Friend -
🇺🇸 This year, I imagined getting America a birthday present. If you know me, you’re like, What The!? … you? I know. It’s not something I’ve ever thought about. In fact, as a queer, half-brown person, I don’t generally pay attention to the supposed birth of this nation (yeesh, that’s too close to the title of the 2025 bros’ fav propaganda film) — a nation that refuses to come to terms with its dark history, getting shadier by the day, as it forces Christianity into public schools, forces women to have babies even if it means a nonviable (definition 1: will never be alive!) kills them, with further plans to force women to also have abusive husbands, even if it means that nonviable (definition 2: unable to survive independently after birth) husband kills them, by ending no-fault divorce (it’s high on their list), & forcing everyone into earlier graves as they work to create/stoke fear & hatred (that has led to higher rates of violence & murder), & gut affordable health care of any kind including life-saving prescription drugs for the elderly. All of this, btw, as always, is about Pat Ree Archy who is making sure that nobody wins except for he/him/his. There are so many more horrific things on Project 2025’s list of Gonna Do It 💯 as soon as [redacted] is their new king, but somehow Saving Democracy Fatigue is the new pandemic.
🧎➡️Let’s just meditate quickly on why the right-wing, Christo-fascist dickheads (it’s all I can think to call them & they probably like it anyways because who needs a brain when you have a penis, right?) want to end no-fault divorce. The short answer from the Christian Nationalist Party, formerly known as the GOP, but what I call Profa (pro-fascist political movement), is that no-fault divorce “hurts men.” Isn’t it *hilarious* that they still call everyone else snowflakes &/or the “weaker” sex? Joanna Grossman, a law professor who specializes in family law at SMU Dedman School of Law says that when no-fault divorce became law (1970 in California and by the mid-80s most everywhere else except for New York who waited until 2010, weird), “we saw a decrease in female suicide. We saw a decrease in domestic abuse of wives. We saw a decrease in homicide of women by intimate partners.” But yeah, ok, let’s do it for the men! Let’s force women to stay with terrible people so that man feelings won’t come out as fists & bullets. This is what Project 2025 is ALL about — making sure that straight, white, cis men have the upper hand, even if that upper hand belongs to the devil.
🎁 So back to that imaginary birthday gift. Going by the age of other nations, with ancient Mesopotamia as the grandmother of civilization, America is a hormonal, irrational teenage boy struggling with personal insecurities & anger issues, who uses bullying to gain attention & dominance. He lacks impulse control & manipulates situations to his advantage via tactics he mimics from history’s worst. His attention-seeking is as annoying as … jk, there is nothing as irritating. So based on that, there isn’t a suitable gift for the empathy-lacking creature that he is. How does one convince an emotional teenager that yes, after 248 years he needs deodorant & mouthwash? Note: I know a lot of people like pretending America uses female pronouns, but that’s just absurd. This country has always been the fatherland.
🔂 So then I thought about getting something for the people dealing with our emotional teenager, those trying to course-correct his unpredictability, get him back on track, but then I got sucked into an existential crisis when, during a run, I had an epiphany: [redacted] is more like the “founding fathers” than he isn’t. Those fellas were anti-black, pro-slavery, white men who believed women weren’t suited for political participation of any kind (read: taking part in the decision-making processes designed to oppress them), because they were not intelligent enough to vote or have autonomy; & they supported policies & actions that would lead to the displacement & genocide of Indigenous peoples. All driven by a desire for the power of land & expansion, calling it Manifest Destiny, a religion-approved phrase that “allowed” them to be horrific to any being if it benefited their ordained mission. I’m still deeply into this current existential crisis, & I’m not sure what can pull me out of it — or if anything should.
🗽 But, imagination doesn’t cost anything, so I let myself dream about some grand gift that might wake those so afraid of being woke. Perhaps Lady Liberty wearing a giant baseball cap for all the world to see, but this time, in Democracy Blue, Pantone 2024, & worn by Team Truth, fighting for empathy, love, & actual freedom — with a union-made, hand-stitched message acting as a beacon for the good people across the world who have been relentlessly inundated & exhausted by the absurdity of America’s devolving. The message billions have been waiting for would simply say, MATA: Make America Trumpless Again. This oversized, overdue message would let them know that some of us are trying to stop the cycle, to put racism, misogyny, queerphobia, xenophobia, religious terrorism & all the other hates back into the closet, where they came proudly tumbling out when Barack Obama had the audacity of hope. I have said it before, & I’ll say it until my final breath: we are in our Democracy Dying Era because of the mass hysteria of white people.
🛑 I mean hats are powerful, right? Profa wears their MAGA hats, as proudly as they wear their hate. Even those of you who still call yourselves Republicans cringe a little when you see red hat(t)ed, Confederate Johnny rolling up in his truck with naked lady mud flaps & rubber testicles hanging off his tow hitch, a Stars & Bars air-freshener (smells like manure) on his rearview, a misogynistic sticker about someone’s mother on his bumper, a back window filled with 27 gun decals, & wearing a t-shirt about how the LGBTQ+ community is bad for children. You cringe because that guy is proof that the control group in the great American experiment has become the confounding variable. He’s the reason you will double down, & dig in until democracy is 6 feet under. Confounding, indeed.
🪫 Of course, I don’t have the power or the money to put a giant hat about love on top of the Statue of Liberty. So, here I sit, in my existential crisis, resigned to the fact that after 248 birthdays, after so much fleeting wisdom and blown-out candles of wishes coming true for everyone except the historically excluded, America won’t get the present we all deserve. We all know full well that all that will happen is 74 million people will spit out slurs old and new, dare us to pry something from their cold, dead hands, and then say, “What’s a MATA, snowflake?”
🎤 You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me,
Dc Lozano, a woke Swiftie & political operative
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