NOTE: Most of you don't need to hear this. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I need to say it and this is my only forum. I beg your indulgence.

I enter into this piece with extreme reluctance. 2016 broke my heart and ten years of raging against the stupidity of my own culture before that left me a bit of a wreck. It's taken a toll, psychologically, psychically and physically. I am now a cardiac patient struggling to stay alive. My medical situation is not dire and I don't want to give that impression - but it ain't what it used to be. I can't swear to it, but I believe that a decade of more-or-less constant fury and frustration arising from the simple act of paying attention to national and global matters has done a number on my heart...and that's just for starters.

I blogged for a solid decade, wrote my heart out, literally and figuratively, to try and push back against the rising tide of dumb, ignorant, cruel, myopic, shallow, petty and insane bullshit that has engulfed our culture. I tried to point out that the hippies were right back in the 1960s about how badly awry things had gone in this plastic war-loving land of profiteers and racist rightwing bullies, how far we had strayed from anything remotely like what we claim our values to be, how screwed ordinary people are for not having resisted the dumbness and the evil of the greedy, short-sighted and selfish rich. I'm talking about the mega-rich, the ones who have screwed us all. The ones who used their power to teach us to love war and hate the word socialism, because it threatened their grabby little kingdoms of pampered luxury and vice for the few, and pain, sorrow and heartbreak for the many.

They've also pushed racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and a host of other social ills because screwing over the people and keeping them at each other's throats was good for the 1%.

At any rate, I have, at the age of 66, been forced to pull back and turn away, to some extent at least, from my horror, rage and dismay at the monumental stupidity of 2016. And the years leading up to it of course. My damage is real. I know I'm not the only one.

So perhaps you can imagine my reluctance to delve back into these matters. Much to my chagrin, there's no avoiding it – not when I keep seeing otherwise intelligent and well-meaning people saying the most idiotic things. And especially not when they relentlessly attack those who are capable of seeing what they are not.

A few bullet points:

No one is fighting for your freedom

Your government is not your friend

Your representatives don't represent you

The media lies to us

The government lies to us

Our TVs lie to us

Our culture lies to us

Both political parties lie to us

You can't believe what you are told

Still, you are responsible for what's inside your own head

Education and Science are real and beneficial (though you might have to parse some words and define some terms)

There IS a class war and it's been going on for decades if not centuries, guess who's winning?

There is a military industrial complex and it's even worse than Eisenhower dared imagine, it's been the ruin of our nation, just as foretold by Ike himself (ironically, one of its architects)

Capitalism and it's demon spawn, mindless consumerism, have devastated the global environment, poisoning the air and the oceans, decimating the rainforests and destabilizing the planetary climate

Fossil fools and the evil billionaires they support have doomed humanity

Republicans are awful, Democrats are marginally less awful

Our political class is deeply and thoroughly corrupted

Greed has been our downfall

The Democratic Party has learned nothing by their cataclysmic mistakes in 2016

I still love the traditional democratic base, to the extent that they are liberal, true progressives, not greedheads, not defenders of the status quo and not supporters of war, but the party itself has lost its way and they don't appear to be coming back.

Some more bullet points:

Hillary and the DNC's “Pied Piper Strategy” (google it if you don't know it) coupled with the shanking of Bernie Sanders and the ripping off of all his supporters is why we have the putrid reign of the Trump regime

We desperately needed a revolution is 2016 and we had a reasonably good one going before the DNC and HRC (and all their little toadies like the counter-revolutionaries at daily kos) murdered it

There are perfectly good reasons to hate HRC that don't include any falsehoods, conspiracy theories or Russian propaganda

If you hate war, fracking, and shameless self-enrichment, you have reason to at least strongly disapprove of HRC

HRC is objectively a horrible human being and absolutely the worst candidate the democratic party could have attempted to foist on the American people (I wrote a piece titled, 'Bernie Sanders is the only electable candidate we've got' in an attempt to explain this to a democratic audience – some of them got it, many did not)

She was the one person who couldn't beat the worst and most ridiculous candidate to ever run

She was a cheater and we are her victims

Yes, it's worse than tragic that Trump won, but it's not HRC who should be president, it's Bernie

And it's not people who didn't vote for Hillary who are responsible for Trump, it's Hillary herself and all the people so dumb and politically inept as to back her over Bernie Sanders

I swore to never vote for HRC years ago, and I didn't. I voted for Jill Stein, the only peace candidate, not because I was especially enamored of her or thought she'd win or anything like that, but because that was the choice I was left with. I do have a conscience after all. I'm not saying I feel great about that choice. I'm troubled by it. Good God, look what happened! But I won't vote for war mongers – never again. I also have sworn off lesser evil voting. Give me something to vote FOR or fuck you. I'm sick and tired of electing people who immediately betray me and that's what the dems (the pols not the rank and file) have been doing for decades. They pander to the people, claiming to represent them, then once in office they busy themselves feathering their own nests, happily serve the 1% and connive with the republicans to push war and thievery and all we get are their bullshit excuses. The lesser evil is still evil. If that's the best choice you can give me, democrats, somebody slightly less evil than republican swine, then fuck you.

People have accused me of falling for smears, conspiracy theories or Russian propaganda because apparently there are no other possible reasons not to have voted for HRC.

No, I'm sorry, there are plenty of good true, objective reasons to have distrusted, hated or not voted for HRC, you know, Henry Fucking Kissinger's BFF, the queen of the Neolibs, the person who cheated us all out of the renewal of a Bernie Sanders presidency.

Yeah, Bernie was imperfect and not political Jesus or anything, but out of all of them only Bernie was on the right track, and only Bernie had a smidgen of integrity – that's why he's the most popular politician in America now – by a wide margin – listen up democrats. HRC was the champion of global fracking and fossil fools everywhere, and a proud member of the ruling class who bragged about having both a private and public position on things, one for the banksters and Wall Street, and one for the rubes, those silly little voters. She was also one of the architects of the disasters in Libya, Honduras, Syria, etc, etc. You don't have to believe a single lie to hate this person. You have to believe a ton of them to like her.

Here she is on single payer health care, you know, that thing we all deserve and should have had long ago:

Hillary has blood on her hands and doesn't seem to mind. This is how she talked about Qaddafi (a human being) being anally raped to death with a butcher knife, as a consequence of her imperial actions against Libya:

None of what I'm saying about her is a lie. None, zip, nada. It's all a matter of historical record. She voted for the Iraq War. Bernie voted against it. Here they are. You decide.

Whoever stole the DNC emails, they didn't write them. What they reveal is what they reveal. Please forgive the loathsome Trumpery in this video but here's Hillary trying to squirm out of her statement to Goldman Sachs, et al about being two-faced, how it's cool to lie to the rubes:

So if you blame Trump on people who didn't vote for HRC, or if you blame Trump on anyone other than Bill and/or Hillary Clinton and the DNC, then you are information challenged, to put it kindly. If you're a person who still loves HRC or wants to swallow a pack of lies or cling to some bogus version of reality because it feels better than the real thing (which is admittedly messy and awful), don't expect me to argue with you or try to explain anything further to you. I have lost all desire to engage with such ignorance and lack of respect for truth or reality. You are responsible for what's in your own head. That's on you. I'm done.

Election days come and go. But the struggle of the people to create a government which represents all of us and not just the one percent - a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice - that struggle continues. ~ Bernie Sanders

For many, the American dream has become a nightmare. ~ Bernie Sanders