Historically, in the words of a former acquaintance, I am “very political”.  This tends to just mean I read a lot, engage in a fair amount of activism, and fling my opinions around dinner parties and the internet like strands of drool from a Newfoundland’s mouth.

Over the years I’ve come to do all of this…less. I’m interested in harm reduction – for myself, my community, and my country.

So going into this election season, I’ve made one very firm decision about the way I’m personally going to use my time, that will hopefully help me look myself in the mirror each day and avoid going completely insane. 

I am going to ignore HIM. 

Yes, even when he becomes the nominee.
Yes, even if he becomes President again.
I’m going to just…not.

I know that many people will immediately find this plan frankly impossible – or at least stupid, blind, self-serving, drastic, dramatic, misguided, and downright bizarre.  But it is what I am going to do.

Of course I will vote.  I always vote. 

I will care deeply about the details on the Democratic side of things.  I will donate and write postcards and make calls if I have to, I guess, if I can focus on the positive.  I’ll do all the little micro things I always do, serving the causes that personally engage me most passionately (summarized by, but not limited to, abortions and libraries).

The activities I will refuse to engage in include (but are not limited to): issuing dire warnings, pearl-clutching, hand-wringing, threatening, sounding alarm bells, and condescending to anyone in this country by implying that they might not KNOW the true real and urgent danger of…him.

I will decline to become fearful or furious about the following facts currently in evidence, including (but not limited to): that he will destroy our democracy and dissolve all of our public protections, that he will accelerate the demise of the planet and fuel the collapse of civilization as we know it, that we will likely all suffer and die because of things he has done before and might do again.

“We” – the leftist elite – tend to Paul Revere these self-evident truths throughout the land of MSNBC and the New York Times, and other people who already hate him tend to nod gravely and say “such an important message!”

I’m going to just…not.

Because by now we know a few things we didn’t necessarily know last time, including (but not limited to) the fact that anyone who is going to vote for him already knows that we hate him. For many of those people, whether they admit it or not, our hatred is at least 75% of the reason they’ll vote for him.

Haley, DeSantis, Ramachandran…they’re despicable, they’ve got potential, but they don’t have the messianic power of HIM.  We the enemy, we the elite, we of Black Lives Matter and Me Too and Love Wins, would need years to work up a bile quite as acidic, foul, and fundamentally disintegrating as the one we all currently carry for him.

So he’s their guy.  It destroys us when he beats us, and that’s all they really truly want: to prove to us that we’re not so fucking big after all.  We’re not so superior.  Who’s sneering now, asshole?

If he wins again, of course I will engage with the consequences.  I live in this country and I have a son. I’ll work to help.  But even then, I’ll decline to talk about him.

This has nothing to do with “caring”.  If you know me, you know how much I will always care. In fact, last time, caring really did almost kill me.  I know that now.

It’s just laughably obvious in retrospect that my particular mechanisms of caring were completely ineffective if not counterproductive – resisting didn’t work, begging, pleading, fearing, screaming…all did not work.  He sat in the Oval Office for four years, and we let him.

My type of engagement often works on a local level, and occasionally in midterms. It got me some “fans” and personal attention. But it doesn’t work against him.

This all seems so crystal clear to me now, so baldly factual, that I find it phenomenally depressing to watch Media People – with whom I once felt kinship and for whom I often felt admiration – just not get it. 

It’s hurt to lose respect for so many people I used to read and applaud and share, simply because they are addicted to this conversation about HIM.  They claim it’s irresponsible not to engage – we have to talk about him!  He’s a threat, you can’t ignore him, or he’ll win!

It seems indisputable to them that we simply MUST endlessly evaluate and judge him, picking out shiny new offenses like magpies and bringing them to the people, educating, warning.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant! A robust free press can and will save the day!

Except…it didn’t.

And I now believe with the passion of a convert to a soul-saving religion that he IS a threat, and we MUST ignore him.  Lest he win.

Maybe I see things this way because I was able to avoid Twitter.  I watched from outside as Twitter destroyed all discourse, and people I previously respected became zombie double agents of that destruction. Twitter was just too seductive, giving people too much dopamine and serotonin while eating holes in everything we claim to want to protect. 

So while well-meaning activists and public intellectuals were acting as canaries in the coalmine, their little wings were flapping the poison right into all of our nostrils.

I am weak, and I was only able to skirt this fate myself because I am a feminist, and sometime around 2005 or so I watched public feminists being pierced by 1000 troll-launched tweets, every time I dared to peek in.

Rape threats, death threats, doxing, flooding…it just didn’t seem to me like the robust fair and healthy discussion I was promised, the one where the best ideas would win.

But that was the ideal atmosphere for him. Twitter was his incubator, he found and grew his power, and he now uses all media the same way he used to use Twitter. He’s a professional troll, and attention – any kind – is his oxygen. In that place, he grew to 10 times his natural size, and took the first steps of his clumsy march into the village.

Facebook and its Russians didn’t help things…that’s where we were seduced into the belief that our newsfeeds were raw truth, instead of heavily filtered personalized advertising, shaped by the master manipulators with the deepest pockets.

But Twitter was still worse. Because thanks directly to Jack Dorsey, all HE has to do now is find a microphone or a keyboard, say “hey, those Nazis had a few good ideas!”, then sit back to watch us freak out. And while we do, he wins another swing state.

I know how cynical this all sounds, how bitter.  But I want my hope back, my soul back, my country and my joy back.

And so there is only one thing left for me to do now, one thing that puny little me can do to resist him, and that’s to just…NOT, with him. I will give him nothing. Not my fear, not my hatred, and not one single tiny drop of my attention. 

So between now and whatever happens next year at this time, this will hopefully be the last time I’ll even obliquely mention him. I feel amazing about this choice, I have zero ambivalence, my heart feels so light.

I know exactly who will likely lecture me about this, call it irresponsible, try to talk me into seeing it differently.

I love you.  I almost certainly admire you.  You know so many things I don’t know.

But on this…I side with myself.
I can’t wait to talk about anything – everything – else, with you.