I Don’t Care Who the President Is and Neither Should You
2016 ended with wailing and lamenting. Every left-wing podcaster I listened to was preparing for the worst, planning for a future in which they would have to fend off hordes of MAGA hatted shock troopers trying to drag them to the camps. The Stasi never came.
Now it’s 2021 and we’re seeing the same wailing and lamenting, coming from the other side of the aisle. I’m not going to get hung up on the fact that the grieving process on the right included storming a federal building.
I genuinely don’t care about federal buildings beyond them looking neat. But I’m also seeing the same level of apocalyptic rhetoric. I want to tell them what I wish someone had told me in 2016. It doesn’t matter.
Donald Trump managed to do all of nothing in 4 years. Every terrible thing we’ve associated with his campaign have been standard procedure for the government for longer than most would care to admit. His inflammatory rhetoric wasn’t anything a sufficiently platformed nutjob could have offered. As someone that lives in the bible belt, I can assure you no one was waiting for permission to be a bigoted fuckwit.
Now that I’ve spoken about things that don’t matter, I want to mention something that does. At the start of 2017, while all my liberal friends were clutching their pearls and trying to choke down the bitter remains of brunch, a bill was introduced to the Tennessee state legislature. The bill was set to prevent EBT recipients from purchasing “high calorie foods”, a term so nebulous it’s impossible to not abuse it. The sole purpose was to prevent people that received “food stamps” from buying food the privileged class didn’t think they deserved.
On the other hand, a bill that prohibited smoking on playgrounds was assigned to a subcommittee and fell into legislative hell. Smoking on playgrounds seems like something obviously illegal, but it isn’t because no one cared enough to press the issue.
These are the kinds of bills that make an impact and they’re being legislated every day at the state level. People track the minutiae of federal processes, but at the end of the day, the decisions being made on Capitol Hill rarely make a difference in the lives of real people.
Tuition-free college, legal marijuana, healthcare, these are problems that have a real impact in people’s lives. There are also many places in America where these problems are being solved by enterprising state legislatures. In Tennessee, my home, every resident is promised at least a two year education at the state’s expense. This promise is backed by a family of grants funded by the Tennessee lottery and includes programs for both high school graduates and adult students. While this isn’t the perfect solution and the coverage of the grants could go much farther, that is a problem that will be solved at the state-level long before it reaches Capitol Hill.
I want to close with a little exercise. What is the makeup of your state legislature? Is it a bicameral system modeled on the US Congress like most, or do you live in Nebraska and have a wacky unicameral system? Who is the state senator in your district? The state representative? What bills have been introduced this year? How does your representative feel about them? What’s their voting history? Did you vote for them?
If you don’t have answers to these questions, but you have really strong opinions about the 2020 election, you’re engaging in an unhealthy and self-defeating way. Before you start freaking out about who the president is or isn’t, just look around and ask yourself if you’re comfortable with the community you’re in. If you aren’t, that’s actually something that’s within your power to change.
