longer.blue

See, what I don't understand is how some people are saying, "You shouldn't celebrate someone's death just because of a difference in political beliefs." Like... what??? As if my issue with the dude was that we disagreed on the Electoral College's importance or rules surrounding lobbying. No no, our disagreements were on things like women having rights, queer people being allowed to exist, equality among all people regardless of their skin color, religious freedoms, the ability to determinewhat happens to your own body (be it abortions or gender-affirming surgery) etc. Those aren't issues of politics; they're differences in core human values, and his quite literally endangered the lives of me and everyone I care about. Differences in core human values are the reason behind things like the American Civil War and World War II. Sure, there were a bunch of other factors, but the slavery of Black people and the persecution of Jews were at least large, impactful factors on the two wars respectively. But we teach in American schools that enslaving people is bad, so as a country we won the American Civil War, and it's not considered distasteful to celebrate the Confederates' loss. MANY died in that war, but why is that not a "difference in political beliefs?" Or World War II, where we celebrate our victory, which was heavily influenced by the dropping of two atomic bombs. And those killed many civilians, too, which is a tragedy. But it won the war. Why is that not a "difference in political beliefs?" It's the same thing now. This dude vocally supported women "submitting" to their husbands (disgusting word choice, btw) and said that basically people that aren't white are criminals so it makes sense to distrust them. And don't even get me started on the things he said about the LGBTQIA+ community and abortion policies. These sentiments he expressed support for—and to which he did his best to rally even more support—are the direct cause of suicides, depression, fear, civil unrest, distrust in positions of power, murders, deaths, hate crimes, and many other things that result in the persecution of anyone in America that isn't a cishet white guy (and even some of them if they have the gall to not be Christian; oh, the humanity). It may not yet be at the severity of a war, but these same sentiments and "disagreements" were the same things that eventually boiled over to become the American Civil War and World War II. And, while I usually try not to speak for other people's opinions, I'd like to think nobody wants this to continue escalating until it IS a war. We celebrated the deaths of the Confederates and the Nazis not because we enjoyed the loss of life or the tragedy that is war but because we enjoyed the world being a better and safer place without their corrupting influence. So why is it that some people claim our celebrating now is over a difference in political beliefs? It's reductive and makes us seem like we enjoy a guy getting murdered. We don't. Not least because the way it happened means it's going to make the man into a martyr. What we do enjoy is the decrease in corrupting influence endangering the lives of millions of people on account of them simply existing; something he and people like him disagreed with. He disagreed that we should be allowed to exist, and that is NOT a political disagreement.