Ok straight, white guys. We get it. You still run the world.

Could you just not burn it all down please?

I don’t write about politics. I’m not sure I write about anything really. Sometimes I just feel a lot of ‘something’ bubbling around in my chest and, when it doesn’t go away but gets bigger over time, the best way to get rid of it is to dump it onto the page. It’s a sense-making exercise and I think it works because - as Winnie-the-Pooh knew - things look and feel different when they are out in the world and can be examined.

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

Usually, when I publish the things that have been bubbling, several people contact me to say, ‘Yes! Me too.’ And that’s really nice. Because then you know you aren’t alone in this weird world.

Anyway, I think I’m avoiding diving in because this might sound political. But it’s not. It’s just feelings. You might have similar ones, you might have different ones, but they aren’t wrong or right. They just are.

It felt like we were getting somewhere. We were building a world which was supposed to better for everyone. Be gay and get married, be a CEO despite having a vagina, be a stay-at-home-dad…if you want to. Choice, tolerance, acceptance, equality, compassion - regardless of race, class, disability, nationality, neurotype, gender, age. I know we had a long way to go. But I did feel we were getting somewhere.

And now? It feels like the balloon has been burst. I’m deflated.

We forgot, I think, that it was the straight, white boy who brought the ball to the playground. Nobody is sure why he’s the only one with a ball, but his dad gave it to him, and he was given it by his dad, and his before him, and that’s just the way it is. He’s been letting the other kids play. To start with he got to pick the teams and make the rules, and it was going ok. But then, the other kids started speaking up, getting a bit cocky, introducing their own rules and mixing up the teams. He didn’t like that. So, he’s snatched his ball back with a firm, ‘It’s mine! And I’m not sharing any more.’

It’s a complicated thing to make sense of, but I do see that the straight, white guy was being cast as the villain in everyone’s story. Awkward, because when you look at the perpetrators who sparked Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, he was. But perhaps we should acknowledge how derisive people were of those who raised their hand and said #NotAllMen. Shush there now, with your penis and your privilege. We’re done with listening to you.

Tim Minchin articulated it better on Channels 4’s ‘Ways to Change the World’ podcast:

“This stat, that boys are going right and girls are going left…that is catastrophic. Everyone’s ‘on’ all the time, apparently getting informed, but actually just being fed what agitates them or what they already agree with. If you’re a boy, if you’re a straight, white bloke in contemporary America, you are not seeing a lot of positive messages about how great straight, white blokes are. There’s not a lot of stuff for you about pride, that makes you feel good. There’s a lot of stuff about how terrible you are, and they are just going to run into the arms of someone who lets them have pride.”

Trump has been in charge of America again for a week. He seems to have done have lot of things, and I wonder, to Tim’s point, how the news outlets and social media algorithms have impacted what different people know about. Let’s swap notes. In my awareness: he had something to do with the Gaza-Israel ceasefire, he keeps talking about ‘getting Greenland’, he released a photo of half-a-dozen brown men who seemed to have their hands tied filing onto an enormous military plane, he shut down the government website pages on reproductive rights, gun safety, disabilities, and anything in Spanish, he closed all government DEI initiatives, banned the Pride flag in government buildings, let a lot of people who support him out of prison, and has announced that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been saying lots of things about European politics, sparked controversy by saluting on stage, and has suggested that the English Channel be renamed ‘George Washington Channel’. I’m not clear why.

People are going to feel a lot of different things about all that. I don’t think I can unpack it.

Meanwhile in the UK, the Reform party gained momentum and are now, apparently, leading in the polls. YouGov says their supporters lean towards male and young. Reform seems to have been handed the MAGA playbook. Divide and rule. Talk a lot about immigration and national pride. Position yourself as the saviour to all the problems. If I had to make a bet, I’d say we will be seeing Nigel Farage smiling smugly outside Number 10 in a few years.

Just to emphasize that this isn’t about politics, but feelings, I should say that each of these men - Trump, Musk, Farage - make my skin crawl. Just seeing a picture of them evokes an unpleasant, physical reaction. How they have notched up 7 failed marriages and several more relationships between them I don’t know. Because that’s a lot of women who have chosen to see them naked. But hey, each to her own.

It’s nice to have optimism about the future of the world, and I don’t have so much at the moment. I hope David Attenborough doesn’t die anytime soon. I worry about how sad I’ll be the day that happens, and I’m not sure I can take it right now. He wouldn’t burn down the world if he was in charge, would he?

But the trouble is, the people who would do best at the job, don’t even want it.