The Witches are Coming

by Lindy West

We kept letting Adam Sandler make more movies after Little Nicky, because white men are allowed to fail spectacularly and keep their jobs.

Women: Just livin’ life, going to college, having brown hair, swimming, helping the injured. Ted Bundy: Murders thirty women (at least) because his peepee scrunched from being a massive shitty failure. The legal system: BUNDY YOU ARE A GREAT MAN AND A GREAT LAWYER AND COULD BE OUR GREATEST PRESIDENT IF I’M BEING

HONEST BUT UNFORTCH I GOTTA SENTENCE YOU TO DEATH ON ACCOUNT OF ALL THE MURDER AND WHATNOT SORRY BUDDY DANG I WISH I COULD HIRE YOU AS MY SON AND HECK YOU SHOULD BE DOING MY JOB, PARTNER! PS U MY HERO.

Millennials. LOVE. Board game–based Cold War murder mystery sex farces chockablock with J. Edgar Hoover references. Bing bang bong! If you don’t know that, then you don’t know millennials, sweetie!

The Trump era has produced an insidious strain of political amnesia, leading otherwise rational left-wing people to feel warm things for George W. Bush because he paints pictures of kitties and shares his gumdrops with Michelle Obama and because a toilet demon is president now and a bungling, babbling warmonger seems like a gorgeous statesman by comparison. (Sheepish disclosure: I briefly fell for the cat paintings.) But how can we forget so much so quickly? My parents literally had toilet paper with George W. Bush’s face on it. Don’t you remember how you felt before you knew that things could get worse?

I understand that the whole point of South Park is to bait me into writing exactly this essay—into such self-serious “offense,” but, sorry, if we let trolls dictate the parameters of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s acceptable and what’s taboo, we end up with Donald Trump as president.

My fellow human beings. Wherever you live. Whomever you voted for. You know those things that mean everything to you—your exquisite loves—whatever your version is, your evergreen trees, your mornings, your cold waters, your Dad-haunted hills, your Ahamefule? Human-made climate change is going to take those things from you and kill them. We will not get to die in the normal ways, quietly, comfortably, together, at home, old. We will die in pain and panic. Or your grandchildren will. They will be panicked and in pain and will never have seen snow on the mountains in the summertime, as you and I got to.