Political Karens

The idea for this post has been kicking around for … I don’t know how many months.  It started when I saw a post about how some Democrats weren’t planning on voting for Biden because of how he’s handled the whole issue of Gaza.  On one hand, I fully understand the dream of only voting for politicians that fully support the same causes you do.  But on the other hand, I doubt Trump could even find Gaza on a map. 

I know some people get really put off being told they have to support the lesser evil, but where the fuck have they been living the past forty years?  Yes, the system is broken.  Yes, the only thing more antidemocratic than only having two choices is only having one.  And yes, Harris isn’t perfect.  But you know what, NOBODY IS FUCKING PERFECT!  If a politician agreed with me 100% on every one of the 8,000 issues we have in the country/world right now, I’d figure they were just lying to get my vote. 

If you took the 100 issues I care most about, and looked at, not what Harris promises to do but what she can probably actually deliver, maybe 10 of those issues will see marked improvement, 5 might actually get noticeably worse, and the other 85 will have little if any change.  Whereas with Trump, 95 will get noticeably worse, while the other 5 will have little if any change.  Will Harris bring about a new golden age of America and the world?  No.  But she will make things slightly better.  Trump will dose the country in gasoline and light a match.  The choice is between slightly better and utter destruction, and somehow people can’t decide? 

Even if every American agreed on what America should be, there’s no way to get there within a Presidential term.  And too many adult Americans don’t understand that.  They’re apparently still at the stage where if they want candy, but if their parent says no, they immediately start crying and screaming.  We can only try to make things better tomorrow than they are today, which means we are often just left with baby steps.  But they can be baby steps in the right direction.

This brings us to my concept of a Political Karen.  We all know the image of a hyper-Karen, someone who would demand the complete destruction of a pizza place as acceptable compensation for not putting enough green peppers on their pizza, even though they never mentioned extra green peppers when they ordered the pizza.  I hope most of us would not only not agree with that, but would see it as going too far.  Now a Political Karen, is someone who – watching the country be destroyed by a fascist Trump – would think that if only Harris had stated support for Policy Y, they might have voted for her, thus avoiding this whole situation.  And I would hope, that most people would see that as going too far as well.