I try not to talk too much about the downward spiral that a lot of the world is currently experiencing, but my social worker said that writing my frustrations down might help me cope with them, so that’s what I’m doing today. If you’re not looking for unfiltered negative ramblings then please skip this post. If you are looking for exactly that, put on Macklemore’s “Fucked up” and get angry alongside me at what is going on in the world.
Let’s start with the “trans issue”. There are a lot of new laws, changes and quite frankly attacks when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights (I hope I got the acronym right, my intent is not to exclude anyone). Government websites in the US are removing their rights, but the biggest attack seems to be on transgender people. They’re no longer allowed to join the military and it looks like the government wants those who are already serving to be kicked out as well. Support and medication for minors is getting scrapped completely and even your passport might need to have your birth gender on it for it to be usable. Now, we can discuss for ages and ages about the morality of letting minors transition. Teenagers can make some very dumb decisions, but teenagers can also be very unhappy with where they are. That’s not at the core of this problem though. Scrapping access to proper help, medication and even support will hurt people. That’s not a solution, that’s just stopping any attempts at making people happy. I will freely admit – and have before – that when I was younger I thought that transgender people were strange. Why couldn’t they just be normal. I’ve grown since, of course, and although I understand why I had those feelings – a lack of experience with real people combined with the normal dose of teenage lack of empathy – I think it’s very important that everyone grows past this. At the end of the day, trans people don’t make my life any more difficult. They just want to be happy like the rest of us. I can get behind that, I’ve been trying to be happier for decades now. Slow and steady. Anyway, support your trans homies and if they’re from affected areas, please check in on them from time to time.
While we’re still on the topic of health care, the measles are back. Isn’t that fun? The current head of the health department is a man so unlikable that I genuinely think it’s okay to make fun of the way he talks, despite him not being able to help it. Robert F. Kennedy is a snake, a liar and a fraud. He has openly spoken out against vaccines and has skirted the line of saying that vaccines cause autism. Not that it really matters at this point since the annoying orange and his nazi son are both open anti vaxxers. As someone who has had to live with autism for the better part of 32 years, it feels like such an insult that the entire thing could have just been prevented by not getting vaccinated. Forget the fact that it’s been proven to be hereditary and there is no cure, how the hell does it make sense that a tested and safe vaccine can have such a crazy side effect? And let’s address the elephant in the room, the study that all of their conspiracies originally come from.
If you don’t know about the Andrew Wakefield study which kickstarted this entire belief, there is a fantastic Hbomberguy video going through the entire thing in detail. I can’t do nearly as much justice. If you don’t have that sort of time, to make a long story short the entire study was bogus, had an absolutely tiny sample size, no conclusive results and the doctor got his license revoked as well as the paper retracted for the serious amount of malpractice. Some of the children involved didn’t even have autism and some of the parents involved didn’t even consent to all the tests being done. It’s a mess of a study that should have never ever made it to publication, yet the results of it doing so have caused ripples into our world that have now led to the measles being back. Good job Andy.
Moving away from health and this rather personal topic, things don’t get much better. Tensions between the EU and the US, Canada and the US, Mexico and the US and well, pretty much everyone and the US are growing. With their strange behavior surrounding tariffs, threats to democracy and even threatening to invade both European and Canadian soil, it’s very obvious that Trump is working hard to destabilize the west. He wants their former allies to be uninvolved when the eventual presidency turns into a dictatorship. And who profits the most from this? Vladimir Putin of course. With the US no longer a dependable ally of Europe, it makes his invasion of Ukraine much more possible. And with Russia on the border of EU territory, the union will think twice to meddle with the US when things start going poorly there. I’m no expert on geopolitical issues, but none of this gives me a lot of faith in a stable future. Living in Western Europe I don’t think we’ll see any of the direct effects of this anytime soon, but indirect effects might reach us within a couple of years. I already can’t afford a house, I don’t want the rest of my costs to go up even more. But perhaps I’m pessimistic. A lot of this might just be loud talking to hide the real problems.
Speaking of making bold and loud claims and comments to hide the real issues. The US government might be one of the first governments to be actively trolling the people. That’s insane to think about when you take two steps back and look at things objectively, yet here we are. We’ve so far seen an AI video of Trump and Elon doing an ethnic cleansing in Gaza and turning it into a theme park with golden statues of the two wannabe dictators. There are two million people – many of whom are children – who call the Gaza strip home. It’s not our place to tell them they need to go. We need to uplift them, sure, but that doesn’t mean sending them out of the country, leveling it and then building a resort for the rich white assholes out there. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, free palestine. Fuck the Israeli government and the IDF. Fuck their actions in Gaza, the westbank and their smug behavior around it. My tax money is going to these demons and that’s not okay. Fuck.
We also saw something the other day that really boiled my blood. Trump and republicans have often said that the Epstein files would be made public if they got hold of them. It’s kind of crazy that democrats never did so, but that’s likely because a bunch of them are in those files too. I don’t care which party the pedophiles belong to, they need to be buried under the prison regardless. Under recent pressure to release them, the official account of the GOP tweeted out a link to the now public Epstein files. Except the link didn’t lead to any files, but instead it linked to Rick Astley’s Never gonna give you up. That’s right, the GOP used pedophilia information to Rick Roll the people. THAT. IS. INSANE. We have reached a point in US politics where reality is much stranger than fiction could ever be and I don’t like it one bit.
Lastly, things on this side of the pond aren’t much better. The AfD won big in Germany, the PVV is big in my country – the Netherlands – and the Italians have been redoing fascism for a while now. Things are going in a very scary direction. We know from history that blaming a part of your population for the problems in your country and then kicking them out never actually fixes any of the problems. It’s almost like they weren’t the problem to begin with. Things seem not nearly as unstable here yet though, and I’ll keep voting and urging those around me to vote for the same kind of normal people. I’m probably more extreme in my beliefs than the average person, and parties I would truly support are so far left they barely get any votes. But I’ll gladly take a center party with decent morals over the shithow we have right now. I’m so tired of all this thinking about the world. My options to grow within my job have gone away due to government budget cuts, my social worker keeps getting more expensive, the financial support I want keeps being denied because I can function just enough to not collapse into a puddle of depression and end it all. Sometimes it’s not great to try your best and I’m so tired. But there are good people all around me and I still have my stories to read and write, so there’s good things too. I’m writing this post on Friday the 28th, the last day of February, in hopes of getting it all out of my system and going into March with a better mindset. I’m sure a billion things will have changed by Monday, when this post will go live. Or I will just delete it, I don’t know. If you see this, please don’t get too bogged down in negativity by it. We started this post by listening to some Macklemore, let’s keep with the same spirit, but in a much more happy tune with the marvelous Hostile Government takeover. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 