the winter of our discontent, prequel.

today i can't stop staring at this. the state i was born in didn't ratify the nineteenth amendment until 1984. two years after i was born. even though it doesn't affect anything tangible in my life, i still feel betrayed in a ridiculous way. and ashamed to have fully half of my lineage rooted deep in a place that viewed my gender as property and second class citizen's until 24 years ago when, more than likely, they decided to ratify the federal law to humor us womenfolk and to downplay their reputation as the country's least socially and intellectually advanced state.

when i was a kid we used to buoy ourselves up with the old 'at least we aren't alabama!' which was consistently the state on the last rung, educationally speaking. but they ratified in 1953, thirty years before we did. a silver lining on a very black cloud, but still.

now that my grandparents have passed, and nobody that i care about still lives there, i'm content to forget that i spent the first decade of my life stewing in humanity's backwash. and i know that there are less advanced places in the world. but that's just it. we weren't supposed to be 'another part of the world', we were supposed to be part of america, land of the 'free'.

and it's not just my hometown, and it doesn't seem any less dismal just because women now have the right to vote, and it's not confined to women's rights or civil rights or tax reform or foreign policy... i'm just feeling the pre-election day cynicism that suffocates any glimmer of hope or warm feeling i may occasionally harbor for this great land of ours. i just don't trust my fellow americans to step up to the plate and make the right decision. they're too slow and stupid and easily impressed by headlines. they are terrified of change, of movement, of truth, of spice. they would rather complain about the price of gas than drive a honda civic. god forbid that we have to adjust our astronomically extravagant standards for living which were unreasonable and beyond our capacity to maintain in the first place. we've been living a lie and now we don't want to deal with our own fucking realities. if i could expat i would.