As the sack of Washington continues, I got into an argument with a friend over the phrase "worse than we expected." My friend, thinking of the swing voters who pushed T over the edge, thinks everyone knew exactly what was coming and those who voted for him knew what they were voting for. They can't protest innocence. I was thinking of trans friends who are reeling at the multi-front savagery of the attack on their very existence. They knew something bad was coming but not this bad, not this fast.
But I was also thinking of myself. It's not just the overwhelm, which we knew to expect (though that doesn't make the scale or savagery or relentlessness of it un-overwhelming), but the gratuitous cruelty of it, the destructiveness. It's merciless in the way Bishop Budde called out. It's worse than I expected because I couldn't imagine the callousness of discontinuing foreign assistance, the insanity of trying to force an entire civil service to retire, the fecklessness of a party cowed into accepting lawlessness as the new meaning of presidential.
I'm not sorry that I couldn't imagine such barbarity. But otherwise what I'm feeling is horror, anger, sorrow, fear and, when I think of the rest of the world, profound shame.
