I am concerned, frustrated, angry, happy, and powerful...

When I was 13 and my brother Tim was 11, my parents checked out and left us to fend for ourselves. The downside was that it left me with a decades-long battle with anxiety and made me a bit of a control freak (“You don’t say!” quips anyone who has ever known me). The upside is that I developed the skills of a pretty good floor general. I am calm under pressure, I can make smart decisions on the fly, and I adapt to change quickly. Times like we are going through now don’t normally phase me.

But I’m human and what we are dealing with is today is pretty damn extreme. I’m very familiar conservative impulse to attack the parts of the state that help people. I am not used to a wholesale, brute-force, stupid assault on everything – especially how it is going down. So, yeah, I’m a bit unnerved. I am concerned about the present and the future, about people I love and those who can’t fend for themselves. But I am not without hope. And the reason I see some light is because I am very angry, about as pissed off over politics and the powers that be as I’ve ever been in my life.

I am pissed off about two billionaires, who are completely out of touch with every day life, deciding what the rest of us need.

I am pissed off that a majority of Congress are fine with the president usurping their power to make decisions for the rest of us. Congress has 100 members of the Senate and 435 House members. Those 535 people are supposed to hash things out, try to find ways to make this very big, very diverse country work as much as it can for everyone. That is their fucking job and they refuse to do it.

I am pissed off that one of the billionaires has hired rapists, sycophants, fraudsters, criminals, dipshits, and hacks to help run the country and the other billionaire has a child army of pube-less twenty-year-old tech dudes helping him tear everything down.

I am pissed off at Democratic leadership for being weak and slow and indecisive. I am especially pissed off that the one Democrat who is out front defending the country and attacking the billionaires – Alexandria Ocasio Cortez – was denied a leadership position – not with the top dogs in the House, but heading a committee – just because leadership is scared.

I am pissed off that Democratic fossils like James Carvell and Rahm Emmanuel are stomping around telling us that the Democrats need to be more like Republicans, like that has ever worked for anyone except their consultancies.

I am pissed off every time I see some liberal, prog, or lefty write on social media, “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” This is our country and it is our responsibility to protect and save it. How many times do people need to be reminded that there is no man on the white horse coming to save us, that this is a fight we must (and that we should) fight ourselves. They treat dissent like its point, click, buy.

I am pissed off that people who oppose the administration think that fighting back is just too hard while acting like it is easy. It is neither. It just is. Like anything else worth the while, you work hard (and together) to get shit done. You take risks. You get dirty. You step outside your comfort zone. You sacrifice. That’s it. You gotta do the work.

That I am so pissed off makes me a bit happy. I am not an angry guy, mind you, but for every reason listed above (and plenty more), I deserve to be righteously pissed off. Righteous anger is good fuel.

What also makes me happy is that I am attracting trolls. I set my social media accounts so that nothing gets posted on my pages or in my groups without my clicking “okay,” which means I am the only one who sees this crap, but I do see it and it cheers me up. Why? Because if I am being trolled, I am pissing the right people off.

Like this guy I grew up with, a 58-year lifetime spectator, who wrote me that I wasn’t “punk rock” and that because I oppose a rank authoritarian, I am not anti-authority. It’s so feeble, just weak ass shit, trying to revoke the punk rock membership of someone who is just about to get the Great American Award of the Senior Discount (and doesn’t care about membership in any club, except maybe Bob’s Donuts frequent buyer’s club). It makes me happy that my detractors are clueless morons.

Then there’s the dozen messages and attempted posts that I got last week, all from a “group” of randos telling me that I’m going to lose and they will laugh at me when I have to suck up to the billionaires, and, by the way, they are watching me! Ohhhhhh, I am going to crawl into a hole and die from fear.

What these people don’t understand is that ever since I started seriously writing about politics in the 1990s, I’ve gotten too many death threats to count. The first was the scariest, partially because it was the first and partially because it was in reaction to an expose I did on a cop shooting cover-up, and the person issuing the threat was likely a cop. A lawyer friend who sued cops for a living (and the fun of it) and another journalist talked me down on that one, both telling me that if I was getting threats, I was doing a good job. After that, threats, trolling, telling me I’m not “punk rock” is nothing more than atta-boys and fuel.

And that’s life, isn’t it? Fucked up shit happens and you deal with it. Fucked up shit happens and you grow from it. Fuck up shit happens and you find something in it to inspire you and give you fight. The key is understanding that it is not what they do, it is never what they do. It’s what we – actually, what I do – that matters.

I can’t control what they do. I can control what I do. I control how I respond to them and how I fight back. I control what I do with my frustration and how I funnel my anger. I control how I react to trolling and threats. That’s all on me and that is a very good thing, because knowing that its on me is a source of power, and as I’ve written many times before (and will write again and again), what they fear the most is people understanding that they have power, throwing off fear, and using it.