“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Today I left the house before eight o'clock, stepping into the humid Minnesota morning, propelled up the street by Shirley Manson's voice -- the only music that could get me moving. But movement was the thing I needed after a night of broken sleep. The heat rises to the second floor where I sleep at my in-laws' house, and the fan could only do so much; more than that, though, I couldn't quiet my brain. So I tossed and turned, and then I ran.
The morning was quiet, even as I jogged along a busy road before turning onto a quieter, shadier street. The thick, muggy air seemed to muffle even the traffic. Insects whirred in the grass. A sprinkler shuddered to a stop just before I could reach it and cool off; I suppose it had been on a timer to run in the cooler dawn.
I ran to quiet my own thoughts for awhile. It mostly worked. By the time I reached the spot where I usually turn around, I was so drenched in sweat that I nearly just sat down on the sidewalk. But I had to finish packing, and we had a rental car to return and a flight to catch. So I panted my way back to the house and vowed not to check the news until I'd folded the rest of last night's laundry into the kids' suitcases, showered, and had some coffee.
It has been a terrible week.
I mean, it has and it hasn't. I've just returned from a lovely family trip to Minnesota. We spent a few days in Duluth, a city I haven't visited since college. We stayed in a beautiful old mansion with Matt's parents and his brother and family. Carmen drove over and we spent a day together, and it was wonderful and necessary -- we haven't seen each other in nearly four years, which is the longest we've ever gone without seeing each other since we were eighteen years old. Suzannah and Isaac loved spending time with their cousins. We shared meals with relatives we don't see often, both near Duluth and back in the Twin Cities. I read a few books and carved out a little time to write. Matt even made sure we stopped by Birchbark Books -- a favorite stop of mine in Minneapolis -- so I could finally use a gift card from my mother-in-law.
So all of that should have made for a lovely start to the summer, except that underneath it all I have felt a relentless churning dread, a sickening shame over what our country is revealing itself to be. I sat upstairs while the kids played downstairs, listening to the sound of their laughter. I sat right down on the carpet and leaned against the bed and clutched my head and exchanged a few texts with friends who were also sitting somewhere clutching their heads, literally or figuratively. This has been a very, very bad news week. I'm just sick. I don't know where to start. We traumatize thousands of children. Children. Without apology or shame. We have no regard for human life if it isn't white, "Christian," and born on American soil (or unborn on American soil. We seem to stop caring once babies are earthside). We now rank in the top ten countries where it's worst to be a woman. As a public school teacher I'm no stranger to anti-union rhetoric, but now, suddenly, I'm actually receiving e-mails on my relatively public school account encouraging me not to pay union dues. And on, and on, and on. Seattle, a city with appalling rates of homelessness, now has an app to make it easier to eject folks from camps. Where, where is our humanity? Tell me that, Christians. Tell me. Talk to me about what it means to be pro-life. Talk to me about family values. And also, what piece of your soul did you sell, Judge Kennedy?
And then today, after my run, after my shower, after our trip to the airport, after I settled in with a white wine flight and my journal and the novel I'm reading while Matt took the kids to work out their wiggles before our trip home, I read the news again: another shooting, five journalists killed.
(When you read that the suspect is in custody, you know right away that it's another angry white man -- the kind most likely to commit mass shootings, and the kind most likely to be taken alive.)
(Nothing about this is surprising, considering the president's constant and vicious attacks on the media and some of his most ardent and vocal supporters actively encouraging assaults on them. This is our country. This is America.)
It would be pretty easy for Matt and me to say we don't like to be political, because honestly, we'll probably be fine, and being political means getting uncomfortable. We don't have to do that. We're white. We're "Christian." We were born into fucking senseless privilege. No one is coming for our children. But because we are white, because we are "Christian," because we are fine, this is our work to do and it is our mess to clean up and it is our debt to pay. It just is. And we're not doing it nearly damn well enough, which is one of the things I'm struggling with tonight. I know this. (Another thing I'm struggling with: people who still say they're "not political." Isn't that great for you? Sleep tight, I guess?)
After our kids were showered and bathed and tucked into bed tonight, Matt and I caught up on this week's episode of The Handmaid's Tale. I first read the novel when I was nineteen, huddled under a blanket in my freezing crew quarters at the fishing lodge in Alaska where I would spend my first summer in college. Now, twenty years later, I teach it in IB literature as part of the junior curriculum. It has always both moved and terrified me, but now that terror is an entirely different beast because it feels real and immediate. The terrifying brilliance of Margaret Atwood is that all of her writing feels real, but this has moved several solid steps away from "speculative" fiction since she wrote it three decades ago.
I don't really even know how to end this. It's nearly midnight, and my family is sleeping. Matt kissed me a bit ago and said, "Don't stay up too late." I want so badly to just go to sleep, to turn off my brain. He calls it the hamster wheel inside my head. I'm exhausted, but what is my exhaustion? It's nothing, really.
Tonight maybe I just end with this, with Rebecca Solnit's words instead of my own: You can't know, won't know how and why it matters, and when the results will appear, but that didn't stop the abolitionists or the suffragists or the civil rights heroes or the environmental champions or the Dreamers. Ask yourself what would Harvey Milk do? What would Harriet Tubman do? What would Ella Baker do? What would Emma Goldman do? Maybe you can't do all they did, but you can do something, and that matters, and doing it is a much better way to survive this regime than doing nothing, for your soul as well as your nation.
It's not just that we can; it's that we have to. I think I still believe that.
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