They Kill the Future

I don't know right now. I'm in this experiential loop where I think can do something or reach out somewhere or say something alchemical and inevitable and strong enough, and then, ah, no. No, the ground needed for that is gone. Gone for good. 

People are deported for wrong think. People are fired for wrong think. 

Everything here is trembling, even if it doesn't feel it yet. They want to harvest the great redwoods, these 2 and 3,000 year old beings in their remaining wood of glorious softness and muffled sounds of animal footfall. Gone soon. 

The loggers have said they don't need to cut more old growth. They need mills that aren't dangerous to the millers. 

Sure, I've studied this history of the US, through our literature, where we were a totalitarian state for most of our history if your skin happened to mark you other: black or native or immigrant. This smacking up against impossibility, quicksand where solid earth should be, it's familiar to these cousins, they have a rich literature about exactly this feeling. The colony inside the nation. How dare we.

Dictators make us fear them and distrust each other. They shatter community.

So the signs are clear that the coup is pretty well done, and now comes the long endurance, dream of recovery after the regime. I can hear the socials snark: white woman, just now really feeling it. Yes. By the accidents of birth, here I am having been safe from some kinds of state-social violence. I'm not asking for comfort. 

I'm feeling through this publicly because I think many people are feeling through this Un-New but Unfamiliar time. We are in an historical Uncanny Valley. 

Yea, though I walk…

I have never been a ‘team’ or ‘identity’ person. I'm too introverted and too bored by group think. I like new, I like exploration, I like discovery. INTP in the Meyer's Brigg's astrological chart, with a pronounced P for Prospecting. Sameness and repetition are not my thing. And, by one or another accident, I have always been a little outside/inside all my life. 

But this is not long a sense of unbelonging. This is a sense of being prey. As a woman, as a feminist informed woman, I know this feeling. The street stalker, the war on women.

This is not where I tell you that my feminism or my quirky otherness have prepared me for this moment. 

This is where I tell you of this grief. I had plans, USians had plans, for the next 20 years, and they are gone. We lived through the last good years in this country and we didn't know it. I grieve all the better we were stopped from doing from the fall of the Berlin Wall to January 2025. Decades frittered away in terms of geopolitical interconnection and liberating human potential. And now, the unformed future decades lost, I hope only to us. Whoever I thought I was going to be — done. Gone. 

The threat of the fascist, like the threat of the abuser, arrives as theft of the future.

Their gleeful, violent unpredictability is designed to keep their target in a present moment so small that any planning or dreaming or action is impossible. They kill the future both in the target's mind and in reality. Creating pain is their deepest creativity. The old GOP-libertarian line of a “government small enough to drown in a kitchen sink” was one sign among many. There is a kind of person who looks forward to drowning a child or pet in a kitchen sink, and we used to put them in custody for everyone's safety. 

Now they're stress testing the global order by heaving the US's future at it like a baseball bat to the knees.

My father died about 3 years ago, and he had a complicated and chaotic last six months. In life, he and I were deep and supportive friends. After he died, I met parts of my father I didn't know about, none of them covered in glory. So the grief of that has lasted. I'm still fighting with my dad in my dreams — threw a crystal ashtray at his head a few weeks ago. Trust me he had it coming. 

Even as I am still in grief, I took on the project of setting right what he's set wrong. Grief is physically leaden, heavy, and pulls toward more sleep, more staring into space, more silence. I know my world will be less, it's new smallness is settling in my body and slowing me down. For many here and across the world, the happy viciousness of these people is already meaning death and the grief millions more.  

But unjust grief is molten and flows all over seeking to make contact. It wants a form. It wants a project, something to sizzle and char. It wants to encase.