reality or surreality

You go day by day. Every day there's a fresh wave of anger, pain, despair, frustration, anxiety. You begin again.

So it goes, day by day.

The stories have been rough; whether of hate crimes or inspiration, moving words or frustrating point missing, they take a toll.

But here's an assortment:

• Hillary Clinton didn’t fail us. We failed her. - America pretends it is perfectly comfortable with the ideal of a female president, only to discover that it is disappointed or horrified by every human woman it encounters. Words like “tarnished” enter the story when idealised women fail to materialise.


• The GOP’s Attack on Voting Rights Was the Most Under-Covered Story of 2016 - This was the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.
  
  ...Even if these restrictions had no outcome on the election, it’s fundamentally immoral to keep people from voting in a democracy. The media devoted hours and hours to Trump’s absurd claim that the election was rigged against him, while spending precious little time on the real threat that voters faced.


• Seth Meyers Shares Remarks on Donald Trump's Presidency


• I’m a Coastal Elite From the Midwest: The Real Bubble is Rural America - To pin this election on the coastal elite is a cop-out. It’s intellectually dishonest, and it’s beneath us.
  
  We, as a culture, have to stop infantilizing and deifying rural and white working-class Americans. Their experience is not more of a real American experience than anyone else’s, but when we say that it is, we give people a pass from seeing and understanding more of their country. More Americans need to see more of the United States. They need to shake hands with a Muslim, or talk soccer with a middle aged lesbian, or attend a lecture by a female business executive.
  
  We must start asking all Americans to be their better selves. We must all understand that America is a melting pot and that none of us has a more authentic American experience.


• There is a group of young girls drawing notes to Hillary in chalk on the sidewalk outside of HFA HQ


• Pistons coach goes on tirade about ‘racist and misogynistic’ Donald Trump - It’s incredible. I don’t know how you go about it, if you’re a person of colour today or a Latino. Because white society just said to you, again - not like we haven’t forever - but again, and emphatically, that I don’t think you deserve equality. We don’t think you deserve respect. And the same with women. That’s what we say today, as a country. We should be ashamed for what we stand for as the United States today.
  
  (related: Gregg Popovich Blasts Donald Trump's Election In Lengthy Monologue: "We Are Rome". Looks like the NBA is doing all right; I frankly don't want to know what hockey players and coaches are thinking.)


• 19 Totally Real Conversations Obama And Biden Have Had Since The Election - *aggressively wears friendship bracelet*
  
  (and more)

I also finished my 15-volume reread of MARS and it is just such iddy comforting soap opera drama and romance. It's the kind of soothing emotional h/c I needed as I seek escapism from reality. Which I continue to do because I just don't want to deal with life as it is; as I said, all the stories are exhausting.

So I'm off to watch Elementary and drink wine and make dinner and all that jazz.