One Bad Thing, One Good Thing

Processing the election of DJT.

[1badthing1goodthing]

#3

The bad thing.

This story from NPR: A Trump Swing Voter Looks Ahead.

I don’t know why I read this.

We are supposed to be listening to each other more, right? I mean, that is the popular thing to say. It’s what Obama told us to do. It is what, as an educator who hears more and more stories from teachers of students literally refusing to even hear other points of view in their classrooms these days, I do want to tell children to do. At least in a learning environment, you sure as hell don’t have to agree but you should be open to listening. So even though I don’t actually believe that people who have been oppressed have any responsibility whatsoever to listen more to their oppressors, as a teacher, sometimes I want to practice what I preach. And NPR is good at laying out stories in a matter of fact way, a way that probably wouldn’t make me too mad. 

That’s the reason I gave myself for clicking on it. But after reading it, I realized the actual reason was probably just because I’m an idiot, and I thought the “looks ahead” portion of this headline meant that this swing voter had realized the error of their ways after seeing the Cabinet of Incompetence and Ill Will that Trump is trying to get into place, or after watching his ridiculous shit show of a press conference that proved he only ever wants to campaign for the rest of his life and has developed absolutely no interest in actually governing. Maybe they looked more into who Vladimir Putin actually is and what he has done and it’s left them a little scared. Maybe they’re ready to apologize and move forward with us.

You already know, dear reader, that that was not the case.

I can’t get this short and simple story out of my head because it feels personal. Jamie Ruppert is my age, living in my corner of my home state. She’s one of the people who broke my heart into pieces when I saw Pennsylvania go red on election night, the final dagger in my soul. She seems sweet. She is quick to report that she voted for Obama twice. That she loves gay people. She might have been my friend in high school. 

After thinking about Jamie Ruppert for quite some time, I’ve realized that I don’t hate her. John Lewis tells us we shouldn’t hate, and so I’m not. I don’t hate Jamie Ruppert. But god, she makes me frustrated.

The reason she voted for Trump is the reason that so many millions of Americans say they voted for Trump. Because of the economy. Because she wants more things to say “Made in the USA.” Because she misses the blue collar jobs that Pennsylvania used to find so plentiful in our coal mines and steel mills. But the thing is, SHE IS DOING WELL! Her husband has a job that pays well enough for her to stay at home with her two, soon to be three kids! They JUST BOUGHT A HOUSE!

Jamie Ruppert is literally living the American dream. But because the America around her doesn’t look exactly the same way as it did when her parents were her age, she looks her American dream right in the face and says, eh, you know what? You are just not good enough.

You voted for Obama twice, Jamie Ruppert. You said you didn’t want to vote for Hillary because she promised more of the same, which you all of a sudden realized you didn’t want anymore. But you also said you care about the economy, Jamie. Obama helped fix the economy. Helping bring us out of the recession, job growth, decreased unemployment, all of it! We still have a lot to do but goddamn our dollar is strong as hell right now! HE DID WHAT YOU WANTED!

Of course, we all know that when someone says it’s about the economy, the ACTUAL reason is a deep rooted misogyny and racism that they can’t face. But still, for the people like Jamie who seem sincere, who want those blue collar jobs back, I mean, I get that. We all want that. But here’s the thing. They have been gone for so long?

Jamie, you and I both grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania in the 90s, right? Did you also go on a coal mine tour as an elementary school field trip? We did that because the mine was empty. Because it is a vestige of our past. The Steamtown Mall had a coal powered train in the food court out of nostalgia, not out of pride in a surging industry. A fading paper distribution company named Dunder Mifflin is a more accurate portrayal of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre economy.

Billy Joel produced a song about the factories shutting down in Allentown in NINETEEN EIGHTY TWO FOR CHRIST’S SAKE.

Coal mining, the auto industry, maybe they can come back in some way. Come back meaning, not die completely. That’s at least what the auto industry seems to be doing. And lord knows coal is still cheap as hell and we still use a lot of energy. But it’s never going to be like it was. It hasn’t been for decades. Why are we pretending like all of a sudden in 2017 it’s just happened?

And say you really did believe that the blue collar jobs of white Republicans’ wet dreams could come back. Do you really believe that Donald Trump, a Yankee billionaire, is going to do that for you? Even his Make America Great Again hats were made in China. You know why? Donald Trump knows how to make money. That’s all he cares about (along with being liked). Nobody who’s as greedy and selfish as Donald Trump is ever going to choose a more expensive and risky option just for labor’s sake. China, Indonesia, Vietnam. They make our products cheap and fast. We buy them. American businessmen make money. That’s what made Donald Trump. He isn’t going to change it.

Sure, he’ll keep making these announcements about companies keeping jobs in the US because of him, even though most of those companies made those decisions without any input from Trump whatsoever. But it’s good, free PR for those companies to go along with it, so hey, they won’t complain. And they’re satisfying, easily digestible stories for the American public. They make more of an impact than just saying “We added howevermany jobs to the economy this month.” That’s just a number. A plant keeping jobs in Michigan, that’s a story. It’s brilliant, really. It’s effective. But that doesn’t make it real. Those stories are still just tiny drops in a very big bucket, and the water filling that bucket isn’t changing.

And by the way, when those blue collar jobs were making America great? Guess what actually made them great. *whisper shouts* UNIONS. And if you think Trump is going to bring back unions, well, then I really don’t know what kind of drugs you’re on.

It’s just so enragingly disingenuous to say you care about the economy when all you actually care about is a nostalgic fantasy. Because there is a lot that DOES make America great. We continue to be the innovative business leader of the world. The technology that now sits in the pockets of children and adults from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East was first created in America. Not that the San Francisco tech world is that perfect either (lord knows none of those devices were actually MADE in Mountain View or Cupertino), but still. There are exciting things happening. Young people are rebuilding Detroit. There are industries (like renewable energy, say) that are just WAITING for young excited people to develop and innovate in. And those innovations could then possibly lead to blue - collar - jobs.

And one last thing. If you care about the economy? If, unlike Jamie Ruppert, you ARE still affected by the recession, and all of Obama’s economic progress still means jackshit to you? Or if you’re doing okay but still hurting? Banks, and billionaires like Trump, are your enemy. Then BERNIE SANDERS is your guy, not Trump. He understands why the recession happened. It was his WHOLE THING. And yeah, I know, Bernie didn’t win, but you’d think you’d want to still follow his advice. And his advice was: don’t be fucking idiots, America.

We didn’t listen.

I know, of course, that people like Jamie Ruppert just don’t care enough to think about all of this. They lead comfy enough lives that they don’t have to. She probably doesn’t watch the news much. She’s about to have three small kids. It’s a busy life. She had just enough time to look around her and think about how America, and her little corner of it, looks different than it used to. And the anxiety that produces? That’s enough. That’s enough to ruin it for everyone else.

Even though those changes that make one person anxious–they could be another person’s entire future. It could mean people get to dream dreams that they were never able to before. It could mean greater equality, better justice, which, by the way, often leads to a stronger economy. In all organic systems, diversity is good. Diversity is necessary for survival. Change could mean America continuing to be the freest, most successful nation on the planet. It could mean so much.

But Jamie probably doesn’t know enough of those other people. Those people that see a different America as exciting instead of worrisome.

So the anxiety lives on.

The good thing.

Times are tough. You might not have loved Obama as much or as thoroughly as I did. I get it. It’s fine. But god, his farewell address? We all deserved that. We deserved that last bit of eloquence and level headed-ness, intelligence and class. We deserved taking some time to just splash around in the joy of his and Joe’s friendship, and in the way he looked at Michelle and the way she looked back, the way his young daughter full of black girl magic clapped and wiped her eyes. And if you didn’t let yourself enjoy even that–well, I hope there’s something in your life that makes you happy. Because we need to cherish those things. Or else we’ll all break.

[1badthing1goodthing]

#2

The bad thing.

Betsy DeVos is our new Secretary of Education.

One positive outcome of this election is that’s it’s suddenly woken me up to how little I know about pretty much everything. I consider myself a pretty smart person, but it’s now clear I’ve been living in a privileged cocoon for the last 33 years, able to survive and live my life without needing to deeply understand all the messy details about why my survival is possible. That is the product of my privilege but also the result of a functioning 21st century democracy. How WELL it functions is another thing altogether, but still, America is a highly desired country to live in for a reason.

But now that I feel like everything I love and cherish about America is in peril, I’m realizing how dumb I am. There are so many things that I just don’t know.

The first area where this became most apparent to me was with this appointment and thinking about education. Education is my career and I hope it continues to be my career until the day I have to retire. I love my job deeply and care about the education of young people in America and around the world very, very much.

But when it comes to knowing how much my job is or is not at stake under Betsy DeVos’s leadership, I realized I have no idea. I know that public education is paid for through a combination of local, state, and federal taxes and programs, but how much of each? How much control does the state have versus the Department of Education? I do have vague answers to each of these from my experience and learning in the past, but I want to know all the messy details. So this will likely not be the first time I write in here about it. I hope it’s not.

But for now, I’ll start with what I know.

Betsy DeVos and the large coalition behind her of private foundations, corporations, and politicians from both the left and the right are the enemy of public education. They believe that our public schools are failing and that the entire structure should be privatized and replaced with a variety of charter, online, and private schools.

This is the path our Department of Education has been on since No Child Left Behind. It was sadly continued during President Obama and Arne Duncan’s administration. It’s been set up almost perfectly: create LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE standards of accountability through No Child Left Behind. (Anyone from either side of the aisle will tell you that 100% proficiency in standardized tests for all children in all schools, without any meaningful accommodations for special ed or English Language Learners, is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE. I have never used the word literally so literally.) At the same time, start a vicious public campaign against teachers. An educational drain the swamp, if you will: bad test scores? Fire the teachers, close the schools. To help replace those “bad teachers” and “failing schools,” invest more than ever in “choice”--vouchers, charters, private schools--and create avenues for more corporate and private investment in education than ever in our history.

When schools can’t live up to those LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE standards? Tout it as evidence that our public education system is broken and ready to be dismantled entirely. Let the privatization that has been happening for years truly take hold and run free.

And to be honest, I think any Republican nominee, even a sane one, would have chosen someone like Betsy DeVos for their Secretary of Education. Even Hillary, who I love, probably wouldn’t have chosen someone that really wanted to buck the standardized test, privatization momentum. She is a good politician and there’s simply too much bipartisan support for it now. But Betsy DeVos is a particularly concentrated form of this viewpoint. If anything, I’m hoping her transparency of corporate interests might make her easier to fight.

Before I describe why I think this road we’re on is bad, let me say that I am not a complete educational demagogue. Some of the best people I know, that care about children deeply, have worked and are working for charter schools. I do NOT believe that online schools, or certain alternative schools, offer as high of a quality education as well-funded public schools, but I DO believe that they are necessary for some students that simply cannot attend a traditional public school for a variety of reasons. I am not inherently against Common Core or other attempts to have a national set of content standards. I believe we should have tough high school graduation requirements. There are structural questions I don’t know the answer to, like whether big high schools are better than small ones, or whether the K-8 model is better than the elementary and middle school model. I am a proud member of NEA but I don’t necessarily always agree with them. There are bad teachers out there, and watching them in action is just about the most infuriating thing I have ever experienced.

And on a micro level, I have a lot of ideas about how to improve our schools. Research on the teenage brain soundly backs the need to start middle school and high school later in the morning than the majority of schools in America do. As a whole, every grade from K-12 needs to be spending more time outside and in physical education, both for mental health and improved learning and comprehension in academic content. Research backs that, too. Our brain simply works better with more physical activity and exposure to different environments. We need to teach more inquiry skills instead of memorization, more about the process of asking good questions instead of even necessarily finding the answers to those questions. (This is hard for kids who have been programmed to view only “right” answers as a measurement of success.) But when it does come to answering questions, more time needs to be spend on media and information literacy. (See this horrifying study of students’ ability to tell fake news from real news.) I believe all content levels need to incorporate literacy and writing skills into their curriculum. I’ve seen a badass, no-nonsense math teacher do this in a tough middle school: it can be done. 

But honestly, when you appoint people to lead our education department who have never even spent time in a classroom as a teacher, I don’t think those types of things even enter their minds. This is the thing that honestly bothers me most about DeVos. The most common complaint teachers have about those in power above them is that they’ve been away from the classroom for too long. Sometimes even as low down in the education hierarchy as the building principal, it’s clear that they care too much about what parents want, how they present themselves to the community, and endless time spent on “data” and “management” that eventually they have little knowledge or passion about what actually happens in the classroom or what kids really care about or need. Part of this isn’t their fault; because of things like NCLB, they are pressured to spend time on a lot of that bullshit instead of children. But a principal or superintendent or state education official that has at least spent some time at the head of a class full of rowdy, curious, difficult, and wonderful children has the possibility of sitting down, remembering those children, and focusing again on what matters.

DeVos doesn’t have that experience. Bill and Melinda Gates don’t have that experience. They just don’t. So they can only see things from a macro and political level. So let’s go to that level.

At the basest level, dismantling our public education system is wrong because it is democratically and morally wrong. I have fierce pride in a few fine American institutions, and I believe the destruction of any of them is a threat to our existence, or at least our relevant existence. I rank them as such:

1. Public schools

2. Public libraries

3. National parks

There are more, obviously (public transit, hospitals, public defenders, etc.) but I really, really like those three. Public schools and libraries are the foundation of equal opportunity in our nation, from the 1700s through today. Even if you are homeless, these people will take you in. You have just as much of a right to enjoy these public spaces as any billionaire, and you have access to the same amount of materials and resources.

And the idea of a charter school lottery for poor black kids in big, poor cities? Of some lucky kids getting the “prize” of going to a new exciting charter school while the rest get stuck back in the “bad” school? Regardless of whether those evaluations of either school are in fact accurate, you’re automatically changing the equity of a guaranteed public education in America just by the process. Reformers tout the value of “choice,” but even using that word is antithetical to what our public education system should be. We are guaranteed to a free appropriate public education (FAPE) by law. The “choice” for all of our children should be the same.

But let’s talk about the dichotomy that vouchers and charters set up, the bad school vs. the good school. Ever since the publication of A Nation At Risk in the 1980s, and particularly in the post-NCLB era, the only thing politicians and Americans seem to know for sure is that our schools suck. Our public education system is broken. We are in a crisis.

Here’s the secret: This is a lie. Data supports that it is a lie.

I’m currently reading Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch, and she dismantles this myth well, as well as where it comes from. She explains: 

“What the critics seldom acknowledge is that our schools have changed as our society has changed. Some who look longingly to a golden age in the past remember a time when the schools educated only a small fraction of the population.” 

This small fraction not only means white people, but also able people. This golden age of education that many Republicans look to longingly doesn’t include mentally or physically disabled people. Special education laws that guaranteed every student a right to education didn’t come into being until the 1970s, strengthened by laws such as IDEA in the 1990s. There is a reason public education is so expensive, and a lot of it has to do with special ed--providing opportunities for our most vulnerable populations costs a lot of money. Similarly, Title IX didn’t guarantee girls equality in education and school-related programs until 1972. This imaginary golden age of education in the past also didn’t include English Language Learners. These are populations that charter schools are often not equipped to deal with, financially or professionally.

Thinking about it this way, it starts to make sense that traditionalists on the far right see our public schools as an abomination because our public schools are so vastly different than the ones they grew up in. Different, and beautiful. This video, made this year by students at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon celebrating its diversity made me cry:

But it’s apparently that kind of diversity that makes Republicans scared because it continues the narrative. Our increased diversity is ruining our culture, our economy, and our schools--even when all evidence points to the opposite. (Not totally related, but I also strongly believe that our strong union makes Republicans haaaaate us.)

Despite the diversity our schools now handle, high school graduation rates and college attendance rates, especially for minorities and people of color, are higher than ever before. Dropout rates are lower than ever before. Even teenage pregnancy is on the decline! Ravitch also notes that even more people would be attending college if it didn’t cost so much, which I can tell you is absolutely true from working with high school seniors directly, and which is a whole ‘nother topic for another day. 

In relation to how our schools are apparently dumbing our students down, as often goes the failing schools narrative, Ravitch also notes:

“Critics may find this hard to believe, but students in American public schools today are studying and mastering far more difficult topics in science and mathematics than their peers forty or fifty years ago. People who doubt this should review the textbooks in common use then and now or look at the tests then and now. If they are still in doubt, I invite them to go to the NAEP Web site and review the questions in math and science for eighth-grade students.”

I can also tell you from personal experience working with middle and high school students: THIS IS FO’ SURE TRUE. I feel like a fool when I try to help them with their math or science homework. Sometimes this is because all of that information has flown out of my head since high school, but often it is because they are working on challenging, interesting, complex stuff.

I’m also a big fan of Jonathan Kozol. Read any of his books and you will know that despite the gains I just flouted, a lot of our schools do suck, by certain measures. I have another book sitting on my shelf that is legit called Our Schools Suck. But there are proven reasons about why these schools suck--and also proven solutions--and neither the reasons nor the solutions are even close to anywhere on Betsy DeVos’s or other privatization advocates’ or politicians’ radars. Because they aren’t pretty. They’re messy and complex. The reformers call them “excuses.”

The reasons are this:

1. Poverty

2. Segregation

3. Inadequate funding

Segregation in public schools is on the rise--worse than it was in 1968. (Good long read: This ProPublica report from Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Segregation Now.) Integration was the central theme of a series of excellent episodes of This American Life this year that won a Peabody Award. If you haven’t listened, you should. It argues that integration is a proven method of improving schools yet no one wants to talk about it.

And politicians and education reformers are DEFINITELY over talking about poverty. We haven’t talked honestly about poverty since Lyndon Johnson.

Yet if schools have adequate funding, they can have all of the following, all of which have been proven to increase test scores and higher learning:

1. Small class sizes

2. Electives, including the arts, foreign language, music, and physical education

3. Libraries with certified teacher-librarians

All of these things are so important. In addition to having a structurally sound and functioning building (which a lot of inner city schools don’t have), these three things are so. important. I’ll be waiting to see what Betsy DeVos says about any of them.

Education is not perfect. There are school districts that are a mess, there are bad teachers, there are scary and violent schools. But the majority of on-the-ground reporting proves again and again that the teachers at those “bad schools” care more about their students than teachers anywhere else in the planet, often devoting more of their personal lives to those kids than is healthy. And in places like Chicago, even an underfunded public school is often the safest, most secure place a child can be. The six hours they spend there can help save their lives and give them at least one adequate meal a day.

To abandon all that, when there are proven solutions, to give up on making our system better and throwing it all instead to an untested, unregulated, profit-driven world can only result in chaos. It will result in less equity than ever before, increasing the social divide that already clearly exists in our country. And I am scared of it.

I do believe there are education reformers and charter advocates that truly, deeply care about children. With Betsy DeVos and her like, though, it’s pretty clear that they care mostly about their children--she never dared to send her own children to a scary PUBLIC SCHOOL. It’s clear she cares a lot about Christian kids. But our laws give us a mandate to educate all children--all of them. And guess what? It’s fucking hard. Schools aren’t businesses. You can’t hire an outside CEO to shake things up and turn things around. Schools work because teachers come in every day and teach. Sometimes they yell when they shouldn’t and sometimes they say the wrong thing and sometimes they cry on the way home from work. But they come back the next day and try again. They talk to kids every single day. If you don’t know what that entails, everything that goes into a day in the life of a child at school, you’ll never know what the hell you’re doing.

The good thing.

Yeah, that bad thing was REAL long, so for the good I’ll keep it short. New Jersey is on its way to becoming the first state to ban the declawing of cats!

This may seem like a small thing, but declawing is REAL cruel, guys. And one thing this election has taught me is that we have to be watching what our states are doing, and cherishing their wins. (Like I’ve said to friends, this election is almost making me a Republican, but like back when they actually cared about stuff Republicans are supposed to care about! STATES’ RIGHTS Y’ALL!) 

Sure, if someone in New Jersey really wanted to declaw their cats, they could still drive to New York or Pennsylvania or anywhere really and find someone to mutilate and traumatize their poor animal. But this sends a message and sets a precedent for other states to hopefully follow suit, and it gives veterinarians more license to truly push their clients about the cruelty of the practice. And New Jersey is a small but densely populated state. There are a lot of cats this is going to help protect.

Small wins! We have to celebrate the small wins.

[1badthing1goodthing]

#1

I am having a hard time.

Some days I think I’m having a slightly better time than I was on the night of November 8, 2016. I’m able to go to work and function, mostly. I’m able to laugh at stuff and enjoy everyday things and not feel guilty about it. But then randomly everything about DJT being president-elect will wash over me and I’ll have a hard time keeping it together, whether I’m at work or in the car by myself or watching a Friends re-run in my pajamas. I’ve been feeling so unmoored, so conflicted about what my country is and processing how much the not knowing apparently affects who I am, conflicted about my job and what I’m supposed to be doing there, what I should be doing in my personal life to make things better. I feel so unhinged that I’ve been contemplating going to therapy for the first time in my life, because most often the people around me don’t seem like they’re on the verge of tears 24/7 so maybe I AM going crazy. 

The truth is we should all probably be going to therapy, regardless of this election. But I am also lazy. I know the truth of my brain is that writing IS my therapy, always has been, my way of working things out and feeling slightly more sane and centered. When I write, I trust myself. But I haven’t been writing at all, for months and years. And real writing, honest writing? Could probably get me fired from my job.

But I’m going to start here. There will be lots of days where I don’t feel strong enough to write, but on the days I feel coherent enough, I’m going to process through one bad thing. There are so many bad things going on that taking it one bad thing at a time might help my brain process. 

And then for my own mental health, I’m going to end with one good thing. I’m going to try to make that thing political as often as I can, in order to remind myself that there are a lot of good people fighting for our country and fighting for humanity, and that the responsibility to take care of our citizens rests on more shoulders than those of one deeply insecure and self-involved man.

Some days I won’t have the ability to find a good political thing. Some days, I may just want to talk about ice cream. Which is okay too. We should never feel ashamed to talk about ice cream.

It’s not going to be okay and the good things aren’t me saying that it is, but thinking about them is important for my self-care.

The bad thing.

Working in a conservative school district, I’ve witnessed students over the last two weeks being positively gleeful about Trump. They twist negative headlines and read them as positives somehow. (”Look! ‘Trump Transition Going Smoothly!’” one shouted one day to his buddies. Later I read the headline myself--they had omitted the “Says Trump Team, Despite Critics” ending.) The overwhelming majority of these students are white males. I’ve heard “Build a wall!” shouted between bros during passing time like it’s some kind of weird catchphrase now. I can’t decipher whether it’s being said sarcastically, as in, “This is such a stupid thing to say so we’re making it a joke now?” (I don’t think so), or whether it’s just straight up racist, or it’s just some unfunny personal joke that I will never understand.

I have a copy of Mein Kampf in my high school library that has been pretty consistently checked out over the last few years (to boys). I always thought it was an important historical document to have in a library, and that the boys were interested in it as insights into history and a man they’ve heard a lot about, interested in learning about what must not be repeated. The boy that currently has it checked out told me last week that “Honestly, Trump isn’t that bad.” I am suddenly reconsidering my previous assumptions.

Most of my internal personal strife has been trying to figure out how to deal with these happy teens, while so much of the country mourns and deals with genuine fear. My teacher brain says that they are simply following their parents’ lead--who doesn’t in high school? Only the few and brave among us--and that their brains will evolve in college and in life. But with the demographics of college educated white men in this election leaning SO heavily to DJT, I am slowly losing any of that previous good intentioned hope.

I’ve also come to the realization that while I know I should be worried about myself as part of the LGBTQ community--and as an ally, I am in fact terrified for the T--the real fear and disgust and shock that I’ve been feeling since November 8th is as a woman. The man openly bragged about sexual assault. He openly displayed disrespect and contempt of women, to ugly, mean degrees.

And the country.

Didn’t.

Care.

I’ve been trying to process what these white teen boys at my schools see in DJT. Some of them are just parroting, some of them may not fully understand all the implications and are perhaps making jokes out of a subconscious discomfort. 

But I had this sudden jolt in my brain on the way home the other day of, what if they see him as a genuine role model? What if they genuinely think he is what a man should be?

And if so many white women also think that is what a man should be--well, just how many abusive relationships are in the store for our future white, straight populations? How many boys will craft their first true political insights during the Age of Trump and grow up to be assholes who think they can say and do whatever they want and still win? How many girls will grow up in a gaslighting, abusive, anti-woman national discourse that has been normalized, and become women who think that asshole machismo is sexy?

How many girls and women will believe they deserve it when, inevitably, they start getting hurt?

How do teachers tell boys to not grow up to be assholes? How do we tell girls that they’re being conned?

The good thing.

Obama giving Ellen the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Of course.

I’m not sure what I love more about this: The fact that she’s getting this award? Obama’s speech? When he tells the tortilla guacamole joke and then says he has no idea what it means but he thought it would break the tension because he was getting choked up! I don’t care if that line was scripted or not, it came out so goddamn genuine and funny and real, just like everything else that tumbles out of his goddamn mouth! How about her fucking suit? Or her eyes fucking FULL TO THE FUCKING BRIM of tears and gratitude? Or the value of both of their trailblazing--of being the first, even at great possible risk, of making even previously closed minded people love them just through their sheer goodness? I am not necessarily comparing Ellen to the president of the United States, OKAY, but they’ve both felt that fear and went for it anyway, you know? It’s fucking heroic. They are both part of the Fucking Heroic Club, and any time members of the Fucking Heroic Club are in the same room I just want to cheer and sing the Star Spangled Fucking Banner.

I know that gorgeous, white, cis, petite Ellen is full of her own privilege, but goddamn is she some kind of magical sorceress anyway. I do not know one person that hates Ellen. Hardcore Republicans in the middle of flyover red country, USA love her. They LOVE HER! Does she push progressive politics on her show every day? Nah. But she and her guests mention her wife all the time. She is GAY AF and it’s totes fine. Human beings that may never in their life know a queer person have watched her dance down that goddamn aisle and smiled. True story: I hardly ever watch Ellen, but when I do, I CANNOT WATCH HER DANCE DOWN THE AISLE WITHOUT CRYING. I don’t know why! Just seeing so many women be so happy and jiggle their butts on TV makes me cry every single time!

I’m sure there are radical queers out there that hate Ellen. But whatever, she was the first, the first that the whole entire nation really got to know. The first the USA loved. She and Barack Hussein Obama are goddamn rays of light, and I will hold their hug in this video in my heart for a long time.