A bummer post about politics, insidious "good news only" accounts and being racially perceived in 2026 (a few good cat photos though)

This morning I realized I haven't done a non-pokemon post on this blog in a while, and mostly I can attribute that to work having been chaotic but then I got sick and I frankly didn't really have anything else in me.

I still kinda don't? Covid has absolutely kicked my ass in a significantly worse way than it did when I caught it in 2020. Even though I work remotely, just being at a desk for a few hours wipes me and fucks up my breathing¹. I get that the disease has evolved but still.

And shit, on top of that it's very hard to focus and care about things in general when your manchild dictator at any moment can press a button that starts a nuclear conflict (see what I did there? can't call it a war if it's not declared) and has more than proven that he is stupid enough to do so. Why are we in Iran? Other than petulant child ego, news cycle refreshes away from pedophile documents and doomsday cult about securing Israel for the end times I guess?

Anyway I don't wanna read the news because there's only so much I can control (thinking forever about a deer's inability to sense a predator over 1000 miles away from it because it frankly doesn't need to know about a predator 1000 miles away from it) but because of my day job I have to have SOME level of awareness of what's going on, and to balance it out I try to find non-upsetting things and boy - it's so SO hard to find good news these days but when you do (this is gonna sound mean??) it's usually some kind of surface level "we all need to get along better" that disregards the experiences of the oppressed.

Over the last decade starting when Trump first got elected and liberals decided politics were important (but not important enough to do anything other than march with pussy hats and administer 'gotcha' finger wagging zingers while asking for $20 and letting fascists get their way) social media sites started to get populated with "good news" accounts (not in a jehova's witness way but equally stupid) and it's always like...an animal got rescued, a community pitched in to repair someone's car or like, a lost kid was found - and these ARE objectively good but any time I see these "restored my faith in humanity" things my brain IMMEDIATELY goes to "that missing dog's owner has a trump sign in their yard" "they repaired her car so she could get to her THREE jobs she needs to pay her bills", "did that missing kid run away from their parents for a reason?". I can immediately see the bad in the good, and I'm not even gonna get started on the more modern trend of AI voices in these types of posts.

There is inherently nothing bad about a community coming together to help each other and focusing on the local in a time when the global is fucked beyond belief - but I can't even go to the library without running in to people wearing Trump hats who gladly voted for a man whose entire campaign started with "mexicans like you and your family are the problem".

I've talked at length about how I have white privilege because I'm mixed but a lot of that depends on how I'm dressed, how much facial hair I have, if I've got "too much" of a tan (I can't stand the show but the family guy "terrorist color swatch" bit is too goddamn real); I'm constantly fighting for my life to not get pulled over by white cops and asked if I stole the vehicle I'm driving and that shit wears you down. I regularly wear a full suit and shave (EVEN THOUGH I'M GONNA BE MASKED) just to go to the pharmacy in the off chance that ICE is there and wants to pick a fight with a brown person and hope that they instead are fooled by my white-perceived invisibility glamour.

Last August I flew home to California for a family emergency and even though I kept up with blaugust the entire time, I didn't have it in me at the time to write about how painful the process was just flying from New England to California as a perceived brown person with a California ID. I was detained by CBP for hours and nearly missed my connecting flight to Denver. All while Kristi Noem DHS videos played on loop on multiple screens, causing me to take back every criticism I've ever made about totalitarian regimes in fiction being "too on the nose" with their in-universe propaganda.

It fucking sucks for me, a person with a modicum of privilege, and that's NOTHING compared to what anyone of more chicano descent is experiencing on the daily, so when I see these "good news" stories where a church gathers together to cook for a person whose house was damaged in a natural disaster, I look up the church and find that they donated heavily to racist GOP candidates and anti-trans organizations.

"Civility" is a thing that gets touted a LOT in modern political discourse and what it almost always means is "being accepting of bigots but not the marginalized" or "the oppressed need to stop acting like they are victims (even though they are) so even passive oppressors can feel better".

But hey - at least that passive oppressor's dog was found.