So. How’s your day going so far?

Today is April 7th; it’s the first Tuesday of the month, my favorite aunt’s birthday, the date of the sun’s annual exaltation. Also the date on which our lunatic president announced that “an entire civilization will die tonight,” not that he wants it to, but sometimes things are out of his hands. Except when he wants to take credit for them, whether he deserves it or not. Which he very much does in this instance, since this entire war was his idea and his doing, the conditions that now precipitate his threat did not exist before he started the bombing of Iran, and if in fact we–the collective we, not that any of us are involved–do in fact bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, it will be because he decided it was the only way to get us out of the global fucking disaster he has gleefully gotten us into.

{Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.}

I want to say something meaningful here, not because my blog post is going to alter the course of whatever future we’re careening toward, but because I just want to know that I went on the record as saying that I viscerally and with great fervor do *not* support whatever it is he has in store for Iran tonight. Which, very possibly, is nothing, since we know that he is a liar and a chicken shit and also a manipulator of markets and says whatever he thinks will make him look powerful and make him money. It could be that he lets Israel blow up all Iran’s railroads and then announces our work here is finished and we’re going home. I don’t know, and I don’t know what to say about it, all I really know for sure is that this would be a really great time for the universe to send one last little blood clot hurtling through a certain maniac’s most congested coronary artery.

I have a lot of feelings about how we got here, as, I imagine, do you; most of mine revolve around my deep and ever-growing rage at organized religion, the ways in which it seems to poison and pervert so much more than it inspires. I have struggled this whole long year and change since the last inauguration with my feelings about certain family members who voted (AGAIN!) for this madness. That the same people who never missed a single opportunity to proselytize at me throughout my childhood have somehow either forgotten or outright rejected every single teaching of the man they insisted I invite into my heart is infuriating, and depressing, though perhaps it also validates my refusal. Look how much good it did them! But also, there is a fetishizing of apocalypse that runs through certain strains of Christianity (though it’s hardly exclusive to the Christians), and that bloodlust for the end times is on full display right now with Hegseth and Trump and Vance all salivating over nuking Iran. When the greatest thing you have to look forward to in your belief system hinges on the end of the world, there’s not a lot of motivation to keep that world in good working order. I am angry today, more so than usual, at every single person who got us here: every person who voted for this guy, or didn’t vote, or voted for some third-party idiot who never stood a chance. I am angry at every person who said “I don’t like either one of them,” then voted for a blasphemer and a pedophile over a competent woman who never raped anyone. I am angry at every person who claimed they were voting for the “lesser of two evils,” and then chose absolute evil.

I don’t know what will happen tonight, or tomorrow night, or next week, but I know this: we cannot continue to call ourselves a civilized nation if we allow this to continue. “Civilization” is defined as “the stage of human social and cultural development that is considered most advanced.” If we leave this monster in office, and sit idly by while he boasts of his plans to murder a nation of 90 million–whether or not he actually attempts to–then we no longer meet that standard. The president might very well be correct when he says a civilization will die tonight. It may not be the one he thinks.