Posted by Vote, and get your friends to vote. Remember the people who fought and died for that right. Remember that people are still fighting to prevent people of color and other marginalized individuals from voting. If you stay at home because you feel demoralized, you are doing their work for them.
But do something nice for yourself when you are done. I plan to drink some Ada Lovelace gin, and light candles for my secular saints.
How about you?
Magick From Scratch 
Because we’re temporarily in Hoodsport WA we voted via absentee ballot. I’m making chicken and rice with carrots and peas for dinner and a cherry strudel for dessert. Maybe a cup of hot cocoa to celebrate and chase the damp and cold away. To your very good health!
Thenea, you wouldn’t happen to know anyone who has a really good plan for dealing with the Nazis (and so on) would you? I would go ask myself, but I have a feeling you’d have better luck than me. I don’t even go here đ
Having studied the issue from a sociological perspective, the underlying issue is actually poverty. Environments in which many people are faring worse than their parents are environments wherein we are most likely to find people looking for someone or something to blame. Itâs easier to blame whatever it is on minorities or whoever else, than it is to dig deep and understand whatâs happening to the economy and the modes of production.
If we want to defeat Nazism in this country, the best groups to support would be the ACLU, and any political group pushing for basic income.
A society wherein hate crimes are prosecuted aggressively and everyone has a full belly is a society wherein idiots donât feel the need to go to rallies defending their right to hate various categories of people.
Which is not to say that bigotry wasnât a huge issue before the rise of Nazism in our country, or that it wonât continue to be a major issue for marginalized people long after it stops being so visible. It is not to say that the law have ever been applied equally, or that it will suddenly be applied equally just because hate groups are no longer rallying. To fix the cultural and philosophical issues causing bigotry requires changing the minds of an entire culture about where power comes from, how power should be used, and what the very nature of morality is. Any solution to this problem which does not change peopleâs hearts on this matter is simply a patch. And on that front, we must look to our artists, poets, novelists, and writers.
It may not seem like a related problem when a âpopularâ kid picks on an âunpopularâ kid somewhere in a high school or middle school, but it certainly is. The very idea that we have more social support when we demonstrate our power over those whom we have deemed âless than,â the very fact that someone can be âpopularâ while being unsociable and cruel, thatâs at the heart of why bigotry is such a problem in our culture. We can shrink the circle of people that are acceptable to pick on, we can grow the circle of those considered acceptable, but the underlying problem is that our culture teaches us to look for someone âless thanâ to shit on. Or that we should look up to people doing the shitting. That needs to get fixed before we can see any lasting change. Anti-bullying groups and education groups looking to grow peopleâs social problem solving toolkits address the same problem in their own way.
It would also be nice if someone would fix the gerrymandering issue. FFS.
But I cannot recommend a Pagan or Polytheist group for this.
I hail from the heart of Trump country, and I agree with your assessment. As soon as I realized the bastard might actually win, I went around asking as many rednecks what they thought about it as possible, because I recognized what was happening, and I wanted to remember. Before the primaries, they were mostly saying that they would vote for Trump as a “lesser evil” compared to Hillary; they 100% would have voted for Sanders if they were given the option. Before he was the Republican nominee, rednecks I knew thought he was a huge joke, a “dumbass rich guy who found a way for people to listen to him for a couple of months.” It was only after the primaries that most of them started to like Trump, and even then it took a while. Flash forward a few months, groupthink took over, and they all acted like they’d always liked him. Maybe they even believed it.
I watched my own community become steadily more hateful. I watched my high school become more and more racist, until people started showing up with the Confederate flag on their trucks. I tore one off and posted shit around the school calling the flag racist; you should’ve seen the look on one of their faces when he tore it down. Livid. Veins bulging. Kids came up to me asking, “did you say our flag is gay???” A couple hispanic friends of mine told me it was “awesome”; most of the school was pissed off. It wasn’t the anger limousine liberals imagine, a sort of “I have the right to my opinion” anger. It was the anger of someone who thinks they’re defending their entire way of life. They couldn’t be reasoned with about it because they all went home to their parents.
I don’t live there anymore, but my younger siblings do (with a father who sides with the bullies and gaslights us about it). My trans, autistic little sister and little brother are still going to that high school. They repeat things they heard kids and teachers say in class that would never have been permitted when I was in school, actual racist, alt-right talking points. The man who took me in after high school and drove me to my first Pride recently told me that when he’s with other straight people they’ve started saying things he can’t believe, talking about killing people.
I love my people (white, rural rednecks living in poverty), but I am so disappointed in them that words cannot express it. I thought better of them. After all that talk of opposing tyranny, when the cards are down, they all trusted the wolves in sheeps’ clothing. And now I fear for my family’s safety, being stuck in what is becoming a frothing mass of hate and narcissism. Something has got to give, and soon, and I don’t know what will happen. All I think we can really do now is watch and wait and pray, and hope that some of these rednecks remember set syphyr tyrannus, now that it’s obvious the man who would be god-emperor only wants to “go down in history” with his fucking wall.
My little brother finally Snapchatted me from high school. He told me to stop the “tomfoolery” and I had to talk him into Googling it.
Lol
I’m snapchatting my old aforementioned Drama Club twink friend instructions on how to summon Set in order to ask what the land spirits there are up to. I’m pulling a solid You Fucking Owe Me One and hoping Set and Pan can communicate what the fuck to do. Let’s hope it helps. I’m also about to go get stoned cheers everybody
Me in January: “I have an overwhelming urge to talk about politics on this one particular blog post. I bet that doesn’t mean anything”