fuck it. post ohiocore

Bob & Sally Are Not Friends

There have been a lot of calls on social media lately, in the form of blogs, memes, videos, and status updates, demanding that Trump supporters and not-Trump supporters put aside our pitch forks and learn to get along. Given the current political climate, and the fact that the more liberal sections of society are the ones doing the loudest protesting, it’s safe to say that most of these memes et al are probably not aimed at those supporting the President. Since many make references to “snowflakes” or encourage one side to “grow up,” two insults pretty routinely flung at minority factions who are busy stomping the streets attempting to ensure we don’t start losing rights we’ve worked literally decades to attain, it’s safe to assume that most of these memes are aimed at making the anti-Trump team get over their anger.

Here’s the thing, your memes aren’t working. You can shove stick figure Bob and Sally up your ass. If you voted for our current President, I may well tolerate you, but I’ll never accept you- a stance many Trump supporters should be quite comfortable with, since they’ve been applying it to minority populations their entire lives. I don’t forgive you. I probably never will. And for those of us who are suffering, or stand to suffer, under the current administration’s practices, your memes are doing nothing more than illustrating the same privilege that let you vote for him in the first place.

It’s super easy to look at a hostile political climate and scream “can’t everyone just get alone” when you stand to lose absolutely nothing. If you are a white, straight, cisgender, Christian human, this administration is going to take almost nothing from you. If you are male, on top of that, they are going to literally take nothing from you (except your healthcare, some of your finances, and possibly your job. Sucker). If you are not these things, there is a good chance that at some point during the duration of this administration, you are going to lose a right that has already been given to you, or you are going to find yourself staring down an extra decade without a right that you felt you were pretty close to securing.

Since I’m queer, I will use my queerness as an example to illustrate the overwhelming frustration that minority populations feel when Trump voters, or generally privileged populations, whine loudly that we need to just all get along.

All things considered, I’m a pretty privileged queer person. I live in a city that has anti-discrimination ordinances on the books. I work in a city with the same. Our capital is the second largest gay mecca in the country. My employer has incredibly stringent anti-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation and gender presentation, and everyone at my place of employment is either very accepting or completely silent regarding their homophobia. My neighbors don’t harass my wife and I for being queer. I am, in general, pretty safe. I know how lucky I am, because I know how unfriendly spaces can be to queer people. Some of those spaces exist in my state which, despite locally granted protections, does not have a single state-wide protection granted to LGBTQ persons.

In my state, the state Constitution stipulated that marriage was for only a man and a woman up until three years ago, when the Supreme Court rule that this wasn’t okay. Because of that ruling, queers in my state are entitled to get married and are entitled to all the rights that come with that marriage, but they are entitled to absolutely nothing else. We can be fired for being queer. We can be denied housing, denied promotions, or asked to leave a business or public space, because we are queer. We can be told which bathrooms we are allowed to use, we can be denied the right to adopt just because we’re gay and, at times, we can even be denied medical treatment or other basic services. Since there are also absolutely no protections for sexual orientation built into federal law, excepting the right to marry, we have no recourse if we do not live in a space that has incorporated these rights and protections into their local laws or ordinances.

Thankfully, my state is one where cities and towns have been allowed to create their own local protections for queer people, since not all states are quite so… “kind.” North Carolina, for instance, all but went to war with itself when individual cities attempted to rebel against the hatred often espoused at the state level. The end result was a statewide “bathroom bill” that isn’t really abided by in a lot of more liberal spaces, but does a great job of making homophobes and transphobes feel like their views are valid and worthwhile. Indiana has had similar issues with Mike Pence’s religious freedom bill.

Telling a queer or trans person to suck it up and get along with a Trump supporter is, effectively, telling them to suck it up and get along with someone who is comfortable stripping them of their rights or allowing them to continue living in an environment where they have fewer rights than those who are straight or cisgender. Admittedly, not all Trump supporters voted for him because they hate gay people or because they want to see gay people oppressed or treated like shit. A vote for him, however, is an admittance that they don’t really care if gay people are oppressed or treated like shit, though. Trump told us exactly how he felt about the LGBTQ community when he selected Pence, possibly the most anti-LGBTQ politician in the country right now, as his Vice President. He told us how he felt about us when he acknowledged that, though he would be unlikely to work to overturn the Supreme Court decision allowing us to marry, he would have no trouble signing a national religious freedom bill, ensuring that those with a moral opposition to who I am as a human, never have to actually treat me like a human.

Bills like that are more than just “cake” and “flowers,” as anyone who is actually queer can tell you. A bill of that nature would guarantee that full rights under the law, for LBGTQ individuals, would never exist. All anyone who didn’t like us would ever have to do to legally discriminate against us, is claim that serving us is a violation of their sincerely held religious beliefs. Don’t want to serve gay people at your coffee shop? Claim we violate your religious beliefs. Don’t want us to go clothes shopping there? Claim our shopping method violates your religious beliefs. Don’t want to have to treat us in the emergency room? Claim that doing so violates your religious beliefs and, just like that, you’ve contributed to the death of yet another queer or trans person in America. Fuck the cake. Fuck the flowers. I want to know that if my house is on fire, the local fire department isn’t going to let it burn down because, “Ew, lesbians are  yucky,” and actually get away with that response.

If you voted for Trump, you might not personally light my house on fire, or kick me out of a coffee shop, or refuse to treat me if I’m sick, but you’re admitting that you don’t really care that much if these things happen to me. Because it was stated, clearly and repeatedly, that things like this were a possibility if he won, which meant you voted for him knowing that his election to office would probably hurt me and others like me. You don’t get to passively allow injury to another party out of some espoused indifference to their well-being, only to then get angry when the party in question decides that maybe you’re not actually their friend after all.

Now take this is and multiply it by every minority group in this country that is being negatively effected by this administration’s quest to do precisely what they said they would do while they were campaigning. Racism is rampant, with crosses being burned in yards and white supremacist rallies taking place all over the nation. There are literal Nazis in the streets, as evidenced by the fact that they are carrying Nazi flags and sporting Nazi regalia. Our nation is locking small immigrant children into detention centers and, even after swearing that they will get them back together with their parents, routinely failing to make that happen. Women may well lose the right to abortion and certain types of birth control with the inevitable appointment of another far-right, anti-Roe v. Wade, justice to the Supreme Court.

If you voted for Trump, you helped make this happen.

I’m not going to be mean to you about it. I’m not going to taunt you about the fact that you might not have healthcare anymore and, if you work in manufacturing or agriculture, there’s a real chance he’s going to kill your job instead of make you more money. I’m not going to point at you in public spaces and taunt “look everyone! A Trump supporter! Look upon the face of stupidity and evil!” But I’m also not going to make myself be friends with you and I’m not going to forgive you. It won’t matter how many times you call me childish. It won’t matter how many stupid fucking memes you make about Bob and Sally and their stick figure friendship.

At the end of the day, my well-being was not a factor in your overall decision making when you went to the polls. To that end, your well-being, specifically your desire to feel liked and appreciated, is of absolutely no concern to me. If you wanted me to like you, perhaps you should have cast a vote that implied that you like me. I deserve better from my friends. So do the black people in this country. So do the immigrants in this country. So do the young children this country is keeping in cages. I can’t make you realize that you need to care about other people, but until you figure out how I think you need to stop bitching that the very people you don’t care about, don’t really care about you, either.

So, no. Bob and Sally aren’t friends. And Bob’s just gonna have to get over it. It’s a concept he should be familiar with, since he probably spent the first six months after the election telling Sally precisely that. It sort of sucks when people you thought were your friends make it apparent that they don’t really like you, doesn’t it?

Now imagine that “sort of sucks” coming with a side of “no more civil rights.”

Fuck you, Bob.