Artemis in Elk: "Some of us need to stop being astonished & ..."

I'm not going to say Trump was an inevitability, but I think the US was headed towards a blatantly corrupt kleptocracy propped up by increasing authoritarian control & violence regardless.

Trump was maybe a bit "early", but eventually the oligarchs were going to make a mad scramble for anything left to grab.

Or at least from the perspective of the political elite, he was "early". The Epstein Class seems to have thought it was time.

It's not like if Trump never came along we were going to continue forever, perhaps slowly progressing.

The social/cultural groundwork for fascist takeover was already being laid before Trump declared in 2015. He couldn't have done what he did unless the way was already prepared.

We might have gotten more dignified fascism, something more buttoned up, more tasteful, but then again, we might not have.

Either way, Trump didn't fucking invent the global rise of fascism nor the frenzied fight for power & control by people who know they are running everything into the ground.

Look at how many people the US incarcerates. You want to tell me that we haven't been normalizing human rights abuses & mass incarceration for decades now? You want to tell me that's completely unrelated to the detention camps we're getting now?

We've been living with "soft fascism" for a long, long time. It was there.

Ask unhoused folks. Ask indigenous folks. Ask anyone who isn't considered an "upstanding citizen" within whiteness.

The cruelty, the abuse, the control, the theft, the murder. It's all fucking there.

Trump is anomalous, sure, but then again, that's how change happens. We're in a new phase with new rules. The world doesn't just go on the same forever.

The consequences of the past create our present, so expecting our present to perfectly mirror the past is absurd. Of course things are different now. Of course this or that is "unprecedented". Change happens. Nothing stays the same forever. Nothing.

Some of us need to stop being astonished & offended that change happens & get more serious about shaping change.

That is to say, things will change whether we want them to or not, so our job is to adapt & try to create the future we want. We can long for "normalcy" all we want, but change always comes eventually.

March 10, 2026 at 8:37:45 PM

And I'm not just looking around at everyone else when I say that. This has been me too, too stuck on the shock of "new & different" to have a realistic perspective on change.

But change happens. It will keep happening. The past does not predict the future...it creates it.

Re: "shaping change"

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower is one of the most emotionally difficult things I've ever read, but somehow it is also radically hopeful.

If you want to know what the somewhat nebulous phrase "shaping change" means, all I can really say is "read the book." I can't do it justice.

Trigger warning for Parable of the Sower: all kinds of violence & brutality (sexual violence, torture, etc.) including against young kids.

Not a light read, but worth it.

I think it is dangerous for us to live in the past, to expect things to always remain essentially the same as they are forever.

That's where some of the focus on Trump as an "anomaly" can lead us if we aren't paying attention. We get so hung up on the fact THAT change is happening that we don't adapt & create change of our own.

It's perfectly normal to be horrified by him daily, but when it comes to his transgressions, "different than what came before" is not the part that should confound us.

And look... being distressed about change is an extremely normal human trait. If that's how you feel, that's how you feel. You may learn to deal with that better, but you're still going to be a human with human anxieties.

Change can be good or bad or extremely fucking complex, but the one thing you can know for sure is that change will come.

So I'm talking about awareness of ourselves & our world, how we think, communicate, & plan, not about how we may feel. Humans struggle with change

One can hope that we might get some peace from being more conscious of the one universal constant which is change (the one thing you can always count on). I certainly find it helpful.

I think it could help you too, but even if it doesn't give you peace of mind, it can at least make things make a little more sense (so you can be distressed & anxious more accurately, I guess).

Let's be aware of change & realistic about it. Dealing with the emotions of it may be a separate piece.