"This Time - Come Back"

Yes, take today off - but then, come back. [twitter original]

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At some point today, I'm going to collapse. But I'm going to beg all of you for something first.

12 years ago, Barack Obama was sworn into office following a disastrous Republican administration, that of Bush II, in the middle of multiple ongoing wars and financial collapse.

Bush II had created and implemented the surveillance state. He'd created and implemented a torture regime which shames this country to this day. He'd invaded Iraq entirely on a structure of lies _they_ called manufactured reality.

Staffers had bragged about it, talking about it as a tool to maintain Republican control... forever.

He'd lost the popular vote on his first term too, by the way - and declared the first day that they intended to govern like they had a mandate. Quick reminder of that.

But then Obama! Hope! Change!

And not _one whit_ of accountability.

Everybody I knew working all this, like we've all been working Trump? Took the day off...

...and almost none of them came back.

I did, though. And when I ripped into Obama over a lot of this...

Well. I'd already lost my conservative friends over Bush II's war crimes, torture, fiscal insanity, for holding him accountable to what were supposedly Republican principles.

This time, I lost my liberal friends.

...who, again, never came back from the vacation.

And that's a big part of how we got _here_.

_We can't do this again._ We just can't. Okay? Last time got us _this_. Imagine another round.

We won't survive it.

So yes, please, do, take today off. I'm literally going to collapse from exhaustion sometime today. I might be asleep for a day or two.

But I am _begging_ you. I am _pleading_ with you.

This time - come back.

Compartment Four

More Twitter writing for you today.

Here are the executive actions Biden is expected to take on Inauguration Day

President-elect Joe Biden plans to take 17 executive actions in the first hours of his presidency Wednesday, signing a flurry of executive orders

The headline preview is out of date. 17 exec orders confirmed today. Tomorrow is more pandemic actions. Friday includes restoring Federal collective bargaining rights. Monday is w/e, but Tuesday starts the push to END PRIVATE PRISONS. And it goes on.

We're back in the fucking WHO. We're back in the Paris Accords, it takes 30 days but it's started.. The Muslim Ban is gone. The Census is being de-rigged, which is PRETTY FUCKIN' IMPORTANT for representation. The anti-LGBT discrimination exo is gone. The 1776 Commission is gone.

I've heard some noise about how Biden's not even good at not being Trump and how that was his only redeeming quality.

Fuck. That.

Did I mention border wall construction got stopped?

Next Wednesday is climate change day.

Sounds like a pretty good job so far of NOT BEING TRUMP.

That doesn't even _mention_ going straight at white supremacy in his inauguration speech, after a President who did everything in his power to reinforce it, and lock it in with a fucking INSURRECTION.

Look. I know. He was part of the Obama team, and they gave way too many passes to way too much shit from Bush II. Certain types of US foreign policy aren't going to get better. But you have to understand something.

HE'S REPLACING A FUCKING FASCIST.

And also:

Basically? The US?

It's the fucking Titanic. Okay?

And it's been headed for an iceberg for a long time, some of us have been saying so for a while, everybody else was listening to the band play.

Then Captain Donkeyballs decided to steer it _straight into_ the fucking thing.

Four compartments open to the sea, except...

Somehow, through some _miracle_ of _intense, sustained labour_...

...we got compartment four shored up.

_We don't have to sink._

The ship - the Titanic, the Third Republic - is _fucked_. Okay? But it doesn't have to sink. It needs to be drydocked and overhauled and there need to be some real design changes.

But we don't have to _sink_.

Sadly, there's still a big problem, in that right now, we're still basically at sea, and the shoring is temporary, and improvised, and even with a new captain...

...the old one and his minions are attacking the shoring.

They want that compartment _open_ again, by god.

I've talked about our job a lot. Stabilise this thing. Get it to shore, or dry dock, or whatever - don't stretch the metaphor too far, no metaphor can take that - and get to work on real structural changes.

But we have another job, too. Or at least, a functional requirement.

And that functional requirement is admitting that there's a _difference_ between the captain and crew who steer _into_ the iceberg and _attack_ the shoring are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT TO the ones trying to put things _back together_.

We can bring this ship, this Titanic, back to shore afloat. Fix the structural problems. Make the damn thing actually work right this time. Or at least get closer to that.

But you have to realise, you have to _admit_, that even if you don't like the new captain and crew's shoring plan, at least they're working on keeping it _above the water_, and not reopening the hull to the sea.

Electing Biden - and actually getting him into office - was changing captain and crew. If you want to call it mutiny, the MAGAts would certainly agree, but fuck 'em.

These executive orders, what's going up right now, and what's going up next week, is obviously the shoring. It's not a complicated metaphor.

It's also not enough to sail the ship.

But if we're lucky, and we work really hard, and we don't give the old captain and crew the opportunity to wreck shit...

...maybe, just maybe, we can get to shore alive and start to rebuild this goddamn boat.

That's where we are. We have a shot.

Don't screw around and blow it.