Notes on Politics as a Millennial

 I also have some incomplete thoughts of what it means to be watching this as a millennial. Pretty much every Xer and older I see on my social media has made some kind of remark regarding their shock and disbelief at yesterday's events. Maybe it's because they have a decade and change of ideological padding that I don't, but I honestly wonder where they have been and what they have been watching. The 20 years where I have had an actual role as a voter have all been beset by drama and danger.

2000 was when I first got to vote. That dragged out for months. (I remember in 2008 being astonished at being able to know who the next president would be immediately.
 

I was in undergrad when 9/11 happened. What this meant in real time was that I saw people in my classes disappear as they went to go enlist in the forever wars. The anti-war protests of 2002-4 saw the first kettling and the little "freedom of speech spaces" well away from where speakers of events could actually see them.  After the 2004 election there were a number of people writing sincerely about moving to Canada because they were concerned about the Bush administration's tamping down of dissent. (The first flashes of proto-Trumpism were when Bushies wanted to declare the AARP a "terrorist organization" because....why? I forget. But my newly retired mother was bewildered.)
 

The Obama admin was quickly beset by Tea Partiers and that nonsense. Violent calls to revolution were seen as crackpot but normal. Of course that only gained traction from 2010-2015.  
 

And then we've had the past four years where, you know, we've had "debates" on labeling, because we should call the dudes with the swastikas "alt-right" instead of "Nazis" and call the people in cages... what DID we decide to call that? Because calling them concentration camps was a problem but separating families and denying food and medical care wasn't. Anyway.
 

TL;DR Yesterday was the logical conclusion to twenty years of right-wing bullshit and anyone who "didn't think it could happen here" was not paying attention. We got off light this time--those gallows they built weren't used. How much longer can we say that?