For your rights

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Well, shit. Holy shit. Sweet merciful crap. I didn’t think this was possible. I didn’t think that enough U.S. citizens were gullible, ignorant and hateful enough to elect this shady con artist to the presidency.

All year, I obsessively checked the polls and read the analysts. This fascist victory seemed impossibile. I told my friends, family and coworkers not to worry. Now, I’m the sucker—a sucker who believed the numbers instead of recognizing the hate in Americans’ hearts. That’s the only explanation for why the numbers were so off. The surveys and exit polls had Clinton well ahead—but some people were either hiding the racism that allowed them to vote for a xenophobic bigot or concealing the sexism that prevented them from voting for the most qualified candidate.

Part of me that just wanted to write the word “fuck” over and over 400 times in this column. This election result had reduced me to a simpering, braindead ball of fetal anxiety, curled up under the covers with a pint of ice cream.

But screw that. Instead, I searched for a silver lining. The good news is that Nevada and Washoe County both voted for the more progressive presidential candidate. And we elected Catherine Cortez Masto to the U.S. Senate, and many qualified candidates to state and local offices. And Nevadans and Californians voted for recreational marijuana, which, as many of my stoner friends have pointed out, we might need to get through the next few years. Of course, with that demagogue in the White House, there’s a strong possibility of the rekindling of a totalitarian federal War on Drugs. And that’s just one of the many wars to come.

This fearmonger has already launched his wars on women, Muslims, Latinos, African Americans, Europeans, Jews, the LGBTIA+, the disabled, environmentalists, journalists, academics, artists and many others. And he won a major battle yesterday. But it’s time to dust ourselves off, revive punk rock, start serious investigations, write, rally, sing and protest. Time to fight.