Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

Today feels like an ending, the eve of the coronation of our new autocrat.

Now I know this is something that has been happening since colonizing white Europeans arrived in the Americas. We’ve been on a journey through capitalism that has turned our lives upside down repeatedly, benefitting fewer and fewer people, hurting more and more.

Our American society is fueled by violence, racism, sexism, and greed. There are good people, but the systems are oppressive, evil, and destructive.

Still, there is a difference between today and tomorrow. There is a before Trump 2.0 era that feels safer if only because it is familiar. There is something that will fundamentally change tomorrow during the Inauguration, even while it is something that culminates from all that we’ve done. We created this – especially those of us who are cisgender white folx.

Not everyone is experiencing that veneer of safety today. I understand that.

Tomorrow, the veneer of that privilege will no longer protect us from the excesses of our nation. We’ll still be privileged most of the time. As long as we aren’t pregnant, being raped by an uncle, or rejecting christianity. Deliberate decapitalization. We will be both ‘othered’ as threats to other white folx, other people who worship jesus, others who have resources they think they earned. But we will be looped in with the motherland when our whiteness is needed to cope with the inevitable increase in diversity in the United States. Sort of like how the cultural concept of whiteness itself spread because the A Team would rather align with Irish and Italian immigrants than with Black folx.

We’ve done this before.

I am scared. For everyone. But mostly right now I am scared of how I will respond when confronted with the flashpoint moment where some lug-head Trumpy feels emboldened to harass a strange in a grocery store or restaurant, at a School Board meeting, in the workplace. Do I have what it takes to resist influences that would welcome me to the pale side if I would just get on board?

I don’t want to allow that fear to control my life choices, to isolate myself or retreat. Certainly, I do not want to capitulate or get along with these evil men. And I’m not going to abandon people I value and respect and appreciate.

So this time right now matters. We must acknowledge the shift even as we must be honest about how the before times benefited some of us at the expense of most of us. I don’t mean Bezos and Musk. I mean you and me.

This isn’t the end of an era or the beginning of something new. It is the culmination of everything we refused to hear, see, or address. We are tumbling into a dystopian fascist state. Of course we are.

Today is the day before tomorrow. Perhaps as the depth of betrayal and acquiescence becomes visible, we’ll finally pay attention to the folx who have been fighting this struggle for hundreds of years.

Real Talk

Today a friend, someone I’ve known for early 20 years, stood in my living room after helping me with some tasks and told me that he honestly thinks most lesbians are ‘in it’ to be cool and that the arrest of the Pine-Richland predator was the end of that story – no need to try to support victims who didn’t ‘bother’ to come forward.

I didn’t know what to say. He’s in my home. I care about him. I had no idea this was him. And it really hit home how unprepared I am for whatever tomorrow brings.

The End

There is literally no way to end this post without reading trite, flippant, or delusional. I am not those things.

There are 16 minutes left in this day.