This is an excellent piece. In answering the question — yes. The primary reason is that Kamala is not a malignant narcissist. And that is where there is a substantial difference between Trump and Harris. But that's where the "being better" stops. Without a doubt, she is aligned with imperialism. And Kamala Harris would not have been acting to stop the U.S. government's funding of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. So it depends on who a Harris presidency would be better for — certainly not for the Palestinian people. And she would have remained aligned with the neoliberal capitalist forces which have long taken over nearly all of the Democratic Party. As is true for other neoliberals, Kamala would have continued to serve the donor class connected with the military industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street and the big banks, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, the prison industrial complex and animal agricultural industries, AIPAC and Israel, and on and on. She would not have prioritized the needs of We the People and the planet over the longstanding status quo which for decades and under both major political parties has had us all on a suicidal trajectory. Kamala Harris would have slowed down the madness of this death spiral that we've been on under the current fascist regime, and she would not be throwing kerosene on the fire that Trump and Project 2025 are. And the trajectory would have remained the same. Would she have been better? Yes. That said, this incredibly low bar that must not be normalized when the cost to all of life on Earth is imperiled. — Molly
Millions read it and checked again. Some thought it was AI. Some thought he had been hacked.
It was real.
“Open the F**king Strait, you crazy ba**ards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
Easter Sunday. The president of the United States.
35%.
That is the share of Americans who approve of military action in Iran. Not a fringe. Not nothing. Thirty-five percent of a nation of 340 million people, which is a great number of people to still be standing in that figure after everything the ledger contains.
At least thirteen Americans dead in a war that began on a timeline Israel set and America funded. On the first day of that war, a missile struck a girls’ primary school in Minab, Iran. A hundred and ten children between seven and twelve years old. Since that morning, the Center on Conscience and War has recorded a 1,000% increase in active service members seeking conscientious objector status — across every branch, pilots and officers included. These are not people afraid of dying. Every one of them has said so. They believe the war is wrong. The school was the moment they could no longer stay silent.
The gas above $4 and climbing — not because of the market, because of the Strait, because of the war, because of the choice — and every Sunday since. The stock market falling as the trade war and the shooting war pull at the same thread. Grocery prices rising as the thread frays: food costs nearly 25% more than five years ago, the war pulling, the tariffs pulling, both running out of thread. Four million Americans losing food assistance this year under the largest cut to food aid in American history: veterans, parents of teenagers, people in their late fifties who cannot find work, the work requirements written into a bill that paid for tax cuts with the grocery money of people who had none. Healthcare premiums that doubled, in some cases tripled. A woman in Fresno canceled her insulin the same week her husband’s food stamps ran out. ICE still moving through neighborhoods before dawn, pulling people from homes, separating families — the apparatus of enforcement never pausing, never short of funds, never overwhelmed.
A $250 million ballroom going up in the White House. A monument to himself planned across from the Lincoln Memorial. On a website, a tumbler for sale. The copy reads: we would’ve made it with salvaged steel from Iranian naval ships, but they’re at the bottom of the sea.
Tariffs that raised the price of everything a family touches. DOGE, which promised $2 trillion in savings and left chaos. A foreign president captured and held. The Strait still closed — the deadline extended once, then again, then a third time, each extension arriving not as relief but as more weight: more days of $4 gas, more days of the market falling, the grocery bill climbing with it. On the other side of the Strait, Iran is striking power grids and oil infrastructure across the Gulf, hitting back at what America hit first.
Bridges. Power plants. Civilian water supply lines.
Trump has threatened Iran’s desalination plants.
The water. He threatened the water.
The world was already behaving wrong before Easter Sunday. The post made enough people look up.
In Crystal Lake, Illinois, the Trump Truth Store has closed. Owner Lisa Fleischmann said sales were dead from the moment the war began. Her customers are afraid to wear it now — afraid someone will come up and ask questions. The store carried ICE ICE baby shirts. DOGE caps. Gulf of America merchandise. Now the lights are off and the door is locked.
And still. 35%.
Still Here
At least three ways to hold that number.
The first belongs to the one buying the tumbler. The one typing blow it all up. The one who sees brown people, Muslim people, the enemy — and feels nothing when the school burns and something close to satisfaction when the ships sink. The weight of the ledger does not reach this person. It cannot. The weight has been converted into fuel. It burns clean and hot. Requires nothing from the one who tends it.
The second carries the full ledger and feels it. Runs every item without flinching — the way a person runs a hand along a wall in the dark, feeling each crack, each gap, each place the plaster gave. The tariffs. DOGE. Maduro. Netanyahu. The war. The school. The gas. The food. The healthcare already gone. Feels every crack. Measures every gap. And then, after the wall has been mapped end to end in the dark, the hand pulls back and arrives at: Do you really think Kamala Harris would be doing better? Yes, he’s a clown sometimes. But nobody will convince me he wasn’t the better option.
The list is complete. Its conclusion withheld. And still the hand pulls back from what it touched. The thing in the dark stays unnamed.
The third is the one who stopped coming into the store. Confirmed it was real — not AI, not hacked, him — and still does not know what to do with it. Is not defending. Is not condemning. Is afraid someone will ask questions. The quiet has become the answer.
Three postures. One number. Beneath all three, the same conclusion, reached and unspoken, because speaking it would mean looking directly at what was chosen, at what it cost, at who has always carried it.
Who It Was For
America has always known how to feel nothing. An old skill. It was practiced when Japanese American families were loaded into internment camps while their neighbors watched from porches and said nothing. It was practiced when the bombs came down on Black Wall Street in 1921, when a prosperous Black neighborhood was bombed from the air and burned to ash. It was practiced through the Chinese Exclusion Act, through the Bracero workers who built the fields and were deported when the harvest was done, through forty years of Tuskegee, through every decade of militarized police moving through neighborhoods that never belonged to the people who ordered it.
The country learned to feel nothing by learning to feel it selectively. By deciding, long before any of this happened, whose suffering required a witness and whose did not. Not in a single moment. In ten thousand small agreements made across generations: that certain people’s pain was a fact of life and certain other people’s pain was a crisis. That certain violence was order and certain other violence was chaos. That the aim mattered. That as long as the suffering moved in the right direction, toward the right people, the floor would hold.
The Muslim ban held. Raids on Hispanic families held. Children separated at the border — held. ICE moving through neighborhoods before dawn, the apparatus of enforcement running clean through the shutdown and the war and all of it, never pausing, never short of funds — that held. Through all of it, the 35% held. They had been practicing their whole lives. They had inherited it from people who had been at it longer.
Then a president typed “Praise Allah” on Easter Sunday and some of them checked their phones twice. Not because the contempt was new. The contempt is as old as the country. Because the aim felt uncertain. Because for one moment the violence seemed to curl back toward the hand holding it, and people who had built their safety around where the suffering aimed suddenly could not feel the floor.
The Trump Truth Store closed because owner Lisa Fleischmann’s customers were afraid to be seen in the hat. They had worn it through everything. They stopped when the aim became uncertain.
What a country will not look at does not disappear. It passes down. It becomes the floor the next generation walks on without knowing. And when that floor shifts — not collapses, just shifts — they reach for their phones. They check twice. They ask if maybe he was hacked.
He was not hacked.
The Strait is still closed. Three deadlines have passed. The gas is above $4. The grocery bill is higher than it has ever been. Food assistance is gone for millions. Healthcare is gone for millions more. The bombs are falling on civilian water supplies. Service members are leaving this war at a rate no one has ever seen. The Trump Truth Store is dark. The tumbler is still for sale.
But would Kamala have been better?
Please go here for the original article and notes & sources: https://thehumanityarchive.substack.com/p/but-would-kamala-have-been-better
No comments:
Post a Comment