And you know what did it? What finally pushed me over the edge?

This week’s marches. These so-called “resistance” events that were nothing more than glorified brunch parades. Cops guarding the route. Organizers insisting on “unity” while refusing to name what the hell they’re actually resisting. Signs about 401ks and “saving democracy” but not a damn mention of mass deportations, erased trans lives, or the fascism stomping on our necks.

And now? Now we see it in writing.

Democrats, the ones who begged for our votes, are openly calling due process violations a distraction. A man was illegally deported to El Salvador despite a court order. He's being held without access to family or lawyers. And what does Gavin Newsom say?

It’s the distraction of the day.

The fucking distraction of the day. Because human rights are too messy, too brown, too queer, too unpollable. Because this fight isn’t marketable. Because empathy is inconvenient.

You know what’s worse? I’ve seen this before.

When I ran ConTessa, I begged marginalized folks to stand beside me. I gave up years of my life, money, time, safety—so others could have the visibility they said they wanted. And when it came time to risk something, when we needed people to speak up, push back, demand structural change? They disappeared. And the organizations that claimed to “support” us? Gen Con and their ilk? They wanted us there—but only if we paid our own way. When I pushed back, people told me, “I’ll still be attending. It’s important visibility.”

Visibility? Without solidarity is a knife.

I’ve spent years showing up. Voting in every election. Backing Democrats, even when they trampled my rights, because I believed in strategic survival. Because I believed someone had to hold the line.

But what have we gotten in return?

• No codified Roe.
• No Equality Act.
• No trans protections.
• No action when we are abducted, erased, discarded.
• And now, when we dare to question the focus of their protest photo ops, we get told we’re “defeatist” or “boring.”

We were there for them. We showed up when they needed votes, when they needed bodies, when they needed morality cosplay. But when we need them? When our rights are on the chopping block?

Silence. Or worse, strategy memos about how our pain is bad optics.

This isn’t just betrayal. This is clarity.

If they won't stand up for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, if they won't stand up for trans people, for disabled people, for immigrants, for the working poor, then they will not stand up for me.

And I will not stand with them.

I'm done marching for people who don't show up for me. I'm done voting for parties who see my existence as a liability. I'm done swallowing my fear and rage for the sake of their comfort.

I don’t need their approval. I need a future.

And if they’re too afraid to build it with me, then they’re the distraction. Not me. Not us.

Them.

I have to go pick her up this afternoon. She'll need to see her normal vet and we'll probably have to put her on an anti-seizure medication, but she'll be alright. My brain, though, seems to have only one way to respond to things, and that's running immediately to the worst worst worst worst case scenario. It's part of how cancer left indelible marks on my psyche. It was the worst thing I could imagine.

The worst thing I could imagine is what sends me into hyper vigilance. My brain just wants to prepare me so that if the worst of the worst comes true, I'm prepared to handle it... it's doing its job. It's just that it's exhausting me. Literally exhausting me. I keep going over all the reasons we don't need to be hyper vigilant about this, but only medication seems to get through.

My brain, by the way, does this with everything. EVERYTHING. I had some anxiety prior to cancer, mostly around work and stepping out of my comfort zone in other areas of my life. This was brought on by childhood abuse. My mother had this horrible abusive pattern. Get mad at me about something ridiculous, start a fight where the power dynamics are impossible for me to do anything to defend myself – especially as a child, withdraw love and affection I'm guessing punitively, then just wait. After a number of weeks, months, or years, she then returns to my life and expects the incident will just be forgotten and never brought up again.

As a result, even though I've been no contact with my family for the last 15+ years, I'm always on the lookout for some random thing that'll set off someone around me that I'd like to avoid. Cancer intensified that to the Nth degree. EVERYTHING is life or fucking death. Fight or flight. The biggest problem with THAT is that I pick fight. And when I fight, I fight to hurt because I was bullied with impunity throughout my entire life by children and adults. I know what hurts people. I know how to find a person's insecurity and hammer on that over and over and over until they rage or they cry or they slink away. I've done it before and I feel bad about doing it, even if the person deserved a taste of their own medicine, but I don't like it.

I don't like it, but I think it's necessary. Not as mindless cruelty to people you dislike, but as targeted anger to people who harm others. I want to say I learned how to weaponize the bullying of others against them when I was in 6th grade. Fourth and fifth grades were full of bullies that loved to make fun of my name or my clothes or my family or any little thing they could trigger me on... and I was (and still am) an emotional person who cries when they're angry, frustrated, sad, depressed, basically... if it's too much emotion, I cry.

I realized, after Stephanie Strayer pushed me against a brick wall so hard I hit my head, then took a Polaroid of me crying and showed it to everyone, that this is what hurts people, and this is how girls hurt girls who don't fit in. Like a girl who was actually nonbinary, but didn't have words for that in the 80s and had to deal with other labels like, “not like the other girls”, and “tomboy” that were close, but not quite true, and always kinda carried a negative connotation, with a German last name that was easy to make into new, horrible words. These bullies pulled out the my insecurities and weaponized them.

So, in 6th grade, when a girl whose name I don't remember kept relentlessly attacking me in front of her friends over every little thing, finally got on my last nerve, I turned to her and told her that at least I didn't have to suck up to the teacher to get a decent grade. I think I used the words “teacher's pet” a few times while her dumbass friends looked on and made “oooo” sounds. I dropped it, walked away, and she didn't bother me ever again.

But I knew I hurt her, and I didn't like hurting her.

But I also know it works. Because it works on me.

To bring that back around to politics and pulling punches, this is what I mean. Not a lot of people are willing to go there because we're not like them. Which is admirable, but short-sighted. No, we aren't mean and cruel. We don't hurt people because it makes us feel good, and we do our level best not to hurt people at all, no matter how brainwashed they happen to be. We understand the reasons, and we know who is feeding these poor souls all these crap lies to exploit them... but we can't let the town idiot run the town.

Red states CAUSE their own disasters. They ignore climate change, prioritize really dumb and bad culture war legislation, let corporations get away with murder. While it's super lovely to think of the poor people, it's these poor people that voted in such a way that their state became a mess. At some point, blue states are just enabling the really bad choices that red states make. If the federal government wants to limit any federal aid that goes to California wildfire victims, California will need to keep more of our resources at home.

We can't do anything about the discrepancy between where federal dollars go because the IRS controls all that directly. We CAN, however, keep our experts at home, where we need them, and give no additional aid other than what they're naturally getting through our federal taxes. Tough love. You all keep voting in ways that make your states vulnerable to natural disasters. We've supported you for a very very long time, but there comes a point when you have to learn from your own mistakes.

It won't happen, though... nominal leftists are far more interested in appearing as though they're model compassionate progressives than actually doing the messy work necessary to make change. Not in a purity test “have you ever made a mistake” sort of way, but in a holier-than-thou, look-at-how-compassionate-we-are sort of way. In the past, I've seen people who have done some terrible things, never took accountability for their actions, never sat with their discomfort, never did anything at all to indicate they've learned from the experience be welcomed back into nominal leftist spaces because of “compassion”.

It's not that people don't deserve opportunities to change their path... they absolutely do... but they have to actually change their path. Nominal leftists (a term I lifted from something I read on reddit) are often pretty selfish. A lot of what they do is for the optics, after all. That selfless compassion. That unconditional love for your fellow humans. They would sacrifice everything to help someone else... but that thinking doesn't ever get us forward.

People keep voting for bad infrastructure, then we keep cleaning up the mess left behind. Then, when we are in actual need of help we don't get it or it comes with conditions because the people we're helping aren't even being compassionate for the optics. They don't care. They don't know how to be compassionate at all. That dysfunctional cycle has got to be disrupted somehow.

California will recover with or without federal aid. We are the world's 5th largest economy. CAL Fire has decades of experience fighting wildfire and spreads that knowledge across the states. There are a gazillion other reasons and ways California could fuck the rest of the country by keeping our resources closer to home. But we won't do it, even if there seems to be no other way there's going to be any appreciable change.

Plus, if the federal government really does restrict aid based on required changes they are not qualified to decide, it becomes necessary to conserve our resources. California resources for Californians. It would be a messy, uncomfortable, and difficult place to manage for a while, but maybe a little FAFO would wake up the red state leeches?

Anyway, just heard about my dog. She's doing well, I'll get to go pick her up in an hour and a half. I'm gonna make the appointment with her family vet right now to look at medication options. Writing this post helped me focus on something, so I'm grateful for that.