There has been no shortage of things that we’re frankly not all that happy about this year. You know it and we here at Political Flare know it. Some days it’s hard to put in the work of documenting these dark times — it would be so much easier to publish a website that was comprised of lists of the world’s cutest puppies or something.
But this work isn’t just not for the faint of heart. It requires fuel. And sometimes it feels like Donald Trump is a gallon of water in the gas tank. He’s that stupid phone charger from the lost and found at work that’s definitely not ours, Sharon, and that one you’re using looks like ours, but whatever.
Donald Trump is that guy at the campsite who had one too many beers and pissed on the fire. It stinks, it’s in everyone’s eyes, and now we have to stand over it and get the fire going again. Also, that guy totally only knows “Wonderwall,” why did he even BRING his guitar?
Anyway, I swear I’m getting to my point.
There’s only so much you can take of having committed to memory the misdeeds of legions of politicians who are sworn to make our lives better, but who take advantage of us at every turn. You run out of fuel. And that’s where you guys come in.
I don’t mean you click on the ads on this site and make us money so we can keep going (although, thanks for that, food is nice). What I mean is, every time one of our articles — and I’m sitting here at my kitchen table writing this today — is a heartfelt work of compassion, anger, despair, or hope, and you guys hear us, it fills us up again.
Every single time you’ve thought “THAT’s the way I should have said it to my mom.” Every time you share an article because it had a glimmer of hope that you hadn’t considered before. Every time the theme of something we write, whether it’s funny or sad or celebratory, resonates with you enough that it whirls through Reddit or social media, our flame is rekindled.
This isn’t unique to us. This is a thing you feel in your own life as well. You do this, and you don’t even know it. When your heart is in the right place, you say just the right thing at just the right time, and the power of your fellowship changes someone’s life.
It sounds trite to say “there’s power in numbers,” or some cliche nonsense like that. So let me phrase it differently.
In dark times, it’s easy to feel alone. That feeling is amplified manifold by something like this most recent election. We looked around us the day before it happened and we saw the faces of people that were surely going to make the right choice, who were certainly not going to put us in this position again, with this leader, under these circumstances, and by Wednesday morning, we found that we were wrong about at least some of the people that we thought we knew.
And we’ve written countless stories full of schadenfreude at the misery of folks who fall into that category and have been surprised that they’re now getting exactly what we tried to warn them about.
But still, it’s hard to stomach the fact that such a large cross-section of America was willing and eager to go down this road. It’s hard to hear their taunting mockery, like the internet come to life in the form of alt-right trolls at our dinner tables.
But our community will survive.
We worked hard at this, you and I. We built something those people can’t touch. While it’s frustrating to not be able to reach everyone, while we’re tempted to cry every time someone calls a simple Google search biased, while recorded history gets discarded as “politically motivated” as though it didn’t happen because we didn’t like it, we know the truth.
They can’t take the truth away.
And I promise, one day we’ll get the candidate we need to stand up to all of this. Unless there’s a revolution and the entire structure of American democracy is altered, we’re going to have to work inside the system we have, and that means we’ve got more work ahead of us in the form of cultivating goodness at the ground level and weeding out bad actors from among our own.
But one day, we’ll watch a presidential debate and smile the biggest smile of our entire political lives as our wheelchair-bound, Asian-American, lesbian candidate who lives in a sensible home with her wife and her dogs triumphantly holds up her smartphone on the stage and says, “No, sir, it took me 6 seconds to find a video of you saying EXACTLY that.”
One day all of this stuff that makes us feel like we’re taking crazy pills will be something we can discuss as a historical footnote.
When that day comes, it will be because you stood strong. We put in words only what you are observing right along with us.
Today, do your best with your right-wing uncle, or ask him to leave if that’s what you need to do. Hug your kids extra. Take pride in your humanity. Be thankful for this family we’ve become. Because we are not a demographic of voters. We are friends, and we know we could call any one of you at 3 in the morning for a ride from the airport, and you would get us home.
I’m not sure that without a catalyst like Donald Trump we could ever have had the clarity of this bond.
Bill Clinton showed us the difference between liberals and centrists. George W. Bush showed us what incompetence can lead to. Barack Obama, frustratingly wonderful, showed us both how restraint can build bridges and how letting an opposition party make the rules can stifle what could have been major progress.
Donald Trump set the boundaries for being a good person. For all the people who liked him because “he’s not a politician,” I issue this confirmation: You’re right. He’s not. He’s barely a human. Yes, he feels pain and eats food and has grandkids and memories and fears and joy like a regular human, but he’s a sociopath.
That can be a hard thing to pick up on at first, but Donald Trump has done the work of dividing the country into reasonable people and sociopaths.
I don’t mean that the people who vote for him are just like him. I just mean, they know there’s something wrong, but their selfishness makes them ignore it. Maybe their desire to see others suffer makes them embrace it. Maybe they’ve had similar thoughts as Trump. Maybe they really DON’T care about their families and friends.
Those things are all sociopathic. That doesn’t mean murderer, it just means someone who can stuff down the cognitive dissonance required to ever approve of anything done or said by Donald Trump and pull the lever for him.
Congratulations! You’re not one of them. And friends, there IS power in numbers.
We’re here when you need us. Thanks for being our fuel.