Anecdotal, but I've also noticed multiple layoffs the literal day after the election. Obviously this could be a total bad luck coincidence, but is it related at all to the election? Trying to cut costs ahead of perceived financial hardship? Idk.
Oh ok calling it now. Mass layoffs coming to a workplace near you.
Lol. Lmao, even.
one of the most frustrating - not the most infuriating, not the most devastating, not the scariest - but the most frustrating, on a granular level, things about this goddamned election is the way people voted for an economy that is going to directly fuck them over, bad.
The thing that really kills me, in terms of frustration, is the people who were all about the economy. They don't give a fuck if I get lined up by a firing squad for teaching college students about the Reconstruction, or for being queer; they don't give a fuck if my brother gets deported to a country he's never been to because he's not white and was in the wrong taqueria at the wrong time; they don't give a fuck if my friends and colleagues and loved ones and strangers get rounded up and put in a camp and killed or deported or worked to death, or if every Black youth in the US gets a threatening text, or if trans kids' suicide rates go up. They might not even care if half our national parks and tribal sacred lands and national monuments get carved up and mined out, or if Trump stays in office for sixteen years.
What they care about is if they'll have enough money to pay their rent or mortgage, buy the groceries they want and need, get gas to get to and from work, school, their friends' house, etc., and save up enough to retire someday. They want gas, and eggs, and meat, and chocolate, and car repairs, to be affordable.
And so they either stayed home*, or voted for Trump, because they didn't know anything about Harris's economic policies and had been hearing from the most irresponsible news media imaginable, that public opinion "said" Biden was bad for the economy and Trump "said" he wouldn't be. And, let's face it, because they didn't really want a Black woman to be president.
But.
every plan Trump has mentioned he wants to do is going to make their lives immeasurably worse. not just mine. not just people who are Black, or Brown, or Queer, or immigrants. Their food bills are going to go up; their rent is going to go up; their gas prices are going to go up; their doctors' bills and medical costs are going to go up, and so is their insurance.
I have a hard time feeling bad for them. But I am going to grit my teeth and work to improve their lives, too, because we're all in this fucked up sinking ship together. If I write them off and say I don't care about their suffering, only the suffering of my own people, sooner or later I'll make the same mistake they just did.
The sad reality is that, if you want progress and community, you need to save all the people from the leopards, even if they voted for the leopards.
