Would you have been a Nazi if you lived in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich? How do you know? Or would you have been part of the resistance? How do you know?

Perhaps the craziest thing that could have happened during this cardinal T-square with Pluto, Jupiter, and Uranus happened: the leader of the superpower is completely, absolutely, unqualified, and perhaps the last person on Earth most of us would want running the country. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is a traitor who interfered with a U.S. election. And, due to a formality that was put together to make Southern states feel they were more a part of the union, the crazy was voted into the presidency not by the people. It was by the electoral college, who vote based on geography and not population. The people didn’t want this man. In fact, he lost the population vote by three million votes.

I can’t get down to any of the marches today. I wish I could, so instead, I will do my part to make sure that the other shoe doesn’t drop and the inevitable doesn’t happen.

I haven’t had time to blog about this, and frankly, I’ve been hesitant to do so for fear of alienating my audience, as if thirty people who have followed my blog would suddenly be scandalized to find out that I hate Donald Trump and I have hated the man since he announced that he was throwing his hat in and was going to disrupt what was supposed to be a serious race for the leader of the United States.

And now he is the real, actual president whose sole agenda is smearing the black man who was the previous president. In an ironic twist, his minions and fans are acting as if Trump is somehow going to restore adherence to the Constitution. What they are upset about is the Affordable Care Act. What they refuse to see is that their own homeboys, the Republicans in Congress, wouldn’t move on anything if the black man in the presidency was involved in it.

They didn’t want a woman president. They sat by and cheered while Kaiser Trump threatened to put her in prison Unconstitutionally. They sat by and cheered while he made promises without plans to deliver them. They sat by and cheered when they found out he bragged about sexual assault.

And they did more than cheered. They voted for the monster.

We are now in a cold civil war. I have cut off family and friends over this. I start seeing their true colors, and I cannot abide. If you are against the things that keep me alive, well, and safe, you are against me. If you feel the need to mansplain why I shouldn’t feel this way, then this is the last time you speak to me. If you invoke Jesus in your reason for having Trump around, you affirm my atheism. If you’re non-Christian and you voted for Trump, you should have just cut off one of your arms. If you honestly think that we’re going to be free to practice spirituality as we choose in a country where Christians think they’re taking over, you’re a fool. If you’re not white and think that voting for Trump was a good idea, you’re a fool: populism is fueled by hatred of the other, and don’t think that because you share the same ideals as the now-justified racist holding the pitch fork that he is going to overlook the color of your skin or the shape of your eyes and not make his country great again by getting rid of you.

Because historically, this is how countries make themselves great again. They get rid of the Other. If you are the Other, you’re fucked.

I don’t have to compromise what I need to let you have a forum. If you think that we have to give Trump a chance, that he deserves a clean slate now, you are incredibly stupid. A man is judged by the things he says and does; to know what kind of awful person he is and then to say that it doesn’t matter come the 21st (or Monday rather, because he’s taking the weekend off) takes either serious intellectual acrobatics or absolutely no thinking.

You don’t want people thinking you’re cruel or mean because you don’t want people to have healthcare? Guess what? You don’t get to dictate that.You don’t get to tell people not to judge you based on the things you say and do and expect it to work. If you tell me that I can’t have something I need that you don’t need because it just happens to go against your philosophy, I’m not going to take it as a rational argument, because it’s not. I will think you’re a selfish person. You insist big government isn’t my friend. Well, you’re not either, and you can afford private insurance.

This is isn’t mere political, economic, or social conservative populism. This is the start of something really ugly.

Me? I’m a woman. They want to take away my reproductive rights. The Predator of the United States, the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief, has legitimized sexual assault.

I am also a writer, and the first order for the Predator of the United States wasn’t to attack healthcare, but to attack free speech and the freedom of the press. We don’t have to give this moron reverence. The position of the president of the United States is a revered position and he is unworthy of it.

To give up your right to criticize the president is to give up the spirit that lead to the American Revolution. And Bill Maher is right: we need to take cues from the Tea Party. The Tea Party created the monster that is Trump, but they managed to mobilize and scare the shit out of people and scare them into voting for a sociopath. Can we not do the same but for the good of the country?

I’m also going to lose my health insurance soon. I work nearly full-time, and I go to law school full-time. I also take care of someone. But I also don’t make a steady income, and I live in the city, where the cost of living is high. This isn’t what I planned, but everyone has a few hard years, and I am making it work. I can make more at a full-time job, but I can’t do that and stay in school. No one wants to hire a manager who is going to peace out in 18 months to pursue another career. If Illinois leaves Medicaid expanded, I may  qualify, but if the ACA is repealed, no state is required to keep their expanded Medicaid services.

My boyfriend, who is now sick and is now very limited in the work he can do, is going to lose his health insurance until July. This means not getting the surgery he needs to get back into shape to go back to work. This means having to pick and choose which of his necessary medications to get each month. This means not knowing what will happen if he has to be hospitalized because he doesn’t have that medication. If I quit school and go back to work full-time, I not only will make far less than I could if I were a lawyer, but I would also have a ton of loans to pay back on top of it. I might be able to cut back to part-time and figure out how to work around this, but that also means losing my scholarship and my stipend, which is going to cost me more money that I have to get from somewhere.

There are a few things people seem to forget when arguing about “Obamacare”:

1. An individual mandate was the only way to get the GOP to maybe sort of work with him and stop blocking everything the black man does.
2. This is a name-your-price healthcare industry. The reason it costs so much is because everyone has their hands in the cookie jar. Fostering competition doesn’t mean simply stepping back and letting companies do whatever they want. Competitions have rules, and here, the rule is that the industry dictates the price and you pay because most people cannot afford to sneak into Canada or even Mexico to get affordable healthcare. The industry is inherently building against competition. Healthcare doesn’t even have to be an industry. Crime prevention isn’t.
3. Universal healthcare doesn’t mean that the government tells you what you can and can’t do with your health. Even if it puts limits on what it will cover, is this really so strange? After all, your own doctors can put the kibosh on some fucked up thing you want to do that they think is a bad idea.
4. The alternative to not having a USDA is going back to the robber baron era of anyone selling any old thing and you hoping it didn’t kill you. It also means relying on the institutions in other modern countries to tell us what is good medicine and what is garbage.
5. The reason people are suffering under the ACA is:
   1. The health insurance companies can still name their prices.
   2. They live in states that didn’t expand Medicaid coverage.
      1. If your state didn’t expand Medicaid, you live in a poor state that is also GOP-run. Voting for more GOPs isn’t going to fix your problem. Don’t act as if your politicians didn’t know that screwing you over wasn’t going to fan the flames.

This was a campaign started on fear and ignorance, and it will be a presidency based on fear and ignorance. And the GOP didn’t want Trump. They hate this guy. They’re stuck with him though.

Oh, the fear of terrorists, which is ridiculous, because most Trump minions and fans don’t exactly live in places that are ideal or even sensible for terrorist attacks. Ain’t no one gonna blow up your corn silo there, Cleevis. Some parts of the country may look like the disaster that Trump is selling to his gullible. Appalachia, the Rust Belt. Many parts do not. Inner cities are not dumps. I live in an inner city. It’s a nice neighborhood. The average American doesn’t actually know what inner city means. Chicago isn’t a disaster. It’s my town, and it is nice.

And I don’t appreciate some guy who makes a living on bankruptcy and swindling people telling me everything in my life is a disaster and it sucks.

Trump cannot bring back manufacturing to the Rust Belt. I grew up in the Rust Belt. You don’t take an old economy and try to create a new one on top of it. I grew up in a city that actually turned away factories over the decades. The problem is myriad. It is local politics as well. It is that our economy has shifted away from unskilled work to skilled work and our education hasn’t caught up.

But the main reason he can’t do this is because the only real way to compel corporations to stay in the United States is to forbid them to leave, because of corporate personhood. And right now, a human being cannot be compelled to stay in the United States. Sure: you can make it harder for them to do business in the United States. You can raise tariffs. You can raise corporation taxes. You can also make it so selling to countries other than the United States seems a more viable solution.

And the problem isn’t bringing back manufacturing jobs, it’s:

1. Bringing back jobs for unskilled and uneducated laborers. We have manufacturing jobs for skilled and educated laborers. Fuck, when I lived in the Rust Belt in Upstate New York, that was what they were hiring for on a consistent basis. The state community colleges had pipeline programs from the school to the factories and plants. On that note:
2. Philosophically speaking, the same logic from healthcare applies to jobs. I am not entitled to healthcare for the same philosophical reasons other people are not entitled to a job. If you are an unskilled worker, and you have no education or training that helps you stay competitive, then why does the government owe you a job fit for your regressive or non-existent skill set? I suppose if it is out of the question that we all have free public university and college, then it is out of the question that the uneducated and unskilled can do anything about it. A college degree doesn’t mean what it used to mean. It is now what a high school diploma was back in the 1920’s.
3. The only way you’re going to bring back manufacturing jobs for unskilled or uneducated workers is to get rid of all the robots, or repeal all the OSHA laws. Seriously. Robots may be more efficient at repetitive tasks, but robots do work that is too risky to have people do. In the developing and third world, humans risk their lives and health to do what we in America deem to risky for humans to do.
   1. Getting rid of the robots also inhibits a sector of the manufacturing industry. After all, someone has to make the robots, right? People actually make and design robots and machines to do manufacturing work. What will they do after they’re put out of business?

This would require a wholesale regression in our economy back to the 1960’s. A boutique chocolate shop or pot brownie cafe is one thing. Cars, batteries, even stop signs, cannot be safely made entirely by hand. This would put us on par with developing nations, not with developed ones. This would be no good for his own businesses, where his allegiances lie. Why would he do that to himself? He, along with every other investor, would have to pull out of the United States.

There is a reason that Trump loves the poorly educated. And when you say something like that, what you mean is that you want them to stay that way. How horrible.

Securing America’s borders with (another) wall is a waste of time and money. Mexicans are not taking our jobs. They’re taking the jobs I just described above. They are doing by hand what is considered too dangerous, messy, or painful for Americans. Most people would not bus tables for 16 hours a day for $3 an hour. Most customers would not pay what the labor is actually worth.

One of the arguments against giving workers a living wage is that fast food work doesn’t deserve $15 an hour, because it isn’t meant to be a career, or that it doesn’t require a lot of skill. Perhaps, but there is a lot of risk. You are dealing with hot oil, angry people, drunk people, and moving at a fast pace. When I worked at a Denny’s, I incurred more risk to my person than when I worked in a factory. I was safer in a factory.

Mexicans aren’t killing or raping Americans any more than Americans are doing this to themselves. Also…Mexicans wouldn’t sell drugs if no one were buying them, which the same reason Americans sell drugs.

And never mind the wall. There is already a structure along most of the U.S. Mexican-border.

No, you can never force another sovereign nation to pay for something you want, no matter how much a bloated idiot tells you that.

But maybe this is what Trump proposes to do is to take all the unskilled former manufacturers from the red states and bring them to the South West and hire them to work on the wall.

But who is going to pay for it?