The election results are like a cancer diagnosis. I should know.

When the possibility first emerges, you are blind-sided. No. It must be some kind of mistake. There is a period of parsing results. Is it? Or isn’t it? And then, when it is, how bad is it? What stage is it? And finally, will you die?

The prognosis is grim. If 2016 was a concerning stage one diagnosis, 2024 is stage four.

In 2020, you could feel good that you beat that cancer back with a dose of chemo and radiation. But we can never forget that the so-called cure is also toxic. It too will have side effects, which are just effects that you didn’t anticipate or want. You can see now how you let some things slide. Kept eating Doritos. Whatever. The announcement that covid was over, for example, was a red flag. Because it wasn’t. It isn’t. The funding of a genocide was another sign that the cure might be as bad as the disease. It never pays to go into denial about the cancer symptoms.

This 2024 recurrence has metastasized to other parts of the body politic. Those diseased cells have never been isolated and it won’t do you (or me) any good to pretend this cancer will stay confined to a part of the body that we don’t need or can maybe amputate and forget about. The cancer is fascism. It is in the blood and bone now.

The cure, if there is one, will be long and painful. And it might not work. But it’s too soon to bring in Medical Assistance in Dying. I don’t know about you, but I still have some fight left in me and I can be subversive as fuck.

Fuck cancer. And fuck fascism.