Maybe the catcalls on my posts are deserved. Even my fiance calls my posts 'histrionic.' It was his recommendation that I take a look at the comments on my posts in the first place.
But I am sincere, and I'm a real human being with real feelings and a real story. I don't know any other way to prove this except to tell exactly where I'm coming from.
I am 30-ish, transgender female, and I live in Oregon. I came from a lower middle-class Southern family but always found myself at odds with the culture in the Deep South.
At first I tried to embrace it. I tried to like Bill O'Reilly, country music, pickup trucks, and Evangelical fire-and-brimstone theology. And for a while, being immersed in it, I got into it during my teens.
I became really extreme about the time I was 15 years old. I was a Christian dominionist. I wanted to exterminate gays and liberals and here's the disturbing part: I had support from others in my community. I was radicalized by youth pastors at my church who made it a point to get us excited to die for Jesus. What I experienced was the equal and opposite of what kids who get sucked into ISIS must face; I was 15, afraid for my soul, and being fed a steady diet of dispensationalist theology by preachers who firmly believed that the Tribulation would come any minute.
But things change, and I changed. I started to see through it and when I did, I became angry. I was angry at the culture that had sucked me in. I was angry at what the offerings I gave on Sunday were being used to support.
More behind cut.
The part of South Carolina I was in at the time was of great interest to developers in the late 90s and early 2000s. I watched them buy up wetlands and develop them, against federal law. I watched them cut the throat of the thriving tourist industry to try to bring in extra money by attracting a wealthier crowd, who turned their noses up at working-class Myrtle Beach.
And when all these injuries had been done, I saw the people I had grown up with marching lock step to war with Iraq. After 9/11 I really began to see the ugliness in conservative culture, discouraging any sort of questioning what the President's aims were as more and more of our liberties were being given away wholesale in the name of security.
More than that, I saw the role that the church I had once been involved with was playing in enabling Bush to get away with treason, and I began to develop a deep hatred of the Religious Right that turned into a near-lethal hatred when I discovered I was queer at the height of their push to keep the LGBT community from advancing.
I spent a year and a half (2003-2005) in the UK, where at least opposing the war and Bush's neoconservative politics wasn't considered a fringe issue. I tried to emigrate but it was difficult to find work on a student visa. Ultimately, I returned for love, and I've been with the same wonderful man for ten years now.
When Obama got elected, I really thought this country had turned around, but by 2011 I was starting to lose hope as more drones, more spying, and more sketchy defense bills became his legacy. Once again, I felt betrayed and I strayed to the fringes.
I participated in Occupy, via the Cascadia Independence Movement, and watched as Occupy hit its crescendo only to attract a large contingent of anarcho-capitalists (who I saw as enablers of the sort of politics that ran my home state's economy into the ground) and a group unwilling to exclude people whose views were diametrically opposed to our stated goals.
So I left the Cascadians, and I left Occupy, and I fell out permanently with anarchism which I now see as a lofty idea that can never work in practice. And ever since I've been feeling as if the people who want to resist are the people I trust least, and the people I trust the most aren't resisting enough.
A lot of the ideas I post are my own, because I've become so distrustful of the views of others that I'm always trying to read between the lines. I sure as hell don't trust Alex Jones and his ilk. I don't trust most of the media especially the ones who bill themselves as truth tellers. I don't trust police, I don't trust government, I don't trust corporations, I don't trust conservative family or friends... some days I really do feel like I can only trust myself and my fiance, who shares a lot of my frustrations.
I see comments on news articles blaming Democrats for things Republicans do. I see tabloids in the supermarket checkout aisle making a circus of transfolk like myself. I see a country galloping merrily down the road to plutocracy and no one making a serious effort to stop it (except Bernie Sanders perhaps, who is probably the one ray of hope I have for this country). And people, I am afraid. I am afraid that people like me won't have any place in this country in another few years.
This sense of isolation and fear has left me willing to embrace my own bad ideas by putting 2 and 2 together and getting 5 because I always assume there's a "1" I'm not being told about. But that's no excuse to fill a good site with bad articles, or to lash out when my fear-driven posts are ridiculed.
I have no right to complain if I'm labeled a troll. I'm sorry for being too wrapped up in my own paranoia to see just how stupid I was being and I'm sorry for spewing garbage that should never have left the pages of a political thriller.