First Draft

Maybe it’s the Catholic in me. Maybe it’s being raised in a world perpetually on the brink of nuclear warfare, as most of my generation were, or being raised by people who were raised by people who grew up during the Depression, when everything you have can be gone in an instant.

Maybe it’s the small-d depression, taking all the ugliness of the world and swallowing it whole and letting it sit in my stomach like a marble.

Maybe it’s all of those things together, but when I die I fully expect to be judged by the worst things I’ve done, not the best.

This isn’t a contest. You don’t tally everything up and decide that the book I edited for the WWII veteran and the bread I baked for the refugees next door make up for the friend I hurt by calling them out in public, or the times I yelled at my kid, or the way I detonated a relationship on purpose. I can give all the change in my pockets to the homeless. It doesn’t somehow cancel out the things I said to my parents when we were fighting.

I have fucked up aspects of my life flatter than hammered shit and I don’t expect forgiveness for any of it. I don’t expect the good things to balance the bad things out. I’m not okay with anything I did to anyone — forgiving yourself gets used too often as a way to avoid just not sucking, far as I’m concerned — but I am completely, entirely, 100 percent okay with being judged by it.

We do this thing where we don’t want people to be complicated. We all do it, personally, in our own lives, making our great-uncle out to be some kind of saint when we have no idea how he treats his wife behind closed doors, making it impossible to mourn honestly the entirety of someone’s life once they’re gone. What if your asshole relative was a war hero and there are statues in his honor? Where do you put your grief then, when people are throwing him a parade?

Those complications are confounded a thousand times when it’s a national leader we’re mourning. Those people should be judged by the trail of the dead they left in their wake. Obama should be judged by the children of Yemen and Pakistan. It’s not rude or anything to say that the smoking road to Baghdad is George H.W. Bush’s legacy, as are the dead of AIDS who couldn’t wait for the GOP to pivot to basic humanity and curing diseases.

Bringing those things up inevitably brings the defense of “oh yeah, would you like to be judged by the worst things you did?” So let’s answer that: yeah. I’d be okay with that. It seems fair to say she rescued two cats but Christ, she was a dick to people a lot of the time. Any idiot can have a high point.

How low was your low, though? That’s the question should be asked, you show up at the gates of Heaven or Hell.

A.

The war’s not over. It’s barely begun:

“Now wouldn’t it be splendid for us to be free & equal citizens, with the power of the ballot to back our hearts, heads & hands,” Anthony wrote, envisioning a time when women could also fight for “the poor, the insane, the criminal,” armed not just with moral suasion but “with power too.”

“I can hardly wait,” she continued. “The good fates though are working together to bring us into this freedom.”

The older I get, the shorter a hundred years sounds. Susan B. Anthony was jailed and threatened. Alice Paul went on a hunger strike behind bars, and today white women vote for men who hate women, because then, they think, those men won’t hate them. She made prison guards force-feed her. Emily Davison threw herself beneath the King’s horse. Businessmen beat Clara Lemlich in the streets. Dred Scott sued for his freedom and was told, you are not a person, you have no standing, you do not stand here.

Friday night, driving home, as police warned on the radio about riots and robberies that never happened, I saw a young man teaching a child to ride a bike in the parking lot beside a shabby convenience store. That store gets held up, once a month or so. The young man pushed the child and shouted with joy when, wobbling, he righted himself and rode, rode, rode.

I have great good fortune, just at the moment. Work I love, friends I love, abundance in many things. Two soft cats, a warm snug house, new shoes for the winter. Soup and bread and books and a circle of arms around me: husband, daughter. I completed a fundraising project that may prove significant for decades. This year, after a long hiatus, I started writing for publication again.

I have great good fortune, just at the moment and I am incandescently angry, all the time. It feels like whiplash, the contrast between these moments of victory and warmth, and the reality that faces many, a reality I’ve been taking in since starting work as a journalist 20 years ago, when our guiding principle was the instruction never to close our eyes to suffering and injustice.

Oh, but you get bummed out? TOUGH SHIT. Land hard, roll left, and get back up.

I go into Kick’s room at night, after a late work event or watching The Handmaid’s Tale or reading another news story about a little kid in a cage, a little kid in the morgue. I go into Kick’s room and lay down next to her sleeping small body. I do not touch her. I listen to her move around in her warm, safe bed. I sweep her hair off the back of her neck and I listen to her breathe.

Mothers rocked their children, lay down beside them, watched their chests move in and out. Just like this, in times like these, knowing everything they have can be taken away from them. How do you hold onto anything, knowing everything that happens? How do you remember the war when the war isn’t over? How do you survive the next one, when the war isn’t over?

We’re fast coming on to the dark, when we’ll be draping our homes in strings of stars and inviting strangers to come inside by the fire. How do we do that, when there aren’t enough fires, or enough rooms, or enough stars?

On Friday it felt like the world holding its breath: Here in Chicago, to see if a white cop who murdered a black teenager would be convicted, and he was. In DC, to see if the words of women would be enough to keep a rapist from a throne, and they weren’t. This time of year always feels like something to push through, and every time we lose a few people. I have great good fortune just at the moment and I am watching it from the outside, with unearned dread.

Like maybe it won’t be enough this time. Light the candles anyway. An immigrant family comes over for Halloween and their children laugh with mine, a cousin’s wedding brings together family too infrequently all in the same place, and last night I discovered that my daughter loves it when I talk in a silly voice like a robot, read her stories clipped and stilted to make her laugh. Our finest hours are always at someone else’s expense and it’s not a bummer to say that, it’s not a slur. Accounting isn’t blaming. Recognition isn’t erasure.

Susan, writing to her friends up there, didn’t dream of the ability to lay down her burdens and rest. She didn’t dream of a time without conflict, a far-off day of comity and comfort. She dreamed of a time when she and her sisters could do the work they wanted to do, without the fetters of prejudice. They wanted to fight, and were told they couldn’t, and every single day they screamed in frustration that they deserved to be able to. It was the worst feeling in the world.

I say this all the time, and most of the time I believe it, guys: The work’s never done. Earlier this year I rejoined a cause I’d left out of exhaustion and frustration and put my hands to it in a way I’d never done before, no holding back, no hesitation over looking ridiculous. And I felt so much better than I had in the two years since I’d left it, so much better working my fingers into callouses and driving hours by myself at night to get things done. Even the horrible hard parts felt better than the rest and relaxation.

That’s what we’re longing for right now, not a break from the world, but to find a handhold in it, a wheel to which we can lay our shoulders. These four weeks, these few days, under shrinking daylight, are us all holding our breath. Not waiting, not still, but burning through to something that feels like the humming of a rail miles before the train arrives, a current beneath the sandy floor, coming, coming, coming.

It’s always dark. There’s never enough room. Shove over a little, this time, will you? See if we can’t make some more.

A.

Civility, restaurants, and what we expect in society: 

“You’ve been paying about 50 bucks a night to stay in a D.C. condo that’s connected to an energy lobbying firm, while approving their dirty sands pipeline,” Mink continues, reading from notes. “We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who actually does protect our environment, somebody who believes in climate change and takes it seriously, for the benefit of all of us, including our children.”

Mink concluded: “So, I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out.”

The video does not show Pruitt getting up and leaving the restaurant, but according to Mink, Pruitt and his two security guards left the restaurant before she returned to her seat.

At a certain level, they expect it to not matter to other people.

Kristjen Nielsen expects it to not matter that she’s advocating putting children in cages.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders expects it to not matter that she stands up at a podium every day and lies to the American people in service to Donald Trump.

Scott Pruitt expects it not to matter that he’s wasting money and rescinding regulations and helping corporations pollute the water and the air.

Mitch McConnell expects it not to matter that he’s abdicated all Congressional oversight and stole a Supreme Court seat.

And your MAGA-troid relatives expect it to not matter to you that the red hat they’re wearing and the Confederate flag they’re defending and the policies they’re voting for expose how much contempt they have for you.

They expect it to not matter enough to upset their dinner plans. Their coffee breaks. Their working weeks and Sunday rests. They expect you to subjugate your humanity to their — not even comfort, to their convenience. They’re shocked when you don’t. When you won’t. When who you are and how you live matters more than the poor sick human instinct to avoid conflict.

They accused everyone who didn’t want any of this of living in a bubble, as if they weren’t in one themselves, these people who expect to break their daily bread undisturbed by disagreement. As if that’s how anything works.

It’s the most fundamental thing about them, the entire MAGA tribe, even more so than the racism: the avoidance of the new, the different, the advancing of time and changing of the world. Someone on Twitter the other day made this joke:

every piece of shit in New York is going to get their day in the sun.

i imagine they’re exhuming Leona Helmsley’s corpse right now to make her Secretary of Fuck You, a new cabinet-level position.

— rage against the machine learning (@Theophite) June 13, 2018

Which is funny, but is also about time stopping.

These are people — within the administration, and supporting it — for whom time has in a real way stopped in the late 1980s. It’s why they’re obsessed with “black on black” crime and imagine cities as hellholes and rant about people needing to pull up their pants. It’s why the culture war is the only war they care about: They don’t want to hear any new music. They don’t want to learn the names of any new actresses. They’re on Facebook bitching about hip-hop music coming from cars at night.

On some level they know the world’s going on without them and instead of engaging with it, instead of learning who that person is who all the kids are talking about, instead of just shutting the everloving fuck UP about what’s new that they hate, they expect us to build a wall around them.

Around “our” country.

Around our nice restaurants and our Sunday shows and our status quo editorials that never use naughty words. They can’t imagine anything big enough, anything that MATTERS enough, to shove them out of their comfort zone, so they get rage-roided when they see that something’s pushed us out.

They expect it not to matter that people are dying, that irreplaceable natural resources are being destroyed, that we fear for our families and our kids, that we can’t live our lives without their interference, and they expect their preferences to be as respected as our lives.

They call it uncivil when they can’t order a cheese plate in peace, when they can’t remain walled up in their own minds at a time when they felt powerful, as if that’s how anything on earth has ever stayed.

A.

During CPAC a lot of people asked where the Left’s CPAC was, and people offered up options, like maybe Netroots Nation had been at one point something like that, and lots of wingnuts think college campuses are basically CPAC every day.

And people are asking, now, what the equivalent of the NRA is for the Left, like what is the lobby that’s bought most of our congressmen and is presumed so powerful that nobody can cross it. Planned Parenthood? But there are anti-abortion Democrats as well as those who favor SOME abortion restriction, and so far as I know there are no anti-gun Republicans in any way at all so they’re only equivalent if you ignore the role of power.

And I know saying that makes me sound like some kind of insane sophomore Marxist poser but making college kids who don’t want to listen to that Milo creature out to be the equal opposite of a national news network is insane. Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon may say the occasional dumb thing but they’re not on TV coast-to-coast every single night. PETA doesn’t command the phones of every member of the U.S. Senate.

So who’s the opposite of the NRA? Children who don’t want to be shot?

I forget who said this first: Our society is so structured on binaries that we think cats are the opposite of dogs. We put two things next to each other and decide that because they’re both there, they must be in conflict.

“SJWs” on college campuses have killed exactly nobody and lack government sanction even if they had. In living memory the National Guard of the United States of America has marched onto campus and shot protesters dead.

Black Lives Matter is not the opposite of the police. Black people are not the opposite of the police. Gay people are not the opposite of guns.

It’s not just a question of if they’re actually saying things that oppose one another, with equal strength and coherence.

It’s whether what they say, what they do, what they stand for, will have equal consequences. Carry equal weight.

Murder the same number of people.

Until the body count of the Weathermen reaches that of Richard Nixon & Henry Kissinger I don’t want to hear about how the anti-war movement “went too far” and nobody who marched on Washington in 2003 blew off the limbs of any Iraqi schoolchildren. Black Lives Matter want cops to stop shooting black people without consequences.

There is no equivalent conference on the Left hosting the President of the United States while selling “rope. tree. NRA lobbyist” shirts on the side. And while I’m glad of that, for our immortal souls, it’s easy to lament the difference.

But only if you remember that the difference is the power of who shows up.

A.