I’ve already mailed in my ballot, and I volunteered to be a poll worker (though they haven’t gotten in touch). With a week (maybe two) to go before we get the result, I feel caught in a limbo. It feels more important to me to be copying my important documents and organizing go-bags to be ready for a crisis than it does to do anything at work. I also recognize that that is probably a reaction to stress and anxiety and isn’t helping me. That said, I’m part of many groups that the right-wing hates and is openly threatening, so feeling unsafe doesn’t feel unreasonable either.
How are you all holding up out there? And tips for me to deal with this better?
Honestly, other than voting and trying to get those around me to actually give a shit, I’m not. Like in the past two elections, I’m having trouble grasping the fact that half of the (voting) country wants to elect a fascist. My mother told me over the phone that one of her neighbors is voting for Trump because “his wife is absolutely gorgeous”. Like, how do you even respond to that, especially in any calm way?
Oh, and someone here reminded me: cannabis. Lots and lots of it.
If you vote for someone because you think their wife is hot I don’t think you should be allowed to vote.
Oh, and someone here reminded me: cannabis. Lots and lots of it.
I shudder to think about how poorly I’d be handling things if I didn’t have cannabis lol
Reminds me of some French women who voted for Macron because he married a woman 25 years older than him (formerly his highschool literature teacher).
There’s no stress. There is zero that I can do about any of it other than vote. And where I’m at my vote really doesn’t mean anything. I’m still going to vote, but my state isn’t going to even come close to turning red.
If he wins I need to make an ernest attempt to find a quiet far away place to get the fuck out.
We’re honestly just kind of stuck in the track we’re in. With the current state of affairs we need billionaires who are okay with being taxed to send sufficient amounts of money into campaigns and fight off corporate entities on our behalf to no benefit of their own. Back in the Nixon and Reagan days we had a chance to have voices heard and run protests and stamp out some of the corruption but we’re well past that now.
We need to put laws in place to stop the propaganda engines into wrest power from the oligarchs. But even the left doesn’t truly want all that to happen.
Voted early.
Disconnected completely from any news source.
I’ve been writing postcards and letters to voters. It’s a little too late to jump on the postcard wagon but letters can be written until 10/29. It’s super easy, you’re provided templates, instructions and addresses, you just need paper, envelopes and stamps.
I wrote a ton of both and it did wonders to distract me and give me something of purpose to do at the same time.
I’m pretty sure text banking and phone banking is still going on too.
Shit, man, I dunno. I already voted. I fly my blue-team flag in a red town. I hope that most of the people voting for him are just insensitive clods who aren’t as personally hateful as the jokes they’ll laugh at, or that they’re somehow stupid enough to have been genuinely convinced that our creaky business-friendly center-left coalition is some sort of economy-dooming experiment in socialism. So yeah, I’m reduced to hoping that a large percentage of my fellow citizens are idiots and/or assholes, rather than actual fascists.
It’s too close to know who will win, so things could turn out kinda okay if the Democrats pull it off. If Trump wins, maybe they don’t manage the Senate and little of longstanding legislative harm gets passed. Sotomayor should be okay for the next four years, so for SCOTUS itself the damage is likely already done. Finally, I still mostly think that Trump will be content to line his pockets for four years and then pardon himself on the way out. He’s too old to inspire any energy to repeal the 22nd amendment, and I don’t see anyone behind him ready to slot in as an heir apparent, so maybe the less intensely awful republicans will reclaim some measure of control, or a gaggle of pretenders fragments their base and they can’t really get organized to win nationally. A second Trump term is going to fucking suck, though, and a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt all across the world, many more than in a Harris administration, IMHO.
Shit’s grim, and the Christian Nationalists see this as their time, possibly their last good chance in their current form, to really seize the reins of power.
They don’t need to organize anymore they just need a pulse and an ® next to their name to have a real chance of winning nationally at this point.
If Harris does win, the rest of the world would really like it if you invested in education America. Specifically a robust history curriculum. Especially around 1935-1945.
We all know about WWII. Even Germany is having trouble keeping the Nazis at bay though. I think it might be part of human nature for some of us to be literally evil. To properly resist this requires not only for the majority to be good, but for them to actively oppose evil in their personal lives. Most are unwilling to do this.
It feels like something in the genre of the paradox of tolerance, where the most empathetic and pacifistic people are the people best positioned to remove shitters from the gene pool responsibly
I’m just going to do what I’ve always done in all the other elections I’ve partaken in.
I’m going to mark my choices, I’m gonna submit the ballot, I’m going to resume life as normal. Then when election day comes, I’m just going to go to sleep. I don’t want to be up to see the polls.
If Harris wins, then great, because that just means that we’re not going to have another nightmare circus for 4 more years.
If Trump somehow wins, then I will mute myself from the world almost like I did for the 4 years we had with him. It was just a blur.
Bold of you to think it’ll only be 4 years of Drumpf, or his appointed successor.
Doomscrolling, exercise, and looking up firing ranges near me. Been a few decades since last I went
What exercise plan, if any, are you following? I let my fitness slip pretty hard during COVID, and haven’t had good luck getting back into the groove with anything I’ve tried so far
Honestly, me too and I don’t have much of a plan. I tried doing some pushups the other day and was shocked how much capacity I’ve lost. Following the wisdom that the hardest part of a run is lacing up your shoes, i’m just telling myself to do something every day. 3 sets of pushups. Squats during ad breaks. Walk to the store for a snack. That kind of thing A little bit of physical activity is a great distraction from the anxiety in my head
I don’t need to look up the closest firing range because it was recently all over the news when one of the members went up on a roof and tried to shoot this guy who was running for President.
Not the most recent would be shooter, the one before that.
Hell of a fall for the leaves, though.
That it is
Not great… I’m not a US citizen yet so voting isn’t possible. Only thing I could do is vote with my feet… so I moved out of Texas for good earlier this year. I think my current location is as safe as it gets in regards to avoiding political violence (since I’m not exactly in a group that the right isn’t threatening) so there’s that
Other than that? Nothing… If the worst happens I’ll just hole-up in the building and ask my boss for permission to work from home
I feel you on voting with your feet. I left beet-red Indiana for a Democratic-leaning swing state a few years ago. And yet, once you get outside the city by just a few minutes, it’s Trump signs everywhere. Doesn’t feel very reassuring.
It’s cliche to talk about moving to Canada after a US election, but I have started to collect my passport and papers and look at multiple countries for ease of entry, in case shit hits the fan.
If you don’t have a valuable skill/trade or family to sponsor you, moving to another country is not typically an option for most people. Also probably the worst time to move to Canada as there is a growing anti immigrant sentiment.
Fortunately, I have advanced degrees and an internationally recognized professional certification, and my partner is a doctor. I don’t imagine emigrating would be easy by any stretch, but I think we’d have better odds than if we didn’t have those credentials.
Good point on Canada. I’ve also been looking at Panama or Costa Rica. Europe may be an option (I work in clean energy and remember Macron’s outreach to climate scientists after Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement), but may be harder.
I’m playing a lot of pinball, but that really hasn’t changed.
Woo, pinball!
I’m going to be in Hawaii for Election day. I already voted. Nothing more I can do personally. Gotta focus on the controllables in life. Going to try n enjoy paradise and tune it out as much as I can.
“Loosen your shoes
Don’t listen to news
That keeps you up at night.”- Chris Smither
You just get an upvote for Chris Smither. Leave the Light On, Time Stands Still, his cover of Visions of Johanna, plus a dozen others… all brilliant.
Leave the Light on, for my money, is a perfect song. But I have a new favorite on his new album:
Planning my Amerexit. I don’t want to leave, we have a decent country, but if Trump wins this place is going to go to hell fast.
Come to California. We’ll be the center of any resistance.
Where are you planning to go?
Not the person you asked, but I’ll give my answer: I don’t know where I’d go, but I’ve been learning French for the last few years, in part, to increase my options.
(The other reason I picked French is that I’ve also been considering getting a sailboat and becoming nomadic, and France owns a whole bunch of tropical islands.)
Depends how quickly things devolve. If things get bad too quickly, I may move to China for a bit. Yes, really. I know that’s a bit ironic. But I have family there, so getting residency is trivial for me. Day to day life is chill there, just don’t piss off the party. In America, I’d be considered a political enemy if the Republicans go full fascist, so ironically it would be safer for me.
I’d hate to lose American working opportunities, salaries, my house, my friends, and my family. But if things devolve really quick I don’t want to be here and that’s my fastest way out.
If there’s a fair bit of time to move, Japan, Spain, Netherlands, even Germany would all be decent picks for me.
My long term goal is honestly Japan - competent society, free and open, outstanding food, low pollution, safe for kids to be independent with good educational opportunities, few drug addicts, and high social respect.
We survived one term, this one will be worse, but if we stop being idiots and let them distract us with 1000 tiny controversies then we can solve anything.
He had nearly unlimited power last time and we did OK, though McCain helped and that corporate tax cut was brutal.
I think America has become politically lazy, sometimes you have to take a stand for your principles, and we’ve gotten used to expecting the idiots on TV to do that for us.
If he ‘wins’ and we put 10m people on Pennsylvania Avenue, I think we can make it clear that he serves us, not the other way around.
But we won’t do that, we’ll expect everyone else to instead…
Last time there were a lot more guardrails, though. It also wasn’t entirely clear if he was going to be a fascist either.
Honestly a reasonable person in 2016 could consider Trump to even be a moderate Republican (yes, really). Corrupt and lazy, sure, but I was expecting the American equivalent of someone like Rob Ford, not some insane idiot who is begging people in his party to literally rig the vote in his favor.
And it seems like Canada isn’t far behind us either… Though maybe there will be a backlash up there once they see what Trump is doing down here.
I doubt it, Trudeau really has pissed off most Canadians and their Conservative Party is also corrupt as hell. It’ll be better than here for a bit but Canadians in general feel politically stuck and that might not end well. Similar issue in Germany.
I’ve made my peace with either result. If Harris wins, I’ll assume it’ll be relative status quo and a continuation of the last four years, a slow-motion decline. If Trump wins, our deaths are assured and everything falls to shit that much sooner. There may be some personal benefits and opportunities I can try to take advantage of before we all die, but none of it will really matter in the end. My personal romantic life is in such a shitty spot right now that I honestly don’t really care anymore.
I think this is the key right here. The election is important, but most of us have far more immediate concerns.
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People outside of US have the right to worry about this election as well imo. It’s one of many currently on-going battles of autocracy vs democracy and this election will heavily shape the battlefield.
I wish all of the luck to my American friends and really that’s all non-americans can do so I’ll just grab a joint and catch up on the new season of What We Do In The Shadows until this blows over.
People outside of US have the right to worry about this election as well imo
this is just american exceptionalism, i don’t really care, nothing would really change, just more wars, rapes and destruction from the US empire
ah you’re from
.ml, feel free to ignore my comment entirely. Didn’t want to ruin your day with non-extremist world views sorry.nicked you right in the balls, 😅😅
