I have hated most holidays all my life. The only holiday I liked was Halloween, and it’s because black is a featured color. Plus, you can dress up in a costume as an adult and it’s not weird. That’s pretty cool. I did a bait-and-switch yesterday in that I was gonig to talk about holidays, but then ended up talking about bigots. I think it’s pretty clear how I got from one to the other because holidays are when bigots seem unavoidable. Or rather, when people feel pressured to spend time with faaaaaaamily.
I’m not saying bigots and family are the same thing. I am saying that they are often the same thing. I’m also saying it’s when you see the bigots in your family if you have to see them at all. This is one reason I don’t like tradition for the sake of tradition–it makes you do things you don’t want to do and it makes you the problem if you don’t. I mean, this is a problem with family, too, so it’s no surprise that when you put the two together, it just makes everything worse.
I think one of my issues with holidays/traditions is that they become so hardened over time. And they harken back to a time that people romanticize, but were not better for the majority of people. Any time people talk about the good old days, all I hear is “we don’t like diversity” or “we don’t realize that not everyone is like us”. It’s not surprising that most people who mourn for the good old days are white people. In America, I mean. Anyone being wistful for the sixties and is still alive to talk about it is most likely not a PoC or a queer person. Or, quite frankly, a woman.
Especially in this year, I have no tolerance for this bullshit. It disheartens me that I have to reiterate what I wrote about more than ten years ago when marriage equality was being debated. If someone does not believe that I deserve the same human rights as straight people, we cannot be friends. There is just no debating this.
I hate the framing of ‘this is just politics’. It’s not just politics. The political is, as the saying go, personal. If it didn’t have any impact in the real world, then we wouldn’t care about voting at all. (Not going to get into voting right now; I’m just not.) If it didn’t matter, there wouldn’t have been the Capitol attack. Only people who aren’t disadvantaged would say that politics don’t matter.
I don’t like having hate in my heart, but it’s where I am right now. I am old. I am tired. I went through hell with my medical crisis back in 2021–well, kind of. Not going to expand on that, either. This year has been a really shitty year. A very shitty year. I don’t want to talk about that, either, but it’s been such a downer of a year.