Sometimes, the bad guys win

As a survivor of an abusive, violent, chaotic childhood, it's taken a lot of effort, therapy, and willpower (which I'm still not always great at) to pull myself out of interpreting every conflict I find myself in through the lens of a powerless child who was being treated poorly by the adults who were supposed to protect him.

For much of my adult life, my reaction to those situations was a dramatic and decisive overcompensation where I certainly made it clear that I wouldn't be bullied, but usually at the cost of freaking out or scaring people who didn't intend to.

So, seeing news coverage of some of the worst people in the United States parading around in a smug victory lap triggers some of the deepest and intense feelings of moral injustice that I'm capable of feeling. I had to stop looking at the news after a short amount of time.

As I wrote a couple days ago, it's easy — and, quite fair, I would say — to feel despondent in this moment. I feel deep sadness that this is where we now are. I feel deep fear for those who are more disadvantaged and less privileged than I am, still stuck in the US when I am thousands of kilometres away watching the shit-show from a distance.

It's very hard not to feel bitter that enough people hate those who look different, live different, or believe different than they do that they'd put a narcissistic abuser into the most powerful position in the US government, aided and abetted by sycophants and psychopaths who gleefully get to unleash their worst impulses on the country and the world.

And while I wouldn't say that everyone who voted for Trump is a bigot, enough of them certainly are, and did so in excited anticipation of him remaking the country on those terms. I don't know if I have more contempt for those than I do the poorly-informed and politically-disengaged who ridiculously think Republicans (and Trump, one of the least successful businessmen to ever fail upwards) are going to bring the cost of living down for the average person. At least the bigots are honest in their hate.

History always feels like an abstract, distant thing — something that happened then, not something you're constantly in the stream of as it happens now. It's only with hindsight that you see how it mattered and the ramifications of things that seemed less ramifying in the moment.

I write stories for a living. I'm lucky enough that I get to do it as a career. When the bad guys win, it's just a temporary setup for a later triumph in pursuit of fairness, empathy, truth, and love.

But real life doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes, the bad guys win, and win in traumatic, evil, and unfair ways. This present moment in history has the potential to mirror other harrowing points in our timeline. Only time will tell if it does, or if people stepped up and stopped the worst of it from taking place — as has also happened throughout history, too.

So, while right now feels like a loss, I've never been one to let bullies get away with it. And giving in is exactly what they want from all of us.