First Draft

Show me the lie:

When I say these people are fucking furious to the point of wrecking the country because They took the racist caricatures off marmalade jars, I’m only mildly exaggerating. https://t.co/LOsLmj4JQw

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) September 27, 2020

And, like, I don’t UNDERSTAND the stupid culture war shit over stuff like this. Even the pronoun nonsense makes more sense than this, and it makes no sense. At least then you might be talking about something you might actually do, or say, or have to change. You can still buy the damn rice. If you didn’t think about racism before this when buying Uncle Ben’s, you don’t need to think about it when buying Ben’s.

(Call me, Ben, we need a discussion about your “roasted chicken” flavor which does not taste at all like a roasted chicken, THAT is worth getting het up about.)

This is the kind of thing that, when someone acts like it outweighs damage to someone else’s actual life, makes me bonkers. I’m sorry you have to buy a new brand of strawberry preserves or whatever, but my friends are being deported and some of them are worried about being killed in the streets. How are those things analogous? How did you become so easily provoked? What is your idea of a proportional response here?

You were momentarily asked to consider an experience other than your own, possibly more than once, and the cumulative weight of that mental labor made you want to SEND A MESSAGE and VOTE FOR THE FLAG and KNEELING AT FOOTBALL GAMES and SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS and MY HALLMARK COMMERCIALS and what the SHIT, even. You feel like you’re under siege as a comfortable white person in America, because of THIS?

I know, by the way, the difference between this and genuine disgust and frustration with a society that helps all of us too little. That you’re in massive debt for a middling college education and that you have no way of seeing a doctor that isn’t like reaching the North Pole on roller skates. That the factories closed and the unions are powerless and the streets aren’t clean anymore are absolutely reasons for anger. You want to say you’re mad nobody is helping you, I agree. (Stop voting for people who kneecap state and municipal governments, but.)

But if your issues are … this? If your issues are that everything is not precisely the same as it was when you last formed a cultural thought? If your issues are that people just aren’t nice enough to you by giving you literally everything you want, and you can’t for a second think about anyone else, you don’t get to claim persecution to a degree that equals John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. Not in the middle of a deadly global pandemic caused by the person you thought would fight back against the food packaging changes.

Calm the fuck down. It’s just marmalade.

A.

HEY

C’MON
COME OUT

WHEREVER YOU ARE

WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE

AIN’ EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET

— June Jordan, Calling On All Silent Minorities

I’ve written before about how Mr. A has been nesting. He’s mostly done now. The yard is enclosed by a 6-foot fence with a double-lock gate; Kick can leave her toys absolutely everywhere and I don’t have to yell at her to bring her scooter or her ponies or anything else inside every night. I forget to lock doors, still, so we bought a family “calendar” to assign chores and one of Mr. A’s is to check all the locks because I can’t seem to keep track.

He’s built a storage system in the basement, in what was a massive junk room and is now, thanks to his hard work, a massively organized junk room with the “valuables” (extra food, medicine, paper goods, books) off the floor. In case the basement floods, which it has already done once this year.

We have room for the 22-pound bags of flour now. We have room for the 4 blocks of yeast. If I pickled or canned (“can you?” he asks, hearing about pickled carrots, and I’ve promised to try) we would store jars and jars; it’s a root cellar, like the one my grandparents had.

There is safety in there, of a sort. Grocery delivery has been less spotty than it was in the beginning. My parents offer to bring us meat; they have a meat guy now.

Kick is in a day camp; they stay in tiny groups and wear masks; she comes home exhausted but happier. I read, all day, angry Facebook posts from parents about school opening, about school not opening, and we try to make plans knowing we can’t make any plans. “In two weeks some other unhinged bullshit is going to be happening,” I keep saying, so we plan about four days out.

Our weekends, in summer, are usually a rat-a-tat-tat of activity: farmer’s market, skating lessons, this friend’s house, that friend’s coming over, park, zoo, hike, bike ride, road trip, houseguests. Instead I buy craft supplies and we sit on the porch waiting for fireflies. I feel lazy. This feels unreal.

And every day it seems to get just a little bit worse:

What do you do first, after everything burns down? I heard this so often in the days leading up to the 2016 election, I hear it all the time from conservative commentators and editorial boards: Maybe we need to just sweep our arm across the table, clear the field, bomb it all and start over. It’s not always cheerful nihilism; sometimes it’s hard to see where to even begin.

When there’s so much junk around, left over from the last disaster or six, where do you put the shelves to hold it?

But here’s the thing: There is no fresh starting point. There is no clean slate. There is no place you can go where you won’t feel the aftershocks and all of our great crimes as humans have come from our resistance to either the past or the future. We are going to have to get out of this from the middle of it and that’s impossibly hard, but it’s the only way things go.

What do you do first? Is there such a thing as, like, a consent agenda to just rescind the last four years? We need so much right now: health care, fair wages, justice for the wrongs done in our names over and over and over for years. We need hospitals and schools built for everyone, not just the rich. We need universities free and open to the public, we need as many libraries as we have jails. We need as few jails as we have oceans.

We need to defund the police as they are and rethink what they need to be. We need to undo the Muslim ban. We need to pack the courts. We need to protect trans people. We need honest to god laws against gerrymandering, laws providing universal vote-by-mail, universal basic income for crises like this, so that people can afford to stay home if they have to, and they have to.

We need science and art and we need a culture that doesn’t venerate racial belligerence and aggrieved thwarted fascism. We need support for the things that make us alive: Parks and gardens, free exchanges, beehives, birdhouses.

We need all of it and we needed it yesterday, and we act like we have to WAIT for some moment of perfect cleanliness to begin.

I’ve been saying, when this is over. When this is over, I’m buying the most expensive scotch on the shelf. When this is over, I’m taking my parents on the international trip they’d planned and had to scuttle back in April. When this is over, my kid and I are going to the zoo and we’re staying as long as we want and making as many plastic animals in the Mold-A-Rama as she can carry. We are camping by the snow leopard enclosure until they kick us out.

We are going to work harder for right than we do for simple justice. We are going to fight harder this time. We say it every time, because it’s true every time: You have to keep pushing yourself farther, faster, more.

Kick and I have found a local organization we are growing plants for, and raising money for, and donating food and books and games and art supplies to, and that’s our start. Now that we have space in the storage room we’re setting up a table, sorting out what can go, what needs to stay, and what we can sell.

Mr. A is concentrating hard on several friends, making sure they are okay, staying in regular contact. He’s also handling political donations right now because I am like THROW ALL THE GROCERY MONEY AT WHOEVER and we need to be practical.

We aren’t doing enough but we’re doing what we can. We are well supplied. Our home base is not a place to hide in, as I thought when this all started. I misunderstood it; we were never building a bunker. We were building a launch pad. If I think of it this way, maybe I will be less tired and scared.

When this is over. As if it’s ever over enough to feel over. The next world always starts while the ashes are still hot. While you can still smell the smoke.

And where do you even begin? You begin. Tell me where you are starting from. Maybe we can meet somewhere.

A.

I know people who were there in ’68, and not just there as in lived through it, but THERE there. A friend who spoke at my wedding was in the National Guard during Kent State, left soon after. Colleagues were in the streets, getting beaten and gassed.

I know people who fought in Europe in World War II. I knew, many years ago, a man who went to Spain to fight the fascists there after writing about it for years.

Their eyes go somewhere else when they talk about it. When they gather, and someone takes a photograph, it’s not of the wrinkles and bones and bent backs. It’s of the children they were, the years falling away from their faces.

People who fought through something together are, in some sense, always together, and always the age they were when they were fighting.

What if the night just keeps coming down? How do you stay who you are when the fight never ends?

—

There is a great deal of necessary writing about what has happened to George Floyd and why, but two stories pulled me out of the whirlwind this week. The first was from a friend, who lived next door to us for years. She’s beautiful, accomplished, by any measure of America wildly successful, and her son grew up before our eyes: kind, funny, unfailingly generous, brilliantly smart. She’s afraid for him. He gets stopped in the street and the alley and the neighborhood we used to live in, and I cannot fathom, most days, the restraint we ask black people to practice.

The second, speaking to the first, was R. Eric Thomas: 

You learn, at some point, how to perform being non-threatening and you learn that often it matters less how well you perform and more whether the audience for said performance believes it. Or wants to believe it. Or is in the mood to believe it. Or woke up that morning and made a conscious decision not to believe it. And you think: “If it’s futile anyway, if I am powerless over the reception that I get, what does it matter how I approach the world?”

And there’s a freedom in that, for it allows you to prioritize your own voice over the scolding one that speaks nothing but fear. It affirms that the voice asking to see your papers, or calling those in Minneapolis “thugs,” or shouting out a warning “Move along now!” does not belong to you. It belongs to individuals who have been made minuscule and sharp by their addictions to white supremacy and systems of oppressions that are ambivalent about your goodness.

A memory from the video of the shooting of Philando Castile: His girlfriend, sitting next to his bullet-ridden body, called the white police officer who just shot him “sir.” He was screaming at her and her young daughter, she was covered in blood, and she called the officer “sir.” That’s how deep it had to go, the training to be polite. That’s how little it mattered.

The human body isn’t meant to live in fear forever. The response, the coiling of muscles, the pounding of the heart — that isn’t supposed to be a permanent state. Hypervigilance destroys your mind. There’s supposed to come a time when you’re not afraid anymore.

—

You already know all the things to be said about what Trump has said and is saying, that he knows what he’s doing, and it’s obvious and awful, and I have no more patience for the shock of anyone who’d call themselves a journalist, who still thinks there’s any way out of this but through.

I just … What do you think they say? How do you think this ends? B. Barry Bamz and Dubya come out here and say, “lads, that’s enough now” and all the protesters go home, their heads hung down and chastened? Do you think that’s what it’s about? Like people are marching in the streets because they just haven’t heard the right words from the right men? Men who, let’s be honest, were president when a lot of what’s being protested was happening day in and day out?

Since the pandemic started, and Trump’s administration did what it’s done with every crisis, which is to say some stuff and then fall on its keys, we keep hearing that if only someone would SAY or DO something, this would all just … stop. Joe Biden, who’s another statesmanlike man with a past on these issues, has been out here every day acting like the president we don’t have, saying the things we say we wish someone would SAY.

That’s not what this is remotely about anymore.

This ends when the people in the street say it ends. They’re in charge. That’s what makes all these MAGA jackasses so crazy, that’s what’s got the cops all roided up in every town in the land, and it’s what the president knows and can’t let go of. There has never been a bully on this earth who was able to take it when the punch comes flying back.

You cannot subjugate people forever, and you cannot plan for what happens when they decide they’ve had enough.

—

Michelle Goldberg, who has been following the right-wing thread of our undoing for so long I can’t believe she’s okay: 

Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s progressive attorney general, told me that lately, when he goes out walking or running in Minneapolis, he feels a “coiled sort of anxiousness ready to spring.” Many people, he said, “have been cooped up for two months, and so now they’re in a different space and a different place. They’re restless. Some of them have been unemployed, some of them don’t have rent money, and they’re angry, they’re frustrated.”

That frustration is likely to build, because the economic ruin from the pandemic is just beginning. In some states, moratoriums on evictions have ended or will soon. The expanded unemployment benefits passed by Congress as part of the CARES Act run out at the end of July. State budgets have been ravaged, and Republicans in Washington have so far refused to come to states’ aid, meaning we’ll likely soon see painful cutbacks in public jobs and services.

People keep saying, oh, you’re mad now, well hold onto that anger and vote in November. Hold onto that anger, as if there’s anywhere to put it down. I do not want to ask anyone to hold this anger for another second. It’s been a sickness inside us for longer than we can name.

The pandemic and the protests, the stay-at-home orders and the state-sanctioned murders, they’re the result of our actions. This isn’t the weather. All week long I’ve been reading stories that back into this, our weakened and passive journalism describing a man’s deliberate killing as a death having occurred following an officer’s knee being placed on his neck, and other such nonsense. I’ve been reading about protesters “clashing” with police, as if they are two equal and opposing forces meeting on neutral ground. A “wave of protests swept over American cities” and “a firestorm was ignited.”

I scream about it on Twitter every time I see it, every time I see “a man is dead after an alleged officer-involved shooting” because: No. A cop fired a gun and killed someone. You’re making value judgments by the words you use and you are placing responsibility, every single day … nowhere.

We did this. That’s the shame of it and always, always, it’s the hope. We look at the hell around us — the sickness, the shutdowns, the deaths in a custody that never needed to be exercised — and don’t see that it presumes the existence of a heaven. That if we made this, we can unmake it.

That’s what people in the streets right now are saying, with as many different voices as they can. We don’t have to live like this, any of us, so let us make the world we want to see.

My old-hand protester friends, the people I knew who were antifa before Hitler came to power, they all had stories about coming home or leaving, about the moment when the struggle seemed to stop or fade away. They got to lay their burdens down when the war was over, and some of them come back to it when they’re needed, and some of them never have.

Not everyone could do that. Everyone’s war doesn’t end. And I don’t think white America has ever thought of what it does to you, to make every cell in your body the record of brutality, a daily reckoning that goes on out of sight. Where does this end, we ask, and the selfishness of it, to ask that.

This is just beginning.

A.

It’s quoting myself which is lazy but:

This gets to the heart of what annoys me about centrism, civility fetishism, and the deploring of partisanship. It’s a way to shut someone up without having to own that you want them to shut up.

I want lots of people to shut up. I want just for one goddamn day for Donald Fucking Trump to shut his festering assmouth so we can have, like, Christmas or Thanksgiving or something without him being like “Merry Holocaust Remembrance Day! I love The Jews!” and then spell something wrong so there are three days of terrible jokes.

I would like anyone sincerely arguing that the spiritual descendants of Nixon bagmen need to be given large auditoriums on major college  campuses in the name of free speech but trans people shouldn’t be allowed to have driver’s licenses with their identities on them, I would like anyone like that to shut up, too.

If you’re out on the street corner screaming at and spitting on teachers on strike, add yourself to the shut-up list.

I want those people to shut up and I have no problem telling them that.

So if you want me to stop saying things like, “we should not cage immigrant children” or “it’s really not that big of a deal to say Happy Holidays” or “possibly after you commit war crimes you should not appear in public,” then you should tell me that.

But don’t say “be civil.” Don’t say “listen to the other side.” Don’t say “let’s not make this political.”

Just say shut up. That’s what you mean.

A.