As you read this, I’m most likely still asleep after a long night of watching election returns and editing while also working on my blog, watching a movie, and trying to fit in a little time with my Ravenhill gaming guild.

I live an exciting life, don’t I?

When I do wake up and check my home email (work email will wait till Thursday), I’m hoping against hope that the political emails will have, if not completely stopped, at least slowed to a trickle. Sending fundraising emails to me is a waste for those campaigns anyway (especially the out-of-state ones), as I have neither the money nor the inclination to contribute. If I contribute to anything, it’s to entities that help their fellow humans (and/or critters). And good lord, do we really have to get emails from every single person running for office everywhere as well as the special-interest groups that support or decry them? Apparently the answer is yes.

There are other things that I’ll be happy to bid adieu to now that the election (all but the final counting and fighting) is over. The optimist in me is hopeful that they’ll disappear, but the realist has her doubts, considering how deeply they’ve embedded themselves. The pessimist just wants to go back to sleep because it’s all gone to hell.

🙄 Reminders from Facebook that there’s an election going on.

Yes. I know. I voted, and posted my photo with my sticker. Leave me alone now. Seriously, I’ve had enough politics to last me several lifetimes.

😵 Long political screeds that have little semblance to reality.

More than a few of my Facebook friends (some of them family) have gotten upset when I’ve posted a fact check of some meme they’ve posted that is far from true. Repeating lies doesn’t make them true (no legal investigation yet has found that Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts, for example, and you should be wary about #SaveOurChildren posts, as they have been co-opted by QAnon), and taking things out of context is to divorce them from reality. Saying it’s a joke is no excuse, since entirely too many people take political jokes seriously (make of that statement what you will), and most of the time the “joke” isn’t funny in any way (jokes are kinda supposed to be inherently funny). We need to get back to sharing the same reality and admitting that things we saw happen live actually happened, rather than listening to those who try to convince us they didn’t.

Believe me, if wishing made things real, we’d all be rich, happy, healthy and sane, and I’d have all the chocolate and cats I want.

And I want a lot of both.

👿 Social media posts declaring that supporters of one political party or another are destined for hell.

I was more than a little tired by my second day or so on Facebook of seeing posts from people I know (or at least thought I knew) to be intelligent and caring degrading anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs as the spawn of Satan. That’s one big reason I’m not affiliated with any party.

Those who professed to be following Christ’s teachings especially concerned me since I don’t recall Jesus ever saying that we should hate those who don’t look or think like us or who don’t follow our particular flavor of religion. (I recall him preaching against that, and I can imagine him going after people who support this idea like he went after the moneychangers in the temple.) While we shouldn’t make it a competition for who is the better Christian, I would hope that those who have been preaching division rethink what they truly believe.

I know, there I go hoping again. I’m trying to cut down, but it’s tough.

😤 People belligerently flouting social norms, rules, and laws to advance a political agenda.

What purpose is served by blocking freeways, or by using intimidation tactics against those with whom you disagree? The convoys that blocked traffic in various spots this weekend, as well as the blockading of the Biden bus in Texas, as far as I could see, mostly just ticked off a lot of people. Odds are that many of those people had not yet voted, and do you really think they’d be inclined to vote for the person whose supporters were intentionally blocking them from getting where they needed to go, not for the greater good, but to thumb their noses at their opposition? Earlier blocking of highways by human chains for BLM protests were ill-advised as well, especially considering that some people think nothing of mowing down protesters with their cars.

There are safety issues to consider in such tactics (just say no to involving vehicles), just as there are for refusing to wear a mask where mandated because you think your personal “freedom” is more important than everyone else’s health. Your freedoms end where another person’s begin. When everyone is masked, the odds of the disease spreading are low, and that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.

But sure, go ahead and talk about how you’re being repressed. If the covid-19 dead could, I’m sure they’d applaud your heroism. By the way, you know that was sarcasm, right?

Oh, yeah, what am I saying … some people are unable to recognize humor, thinking that only grade-school insults (but only from those on “their” side) are funny.

😲😲😲😲😲

There is a common component to those things mentioned above: Fear.

People shouldn’t have to fear going to the grocery store or to work, yet so many of us are afraid, not because of disease or any government policy, but because of people. We’ve made our fellow citizens our enemies simply because they don’t support the candidate we do, and we threaten them, sometimes with words and sometimes with weapons and/or intimidation. We “joke” about assassinating candidates or journalists we don’t like, forgetting that some people take those jokes to heart; remember Cesar Sayoc or the Capital Gazette and countless journalists who have received death threats and/or been attacked in recent years? My own paper’s Tony Holt was attacked while covering protests in Little Rock earlier this year, coming out with a broken nose, cuts, bruises, and some memory loss.

Do we really need to be armed to pick up a rotisserie chicken or to get the mail? Feeling the need to be constantly packing when it’s not a requirement for your job tells a lot of people that you live in fear and need the comfort of having a gun even though you probably won’t ever be one of the “good guys with guns” saving the day.

Should journalists start carrying guns with them to work to protect themselves from people who believe they’re the enemy of the people? Do we need to start wearing bubbles to protect us from the people who refuse to wear masks and who might be infectious (again, choosing to die because you refuse to wear a mask is a stupid hill to die on)?

Seriously. Common sense and decency would dictate that if we follow rules, we’re less likely to be hurt. That’s why we have traffic laws, criminal statutes, the Constitution, etc., as common rules we are all expected to follow for the good of all.

But common sense seems pretty rare now.

I would love to get back to a point where we live and let live; where we realize that if someone else’s decisions don’t hurt anyone else, then their choices are up to them (if you’re against abortion, don’t get one; if you’re against same-sex marriage, don’t accept that marriage proposal); where we actually talk without letting politics get in the way; and where we recognize that those who don’t agree with us aren’t the enemy. Hell, they may just be our friends (actual, not just Facebook friends).

That’d be nice.

And before anyone goes off on an abortion rant on that decision hurting someone else, remember that the vast majority of abortions are in the first trimester, long before viability, and are usually for valid reasons (meaning not because it’s inconvenient). What pro-life activists call late-term abortions are almost always because the baby will not live because of a catastrophic defect or because the mother’s life is in danger.

Doctors are not aborting babies up to the moment of birth, and women who’ve carried babies for that long fully expected to have a baby, and didn’t just decide, “Hey, I don’t want this brat.” (Studies show the bulk of healthy women aborting healthy fetuses after the first trimester were delayed by not knowing they were pregnant, or by legal or financial barriers, such as the closure of clinics and the need to travel long distances to find a provider.)

By and large the women who have an abortion late in their pregnancies are women who have, with their families, prepared for months to welcome a precious child but have been given heartbreaking news. They may be your sister or your daughter, or your wife. They’re already consumed with grief because of the choice they had to make, which no one but the couple and the doctor should have a say in.

So give it a rest on the abortion diatribe and realize that your feelings and beliefs don’t matter when it’s someone else’s life in the balance (sounds a bit like why you should wear a mask). Let these people have some peace so they can mourn their loss. We can talk later about the ways to keep abortion numbers coming down (which they have been doing for a long time); that would be by more sex education and more available contraception, which drives down the pregnancy rate, and thus the abortion rate. And while we’re at it, why are we just focusing on the women when men can get many more than one woman pregnant in the time it takes a woman to carry a pregnancy to term?

Oops. There’s that common sense again. I’d say I should stop that, but someone has to have some.