Owning Our Shit

https://medium.com/@adrianjanchondo/owning-our-shit-df551475fce7#.kpfdj89qq

I’m about to piss y’all off. I might even lose some friends because of this. If you’re too much of a (grab ’em by the) pussy to handle it or tired of angry rants, maybe you should stop reading now because I’m going in on all of us. It’s been a week since the election and I’ve had some time to weep, rage, drink a bottle of wine, gather my thoughts, eat lots of carbs, weep again and drink two more bottles of wine, but still I have not yet been able to come to peace with the worst thing that has happened to this country since they made a standalone movie for Catwoman. But maybe bitching to you, my friends, my fellow progressives, may help bring some solace and help us understand where we went wrong so we can come together and kumbaya or whatever.

I’ve got one major thing to say to you. HILLARY CLINTON DID NOT FAIL US, WE FAILED HILLARY CLINTON. Now I know, I know, she won the popular vote by almost two million votes, and I know that a lot of you were a part of that so yay go ahead and pat yourselves on the back. You done? Okay. You say she was flawed? Y’all motherfuckers didn’t DESERVE the candidate you got, and every day I watched as progressives posted on Facebook about how much they hated corrupt Clinton, talked about how imperfect she was as a candidate, posted articles that were flat out lies, or wrote things like #ImWithHerIGuess. Your enthusiasm for the former First Lady, Senator of New York, Secretary of State and first ever possible female President was shameful when you compare it to the enthusiasm the other side had for their “flawed” (racist homophobic tax evading possible rapist who has to make his undocumented Mexican maids wash the orange out of his bedsheets every fucking morning) candidate. If you would have just swallowed your pride and given Hillary half of the love you gave Obama, then we might not have woken up on November 9th worrying about families being torn apart, marriage licenses being taken way, guns getting into the wrong hands and women having to stay pregnant after getting raped. Does that sound too harsh? Too bad! This reality show is now our reality and we need to accept it and own our shit. We stepped in it and now its going to take at least four years to clean it off.

And to you people out there saying “Don’t blame me, I voted for Bernie”- suck a dick. Oh noooo- I’m so sorry you didn’t “like” Hillary. That’s so saaaad! I guess that’s worth this result. Your “I told you so” is so worth the millions of people who will suffer because of selfishness and pride. We all act like our nominee has to be the perfect representation of us regardless of how many years they’ve spent working tirelessly for the people. I didn’t give a shit about John Kerry, but I voted for the rest of my country. Every candidate has an email/Swift boat Veteran/Born in Kenya/Benghazi/Reverend Wright/Gennifer Flowers bullshit scandal that gets played over and over again, and for some reason we thought Hillary’s private email server (WTF is even a server?) was more damaging than Trump ADMITTING TO SEXUAL ASSAULT AND CALLING MEXICANS RAPISTS. Who’s talking about those damn emails now? NO ONE. Think about how the world must perceive us.

Who the fuck said you had to LIKE your nominee anyway? Guess what? There has always been and will always be at least half the people in the country who hate a Presidential nominee! This kind of thinking started with the whole “who would you want to get a beer with” bullshit from the Bush/Gore era and now it’s just gotten out of control. We didn’t always have primaries. Our parties used to pick our nominees for us. We had to deal with our choices. Now we get angry and picky if someone doesn’t meet every single criterion that we have created or if we don’t trust them because their positions evolved in a more progressive way over the years. If I had to talk to one more gay person about how Hillary wasn’t always for same sex marriage I was going to start having sex with women. Oh really? She wasn’t for gay marriage? WHY WERE YOU SO SUPPORTIVE OF OBAMA IF THAT WAS YOUR MAIN REASON FOR NOT LIKING HER??? AHHHHHH! Is it because she’s a woman and it reminded you of your own mother when she didn’t fully accept you as gay? We found a way to forgive our mothers who raised us, but we couldn’t find it in our hearts to forgive someone of no relation who evolved in their beliefs and ended up speaking on behalf of the LGBT and providing AIDS medication to people all over the world? I swear I saw more gay people posting about Hillary hating LGBT than articles about Mike Pence believing in electro shock gay conversion therapy for children, or the fact that in Indiana you can get put in jail and fined 10,000 just for applying for a marriage license if you weren’t a man and a woman. So what did we do? We’ve given a billionaire who hasn’t paid taxes the most power of ANY PRESIDENT SINCE THE 40’s. It’s like we’ve given a plumber permission to do open heart surgery on our kids. It’s because of us that one of the best Presidents this country has ever seen actually had to shake the hand of a man who was blatantly racist towards him and tried to get him out of office. Shame on us.