean the idea of hope itself is tarnished.
However many times we fall, the possibility of hope remains.
Despite forecasts, the sun will always rise tomorrow.
In the coming weeks, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do more than put on a brave face as news consistently shatters norms, but if the one thing I can control is how I stand in the face of it, I feel I’ll always remain tall.
There is always someone looking up at you when you least expect it, and they deserve a good symbol of strength to trust to get them through the day.
“Hate is always foolish, and love is always WISE.”
I lost a friend over the past few years.
And I feel fairly guilty about that.
I’ve never been a great man.
I’ve made selfish choices.
There was a time I gave into my ego and nuked my own life situation fairly effectively.
I have no grasp of how people who’ve walked through my life ultimately view me, and after more than enough hours spent locating hope on the darkest days, I’d have an even harder time reasoning that my younger self wasn’t completely buried.
When all’s said and done, I wouldn’t proclaim to anyone that my foundation is flawless, but I’d like to think that my morals always start in a good place.
I’m of the philosophy we are all one being, as we do for others, we serve ourselves. That we should do any harm to one of us, we all suffer.
More than any individual, I hate that people of such little substance have managed to manipulate us all INTO such divisions.
I stumbled upon this Bernie Sanders clip that was shared the other day, and it’s nauseating how accurately it describes what has happened recently..
More than any thought in recent history regarding politics, I’m angry about how infuriated I am at everything now.
I was a Boy Scout.
My mother was a Sunday school teacher.
I’m not perfect by any definition, but I know enough to stand firm on the ground that we should want the sorts of things Kamala Harris stood for, and nothing that Trump is about.
I understand the frustration at the status quo. I COMPLETELY empathize with the concept that many times in our elections, you feel powerless as to choice.
I understand protest votes.
I’m from a hard area to survive in, and I KNOW I’m lucky to have four walls and a roof, but when the alternative to Harris is the VERY plausible complete and inarguable destruction of our society, how do you defend that protest?
I LOATHE that I feel I have little choice, but I’ll always swallow pride for the better good.
And finally, I’ll say it here, once and I won’t bring it up again.
I’m not saying Trump cheated, in fact, if it is 100% the will of my countrymen to burn, I don’t know if there’s a land I could stand on where I’d be 100% in the right for saying the majority shouldn’t have their say valued.
It rubs me the wrong way to hell and back that in the final stretch, Trump simply phoned it in.
Cancelled interviews, swaying onstage for forty minutes, emptying arenas and a disposition that suggested he was done for.
The F student all year came home in the fourth quarter with a straight A report card, and all he did on the daily during the final semester was shit on the school lawn.
Every prior person to touch the stink of his first administration spoke out against him, including HIS vice president whose head was called for on Jan 6th.
The man NEEDED a win to stay out of prison for the rest of his days, and the relationships with Russia/Musk reek like a sulfur pit and I’ll never be able to say I genuinely believe any of it.
And I’ll admit it’s partially to cope with the horror of the alternative.
In high school, I was fortunate enough to receive the opportunity to go on a trip that hit every single monument in DC in one swoop, as well as Gettysburg, one of the first ever Nationals games, as well as the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
One of the most sobering aspects of that trip was our visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
I had already received a solid education of the horrors of WWII, but even with the most adequate reminder of the atrocities of man, few days in my life were as significant as walking through the visions of that building.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more humbled and silent as a human being than when standing amongst the shoes…
Hearing the historical voices in the halls prior did little to prepare me for the weight you feel upon you within a small room containing little more than a reminder to the consequences of unchecked evil.
The threat of fascism is one our society should be beyond at this point, and I’m ashamed that we are flirting with such a line again in my lifetime.
We owe the victims of history’s mistakes far more than what we are giving them today…
Wherever you are, and whatever your situation, if the events of November 5th 2024 left you with a similar loss of hope, I pray you find a little more of yourself in the coming days.
We are all still here together, no matter how unheard we may feel.
I AM angry, despite preaching unity, and I AM mournful, no matter how much positivity I cling to.
There may not be perfect words to offer in this moment, but, as with every day of failure in this life, we remain.
We are all that survived what came before, and we persist in traveling down the road together.
I hold on to the hope that, in spite of the choices of the incoming administration, those who believe in dignity, justice and a fair world for all will not recede into the darkness, cowering in fear of persecution.
I choose to hope that, even if I hold resentment towards negativity, that there are even brighter souls than my own out there with sharper wits and words to inspire support and kindness in trying times.
Regardless of where you are today, I love and thank all who support my work, and wish the good people of my country the strength they need to get to tomorrow..
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