I realized something interesting today that I hadn't fully pieced together: living under #Trump is a pretty close approximation to being poor in a rural area, at least in my experience.
You're constantly afraid of authorities because any of them could randomly ruin your life. You randomly can't afford things (because some unexpected expense came up, or because some incompetent asshole decided to tariff something or start a war or whatever). Everything is terrifying, unstable, and unpredictable basically all the time. The only way you survive is with a community.
I knew Trump would take the rural vote way back because I recognized him as the crooked sheriff or good ol' boy mayor of more than a few little towns I've lived in. He's so deeply familiar, which is really triggering for the tiny number of people who managed to escape that kind of crushingly hopeless place.
So if this has all felt very terrifying and foreign, then perhaps use it to understand the people who find it terrifying and familiar. For at least some of those people, this has been an unpleasant return to (continuation of) an old normal. Understand why we say that things must change far more radically than that which lets a few people "go back to brunch."
@cdarwin@c.im
