Front, left, right, BACK AGAIN.
Well, hello again. After the demise of Tiny Letter, and my move to here at Buttondown, and my one email sent from the confines of my personal email address..wow. We’ve been all over the place. But, after Buttondown put in a simpler text editor that didn’t require me to code this thing, I’ve put the effort into importing the archives and starting this anew. So, here we are. Let’s go.
Life be lifing
Since I talked to you last, a lot has personally happened.I won’t go into detail here, but birthdays and deaths, illnesses and recoveries, travel in the physical and mental senses have all happened over the past months.
What change usually leads me to do is to become really reflective, mostly about my own mortality, but also about how things are around me. Are my people okay? More and more, the answer is no. What then? What can I control? What can I do?
The worst feeling in the world for an empath is to see someone hurting and not being ale to do anything about it. That lesson has been hitting me more often than I care to admit these last few.
But I’m still here. Still going to try to do the right thing.
Friend tings.
In a little oner a month, my college class is having their 25th reunion. I flew out to Cali earlier this summer for a gathering of my high school people, and that made me ruminate on the nature of the friendships and relationships I’ve forged and held onto, as well as those I let grow dormant or stale.
I am hyper-cognnizant of if people like me or not, and I am driven by a need to please that used to be horribly consistent and enabled some bad people and energies to enter my life. (I’m better now. Really.)
I say all that to say that I have become very cognizant of the people I’m around, the people I call close friends, but also the larger ring of people who I will happily talk to and give help and look at their FB pictures or offer food recommendations when asked. Loneliness is a psychological killer, eroding one’s sense of self and connectedness to the world, a world that increasingly sees a need for community and common links to each other. Because, well, we’ll need it.
Politically
So, we’re screwed.
I just have never been amongst people, or been exposed to so many people, who really love the idea of fascism and autocracy. Who yell “freedom”…but only as it applies for them, and not for anyone else.
But my question is, what will people do about it?
I’ve read someone’s justification of Jan 6 as people who believed that the election had been stolen and their help was needed to right that wrong. Sure, it was a lie. Sure, it had no basis in truth. But these people believed, and that’s all you really need to get people moving.
But what if this election is “stolen” with millions of people kicked off the rolls and the Electoral College gamed to get to one dedicated outcome? What then? Is it enough to “tut tut” and decry results? Does it separate you enough from the loonies of years past? Do you hunker down and write angry words while an emboldened police force, even in Democrat-run cities, enforce immigration crackdowns, stop and frisk, and civil rights abuses galore?
And what if people resist? Oh, the NYT and WaPo won’t like that. As glad-handing as they’ve gotten with the sins of the conservative - not calling a lie a lie - believe you me that they’ll paint much different picture of a liberal outcry amongst the people. Don’t let property be harmed - that is the ultimate sin of BLM protests, but smearing literal human shit through the halls of Congress was somehow okay.
A side that only accepts results if victorious and claims all defeats are not actually real is up against a side that remains magnamous in defeat, firing off angry emails. A disproportionate response, and one that makes me angry just sitting here typing it.
Is a noble cause enough? The Bible says that unjust laws should not be followed, but who among us, in our 30s, 40s, 50s…are willing to buck that if the promise of state punishment awaits us? The law says to turn in any woman who may be pregnant; are you willing to risk that your snitch neighbor isn’t going to tell the police that you knew about it? It’s the Prisoner’s Dilemma en masse.
There was a story of a woman who died of complications from a stillbirth that may have been saved had she had an abortion, and people who think as I do were outraged. But someone pointed out that the people who believe in this LIFE AT ALL COSTS do not see her death as sad. She got what she deserved.
How do you combat that?
How do you find “middle ground” with someone who agrees when Head Cheeto says “immigrants aren’t people, they’re animals”, not to mention the whole “they’re eating the pets” thing. And those people are gunning to run this country. And they have a great shot at it.
My question is, how do you resist? How do you fight back? And how do you deal with possibly being locked up behind that? Getting your freedom taken? For my immigrant people, how would you feel about being detained? Concentration camps? Deportation? This is feeling very real.
Most of the people reading this align with my politics, at least in part. And I ask you, how would it feel in six months, where the mainstream news is amplifying calls to have you removed from the country? Where your liberal bastions of bookstores and community centers are shuttered? Where higher education institutions give in to the pressure and condemns the prof talking about Palestine’s situation, but insists they can do nothing about the Holocaust denier? How will it feel to be gaslit, told that what you believe in your heart is wrong? Kids should NOT have school lunch. It’s okay to discriminate. Gay people should be shot on sight. Poor people should disappear. These are things they’ve said OUT LOUD.
I read an interview with a “liberal”, and they held a lot of views that I did, but they balked on gay rights. “I think those people are everywhere and they need to go back in the closet.” They are tired of gay folk “getting so much attention”. Are they really “on my side”? Can they be trusted to do work to figure out how important this tenet of liberalism is, or are we so starved for people doing the mostly right thing that we’ll let the bad things slide?
And this isn’t about the binary of US political parties, but it is about the fact that, in a binary, you got two choices. Which aligns with you best? And a lot of people are finding out that they don’t align with one or the other real well.
That’s where my mind is.
SWITCH!
Whew, after all that doom and gloom, what good is happening?
The good things give us hope; the sun sets in a dictatorship just as they do in a democracy, and while the colors may be the same, things just feel a little better when you’re not being watched by the State or hiding that copy of 1984 you were told to burn.
For me personally, a lot of my happiness comes from the circumstances I can control. I can write silly stories, I can draw silly pictures. I can say hello to people I know, and even meet ones I don’t. I can eat good and drink good and smoke good, because I am blessed enough to do so.
I know good people doing good things, and I can strive to be a batter person. I can support those making good changes, and making good art, and making things around them good.
That’s all I can do. Find the happy, embrace it, love it, spread it around.
For example, I’ve thrown myself into interior decorating. I’m looking at paint. Wall sconces. Moulding. Lighting options. Furniture. All this to make my home more comfortable and inviting. My sister’s rule of thumb is “everything is my house, I love. If I don’t, I get something I do.” From the plushness of the rug to the placement of furniture to the stuff on the walls. And that sounds like great advice to me. And when I get dragged out of my house for talking shit about Our Glorious Leader, just know that I am leaving a place of comfort and creativity and love, dammit.
Words From An Elder
“Nobody’s free til everybody’s free.” - Fannie Lou Hamer
Thanks
Thank you for reading, people. Once I get more comfy with this, I’l look to make this a bit more…useful/fun/thought-provoking. There’s a ton I want to share - short stories, slices of life, food porn - but I thought it important to at least say that I was back. This is fun to do.
If you want to subscribe, hit that button down there. (I have no idea if it works.)