A year after the election. It feels like much more than that. So much has happened and yet so little has happened. What I mean by that is that there has been so much chaos and news about what he does and does not do, nothing seems to have been accomplished except maybe social unrest, which can be directly linked to his tenure in office.
Here’s a list of shit that has been going haywire in just the past few months:
- He’s issued multiple travel bans to prevent Muslims from immigrating to this country
- Sort of tried to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (he recently signed an executive order to discontinue subsidies that would allow lower income folks to attain affordable care)
- The Dreamer Act is being ended. This leaves Dreamers (young people who were brought into the US illegally but have grown up in the US) to try to figure out how they are going to stay here in the country they grew up in. These are people who are now important contributors to our communities
- There’s the constant thread of nuclear war with North Korea because he keeps instating Kim Jong Un, who has working on their nuclear weapons and testing missiles by shooting them out toward Japan
- Oh, he’s going to speak at an anti-LGBTQ rally. Yes, a president is speaking at an LGBTQ rally. So many things wrong with this but first of all, ISN’T THERE A MORE PRESSING ISSUE THAN THIS?!
- He’s being publicly racist against Puerto Rico, which is in dire need of assistance in the wake of Hurricane Maria, which also ripped through a lot of southern states (those states are not being spoken out against by the president, and being asked to pay back any emergency funds)
It’s absolutely insane.
Tangentially related things that are happening because he is in office is that that now neo-Nazis are coming out of the woodwork and holding rallies, speaking publicly (at universities that will take their money), and also inciting violence. More black people have been killed needlessly by law enforcement. That was always happening but it’s definitely more prominently featured now in the news, which is something that we probably need. About 50 people were killed by a domestic terrorist (a white male) in Las Vegas, about 300 more injured, and still nothing has changed in the way of gun legislation. Of course, if it didn’t change after young children were murdered in Sandy Hook, why would it happen ever?
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On the personal side of things, I got a raise this year, finally, after three years of working there. So that’s good! I’m still living with P and that’s been fun. It’s not that big a transition for me, what’s actually making it hard is that I am again in a home where there’s a lot of outside noise from people (not machines or cars) and that makes me very agitated on the regular, especially in the early mornings. It’s not a relaxing home life.
Ashima moved to Portland this month and I drove up with her and Juno. Got to see Joss, Jeremy and Avery while I was there. Portland seems nice but probably too relaxed and slow for me. Most of it anyway, aside from maybe the urban city center areas. I hadn’t been there really since that time I stayed with Arley in mid or late December. I remember it snowed lightly and I was not sure if that meant we would be “snowed in”. We weren’t, of course, but having grown up in Southern California for most of my life I didn’t know how much snow was too much snow.