Hello. So good to be back, and contemplating, what exactly are we contemplating? Ah yes. The possibility of total global annihilation.

I come from the midwest—we might say, I escaped from the midwest, but I never actually thought of it that way until so many people in my home state of Ohio voted for an orange psychopath for president. Okay so that gave me total pause.

And I started hitting up my spies who still live there. Here is the intel:

Those midwesterners didn't actually vote for Donald Trump.

We need to get over that idea. Because, quite frankly, they don't like him all that much—or even, at all. And they never fully believed that he was going to come through for them.

There are for certain plenty of Republican die hards out here. But most of them don't believe in Trump, and what he is now doing surprises them least of all.

They voted for Trump because they don't like people who live on the coasts. They don't like it that we moved away! They think we look down on them.

And they didn't want a woman. They don't like women who are educated, that is to say over-educated. That especially includes Hillary, but it also includes Michele Obama. They don't like smart girls.

They didn't vote for Trump; they voted against Hillary. They voted against my hero. They voted against the woman who was so much better than the man they voted for, it amounts to madness.

They hated Hillary because she's a smart chick. Nobody smarter. And she came out so clearly and calmly in favor of a woman's right to choose, a woman's right to be a full citizen of the earth. That fucking shook so many people up. The rest of us, it made whole.

This is a mournful truth. This disaster has descended on the entire planet because so many men—and women, too, but mostly men—in the American power structure cannot even begin to discuss the way women are being held out of the room where it happens, consistently and insistently. In politics, in the media, in the boardrooms, in the arts.

So here's the part we have to wrap our brains around: The so-called "elites" who everyone is mad at are in fact complicit in the story that insists that Women Are Second Class Citizens. That's what my sister who lives in Cincinnati told me. Sensible Martha, the environmental engineer, who cleans up chemical spills, that's her job. She has a nice husband and three great kids. She works as hard as anyone I ever met, and she's really nice. And she told me—ME—She gave me the news: "Theresa—Women are Second Class Citizens in this country."

It's not like we haven't been out here trying to raise the subject. For so many years, women have been trying to address this subject without pissing anybody off. It was not easy to do. Eventually—recently—women stopped being afraid of pissing anybody, aka the power structure, off. Some fantastically fierce voices have been raised in recent years, pointing to the ongoing necessity of including women in the leadership of the earth.

Most of the time it doesn't work. Every time questions of power start tocirculate around questions of gender, the whole thing blows up. And women end up trying to hide their power and sneak around and wiggle their way into the system without calling too much attention to it.

The wonder of this election was, for me: Hillary Clinton didn't try to hide anymore. Her performance was stunning. The Democratic National Convention, stunning. The debates, stunning. She slayed Trump, and the Republicans, at every turn. She won, in every way. And then a perverse fluke of a perverse electoral system, put in place at the insistence of a racist logic, handed her triumph to her male opponent.

So now we're stuck with him. And he is a nightmare, and he is going to try to unmoor not just democracy, he's going after reason and logic and the whole fucking planet. And we're facing everyone who voted for him, saying to us: You lost! You pussies! Get over it!

Okay. We all have been allowed our moment of terror, but in fact we have gotten over it.

And that means for everyone who wants to save the planet, getting over the idea that women are going to play nice, anymore. It means we are sharing this struggle from top to bottom. Race is not more important than gender. LGBTQ, not more important. Men, not more important. We are all equally important, we are all in this together.

We are all the same.

I have a white husband, and a white son. I have a Chinese daughter. We all look at the horror of despots with billions of dollars deciding that they now and again own the earth, that they can trade it and us with impunity. They are the ones who want this planet to be about power, and dominion. Well I say: Fuck that bullshit. If they wanted to share? We would have happily shared. But that's not what they're saying.

This is what's on the table now. Black lives. Women's rights. Civil rights. Religious freedom. The future of planet earth.
Trump and his minions want to turn all of us—even those who voted for him—into their subjects and their opponents. We do not agree.

Let the games begin.

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December 17, 2016