What's Next

Wooooooof.

Too bad this gif is so apposite so often in These Times.

On Managing Not To Hate Literally Everything: A Snapshot by Dame Sophie

On Election Day, I posted something on FB about feeling, as I’d read Harris/Walz staffers describing themselves, nauseously optimistic. Turns out, my nausea was right. In 2016, I was shocked and grief-stricken by the election result. This time, I've moved directly to determined fury.

I refuse to feel bad or foolish or gullible for allowing myself to believe we’d get it right this time. I do judge myself for letting my focus stray a bit since Biden was elected. Now I’m working on concentrating and compressing what I felt until the wee hours (when Seb FaceTimed us in tears over the Pennsylvania call — I knew it was bad news before I even picked up my phone) into determination to getting back to what’s next, which is what’s always been next — harm reduction, mutual aid, coalition-building, putting my shoulder to the wheel to help protect what we still have, under worse conditions than last time.

So, below are some things I’ve read or watched that have resonated and been helpful while clarifying my thoughts & feelings about the election and what’s next. I’m working on laying claim to my anger and not letting it make me get stuck, but turning it into fuel.

Per usj, I’d love to know what’s working for you, too.

Anne Helen Petersen’s essay “This Is How Much America Still Hates Women” is a scream into the abyss and a call to arms:

“This is our new reality, indifferent and cruel, oppressive and dominating. We can still find kindness and beauty within it, but we must also acknowledge the extent of the damage. This is not 2016. This is worse. It will take generations to reverse the political wreckage that is about to happen, and our primary task, in this moment, feels impossible.

We are weary, and defeated, and furious. We need a fucking moment to mourn. But then — we have to fight. We have to fight even when we’re losing. We have to fight for a future we may never see. We have to protect each other, even when it comes at great personal cost. We have to fight because the alternative is unimaginable.”

Krakauer on reconciling oneself, as fairly optimistic person, with the present and swiftly approaching new reality. He recommends embracing misery, which I don’t interpret at all as giving up; to me, the meaning of “embrace” is to accept that reality is in fact real, and then to ask “ok, and?” “And” right now is “I’m alive, I’m here, so are these other people, let’s put our heads together and do what we can.”

Rebecca Solnit’s insights have been particularly helpful. I encourage everyone to read the full piece, hosted at Anand Giridharadas’s Substack. Resonating with me most right now are two brief passages:

“You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”

The other, which gives me chills (both hopeful and bleak)

“People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good.”

It’s super-important, too, to remember that loving one another and saving what we can from the clutches of whatever is to come is not necessarily easy. It seems like it should be reflexive; we are good people, therefore we’ll make the right choices. What James Baldwin, in this interview clip about how love has never been a popular movement, reminds us of is that contributing to the ongoing project of saving what’s salvageable is an active choice. It is work that requires effort. And we’re not just choosing to do certain things, we are deciding not to do others, choosing not to be terrible to each other. We’re going to be and do wrong, that’s inevitable, but I think that remembering what garbage we’re capable of being is a bit of a hedge against it, too. It’s the reflexive, unthinking choices that can carry with them more danger.

Above: something something philosophical about how the world still spins and two things about that: trees don’t care about us at all, and isn’t it a tiny miracle that we still get to enjoy watching them do their thing, for now, anyway?

Grief and resisting the urge to be an internal emigre, by Karen

• First of all, thank you to everyone who sent a heart emoji back to my heart emoji via the Substack chat I started on Wednesday morning. Grief always makes me go almost catatonic and very numb; a few heart emojis were all I could muster, and it felt, well, heartening to get them back from people. I’d like to do more with the TBD chat feature in the coming months so we can easily communicate with each other and, if nothing else, keep sending hearts out into the world and sending them back to each other as needed.

  

• My first impulse in terrible times is to shut way down, retreat into myself, and think, “fuck everything out there; I’m making a little nest for me and mine and feathering it and staying safe and happy as best as I can.” It turns out there’s a name for that: internal emigres, via this Chicago Reader interview with journalist Jamie Kalven:

  One of the dangers is that people will instead become demoralized and retreat into denial, that they will seek refuge amid the pleasures and fulfillments of private life. That would give carte blanche to power. There was a term used in central Europe to describe those who opted to retreat into private life under totalitarianism. They were called “internal emigres.” That is certainly tempting at a time like this: to live one’s life in the wholly private realm, enjoying the company of friends, good food and drink, the pleasures of literature and music, and so on. Privileged sectors of our society are already heavily skewed that way. It’s a real danger at a time like this. If we withdraw from public engagement now, we aid and abet that which we deplore.

  [This week doesn’t count, obviously. I hope. Ha.] Found thanks to a link from Mariame Kaba on BlueSky, who is always a source of inspiration. (You have to sign in to BlueSky to see her account. I finally fully deleted my Twitter account and am just on BlueSky now—are you there? Find me!]

• Speaking of Mariame Kaba, her book, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Recipricol Care, co-written with Kelly Hayes, is currently on sale for $2 in ebook form from Haymarket Books!

• Kelly Hayes wrote this about post-election grief and anger in her newsletter Organizing My Thoughts; more much-needed fuel against that internal emigre temptation:

Anger is easier to inhabit than sadness. It’s easier to be angry than to feel the loneliness of knowing so many people have cosigned your potential destruction. Lashing out at people who disappoint us can also deliver a small dose of satisfaction. Many people are desperate for that sensation right now. We live in a society that wrongly conflates justice with satisfaction, so our efforts to punish the people we disagree with may even feel like the pursuit of justice. As the hope of true justice fades into the distance, the pursuit of a cheap hit of satisfaction becomes all the more appealing. 

It’s important to remember that our political aspirations have not been vanquished. We are not on the cusp of positive transformation, but that does not mean that all hope is lost or that we cannot breathe new worlds into being. During my four decades on this earth, I have repeatedly witnessed victories and political transitions that I did not believe were possible. I have also experienced losses that reshaped the political terrain, paving the way for future victories. We should never give up on transformation and material change. We are all worth fighting for, no matter how bleak the situation may be and no matter the odds.

• I just finished training to do intake work for an abortion fund two weeks ago. Yesterday, volunteers got a message saying the organization was anticipating lots of incoming offers to volunteer, which was why they had finished training new volunteers before the election. I suspect a lot of interest will wane in the next few months, and I hope we’ll all check back in come, say, March. I’m actually putting “General Check In” on my calendar, in case I have any extra time, energy, and money at that point to give. Of course, burnout and overwhelm are so real, and I think the best thing we can do is pick one thing and give it our all.

• After 2016, I started putting a set amount aside each month for recurring donations and direct giving. That amount has gone down considerably since then, as I make less money than I did in 2016, and everything is more expensive, particularly my rent, but it’s something. I think we get the most bang for our buck going small—for instance, local abortion funds like South Carolina’s Palmetto State Abotion Fund instead of Planned Parenthood.

• I don’t want to shame anyone for things they do to make their life easier. I just want to say I didn’t re-up my Amazon Prime subscription in August because I didn’t have the funds to do so, and also because fuck Amazon, and I really haven’t missed it, nor have the things I normally got from Amazon been that much more expensive elsewhere. It sort of feels like the carbon footprint myth—of course, one person quitting Amazon isn’t going to stick it to Besos at all, but like I said, it was easier than I thought it would be.

• That’s all I have right now; thanks for reading. If you have anything worth reading or listening to, please put it in the comments. Fun stuff, too. ❤

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