Commiserate. From the late 16th century: from Latin commiserat- ‘commiserated’, from the verb commiserari, from com- ‘with’ + miserari ‘to lament’ (from miser ‘wretched’).
And oh, how les misérables lament these days.
The most important part, for our sanity, has to be the com - the with part. We need one another now more than ever.
I intended to sit down and write yesterday, but sometimes there really is just too much. Too much news. Too much emotion. Too much too much. I had started my day by commiserating with a long time dear friend about * looks around, gestures wildly *. She, too, spends her time consumed. (She gave me permission to share some of our conversation - those comments appear in italics.)
Consumed with incredulity. How did we get here so fast?
I have been rewatching The Handmaids Tale and that is where we are seriously headed.
Consumed with frustration. Where is the pushback from our leaders?
And our representatives don't care. I email and call all day and actually got told that one rep is aware how we feel but doesn't care. He will vote however the troll wants him to.
Consumed with the abject idiocy that exists, even in decent people.
My physical therapist asked me yesterday why I was still working at my age. I just laughed and told him I didn't know if my social security is still going to be there tomorrow. He seemed totally shocked that that was an issue. By the time my appointment was over, he was ready to go home and actually do the research needed.
Consumed with fear. There is no certainty to the word retirement, so she, like my husband, continues to push it off.
I will be 69 in April. I should not still be working full time. I should be enjoying a tiny home and playing with < my grandchild>. I understand his (my husband's) thoughts though. I keep thinking if I die while I am still working at least my company has a huge life insurance policy on me so my kids will get that.
Consumed with anger. Sleeplessness, sick to her stomach, ragey.
I have nightmares every night. I just want to be happy again.
That last line. Oof.
I just want to be happy again.
So much that. We felt it during the summer, remember? We felt hope, we smiled, we rejoiced at coalescing around a candidate who aspired to bring people together, to see everyone, to help everyone, to raise everyone. The feelings were palpable, not just inside each of us as individuals, but externally as we joined together and shared those hopes and dreams and aspirations for this country's future.
And it wasn't because Biden was bad and Harris was so much better. He wasn't bad. He was actually pretty great in the overall. But when Harris stepped in, we did have to acknowledge that even with so much experience and heart, age does need to move aside for youth.
What so much of our response was about had to do with how horrific was the threat of Trump. What he unleashed in 2015 was/is a virus for which there is no vaccine. He is herpes in human form. His cult nothing but open, oozy sores looking to infect as many as possible with their poison.
And now, through a ketamine addled, Nazissist (yes, Nazi + narcissist) billionaire who bought him and this country, we are faced with the destruction of every norm, every protection, every guardrail, everything we hold dear.
So commiserating is necessary, so needed. We know we are not alone, but there is knowing, and there is knowing. And that latter knowing comes from sharing out loud.
That's why I sit here pounding this keyboard into oblivion. Venting my thoughts and rage that it might help you feel less alone, see that you are not taking crazy pills, that your fears are founded.
My friend bringing up The Handmaid's Tale is apt. If you have not read it, watched it, you should. More and more it is looking like a roadmap, not a dystopian fictional tale.
Missouri has advanced a bill that will create a registry of every pregnant women - are you ready? - “who is at risk for seeking an abortion.”
Called the Save MO Babies Act, it would go into effect July of 2026. Of course it gives no insight as to how one determines if a woman is at risk for seeking an abortion, which would seem to be intentional. Having a registry of every woman who is pregnant - meaning your doctor would be forced to submit your current medical status to the state, hello HIPAA? - would pretty much insure that anyone not crossing the nine month finish line would be subject to legal consequences.
Mediocre white men again inserting themselves into our uteruses.
And before anyone says it, fuck all the way off with "not all". I know not all white men are mediocre and not all white men seek to control our bodies, and not all white men are misogynist power whores. I'm married to one of the good ones. But let's be clear here, our current state of affairs is happening at the hands of mediocre white men.
Trump, Musk, Miller, Kennedy, Johnson, McConnell, Hegseth, Rubio, and on and on, including their hordes of red cap wearing dude bros. Mediocre white men, all. There is nothing special or spectacular about any of them other than where they have managed to climb. (And no, Musk is not a genius, he is a thief who was born into this world with an emerald spoon in his mouth and who has stolen ideas and profited off them. The people who actually created the things he has? Geniuses. Him? not even close. Rich does not equal genius.)
But he is a hero to the poor masses of white men who must blame others for their plight. To them I say: I’m sorry that the world has moved on and that you have refused to move with it. The world requires that you step up and step in if you want to remain relevant and vital and necessary. Your only contribution has ever been to step on those you could easily marginalize, terrorize, exploit. And that’s simply not the reality that has existed for quite a while. That you refuse to see that, educate yourselves, for Christ's sake, adapt, choosing instead to kick and scream and lash out? That speaks to what you are, not to who anyone else is. The educated woman or black person or brown person or LGBT+ person is not at fault here. You are. You are, at your core, what you’ve always been: weak, insecure, power hungry to an absolute, disgusting fault, and only in positions of power and authority because the patriarchy (read: centuries of other mediocre white men) has put you there.
And as the landscape of society and legal protections has shifted, so, too, has your actual hold on power, supremacy, which is why all of this is happening now. DEI was never about overlooking you to give an inexperienced minority the job. It was about giving an experienced minority the job over an inexperienced white man.
That is why your hero's first steps were to completely wipe out any DEI mentions and practices throughout government. Why educational institutions that receive any federal funding must also wipe that slate clean if they wish to continue receiving much needed dollars. Why the word transgender has been wiped away, as if that magically makes transgender people disappear, too. I'm sorry, but how two year old of you. My granddaughter has a better understanding of object permanence.
This is why lies are the complete hallmark of your heroes. They know you believe anything they say because they know you are not smart enough to question anything or seek actual information.
Last night in an interview best titled, Dumb and Dumber and Dumberer, Sean Hannity sat with President Musk and toady-in-chief Trump. And the lies poured forth. So easily disprovable, but hey, Sean knows who butters his bread. They both rambled on about the two astronauts - Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore - who have been in the Space Station since June. The two astronauts who knew coming back on schedule was a gamble, one that did not pan out due to technical issues with their return ship, and so they are patiently waiting.
Musk stated that the Biden administration abandoned them, that they were “left up there for political reasons". WTF?
“At the president’s request, we are accelerating the return of the astronauts, which was postponed—kind of to a ridiculous degree…,” said Musk.
Trump interjected: “They got left in space.”
Yes, because that is the way of NASA and decent human beings like Joe Biden. Just shoot some people into the atmosphere and forget them. /s
They sat there spewing this garbage despite both NASA, and the astronauts, having repeatedly disputed this tripe. As recent as last week both were interviewed by Anderson Cooper.
“That’s been the rhetoric. That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck—and I get it. We both get it,” Wilmore said. “But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.”
“If you’ll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let’s change it to ‘prepared and committed,’” Wilmore added. “That’s what we prefer.”
Williams said she and Wilmore “knew this was a test flight. We knew that we would probably find some things (wrong with Starliner) and we found some stuff, and so that was not a surprise.”
But hey, another opportunity to shit on the previous administration, so drop trou and push!
Mediocre orange man, Trump, also pushed off the rising inflation since he took office. He told Hannity, "Inflation is back. I had nothing to do with it." Echoes of COVID, anyone?
Every move, executive order, bloviated "weave", and bird flipping to the international community has resulted in everything spiraling quickly. Prices, stock market uncertainty, cost of materials, entire poultry farms culling their stock because of bird flu, and unemployment (all of those fired government employees will be part of the next report to come out) - all of this rests at his lifted shoes.
Farmers are feeling it. Oops, you mean the evaporation of USAID was impactful to people here?!?! Yes, Donny Dipship, where did you think all that food aid we send overseas to help keep people alive was coming from? 41% of that food was coming from US farmers - over TWO BILLION DOLLARS WORTH. And with the sweep of your Sharpie you eradicated thousands of aid jobs, farm jobs, research jobs when you essentially shuttered USAID. As of a week ago, $450 million worth of food was rotting as the distribution chain is gone. And with no distribution chain, children are starving the world over now, but hey, they are mostly of a darker hue, so meh.
But mediocre tangerine man doesn't know that. Nor does Musk. Just like they did not know that firing all the people responsible for nuclear oversight was a bad move. Or that coming out and trumpeting they had found 150 year old people receiving Social Security was inaccurate. But who cares? That lie has its shoes on and is marathoning around the MAGAverse. The truth has bunions and shoes made of no shoes.
But back to the word commiserating. Which is what all of the above has been. Venting so my head does not explode. Venting so yours stays intact as well, and that you may know you are not alone.
The with part is where our true hope lies. With each other. Which is how we must come together. In finance there is a 4% rule to withdrawing and surviving/living out your retirement years. In society, one that seeks to survive and avoid massive bloodshed, there is a 3.5% rule.
The 3.5% rule is drawn from empirical research on resistance campaigns from 1990-2006. In the dataset every campaign that mobilized at least 3.5% of the population in sustained protest was successful. Yes, there have been exceptions, most notably Bahrain in 2011-2014. Despite over 6% popular participation, their efforts failed. But, 3.5% has proven itself successful more often that not.
In a discussion paper by Erica Chenoweth for the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, she states that All movements that had at least 3.5% peak popular participation had succeeded. Moreover, all campaigns surpassing this threshold were primarily nonviolent.
That means, there is such a thing as numbers too big to ignore.
3.5% of our society must mobilize and take to the streets consistently. Physically commiserating, communicating, completely shouting down the lies, the arrogance, the criminality of this administration. Its abuses and gleeful disregard for human suffering are already being felt and we are still one day shy of a single month. As we see SNAP benefits disappear, housing assistance turn people out into the streets, and now Social Security coming into clearer danger, we cannot wait, watch, wish it all away.
Yes, we all wish our leaders would do more, but the reality is could do more. They are not the majority in either house. And hoping that some semblance of decency exists in the Republican leadership is folly. For them, doing the right thing exists only to further their own survival in a party which has not only taken a knee to Trump, but which is now threatened into subservience at every turn by Musk's money being a constant threat when their re-election comes around.
Consistency will be key. Supporting one another vital. Misery loves company, as the saying goes. But when misery has reached too many, when hunger, pain, and suffering become overwhelming, Les Mis begins to take shape. Commiserate with me, my friends.
Do you hear the people singing? My message to Trump et al, you will soon.
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free!
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