NEWSLETTER No. 2: Embracing our tinfoil hat era
Terrified Americans wish for a passport elsewhere, but is there really somewhere else to go?
My mom just sold her house, now too big for her alone, needing to cut costs. I'm afraid she'll lose her healthcare and suffer under Trump, so I asked her to consider moving back to Holland, where she was born and raised. I also thought about moving to Holland myself, but I need a job there to make that possible. And I like my life and apartment in LA.
Mom called her siblings in the Netherlands to ask their opinion, and they thought she would be MUCH SAFER staying in the US! Imagine that? As we live through daily terrors, gasping for safety nets, googling fireproof safes & some of us even buying our first gun - we're safer here?
All of Holland is afraid Putin will bomb them like the Nazis did in the 1940s. Her family thinks since the US is bigger, more spread out, and farther from Putin, mom is safer staying put. (side note, mom got a new house that she really loves near her old place in NJ, I'll be going home to help her move April 1st!)
I told this to a Canadian actress at work and she said Canada's afraid that the US will make them into a state since the Canadian army is too small to fight the US.
Americans are afraid we'll lose our healthcare, our parks, air travel.
Europe is afraid they'll be bombed by Putin
Canada is afraid they'll become the 51st state.
Surely if you asked around, every country has their own dire fear, unique to this moment in time - and there is nowhere else to go but this painfully beautiful planet.
The rise of fascism is a global problem.
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SUFFERING
We all try to understand suffering and destruction. How things could be this way? Last newsletter I suggested the food chain as something cruel built into our design. That we must kill to live.
What I think about most is the relationship between God/Nature and Man - and how that relationship is mirrored between Man and Machine.
Just like man and all natural creation is made in the image of the creator, machine too is made in the image of man, and I'm always trying to understand what that means about who and what we are.
God/Nature built a world where destruction is as natural as creation.
Man builds weapons that could destroy everything.
We build AI and robots that could take our best, most life affirming jobs.
Man also builds medicine and art, gives birth and nurtures. Man made music can be as beautiful as earth's sunsets.
We are stuck in a cycle of destruction and creation.
It seems we could do so much more to save beauty and end suffering with all of our knowledge and resources.
God makes cancer, and we can make science to stop cancer.
Does a future exist where mankind solves all the problems in the natural world?
At this moment we seem doomed to war and conflict as natural as falling rain.
Many philosophers have opined on suffering.
Usually getting to some conclusion about how the rose's thorn is as necessary as its flower.
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“All the grand sources of human suffering are in a great degree conquerable by human care and effort; and though their conquest is grievously slow, and though a long succession of generations will perish in the breach before the conquest is completed ... yet every mind to bear a part however small and inconspicuous, in the endeavor, will draw a noble enjoyment from the contest itself, and would not for any brine consent to be without.”
― John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
This quote on suffering makes me think of the power of story in relation to the power of the journey of overcoming life's conflicts. Movies themselves are extremely powerful and relevant as seemingly the highest art - the closest that art can imitate life and life can imitate art.
“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering … has been the sole cause of every enhancement in humanity so far.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil trans. Judith Norman, Section 225
Do we need to touch the stove to know it's hot? (more on that later)
“We suffer more often in our imagination than we do in reality.” - Seneca, Letter 13: On Groundless Fears
This one from the pre-Socratic Seneca makes me think about those sad animal videos on the Dodo, how much heartbreak I experience imagining their suffering, but I'm not actually experiencing it. Or how Trump rules by fear and imagined consequences, many of which haven't been enacted yet. Or the fears imagined by America, Europe and Canada I mentioned at the start of this newsletter.
We need not fear things that are not our reality, but empathy is perhaps the most important thing man is capable of, and ignorance the most dangerous.
“But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering--provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable…
In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end. In other words, life's meaning is an unconditional one, for it even includes the potential meaning of unavoidable suffering...
[In Auschwitz] the question that beset me was, "Has all this suffering, all this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends on such a happenstance--as whether one escapes or not--ultimately would not be worth living at all." — Viktor Frankl
This one comes from Viktor Frankl who survived the holocaust, and it speaks to something I wrote about in the first newsletter. Creating boundaries around your soul, not letting the bastards in as much as you can control.
“We should remember that even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charm, its own attractiveness. The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why. Or how ripe figs begin to burst. And olives on the point of falling: the shadow of decay gives them a peculiar beauty” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Because I’m fcking goth and love Nine Inch Nails you get this perfect quote on the beauty in decay.
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THE OBVIOUS
It's wild how clear it is to most people that Elon Musk hacked the election for Donald Trump, which keeps him out of jail, and that's why Musk can do whatever he wants. We all know that while Elon is the designer of his fascist schemes, he's not the brains behind his own operations. That means his DOGE boys likely did the actual vote hacking. And these 20 something boys are young and easy to manipulate. They are extremely vulnerable to spies - sexy spies, friend spies, whatever works - I hope we send our best and brightest to do the job.
We can all feel what's surely inevitable by now: civil war or violence or whatever the fck is happening with Putin is upon us.
Calling your reps isn't enough. I hate violence! And guns! But the writing is on the wall. It feels obvious.
Which brings me to: COMMS
All of the skilled fired people from the military and federal government need to band together to form a resistance - and maybe even shadow government - but do we really want to fix Trump's mistakes so he can take credit, or do the American people need to forever learn the consequence of voting for dumb fascists so they don't do it again? The FAFO fuck around and find out of it all - seems to actually be important. Destruction is painful but we're at a breaking point where people need to learn that a stove is hot when you touch it. Trump's first term apparently wasn't painful enough that we're subjected to it again and on much worse terms.
Back to comms - I just hope that all the good people and especially the skilled fired people are exchanging information offline. Trump/Musk are pushing out some of the best people in this country, just like N*zi Germany pushed out their Jewish scientists who ultimately ended them. We can start exchanging comms in our own communities by setting up "cells" or simply - hangout groups! Your social groups need to exchange contact info, backed up on paper, and have a ground game in case of emergency. Emergency meetup points. Get your asses on Signal and Discord. Safe places to store cash and resources. Sounds crazy, but we are living through crazy. Time to embrace our tinfoil hat era!
And yes I know I started Signal and Discord groups that are not active yet. More people need to join to make them useful, and we'll activate them if needed. Message me to be part of that.
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Nukes are important.
In trying to desperately hold on to some assurance that things are going to be ok for people I love, I wondered whether Holland has nukes. They do! Sort of. There's 20 "shared' nukes on Dutch soil, shared with other NATO countries. They've got em in Volkel near 's-Hertogenbosch where my Opa was born. Technically nuclear sharing - but if you've got nukes in your country that's got to count for something.
WHICH BRINGS ME TO:
The Budapest Memorandum
WE PROMISED TO PROTECT UKRAINE from harm in exchange for denuclearization! This Russia sht likely wouldn't be happening if Ukraine never gave up their nukes! Evil plotting long game Russian despot motherfckers man.
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STICKERS
Please do little anarchies. There's many nice stickers available on Etsy. Reminder that Teslas have rear view cameras. But gas pumps and the egg aisle likely don't. In grocery stores the cameras are overhead. Civil disobedience: do your part!
"Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine." ― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
“It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
More Henry David Thoreau quotes because they're so on point:
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A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughingstock of the world. — Slavery in Massachusetts
What makes the United States government, on the whole, more tolerable,—I mean for us lucky white men, —is the fact that there is so much less government with us.— A Yankee in Canada
That certainly is the best government where the inhabitants are least often reminded of the government.— Journal, 21 August 1851
Thanks for reading, and feel free to share,
Heather