Life – Page 3 – The Renegade Coder

It's been a weird week. I'm at the end of my degree program, but it's hard to celebrate. Let's talk about it. Mixed Emotions At the time of writing, it's November 7th, 2024. Earlier this week, I successfully defended my dissertation. Then, the next day Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump. With so little time to process my emotions, I figured I'd take a moment today to reflect. Reflecting on the New Degree On one hand, it's really exciting to reach a milestone I had never even dreamed of. When I was in high school, I never really considered college an option—just that it was something high school kids were supposed to do. Part of this was because I grew up working class. My dad used to grind various shifts repairing electronics until he started repairing them himself. My mom used to build circuit boards until she went back to school to become a psychologist. By the time I was in high school, my family was doing pretty well. With that said, my parents fought about money basically my entire youth. Yet, from a child's perspective, I never really understood why. Sure, there were stretches of time where I didn't have a lot of food, but there were also stretches of time where I was really spoiled. In this weird dichotomy, I would have friends come over to play video games while making comments like "this looks like a roach house." When I finally went to college, I had no plans for my future. I started in computer engineering but identified a bit more with music education. As I worked through my computer engineering degree, I realized I identified a bit more with computer science. When I started working as an engineer, I realized that corporate life wasn't for me. Over time, the stars slowly started to align for me. A computer science PhD turned into a computer science masters and then into an engineering education PhD. So, you'll have to forgive me for not being able to see this degree in my future. As a result, I really haven't unpacked the importance of it yet. Reflecting on the Election Something that has sort of prevented me from celebrating is the election. In 2016, I didn't believe Trump would win, but I was skeptical of Hillary. I remember talking to a friend of mine about it, and he thought I was crazy for even considering the possibility of a Trump win. Of course, my skepticism never actually led me to vote. Learning my lesson, I went on to vote in every subsequent election, including several midterms. For example, I voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and I voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. I also voted on a variety of local elections and ballot measures, like the recent marijuana and abortion ballot measures in Ohio. For the record, I also voted for Obama in 2012, which was shortly after I turned 18. I just couldn't compel myself to vote after a long workday in 2016. Coming into 2024, I was not very optimistic of Joe Biden's chances. I told multiple people this including my PhD advisor and my therapist. There was just no way he was going to win reelection. As a result, when he dropped out, I was basically celebrating in a Costco. I really thought him dropping out was the ticket to winning. When Kamala took over, I started to get "libbed up." Of course, reality sank in pretty quickly as Kamala started racing to the center on her campaign. She started doing weird stuff like proposing Trump policies as her own. She wanted a border wall. She loved fracking. She wanted a strong military. These are traditionally right wing policies that are not going to appeal to the base. Not to mention her horrid position on Palestine. Then, she started leaning into Lincoln Project bullshit, like recruiting fallen republicans like Dick and Liz Cheney. The whole thing was very weird. She was playing to the middle in some weird attempt to attract right wingers, which obviously is not going to work. Why vote for Hitler-lite when you can just vote for Hitler? With that said, I still didn't think Kamala could lose. Polling was starting to look good closer to the election, so I was excited about the prospect of a Kamala win. Again, it's a lesser of two evils vote, but 99% Hitler is obviously better than Hitler (and frankly I don't think Kamala would have been that bad). Well, as it turns out, she lost. And now, liberals are turning their sights toward leftists (again) to blame us for the loss. Multiple times now I've voted "blue no matter who" because I believe we have a duty to do damage control, but I also understand voters who are apathetic. The democratic party has done nothing for the vast majority of people. Ultimately, it's easy to point fingers. You can be mad at green party voters or young men or white women or Latinos. But, identity politics is ultimately silly. If there is a single takeaway from the election, it's that fewer people showed up to vote. Both candidates lost votes. There isn't some huge red shift happening. We don't live in some insanely racist country (though, it is racist). It's just that a lot of people stayed home. Maybe if we put a leftwing populist out there, we'd have Reagan numbers. Instead, we tried to capture republican voters, and it kept people at home. Now, we're going to pay for it with a hyper-reactionary supreme court for the next 40 years. Looking Ahead The day after the election I was feeling like shit. I had to go back to work and pretend like everything was okay. You could feel the depression in my classrooms. Students didn't want to be there either. Yet, two days later, I felt really good. I felt vindicated. I was right to believe that Kamala's strategy of playing to the center was bad. She got no one excited to vote. Now, it's not a good feeling to be right. Ultimately, we're going to suffer as a nation for a long time. But, I couldn't help but feel empowered in a way. So, I decided to join the DSA. I know there are a lot of socialist orgs and there's a lot of criticism of the DSA, but I would much rather do something than nothing. As a result, I paid my first round of dues today. I think it's time we all sort of started contributing to our communities in some way. We can't keep letting these freaks run our government.