The Time of Monsters

Content warning - long rambling "I'm 13 and this is deep" level stream of consciousness follows.  I am trying to work something out.

Here's a thing to consider. Trump is a symptom. As much as we find it incomprehensible and offensive - Trump commands the adoration of a very large number of people. Now it's true that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by millions - but at the same time, why the hell was it close enough for him to steal it through the Electoral College? Tens of millions of people voted for him in 2016, and despite the dumpster fire that was his first term, even more people voted for him in 2020.

Is American society really that sick and depraved that such a larger chunk of it wants this shit? Why is it that running transphobic bullshit in the NY Times ends up being a successful business strategy? There's something much deeper than just the current freakout over the "Dictator on Day One".

A lot of it is that the alternatives suck. Neither Hilary nor Joe inspired people - their main selling point was that they weren't Trump. This is still like 99% of Joe's current campaign. But that only explains why they didn't get blow-out victories like they would have in a rational world. Trump still got a lot of people to vote for him. Crazy shit.

Maybe that's really it - the end of the experiment in American democracy. Maybe there is no reversing late stage capitalism and the twilight of empire. How does it go? The old world is dying while the new one struggles to be born, we are in the time of monsters. 

But then again, fighting monsters is what we are supposed to do. This is the human condition - the struggle against something larger than ourselves. This is where heroes come from - rising up against adversity to defeat the threat to us all. Or at least that's how it works in the story books.

I guess we're supposed to be the heroes. That we're supposed to do our part to stop the slide into fascism and decay. But none of us know how to. This isn't a Hero's Journey with sign-posted stops along the way. It's one where we can't even identify the monster. Who knows - maybe the monster is us.

Everyone has their own priorities and perspectives. Maybe your monster is someone else's hero. There's legions of people who have Trump as their hero.

Here's my perspective. My monster is those people. The ones who idolize Trump. And yes - they are being taken advantage of. They too are victims in all this. But that does not make them not-monsters. Also too, Trump is not the first to have exploited their small minded bigotries - they keep falling for a long line of grifting assholes promising them that "the bad guys" are really gonna get theirs. Maybe they have honest non-monster excuses to believe what they do - but surely some of them (and I venture to guess that it is a large majority) do not.

Anyways - my current confusion, the one that's been eating at me in some way or other for as long as I can remember - is trying to figure out what to do about it. How do you fight a monster like this? Clearly the act of actually fighting them only makes things worse. But letting the bullshit fester and showing people that there are no consequences for anti-social behaviour also makes things worse.

I guess this is all just a bad framework to view the world through. Maybe all of us are monsters, and as a result - none of us are monsters. Maybe the thing which makes monsters is identifying someone else as the monster - that desire for "the bad guys" to really get it this time. 

No. There are monsters - they reveal themselves to us all the time. It's just that society values monsters and rewards them and I have no idea how to make it stop.