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| 2010 APUSH grads |
Hello again. I am writing today because the world is on fire and I don’t know what else
to do. What else is there to do, really, other than resurrect our old high school blog?
When we started Liberal Ladies Restoring Reason, it was 2010. We were 18 and 17 and
had just witnessed the first midterms of our young politically active life. Alisa got to vote,
but I didn’t turn 18 until a few weeks after the election.
We went to high school in what felt like a small town in Florida at a prep school where
we were amongst very few other people like us, at least outwardly. Queer people,
people of color, and most importantly Democrats, were scarce in our class.
As two liberal ladies, we bonded early over our love for Weeds, the show not the
obviously should be legal drug and the fact that Elizabethtown is unquestionably the
worst movie ever made. Oh and of course, Barack Obama.
We, like pretty much everyone else our age that didn’t go to our high school loved Barack.
We were so disappointed that we hadn’t gotten to vote for him in 2008 and made a pact
to vote for him in 2012 no matter what.
I ended up having to send in an absentee ballot, but I texted a picture of it to Alisa
before I mailed it in.
After the blue wave in 2008, I was comfortable in my ignorance. I think this is a feeling
most of us had, give or take a drone strike, until October 2016, when shit got really real.
But in 2010, we realized that the Tea Party was no joke. I was frustrated that no one was
talking about politics at school, and that everyone’s parents just told them what to think.
To be fair, our parents are proud Democrats and definitely led us in that direction.
But our parents were right. And that’s what matters.
To be honest, I’m not really sure how the blog started. I know that we were frustrated
and I know that Bill Maher was getting us all riled up and we felt like we didn't have an
outlet and the midterm elections were coming up and it didn’t look good for our guy.
So, we wrote.
We started this blog. Liberal Ladies Restoring Reason. Because that’s what we
thought we wanted to do. That was our message. That people are acting unreasonably.
That they’re ignoring facts and using harmful rhetoric and just plain lying.
Lying is a funny word. The media still doesn’t really like it. It doesn’t matter how
many times Donald Trump or members of his staff do it. The people on TV or writing
the op-eds we all read will dance around it, using stupid euphemisms.
But that’s really more for a future post. And there will be one.
Because the thing is, in 2011 we graduated. And went to college. And our guy came
through for us, we thought. We got to vote for him in 2012, and we dropped the ball
on the blog.
Our frustrations were actually shared with classmates, though at different schools.
We had an outlet.
Well now we’ve graduated again. Alisa is such an overachiever she’s already
graduated twice.
While all that is great, our guy is gone.
And this new guy.. he sucks.
Like he really fucking sucks.
And we have to pay attention. And that kind of sucks too.
Cliché of the day: there’s just so much news!
And there is. And it can be really hard to turn it off. It seems like we have to choose
between reading/ watching everything or nothing because the everything is too much
to bare.
It’s a difficult line I know I’ve been walking where I know that reading everything isn’t
working for me. I’m having trouble sleeping and focusing and not crying in my car or
pausing my political podcasts to scream.
It would be so easy to just stop. And I have friends who have stopped. They don’t know
which moron just got hired to work in the White House or which nightmare was
nominated to the Supreme Court or which criminals are being indicted. I don’t judge
them for it.
But the thing is, I kind of feel like we have to try to stick it out. At least a little.
Try to not just shut down. To care about Brett Kavanaugh and Ariana Grande and
Pod Save America. To read books by Ben Rhodes and Ronan Farrow and Rhetta.
To watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
To at split our time a little more equitably between pop culture and news.
Some days the balance may shift, the news may be too painful to be 50/50
with pop culture. Some days we can’t think about children being separated from their
families, so we need to read an article ranking all the episodes of Sex and the City or stalk
our hair influencers.
Some days, things won’t be so grim and we’ll be able to accommodate more news. It still
won’t be everything or be able to command all of our focus or attention. But it’ll be there.
And so will we.
We’re bring this blog back from the depths of the internet. We’re going to leave up our
old posts from when we were just kids and we still had a sane president. But we’re older
now, and we know more and we’re ready to share it.
And if this still feels like screaming into the void, then so be it.
But at least we’ll be screaming together.
Welcome back to the resistance Liberal Ladies Blog.
We’re happy to be here.
