Shit that Pissed me Off – 11/11

President Elect Trump

Well yeah, I kind of had to lead with this, didn’t I?

For the last several weeks, I’d been hopeful that come election day, I wouldn’t have to write about Donald Trump any longer.  Maybe one more column about how much of a sore loser he was, as we all expected.  Instead, he is going to be our President for at least four years.

As a comedian, I should be happy.  Hillary isn’t nearly as easy a target as Donald Trump and the parade of people he is going to include in his cabinet.  They will say and do things worthy of ridicule on a nearly daily and certainly weekly basis.

I’m a  little bit worried, though, that while I’m making jokes about Trump and his cabinet, they will be working on ways to take rights away from same-sex couples in the name of “religious freedom.”  I’m a lot worried that they will be creating a country in which Hispanics and muslims are treated with mistrust and hostility simply because of their race and/or faith.  I’m a lot worried that my transgender friends will face a supreme court openly hostile to their identity.

But let me tell you what has me super worried – that people who are upset with this outcome will throw up their hands and say they can do nothing because the DNC screwed them out of the candidate they wanted.  They will blame others for the fact this happened.

If we blame someone else, we don’t have to spend any time doing anything ourselves!

We are all to blame.  When almost 50% of eligible voters stay home rather than vote for anyone, we are to blame.  When we allow people to say “they are both terrible” when one of those two people is President because he spouted a racist and xenophobic agenda, we are to blame.  When we whine because our perfect candidate isn’t on the ballot instead of recognizing that 75% of what we want is far better than 10% (if that) of what we want, we are to blame.

When we angrily shake our fists at a system in which we refuse to take part because all we ever do is vote once every four years, we are to blame.

Donald Trump won because people who have never been excited about voting got off their asses and turned up.  I don’t care why they turned up. The fact is they turned up.

If you read my blog, you probably voted.  Odds are you didn’t vote for Trump.  Some of your might have voted Stein or Johnson but you didn’t vote Trump.  You are as upset as I am right now, I would imagine.

So once you stop being angry, you have to ask yourself, what am I going to do now?

In Morocco, Teen Girls face Jail for Kissing

In the “it could be worse for same-sex couples” category, I remind you that there are still countries in the world where homosexuality is illegal.  Like “kiss someone of the same gender in public and you will go to jail” illegal.

In America, this will never happen because too many of the people making laws secretly watch lesbian porn and they recognize that even though two guys kissing really freaks them out, any laws meant to punish that behavior would also punish the behavior that gives them a gigantic boner.  So score one point for porn, I guess.

But there are many parts of the world where being gay is far more dangerous.  Even though two women (or men) kissing on the street does not present any sort of active threat to anyone else on that street, it is illegal.

Worse, though, it is illegal for them to do it in the privacy of their home.

It is important for us to remember, even as we look at the erosion of the rights for GLBTQ Americans in the next four years, that being GLBTQ anywhere in the world is filled with challenges.  And as we fight for rights here, we cannot ignore that those rights are under attack everywhere.

A Bunch of Clueless Cheerleaders Use the Trail of Tears to Taunt an Opposing Team

I’m probably more upset at our education system than I am at these cheerleaders.  They were just trying to taunt an opposing team with an Indian mascot.  They chose to taunt the opposing team with this banner.

Now it stands to reason that few, if any, of the members of the opposing team were Native American.  So this banner wasn’t meant as an actual taunt of actual Native Americans.

I don’t think that makes it all better, though.  Because what happened is these young women thought their banner was funny without having any real idea what their banner referenced.

They just thought they had come up with a clever way to make a joke about their opponent.

This is a failure of America to teach our kids about some of the things we’ve done wrong. If these girls knew what the Trail of Tears was, I feel they would have made a different choice.

Or maybe not.  Because if we still don’t understand why “Redskins” is an offensive name for a Football team, these kids might have known exactly what they were saying and they didn’t care.

This Week’s Meme that Pissed me Off

I’m highlighting this meme because it shows off my favorite fallacy: False equivalency.

So first off, there is the assumption that Obamacare is awful.  Not just awful, in fact, but the moral antithesis of freeing slaves and giving black people the right to vote.

That’s just dumb.  The Affordable care act isn’t perfect.  But wanting everyone to have access to affordable health care is, in fact, a laudable goal.

There is also the fact that the Republican party that supported these amendments was a different party at the time.  When it comes to social issues, the two parties flipped a few decades ago now.  So while it is wrong to say that the Republicans of today were the Democrats of yesterday, it is more right than saying “Republicans of today would have made the same decisions as Republicans of yesterday.”

Let us consider the fact that Republicans of today have been pushing constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage.

Conservatives hate Obamacare, I get that.  As a liberal, I think Obamacare is imperfect but as a self-employed father of two with diabetes, I’m sure as hell happy it is there.

I’m happier that black people have the right to vote.  I’m just not going to spend a lot of time thanking today’s Republicans for giving them that right when these are the same people who spent the last eight years questioning whether or not Obama was born in America.