The Human Show

One thing I dislike with the heat of a thousand suns is the feeling that arises when someone says they love you, but wants you to stand in a field of horse manure and pretend it smells like roses. Being asked to behave like things are not as they are, or to carry on after something hurtful has happened without any kind of acknowledgement, is an invitation to betray yourself so someone else can feel comfortable.

Horse Manure: Wolfgang Weiser on Unsplash, Roses: Anastasiia Malai on Unsplash

That’s the moment love starts dying on the vine. What’s the point of standing there, smiling with sad eyes while we murder any chance of intimacy or trust between us? The first time someone asks won’t be the last. The first time is a test, and failing is the only way you win.

The intensity of my stance on this probably comes from one too many mornings as a kid, waking up in my bed remembering the night before, and wishing I didn’t. Seeing a flash of my mother’s beautiful face all twisted by rage, and the feeling of my spine pressed up against my cold, ballet-pink bedroom wall, my arms up like an X, trying to protect my head, my own face, whatever I could. There wasn’t any point trying to cover my heart, it always broke, and there wasn’t any point trying to understand, because no kid ever can.

Regardless, I was expected to act like nothing had happened the next morning, to leave my room with a smile on my face. If there was a hint of remembrance, and I’m not talking about anger or any kind of attitude, I mean if I seemed quiet or sad, or even if I startled easily, a storm would start brewing immediately. The ground underneath me would become slick and dangerous. I learned to hold things in, but I can’t do that anymore. I can’t, and also, I will not. I’m a grown woman now. If that’s the ask, the answer is no.

A few months ago, or maybe it’s six because time is strange these days, I met an old friend for coffee. He was a close friend for twenty years, someone I believed I knew. There was a time I trusted him and thought I understood his heart. I would have said he was a good human being who thought all people deserved to be treated with dignity and empathy. I haven’t seen him as much in recent years, but a person’s nature doesn’t change, that’s what I used to believe. I’d noticed he’d been posting some strange things online, though. I thought he must be confused, but it was me who had gotten it wrong.

It turns out my old friend — a straight, white man with crystal clear blue eyes and dual citizenship, a man, that is, with nothing to fear — loves the president. He thinks he’s funny, and that he tells it like it is. Haha. So funny when kids are going to bed hungry because SNAP benefits have been cut. He liked Charlie Kirk, too, he thought he was “encouraging people to have good debate and productive conversation.”

It was like getting punched in the gut. He’d gotten me a matcha latte, but I couldn’t touch it. I get quiet when my heart is breaking.

No one deserves to be killed for their disgusting beliefs. Equally true, there is no “context” in which it’s okay to say the racist, misogynistic, homophobic things that man said, and going around to college campuses talking over eighteen-year-olds, and telling young women that 1 in 5 of them have not been assaulted, actually, that there’s no way that’s true, does not make him a hero, or good at debate. It makes him absolutely wrong.

Stating your wrong, uninformed, wildly offensive opinion loudly and with confidence might just make you another drunk idiot at a bar, but when you are in your thirties, and millions of young, conservative people follow you, and you say that same thing over and over again on college campuses across the country? Yeah, it’s not okay, and that’s just one example of one of the horrible things he said.

One individual — citing the National Sexual Violence Resource Center — said that one in five women will be raped, a statistic Kirk categorized as being “pathologically insane,” adding the contention was partly responsible for men trending toward conservatism.

“You want to know why men are becoming conservative?” Kirk asked. “They’re told that one in five women have sexual encounters that result in rape. We as men know that’s a bunch of rubbish … we’re tired being called rapists at every turn.”

I felt pretty sure I’d told my friend I’d been assaulted at sixteen, grabbed in a stairwell at thirteen, had men rub their hard-ons against my legs on crowded buses and subways at rush hour when I was fourteen, fifteen, been followed onto an elevator by a guy who whipped it out when I was twelve, been flashed in Central Park at eight years old by a man who masturbated in front of me, a thing that is now “trending” and even has names like “gooning” and “sharking.” The guys who do this are “gooners.” The “gamification” of sexual assaults has begun. Fantastic.

Now my friend was sitting across from me, defending a guy who stupidly said 1 in 5 women couldn’t be the victims of sexual assaults because that would mean the United States had stats like the Congo, and if that were true, no woman would go to college. He also said a lot of the time alcohol was involved, and sex was happening between teenagers, and it was a “grey area” because consent was given and then removed. I can think of few more terrible messages to spread on college campuses.

My friend smiled and told me I should focus on my own life, because how was any of this really affecting me, anyway?

Aside from the fact that categorically and fundamentally, I will always care about my neighbors, let’s pretend I was a selfish asshat who only cared about myself and my own life and family. If I get in a car with my kids and drive across the country right now, my son’s rights to lifesaving healthcare remain the same, but my rights and my daughter’s change every time we cross state lines. It’s hard to put into words how personal that is to me.

My health insurance used to cost $346.46/month, but when this administration refused to extend the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) subsidies, the plan I was on jumped to $1706/month, so I had to switch to a plan that is little more than bankruptcy insurance. Meaning if I end up in the hospital for some reason, it will not bankrupt me. Of course, if I end up in the ER, this administration, so full of “don’t tread on my rights, bro” supporters, now wants everyone’s un-redacted ER visit information, a thing you should know about.

Is that a HIPAA violation? Yes, but they’re tracking “product safety”, see, so there are exceptions. Babies who end up in the ER because a crib isn’t safe and needs to be recalled, or a kid who was riding a bike with faulty brakes? They can gather that information, and it’s good they do. Used to be they’d gather information about the product, and redact the person and their address and DOB.

They’d exclude things like adult suicide attempts, or injuries that result from domestic violence, because those are absolutely HIPAA violations, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission does not have the right to gather that kind of information. But KONZA is telling hospitals “they’d better comply or else.” It’s the constant refrain of this administration, and it trickles down from the top.

You might want to see if your local hospital is complying with KONZA if you care about your privacy, because they hold onto your information and also use AI because they want everything to be privatized and gathered into one big data system. Oh! And KONZA had a data breach a few years back and the medical records of 30,000 people were improperly handled, and they didn’t tell any of those people. That also feels personal to me.

My son is going into his third year of college, and my daughter is heading to college this time next year. For one year, I’ll have two kids in college, which I try not to think about too hard or too often. We can do anything for a short amount of time, right? But they messed with the system and the income threshold, and I don’t know what will happen with the FAFSA this year, or next, or the two years after that.

It’s all a big wait-and-see game, stress is hard on the body, and my insurance sucks as previously mentioned, so I’m glad I have tools and know how to stay present, but I am human. I have my sleepless nights. Meanwhile, the cost of gas and groceries have skyrocketed, along with everything else. So it is affecting me, personally? Of course it is, it’s affecting all of us.

That’s not to mention being a woman in this culture, generally. It’s not safe to speak up if something happens to you, or if you’re worried about your kids. There’s now a name for people who wipe out their entire families, instead of getting a divorce like a normal human being: “family annihilators.” Even if you want a break from stories like that, there’s really no way to avoid them, that’s how common they are.

So much of the time, you find the cycle of violence is being passed down from father to son, and can’t help but wonder what it would have taken to break the chains that bind. Why it’s so hard for women and children to get help when they need it?

It worries me to think of the things that are being normalized. The Tate brothers got arrested, and in this current insanity I feel grateful (thank you, U.K., god knows we don’t do anything about pedophilia-obsessed, sex-trafficking rapists in the United States), but their attorney, who looks like he graduated from one of Tate’s PHD (Pimping Hoes Degree) programs, was talking about how awful things are for the poor Tate boys.

Now, according to him, there’s a “target on their backs” due to the nature of their charges, and the “political hierarchy” in jail. The Tate brothers are in real trouble, everyone! Inmates are walking by hurling insults at them, calling them the “p-word”! How quaint! Their attorney wouldn’t say “pedophile”, but he’ll defend them.

My dude. Of all the things I do not care about, the emotional well-being of the Tate brothers is at the very top of the list. It’s so high up, I can’t even see it. I’d have to put on a pair of really short grey capris, and grab a very tall ladder, and start climbing toward the sun before I could even begin to see a glimmer of that thing you’re floating as a “care”, and then I’d be like, nope! That was just a trick of the light, better keep climbing.

All the way at the top, still don’t care. Photo by Armand Khoury on Unsplash

I jest, I will never care about the internal lives of those misogynistic, stunted sociopaths. Glad they’re somewhere they can’t hurt anyone for now, and I hope they’re extradited expeditiously, then convicted for life without parole. That’s the absolute end of my care. Barron might care, though, and Don, Jr, too.

Part of the problem with a reality tv personality cosplaying a president for ten years, a man who played a “savvy businessman who understood the ‘Art of the Deal’” on The Apprentice, but was nothing more than a sleazy conman who’d declared bankruptcy multiple times as a regular method of gaming the system, a shapeshifter who has been a Democrat, an Independent, and now says he’s a Republican, but is really just a Malignant Narcissist, is that everything loses meaning after a while. Alternate Facts!

There was a time when this man said he believed in a woman’s right to choose, but the thing his supporters will never understand is that he’ll say whatever he needs to say to get what he wants. Even that is not simple, because there’s what he thinks he wants, and what he actually wants.

What he thinks he wants is money, power, status, and the respect of strong men everywhere, especially men who rule by force. That looks like strength to him, because he’s weak and shallow. He thinks if he can rule the world, he will feel better, but you might have noticed, he has the title. He is currently the “leader of the free world”, but does he seem happy? Satisfied? At ease?

He’s obsessed with President Barack Obama, with President Joe Biden (who never fell asleep at his best friend’s funeral), with late night comics because he’s so thin-skinned, with Rosie O’Donnell because she’s smarter and funnier than he’ll ever be and has people who love her for who she is, with trying to get out of paying E. Jean Carroll, no matter how many times juries confirm he sexually assaulted her at Bergdorf Goodman.

Now he’s even asking the Supreme Court to get him out of paying the money he owes her for the defamation lawsuit because he said those horrible things about her during his first term, and they decided to grant him the immunity of a king. Well, have fun, the king has come knocking again. To him, Supreme Court justices are no more than fixers, and the ones he nominated are supposed to decide in his favor. Just fix it, dammit, that’s his motto.

He doesn’t want to pay his debts. He doesn’t want to be accountable. He finds loyalists to help him break whatever rules need to be broken so he can grift to his heart’s content. Last year that meant $2 billion emoluments-be-damed dollars, but that isn’t enough. He’s still not happy.

The golden jet from Qatar doesn’t do it, and it isn’t even outfitted properly and has already cost American taxpayers upwards of $400 million dollars in alterations. He doesn’t care. The press conferences where he berates journalists, especially strong, brilliant women, saying things like, “Quiet, Piggy” and “Fake News” and “You’re a terrible person, you know that?” None of that makes him feel big and strong enough.

He starts wars he thinks he can win because we have “the greatest military on earth” as we should, since we spend more on our military than the next 6 countries combined, and I’m talking about China, Russia, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and Ukraine. He uses our military like it’s his personal fighting squad.

I feel certain there’s something in the War Powers Resolution about mandatory congressional approval after 60 days, and withdrawal if not. The only exception or extension is an additional 30 days to safely remove troops. There is nothing about a temporary ceasefire (and let’s be so for real right now, we should call it a half-assed pausefire) stopping the clock.

Now we’re in over our heads in a war no one asked for or wanted, and it’s only escalating. This is the exact situation every other president has carefully and astutely avoided, because they were smart enough to understand the Middle East is not a place where you ride in like a bunch of cowboys. “Operation Epic Fury” my god. This is why you don’t put men like him, like Hegseth, or like Stephen Miller in charge. You don’t surround them with spineless bootlickers like Mike Johnson, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio, men too weak to do anything but freeze, fawn and sell their souls or adjust their eyeliner.

Is the president awake, pacing the floors of the First Family Residence? No, because if everything goes to hell, he’ll just blame someone else. He’ll say our Allies let us down, or the Dumocrats cut spending, and somehow it’s their fault, or it’s Obama again. He probably wasn’t feeling terrific, though, because he spent hours over the weekend creating AI versions of himself as a hero on his lame-ass social media site.

They’re the kind of creations a middle school kid would make alone in his room, and never show anyone, because even an eleven-year-old would know they’d cause any emotionally stable person to feel second-hand embarrassment. The void in this eighty-year-old man is as wide and deep as the ocean. He’s not going to have a breakthrough, he doesn’t have enough time. There aren’t even people in his life who recognize he needs an intervention, and hashtag Florida-Retirement-Life, stat.

What grown adult has hours to make dumb movie posters starring themselves? I have bills to pay, responsibilities, interests, creative projects, and people who count on me. I have a dog who needs to be walked. I don’t have whatever accounts you need to create a cartoon version of people I dislike, but it must take time, right? He has hundreds of millions of people he’s supposed to take care of, not that he thinks of his job in that way, but that is the job. This man works for us, he’s a public servant who has cut SNAP benefits and started a war that’s cost us billions, whilst grifting billions for himself.

How does he think it’s okay to post like that as POTUS, and why are his supporters laughing along? My old friend finds him funny. He “tells it like it is.” Really? People are suffering and dying. They always are, of course, but they’re suffering and dying needlessly, because of that man’s actions.

Citizens are being executed in the streets. Members of our immigrant community are being chased by masked men in unmarked cars, and as we have all been screaming for years now, ICE agents are wildly easy to impersonate, because they’ve been given free rein. They don’t have to present ID. They don’t have to show their faces. They don’t have to offer anyone due process. This administration has given them no limits.

So now men are playing dress-up with outfits they bought off Amazon, and guess what? They’re not drag queens. They are not “men in women’s bathrooms.” Nope. They are rapists. They are masked men in unmarked cars, chasing down young brown women, pulling them over, pretending to be ICE agents, and then sexually assaulting them. If you are someone who said you cared about girls and women in bathrooms, why don’t you care about cars? Roads? Detention centers? Detention centers? Detention centers.

Listen to me, please. They don’t believe white women when we come forward. Men, I mean. Police. Far too many women, sadly, sometimes our very own mothers. Ask me how I know. They do not believe white women, women generally, or young girls, we all know this. We get attacked a second time in the court of public opinion.

If you have any doubt about that (and if you do, you haven’t been paying attention), please watch American Nightmare on Netflix. It’s about the Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn home invasion/kidnapping/assault case on Mare Island in Vallejo in 2015. I won’t say much, but there’s a moment where I almost stood up from the couch because I was so enraged I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’ll tell you this part without giving anything away for those of you who don’t know the story.

There are other women before Denise, prior botched attempts. One of these women calls the police, as you do in a home invasion, whether the man successfully assaults you or not. This woman, who lived alone, explained to the officers in detail what had happened. These officers then called this woman’s boyfriend, a man who did not live with her and was not there during the attempted home invasion/failed assault, and asked him if his girlfriend was “attention-seeking” and whether he thought she could be lying. Police called the boyfriend of a woman to see if he thought she might just want attention. I’m surprised they didn’t ask if he wanted to have her committed.

That’s what white women deal with, so I want you to ask yourself how you think undocumented women and teenage girls are doing in detention centers where they tell you up front they are “not responsible for the behavior of the guards.” Then think about a president who spends his time making movie posters of himself running for a third term like it’s funny, in the middle of all this chaos and pain, all this anxiety and heartache for so many people.

I don’t have to tell you this is not presidential, it’s not even halfway normal for a regular man sitting at home. He should not be spending his time playing with fantasy memes like a middle school bully while the world burns. He can keep spouting his talking points about Iran not having a nuclear weapon, but Iran wasn’t close to having a nuclear weapon, unless this administration lied to us back in June. We aren’t stoopid.

We have mothers and children and innocent civilians all over the world who should be alive, and we have our service-people, too, no matter how they try to lie about those numbers, and pretend we’ve had two different wars, instead of one long war they shouldn’t have started and cannot end.

He and Elon Musk can say canceling USAID didn’t lead to the deaths of millions of people, but the data says otherwise, and I have friends who worked there for years. Aside from that, there’s the emotional toll of living this way, and worrying all the time. Not that I would want to be like my friend, out there living his best life.

Any normal president would be racked with guilt, trying to figure out how to change course. Maybe calling a trusted mentor, or a close friend, or talking to his wife. Not this guy. Roy Cohn is dead, and if he were alive, he’d be helping him make things worse. “Attack, counter-attack, and never apologize.” Lovely. His wife doesn’t give a fuck about Christmas, so I don’t think she cares about the common folk.

This man, who should be unable to sleep because he is devastated to realize he has thrown the world into absolute turmoil with his ignorance and hubris, instead spends hours creating memes building himself up and threatening to run for a third term, or going after Stephen Colbert, or pretending he has muscles.

He’s had a run of days that are alarming, and a terrible string of public appearances. I saw a clip from the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and could not make sense of what I was seeing. The Wall Street Journal won for “courage and accountability” for their coverage of the birthday card/drawing/poem the president sent to Epstein on his 50th birthday. You know the one, where his signature is the young woman’s pubic hair. Super classy.

The POTUS said it was “Fake News”, he didn’t draw it, he didn’t send it, and then he sued for defamation, a thing he does when he thinks he can win, or when he thinks he can intimidate people. But when he sued, he doxxed one of the journalists, Khadeeja Safdar, the only Woman of Color on the team. Hers was the only home address that was revealed in the court documents, and she and her family had to leave their home and relocate. They had to deal with death threats, because of him. So imagine my surprise when he sat there shrugging and laughing as Wolf Blitzer recounted this story, and then as he stood up and shook hands with the team of journalists winning these awards.

Ms. Safdar shook his hand, but turned on her heel and rolled her eyes simultaneously as he tried to speak to her, and he shrugged and laughed and mugged at the audience, again. As if being close friends with the world’s most renowned, international, sex-trafficking-pedophile-rapist is funny and not a big deal, and threatening the safety of a journalist for doing her job well, is just another day at the office.

I couldn’t make sense of it, because what I was seeing didn’t make sense. Then Kaitlan Collins won an award for “Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure” for her coverage of the Zelensky visit. She’s CNN’s Chief White House Correspondent. She’s in the trenches every day, asking the president questions, and getting under his skin. She’s intelligent, hard-hitting, and professional. She’s also unflappable, and doesn’t lose her cool when he tells her she should “smile more” because she’s “young and attractive.”

She will push back sometimes, like the time she told him she’s not going to smile when she’s asking him about Epstein survivors, because it’s not a happy topic, and she’s being respectful of the people Epstein victimized. Most of the time, she’s tenacious but calm. There she was, being recognized for excellence, and this man just had to make it about himself, and tell her to smile more on the world stage. Because women don’t hear that enough.

Of all the things he could have done on the night she was being celebrated and acknowledged, the choice he made was to insult and attempt to diminish an accomplished, secure, poised, successful woman, one who is a freaking rockstar and a fantastic example for young girls everywhere. How bottomless the void.

The day I met my old friend for coffee, I thought he must have only seen some Charlie Kirk clips. I hadn’t seen him for quite a while, so I assumed there had to be some kind of misunderstanding on his part. I could not imagine he’d gone down the rabbit hole, or that he would support an administration that included the open, unapologetic, enthusiastic racism, white supremacy and xenophobia of Stephen Miller, nor the misogyny of a man who said he “grabs women by the pussy”, and his sidekick who said “childless cat ladies” were the real problem, and people with kids deserved more of a vote because they had a greater stake in the future of the country. Tell all the 17+ kids who enlist and put their lives on the line, that the VP thinks they deserve less of a vote.

I thought a man who said legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield were “eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the pets of the people who came here” and a VP who said he’d back up the president’s lies and make up stories himself if that’s what he needed to do, would surely be a dealbreaker, because I did not think dishonesty aligned with his values. I didn’t think racism, bigotry or misogyny did, either, and I don’t find any of them funny. I thought any one of those things would be enough for him to say, absolutely not, I am 100% out. But he was not confused, I was, and when that became clear to me, of course I tried.

I tried the way any of us would try to push back and offer facts and figures, but I did it calmly. I said what about this, though? What about that? Don’t women and girls matter to you? Don’t People of Color matter to you, you’re married to a Woman of Color. Doesn’t the LGBTQ community matter to you? You’re not from here, don’t immigrants matter to you? How about decency? Empathy? Kindness?

He told me DEI was racist because it infantilized Black people. I told him white women benefited from DEI policies more than any other demographic. Veterans, too. People with disabilities.

When my old friend started talking about George Floyd and fentanyl, not the 9 minutes and 29 seconds Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck while he cried for his mama, I knew he was gone. I didn’t know the person I was looking at anymore. I knew I was done, too.

He texts me every so often. I don’t text back, which isn’t my style at all. I don’t ghost people, ever. I already told him how I feel, though. I can’t be friends with someone who supports this administration and thinks the president is funny. None of this is funny to me. Sometimes his texts are lofty and a condescending, in that way a man can be when he’s decided he knows how you feel. “You’ve put me in the enemy camp, but I’m the same person I’ve always been. I still love you. Your ‘idea’ of me is the issue. You’re open minded. Come for a party in my backyard, we’ve been through so much together. This time in the world is breeding division.”

Your choices have consequences, that’s all. One of the consequences is I don’t want to be friends anymore, it’s simple and very sad, but not confusing. It’s not because of my “idea” of you, it’s you. We don’t have to agree on everything, but none of our values line up anymore. I’m not going to stand in a field of manure and pretend I smell roses for anyone. I care about my neighbors, I always will. And, it’s also affecting me, personally, and you haven’t looked beyond the tip of your nose long enough to grasp that, so what kind of friend am I losing, anyway?

I’ll be with the people trying to fight for sanity, empathy and kindness. We’ll have our own party where we don’t ask each other to pretend things aren’t what they are. Where love can bloom.

Sending you a lot of love, friends. I appreciate you so much.

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P.S. Here’s my AI statement: Hi, Ally here. Everything on my ‘stack is coming out of my very human brain, my lived experience and my heart, for better or worse. Each essay takes me several hours a day, for multiple days. I edit relentlessly. I don’t use AI for any part of the process. I don’t use it at all. I love my em dashes, I used them long before LLMs were trained on our stolen books. I sound like the old lady from Titanic. I love writing, even when it’s hard, maybe especially then. Thanks for being here!