I had no interest in politics for many of my young and wasted adult years. I was essentially drowning in clown world - parading around declaring I could be a "bad bitch" one minute and a "boss babe" the next- all while drowning my little millenial sorrows in a liquor bottle a gallon deep. I was surrounded by other young women who declared to be free thinkers, atheists, and self-proclaimed rebels, all the while, mindlessly following the lost nation into its slowly evolving hurricane. It wasn't until 2016 that I really started paying any ounce of attention.
The Hillary/ Trump election in 2016 secretly changed my mind about how the world worked. But I didn't want to lose all my friends at the time. Like being lost on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean, I had no idea what was lying beneath the water around me. But I knew, I really, really shouldn't get in it. Nevertheless, I stuck around those friends for a long time. They force-fed me their agendas, and my heart would race as I lied to their face about how I'd surely vote the same way as them. See, the process of investigation, when you've had a public school education, is long and rough, and rebuttals to the emotional appeal on the left are hard to come by when you know just about nothing. Just like being on that boat in the ocean, that's the scariest part. I knew if those leftist friends knocked me off, I probably wouldn't have the strength to get back on.
So I lived out my investigations in secret, I asked other conservatives hard questions in secret. I questioned a lot and most of my questions started with feminism. You remember when everyone was wearing those pink knit hats and running wild in protest, right? That really kicked off my questioning big time. I couldn't understand how women had any lack of equality in our nation. I learned that the answer is, we don't have a lack of equality. Even the difference in pay scale argument isn't very good when most women choose to work in lower-paying jobs to accommodate their families. As a woman over the age of 18, I've always had the right to vote; Wells Fargo certainly had no problem awarding me with a credit card I had no idea how to use; I could work anywhere I wanted, drive anywhere I wanted, etc. It was and is a blatant lie to say that women are not free. Fast Forward to 2023 and the gender battle certainly does display facets of inequality, but it isn't the women suffering... that is a different discussion. Every bit of the feminist argument had more to do with killing life and living for your own will and I just wanted no part in it.
After Trump won in 2016, I was relatively happy to just raise my boys and go about my business, sticking my head in the sand from time to time and investigating social ills at other times. I didn't feel any sting in the economy and I think for many people, that's when they pay the most attention. But I still had no life vest on my little boat in the ocean and I was still friends with the sharks in the water.
In late 2019, I was paying attention again. I heard of a teeny tiny little virus called COVID that was shutting down China. Again, the sharks started to go nuts. I was being told what to do left and right. It was never men telling me what to do. Literally - never. I was constantly given direction by the liberal shark feminists I thought were my friends. They would say, "Go buy toilet paper" (there was plenty in my small town), "Don't leave your house" (to be fair, I'm a homebody anyway and kinda liked this one), "Wear a mask and use hand sanitizer anywhere you do go" (like, no, it's hot out). And, of course, later in 2020, it was "Get the Vaccine." I assured them I would get the vaccine to get them off my back. I even faked a vaccine card for one of the sharks who was always insistent; I was a little afraid of her. But, in reality, there is no experimental vaccine for me.
If the pressure from the liberal women in my life was terrible in early 2020, imagine my despair once we got to George Floyd. I genuinely wanted to investigate George Floyd and lucky for me, by the time that story broke, was when I started writing. At this point, I had been thrown into conservative politics even more. But I tried to keep it even more secret in my personal life. I was very much harassed by my liberal friends about George Floyd. Everything became about race. One of the sharks wanted to boycott a tiny restaurant across the street from my house because they didn't hire another friend of mine for a waitressing job. The friend who was mad and wanted to boycott? -Yeah, she wasn't even a mutual friend with the one who didn't get the job - she had met her in passing and only knew her name and skin color.
After George Floyd passed, I started sharing some of my conservative values with the sharks. I attempted so hard to keep them. I thought they would support me if I fell out of the boat (but that's dumb, cause they are sharks, so.....). I tried to make my views seem more centered and tried to even get them to see any shred of logic and reasoning. But the sharks were predators. They didn't want to listen. For some reason, they swam away all on their own. And who was there when it was just me and my lifeboat?
Logic, reasoning, morals and values were my life preserver. I stayed on the boat alone for quite some time. Conservatives had a boat for me - a big cargo boat. They threw me a net and they brought me onto their ship. I am not lost at sea and I stand firm on the ground of America First.
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