Thursday Thoughts - we're going out where the sand's turning to gold so put on your stockings, baby, 'cause the night's getting cold

Waiting for election results like the rest of us. I am extremely disappointed in people acting like democrats are trying to steal the election by counting votes. What is wrong with you? Are you unfamiliar with how democracy and voting works? You exhibit a fundamental disconnect and lack of knowledge of how elections work. All the votes get counted. And you don't incite violence and bullying mob behavior surrounding your opposition to that. You don't get to install SUPPORTERS to watch the count and intimidate people. Do you want to fucking talk about all the voter intimidation throughout my district. Do you want to talk about the man AT MY POLLING STATION waving a trump flag and yelling at Black poll workers who had to be put in the back of a cop car after police told him to stop doing that and he would not, instead aggressively waving his idiot flag at them? Where are the Back the Blue people now? I'm fucking pissed and these people supporting violence and intimidation around voting are only one of the reasons. I cannot know you. You sit in your house running your mouth on social media and you put actual people in danger. 

Wondering when we'll see pundits focus on the white voting block that looked at all of the shit from the past four years and said this is fine. Choosing whiteness over every other thing in this world like we've been doing for all time while telling others we don't discuss race. If this makes you recoil or uncomfortable, something within you knows this is true, that we've all been complicit in it, and the thought of fixing this is overwhelming. I'm right there with you. If you are pissed off at me or defensive or thinking not everything is about race when you're reading this, you are hearing the indoctrination of the white supremacist and patriarchal systems we were raised in and it is reverberating in you and you are conditioned to tune me out or turn on me. You can come at me over it, I don't give a good shit. We can do this all day long. By the way, democrats and republicans fall into both of the above categories. No one has the market on either. Women have internalized misogyny. Black people have internalized racism. There's a lot of work for most of us to do. Much more work than posting black squares on Instagram and saying we're listening. Guess what? Saying you like people and voting against them is doing irreparable harm. If you are ready to sit in this uncomfortable space and begin to really examine this, follow Bree Newsome Bass on Twitter (go back and start reading from Election Day on) and read every slide of this thread on Instagram. Read and sit with it. Discuss it within yourself. Then sit with it some more. 

Thanking family and friends and volunteers and staff who worked on MFD's campaign on Election Day itself and before and after it. I'm ready to be done with everything. The wife of a candidate who is done campaigning is a dangerous thing. Soon we'll talk about my neighbors two doors down surveilling us and reporting on us on neighborhood facebook pages (literally taking photos and making up stories about what is shown in the photos) and naming names. I support my husband and I think he would be great in service to the people of our district and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I did not support a second run for office though, and it's because of shit like that. People like my neighbors think this is a game and this is actually my fucking life. And posting all of this shit about my home on facebook endangers ME. The private citizen living in the house NOT running for office. I am fucking furious.  These are the only two photos I took on Election Day - friend and volunteer Morgan and my Dad & Carol. We also did a family pic with MFD's brother, sister, and nephew but I don't have that one. Thanks to all who showed us kindness in any way in a very fucking unkind time. I didn't write about campaigning this time and mostly stayed out of it in another state for many reasons - my house was needed as campaign headquarters, and it was safer here at the shore for me versus in Philly with very un-neighborly neighbors filming and photographing and watching everything because they have nothing better to do and place more weight on having a tight flower bed out front than not having hate in their hearts. Imagine being such a shitty, soulless neighbor that you actively make your neighbors feel hunted every time they step out their front door, that you question Black people in cars near their house. We won't even get into the petty shit like not shoveling out a parking spot on the street when it snows and then parking in other people's spots. But, that's all a story for another day. Maybe after I have the sign made for my flower bed letting the neighborhood know the family is stalking us. I'm the do we have a problem? Let's discuss it, neighbor neighbor. But you put my life on the internet without consent? I can do that too. And I have a wider reach. 

Sharing this for anyone feeling sad or discouraged. For those of you who still thought America was better than this. Lay it all down - the things inside of you that say you should or shouldn't do or say something. Let if fuel radical love. Let it propel us all toward justice. 

Listening to Atlantic City by Bruce Springsteen (it's the lyric after the hyphen in the title)

Watching nothing, but I keep meaning to watch the last season of Schitt's Creek. 

Reading not too fucking much, my friends. I've been "reading" the same book for two weeks. It's wild. This has never happened to me before. Ever. Work, politics, the state of the world are all to blame. So I'll be showing up for Show Us Your Books Tuesday but mainly just to host it. See you there. 

Laughing because man, fuck it all right now

Hang in there. Biden is winning this. That won't solve anything in and of itself, but it will make it easier since you won't have to concern yourself with what fucking wild shit your president is tweeting every day. It also makes a clearer path forward. That path does not include you sticking your head back in the sand and disengaging from community issues and politics. Get ready to work.