THE END TIMES: A NOVEL | FICTION PREVIEW | AM I CRAZY OR IS THIS WHAT SANITY LOOKS LIKE IN AN INSANE WORLD?

My name is Aurora Stelleperetti, and I come from an alternate world.

In that world, I was an artist and then I was a revolutionary killed for being a visionary. Humanity came to an end when the Coronavirus destroyed our reproductivity and corporate deregulation destroyed our air and our water. That happened when fascists took over our government in 2021, hanging Mike Pence in the process. We tried to save ourselves for a while and managed to keep fascism from rising to power, but all to no avail. I played a roll in that: Suffice it to say, it wasn’t easy, and it’s a long, long story still under lock and key. Nobody has time for that.

So, no, I don’t come from the future, I come from the present, in a way, with an important message: Disinformation is a Cold War Weapon, religious extremism is fascism, and you, yes, YOU, dear reader, are in serious jeopardy. Your president has vascular dementia, and the cabinet must step up and declare the 25th Amendment to ensure that presidential immunity is used for all official acts necessary to protect our democracy.

 I know. I know. I know there are times when it feels like the world is just … unlivable. I don’t know how else to describe it. Why the hell am I here?! What is the point to all this?! The situation just seems to be getting more and more dire by the minute and the hour.

I cannot draw, I cannot paint, I cannot breathe at night. My heart lives in my throat, suffocating, and my mind is spewing out its guts like it’s suffering from radioactive poisoning. That’s the disinformation. It’s a technological poisonous gas, a kind of biological cyberwarfare. It is eating us all alive from within.

Sometimes I come back to that very first question: To Be? Or Not To Be. And now it truly stumps me. What am I, if the world tells me I am nothing? Can I be not of this world? Can I be the heroine in my own story? Can everything I write be labeled as fiction?

That’s a silly thought, the kind of thought I escape to when the weight of this catastrophe is about to smother me or I start to grab hold of the idea that it is me going crazy. Wouldn’t that be something special, if I really was just caught in a nightmare all in my own head, every headline and every comment and every bit of evidence to the contrary made up by me. Man. What a mindfuck that would be.

Forgive me because I’m having too many thoughts to put them all out at 90 characters per minute given the lack of minutes I possess. It’s tough sometimes when God speaks through you like this. I don’t have control of my fingers, I don’t know what I’m going to write next, I just know what I’m hearing. And I’m hearing alarm bells and sirens and sobs and silence. And these words.

Oh, God, this is so hard. And this is just too much. Where to even begin?

First, the threat of Christian Nationalism is real. That’s the scariest thing to me, and to God: God absolutely fucking hates it people use faith in God to commit atrocities, to take away Free Will, to interfere with life’s purpose and meaning when they have been so tempted by power and money. I think people need to understand: Christian Nationalism is not the same as Christianity. It's not just "oh the government's going to put Under God on everything but nothing will really change." It's not something that is "only going to affect Jewish people or Muslims or people who care about their religion and I only care about music and food". It's Hitler. It's a genocide on American soil waiting to happen. It's the destruction of freedom. Trump does not care about you. He's a power-hungry demonic force tempting you through your darkest thoughts. #VoteBlueToSaveAmerica #demonocracy #savedemocracy #freedomforall #justiceforall #agnosticnation #TruthMatters #formercatholic #godwantsmetotellyou

The Democratic Party, under Dementia Joe's confused leadership, has been extremely, pathetically, tragically, weak in this modern day fight against fascism. Biden has never been willing to call a spade a spade when it comes to Trump, and Harris has largely followed his lead. They don't sit down and talk about what Russian election interference really means at its core, they don't say disinformation is the new cold war, they hardly really say anything. "vote vote vote! vote vote vote! donate donate donate!" Like, JFC, DO SOMETHING. BIDEN HAS IMMUNITY.

The thing is, Citizens United completely broke our democracy in 2010. It basically gave 100 percent of the power to billionaires while still preserving the appearance of elections, and this country has been at death's doorstep ever since because the parties won't admit to the damage that has been done. A) The Republican Party is totally against democracy, does not believe in the power of the people, does not care if it's in the minority or the majority, does not think women should vote, does not want all votes to be equal. Fundamentally. At its core. And B) the centrist Democratic Party has not been pushed toward change or progress. In fact, the extremity of the today's Republican Party has pushed the Democratic Party to the right. That's why you've got the Cheney's endorsing Harris. Billionaires have completely silenced the left these days. When you call Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi leftists, and every single person in the media just falls in line, you're erasing the true left. The progressive left.

But this is Germany in 1938, except in our time, in our turn, Hitler lost his power and is fighting to get it back. We absolutely cannot let him get it back. There is absolutely no problem we are facing that will be solved by a Trump presidency. Calling Trump and Vance "weird", while it seemed to work on social media, still downplays the danger. The Democratic Party, while injured and limping around after a cataclysmic event, is still not fascist. It is still full of public servants who believe in helping people and doing the right thing and basic human rights and using the government as a tool to help people instead of as a weapon to control people. That's what fascism does, uses government as a weapon.

This nation has always been a nation of immigrants. Immigrants have always been how we've grown our numbers in this country. That's not "replacement theory", that is ... America. But Republicans are now anti-immigrant. They believe non-white blood is dirty. Elon Musk is a Republican obsessed with population growth. Ask yourself, how do those things go together? Hmmmm? Maybe you think, well, it's one thing to force a woman to give birth if she "wanted it, should've kept her legs shut". You know, sex has consequences, women have to take accountability for our actions, blah blah yadda blah. But once you start forcing some women to give birth, it's not a stretch to force others to give birth, especially when so many Americans, in particular Christian Nationalists, seem to believe rape is a myth in the first place. They are more likely to believe in virgin births and divine conceptions. To them, pregnancy has nothing to do with men. It's God's will.

Christian Nationalists will try to remove women from the workforce. Women being subservient to men and staying out of the rooms with power and being financially reliant on men for survival are core Christian Nationalist beliefs. And maybe you're a guy who thinks, "good, more opportunity for me, let the women starve!" or "women suck anyways" or yadda yadda yadda, whatever dark thought you have about it, and I just think you haven't thought this one through. You want to go back to the "good old days", but on Earth, there is no way to actually go back in time. There is only forward, and it will not be the same. It will not be "the good old days." Women's rights are a Pandora's Box. You can't just put them back in the box and expect the world to function. They won't go back in the box. Women will be miserable, women will make your lives miserable, and you will be miserable without us.

You are allowed your dark thoughts. Life, survival, heartbreak, it's all complicated. We all need more therapy than we have access to. But when you let those dark thoughts rule, when you give them all your power, when you let them take over, when you don't have a kindness to give or a light on inside, you're not a man. You're not the protector, you're not a hero. You're the villain.

Maybe you don't believe in villains. Villains exist only in stories and in the movies, we are all just out for ourselves, it's survival of the fittest, dog eat dog, kill or be killed, etc. The Handmaid's Tale is just a work of fiction, Animal Farm is just a story about some mean pigs, Marvel movies have too much CGI. Maybe the stories don't inspire you, but stories are inspired by real life, and other people are inspired by the stories they hear. There is so much truth in fiction. Robert Downey Jr. recently called Elon Musk out for "cosplaying" Tony Stark, and it's about time. Elon Musk wants everyone to think he's some kind of Iron Man. But he's not Tony Stark. He's the fucking Joker targeting the working class (and Adam Kinzinger is Batman, but that's a post from another day).

So yes, even though the Democratic Party leaves a lot to be desired, #voteblue #pandorasbox #womensrights #fascism #ChristianNationalism #artistdiary #electionanxiety #countrybeforeparty

Best Case Scenario:

Man, I have to say this one little thing that’s going to make everyone hate me. It’s going to bring the “vibes” down. But there comes a time when too much optimism reallllllllly becomes a problem. It’s like, you really just believe everything is just going to somehow wind up fine? That sometimes sounds like the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Progress takes work. Suffering is everywhere. Between the rise of fascism, the climate crisis and artificial intelligence, we are in the middle of a perfect storm. This is the point in the movie where we need all hands on deck.

I can see all our souls sitting up there, watching us as we blunder, SCREAMING at the TV, about to change the channel to the next multiverse in the hopes that they did better.

If all goes perfectly, best-case scenario, both sides contest these results, Biden stands up and uses his immunity to remove the insurrectionists from office and declare Harris as the next president, Trump disappears from the ether, and we go back to saving the bees again.

I’m putting that out there. I hope to God that’s what happens. God prays to us that that’s what happens. Free will is a bitch like that. I can’t say I’m not choosing to be God’s instrument.

There’s a future that may be about to happen where I just don’t stand a chance, and that future casts a wide net. It’s not just if Dumbotron and his Russian bot army wins. There’s a lot that can still go wrong if Harris wins, if all the centrists and moderates in office don’t take enough actions to fit what is broken, if they keep putting band-aids on our giant gaping wounds, if they keep trying to negotiate with terrorists and people who declared war on us. There’s a lot that needs to get done to set the world straight, to continue with modern-day progress and to keep the hope and the ideal of freedom and justice for all alive. This is a narrow path I walk, where it pays to be alive.

My time on this earth might be so limited. You’ve got to understand, being silenced, having your free will taken from you, are the same as death. Some of us die many deaths in our lives: the death of our biology when we never conceive. The death of our passion when we never succeed. The death of our words when our ideas are banned. Life under fascism just won’t be the same as living. I fear the rising inequality and the ways in which trillionaires will destroy any and all working class equity or voice in our government, quickly leading us to become a feudalist fascist theocratic nation instead of the democracy I was so proud of.

Democracy, what a fraud. There hasn’t been democracy in this country since “Citizens United” in 2010. “Citizens United”. What a misleading name. Nothing managed to divide us as quickly as billionaire spending. I know we’ve always struggled to be a free nation, but now we’ve got fires in drop boxes and swing state lotteries and disinformation being used as a fascist cold war weapon, all being done in the name of GOD.

I know the narrow path I walk. It’s a thin alley of solutions. Trump ended the peaceful transfer of power in 2020; it does not matter that he did not win the battle. It was a declaration of war that the rest of us just didn't want to believe. That war has been ongoing, fought only by one side. Biden must use the Presidential Immunity SCOTUS "gifted" to presidents to fight the rise of fascism in the United States. The President takes an oath to protect democracy from all threats, foreign and domestic. This is not a voter responsibility nor should it fall to voters at a time when disinformation is being used as a weapon in a modern-day Cold War. All tools at Biden's disposal should be used or our government will cease to be a tool for the people but a weapon used against the people. Everything SCOTUS has broken in these last four years must be fixed before we resume elections in this country again. Starting from the first lie that the 2020 election was rigged all the way to Musk's swing state lottery, our elections have been totally tampered with and cannot be trusted, and the Democratic Party has been negligent in its duty to protect Americans. NEED I REMIND YOU THE PRESIDENT HAS DEMENTIA! Biden's cognitive capability to fully comprehend what is happening is clearly questionable. He stepped down as a candidate, but perhaps it's time for the Cabinet to take away the keys to the car.

I mean, there is so much happening right now. It’s impossible for someone at their peak to keep up with it when disinformation travels faster than the speed of light. There is no free press to say all this. I might have forgotten to mention that. It’s almost like, poof, one day it was there, and the next day it was just gone. The billionaires had put their foot down, fulfilling the prophecy that it all ends in ruins. When you want to explain how it can be that 20 years is also 20 seconds, think of the fall of newspapers. That’s what time is: a rubber band that stretches, a list of headlines each with different stories to tell. It’s a page in a book that lasts across time.

So I think now I’ve told you about everything, sort of, though the details can still only be imagined. Am I crazy? Or am I what sanity looks like in a crazy world?