Aaron M. Fortkamp

I’m stuck in the ‘anger’ stage of grief. I really believe the path forward is together, but I think, like, psychologically, I’ll be stuck for perhaps months letting off this anger in a slow hiss, and therefore it seems to me worth the risk of overstepping a bit, as if someone in the next room might overhear me screaming “fuck” into a pillow. I can’t help it, at this point. I’m losing sleep, I’m so mad. I promise, after this, I’ll do my best to return to civility, cohesion, progress.

You. Stupid. Motherfuckers. Four years ago, our country beat cancer. Put it in remission. And y’all just said, ah fuck it, let’s chainsmoke anyway.

Are you proud? The whole country, the whole planet, will now suffer an immeasurably worse future because you had to prove to nobody that you will support your team no matter what. Do you feel better? You really stuck it to Biden, just the way all those Fox pundits-turned-cabinet-members told you you should, didn’t you? Did you really believe all that shit they were spewing about Kamala, or was your latent racism enough?

This doesn’t help. This doesn’t make me feel better, the anger at the people who voted for him. Maybe it’s not encompassing enough. Hey, all you liberals who skipped the vote, to prove to no one except you that you draw the line at genocide, that you will not support those who permitted the supply the weapons that are being used for indiscriminate slaughter in the Middle East: I’m glad you have such large hearts. Good for you. Perhaps someone can transplant for you a piece of your excess into the cavity where your brain should be.

Fuck.

Meanwhile on the Substack feed: lots of mocking posts reveling in the fact that the people who voted for Trump are now regretting it because of businesses everywhere clenching their legs together in anticipation of the upcoming tariffs. This is funny? People afraid? They’re googling terms like “abortion ban” and “who pays the tariff” and being unknowingly mocked for not knowing what they were voting for. And it is their fault, I know that, but also not their fault. They fell for a grift. They looked over there when all of their trusted TV personalities shouted “Look over there!” They fell for the immigrant fear. This is funny? Do you mock your grandma when she gets scammed into letting “tech support” port into her computer and steal her bank account number? Yes, people should have known better, or at least learned from the last time, but they didn’t. This is funny? Our collective antipathy towards education in this country is so strong that people pointedly refuse to learn even the lessons their own life has taught them. We’re never supposed to be unhappy, so we never show it to each other when we are, and then years later as the memories come up on our timelines of the false happiness we presented at the time, we unlearn whatever that past pain may have taught us. We believe in the fantasy again that we helped to build with our own falsity. We fool ourselves, collectively and individually. We hated COVID so now we don’t talk about it, and it’s like it never happened. Trump’s handling of the pandemic alone should have been proof enough. But the only people who learned permanent lessons from the pandemic are dead. We don’t like death, we don’t want to think about it, we don’t like illness and sadness and like a rat in a lab we just keep pushing the cocaine button, we dope ourselves up with tiny screens and limitless scrolls, forgetting things is as easy as a thumb swipe, poof, it’s gone, good luck finding it again by the way, the algorithm needs you to keep scrolling and that means all new, all the time, forever. It feels like progress, scrolling, doesn’t it, but the feed is just a wheel, little rat, you’re not actually moving anywhere.

This is not moving anywhere. There is so much anger here and no way to be rid of it, to protect myself from it. I am lost.