Imaginary Conversations - The Beginning

This conversation is imaginary.  You know the drill. The rest are here.

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHH"

"Yeah, pretty much"

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH"

"Feel better?"

"I don't know what to do anymore"

"I know"

"I want to keep fighting but I am broken"

"I know"

"I'm starting to question my very sanity.  I don't understand how these people don't realize what is happening.  I don't understand how they can say things are business as usual.  I don't know how they can be so callus about people's lives.  I don't know how they can't see how he is consolidating power.  I don't know how they can't see..."

"Neither do I"

"Whenever you watch movies... and I hate to compare this to a movie, but I have to because I really have no other basis for comparison right now.  Whenever you watch movies, it is always at the end."

"Huh?"

"It is at the end.  It is after a period of 10-30 years of horrible, sometimes more, and the good guys stop the bad guys after years of planning and organizing and stuff."

"I see what you are saying"

"Like even Rogue One, which was before the end, which was the catalyst for the end, took place in the context of a Rebellion that had been growing over a period of years, a Rebellion that had an infrastructure and stuff, you know what I am saying."

"I do.  You are saying we are in the prequels."

"Yeah, sort of. This is just the beginning.  It has just started.  I always thought that if I was there at the beginning that I would know what to do to stop it.  That if everybody saw it for what it was they would stop it.  Like if Senator Palpatine was unmasked as a Sith before power had been consolidated that everybody would be ok and we would have never had Darth Vader or any of it."

"But you are starting to realize that unmasking a Sith is harder than you thought?  Or that it isn't enough?"

"That it isn't enough, I guess.  That even if somebody saw Palpatine Force choking somebody they would think like 'well maybe he just happened to choke on a pretzel at the same time.' That even if they saw the evil right in front of their eyes they would either think the evil is justified for their own protection or that there was no evil and the evil wasn't really there at all.  There was no Force, there was no Sith. It was just make believe."

"Fake News."

"Yeah, exactly.  Like you know how Rey and Finn are all super surprised that the Force is real?  Even back in the original trilogy, Han called it a superstition and stuff. That always struck me.  There used to be this organization of magical Force wielding Jedi that everybody believed in and then all of a sudden people stopped believing that such a thing could even exist.  They knew the Empire controlled everything, but they probably didn't even believe that the Emperor was a Sith, even after all that time. None of it was real.  All of it was pretend."

"I've read somewhere that most people in the Star Wars universe probably couldn't read, that communication was really difficult.   Things were still very much like videos only, not a whole lot of real written records.  Plus, as we saw in Rogue One, storage of records was really bad.  You take one thing and that's the entire record of that thing, there are like no other copies of anything anywhere.  I could understand how information could be distorted in that environment."

"So do I, and I have definitely read articles about that before.  What I struggle with is, yeah, that whole Fake News thing.  Just that people might as well not be able to read, might as well be like the people in Star Wars, because they don't trust anything.  And maybe they shouldn't trust everything because there is so much propaganda, and information is so easy to distort, but when you trust nothing it is as though nothing is really there.  You can show a person the truth but they won't believe it because it doesn't conform to their world view.  They might as well be living on Tatooine and thinking that the notion of this Death Star is some kind of myth."

"I totally get that.  It is frustrating to be sure to hear from these people who said they didn't trust the government when Obama was President all of a sudden trust the government now.  Now it is the government that is good and the people who are obstructionists who are bad.  Now when the government detains people who have lawfully immigrated to this country it is good, but when the government tried to restrict who had access to guns it was bad.  They have this idea that they need these guns to rise up against an oppressive government but when the oppressive government gets here they are happy as clams because it isn't oppressing them.  They are just so full of shit."

"Wow you have gotten angry."

"I have gotten angry"

"You used to be the sensible one and I used to be the angry, depressed, anxious one."

"That was before."

"So what now?"

"Now everybody is either angry or deluded.  Everyone is either sad or they are complacent. Everyone is either able to ignore what is happening or is trying to fight it.  We live in different worlds"

"Are things that black and white though?  I don't think they are.  God look at me, I am trying to be sensible.  I mean there are probably people who think things are bad but not THAT bad and they won't believe that it is really bad until it gets too bad."

"Those are the people that frustrate me the most.  How bad does it have to get?  How horrible?  What has to happen?"

"I know. It isn't enough to say that Palpatine is a Sith, they don't believe if they see him Force choking somebody, what needs to happen?  If they see him shooting lightning out of his fingertips will they believe that is the Force or will they think that a freak lightning storm just happened that day."

"Life isn't like Star Wars."

"No.  Life isn't like Star Wars or Harry Potter or any of it.  Life isn't even like movies about the French Revolution or the American Revolution or the Communist Revolution.  Those were movies.  Even if you lived then it wouldn't be like in the movies.  Nothing is like in the movies.  Movies are easy."

"Movies are easy; life is hard."

"But what do you do when your life becomes closer to a movie than to your life?  What the fuck do you do?  I don't know how to live in this kind of world, in this movie world.  What are people supposed to do in these situations?  What happens now?"

"I guess people move on and live their lives the best they can"

"But how?!  I don't know how to do that!  Nobody prepared me to live in this kind of world, the kind of world where the court orders something but the government just doesn't comply.  I mean what the actual fuck!?  I don't even know how to respond to that.  Bush was bad but Jesus at least I felt like he believed vaguely in the rule of law.  I mean they would torture people but at least they would have the courtesy to go through the song and dance of not calling it torture instead of saying just like point blank, 'yeah we should torture people again, that was a good idea.'"

"I know.  It is nuts.  This whole thing is nuts.  I want to just go back to talking about stupid bullshit again and not politics"

"YES!  I wish politics just faded into the background again, like it wasn't so urgent.  Man, during Obama I was so relaxed.  I mean, not all the time, but just generally, ya know?  There were months that went by where I didn't think about Cabinet positions.  Shit, like I forgot John Kerry was Secretary of State for a bit.  The news didn't affect me, nothing really changed all that much, things were just..."

"Things were normal"

"Yep"

"This is not normal"

"None of it is normal.  I am so tired of saying how not normal everything is, but I don't even know how to stop.  Like if giraffes started flying one minute and then the next minute the grass was orange and just when you are dealing with that weirdness bananas taste like apples or something"

"I know what you are saying"

"There is this thing we are supposed to be doing like tracking all the little changes so we can see just how not normal everything is, but like there are so many!  Ugh! God I want to just be able to not think for 5 god damned minutes but I can't shut it off.  No wonder I've been drinking more."

"I think a lot of people have been drinking more or smoking more or fucking more or whatever it is people do to not think about this relentless march toward fascism."

"I think that is really my only consolation: that most people, not everybody, but most people I am friends with or who are in my life are just as freaked the fuck out as I am.  It makes me feel like I am not alone."

"We are all in this together."

"We are.  I didn't even know what that expression meant before, but yeah.  We are all in this together."

"And we have to fight it together."

"But I don't even know how to do that?  Like I have my Congresspeople and Senators in my phone contacts.  I call them a bunch but hardly ever get through even to a voicemail.  I go to marches when I can.  I send free faxes to people and shit.  Like is that it?  Is that the resistance?"

"What did you expect?  What did you want?"

"I don't know what I want really I just... Ok yeah alright I expected things to be more drastic.  I expected people to start... I dunno... being more like the antifas."

"So you are saying people should start burning things with more frequency?  Are you advocating for domestic terrorism?"

"Noooooo?  No. Maybe? No.  I don't know.  No.  I'm just saying like... no.  I am not saying anything."

"I mean it kind of sounds like that is what you are saying."

"I guess what I am saying is that how bad will it have to get?  What will have to happen?  What will it take for the people to get there?  What will it take for that not to be fringe? You know what I'm saying?"

"I don't know.  What do you think it will take?"

"I mean I don't know either, but as peoples rights are getting taken away and we are witnessing the decline of our nation and cabinet positions are bought and sold it feels like all this letter writing and calling voicemails and walking around with cute hats on seems like bullshit.  Like it seems like we are past the point of being nice.  That our so-called democracy and our so-called president are illegitimate and something needs to happen.  Something more than writing letters.  The entire system doesn't care about its citizens.  All Congress wants to do is disenfranchise voters, promote their Christian agenda, and make money.  Like you can't fight that with well reasoned arguments.  What the fuck is the point?"

"So you say you want a revolution?"

"I... yes?  Will I get in trouble for saying that?  Yes.  I do.  Listen.  Every other Western democracy has gone through many periods of change and transition.  They have written entirely new Constitutions.  They have completely changed their governments en masse.  I'm not saying that such a thing would be so terrible.  I mean it will be.  It would be terrible.  But it seems like it is necessary.  I don't know.  I don't even know."

"I know."

"I don't know how I can make it through 4 years of this.  I have barely survived 2 weeks.  I can feel my body rejecting this administration."

"We have to just pace ourselves and do what we can.  I know you want things faster, more dramatic, like a movie, but life isn't like that and you know it."

"I do.  Oh good, you are back to being sensible again.  I really need you to be sensible."

"I try."

"I guess that's all any of us can do: try"

"I guess so."
     

The End

Here we are at the end, the last day, and I feel so empty. Used up. He came and he told us to hope.  He told us that we should keep hoping.  He came and he gave us this glimpse into a world that could be if we kept changing and hoping.  He didn't do it all.  He didn't do enough. He couldn't save young people shot by police, he ordered the deaths of people on the other side of the world, he didn't do enough. He came and he told us to hope, though.  He made us believe that leaders could be good and kind and worthy even when they don't succeed at all they tried to do. He made us feel that we were moving into a new era, that we were going to keep going, keep reaching, keep hoping keep changing and on and on until at last we had a nation that was truly equal and truly free. He made us believe.  He made me believe.  He made me hope.

 Maybe it will go on like normal.  This is what I hope.  I hope that I wake up in the morning and I make breakfast and I drop my daughter at school and I go to work and I help people.  And I hope that the child who told me she was worried that her mother would be deported doesn't have to worry anymore.  And I hope that people are healthy.  And I hope that if people aren't healthy they have people and insurance to take care of them.  And I hope that if people don't have friends or family to take care of them that charities really will step up and make sure they live.  And I hope people live.  And I hope people have clean water to drink.  And I hope that people have food on the table.  And I hope people have families who love them no matter who they are or who they love.  And I hope businesses do right by people and make products that don't harm the environment.  And I hope that businesses do right by their employees and give them medical leave when they need it or parental leave when they need it or even just time off to see a child's play because they are good people who care for their employees and want them happy.  And I hope that there are no more wars.  And I hope that people stop killing.  And I hope that all the nukes are destroyed.  And I hope that everyone can get a quality education.  And I hope that nobody is judged by the color of their skin or their religion or their gender.  And I hope that people stop hating.  And I hope.  I hoped.

 I hate him for it, a little.  I hate that I got to see what we could have had if we only knew what we had when we had it. I hate that all this hoping made me believe a lie that somehow we were changing, when things are just as they have always been.  I hate that he made me hope for things that are not so.  I hate that we got so used to hoping, believing the impossible.  I hate that people are still hating.  I hate to hear my daughter cry how much she hates the new one, the asshole who comes tomorrow.  I hate that she sees such pain in the world and she weeps for us.  I hate that I am not strong enough for her.  I hate that I cry in front of her.  I hate that I can't promise her a future.  I hate that I am finding it hard to lie.

I try to hope.  I try to hope that tomorrow is the way I wish it would be.  That it isn't so terrible, it isn't so bad.  But for me it feels like hope is leaving me, is on his way out the door. I look around me and I see our natural world dying.  I see our schools dying.  I see our people dying.  I see our nation dying.  I used to hope for a wondrous future full of possibility.  Now I hope that there is a tomorrow.  Now I hope that bombs don't fall and people don't die.  Now I hope there is an America at all when I wake up in the morning.  Now I hope that things are terrible but not that terrible.  That isn't any kind of hope at all.  It isn't the kind of hope that he promised us when he stood there on stage all those years ago.  I hope the asshole doesn't kill us all.  That is no kind of hope to pin your dreams on.  I used to dream of fanciful things and now I dream of death.

It is foolish to put faith in a man.  To believe.  It wasn't really him though: not the man, the president. It was the idea, really.  The idea of hoping.  For 8 years, 9 really, almost 10.  From the moment he announced he was running and gave us the notion that such a thing could be.  And he won and it was as though all things were possible, that we had entered a new world.  It was into this new world that I gave birth to a daughter.  It was in this world that she grew.  She never knew anything else.  She never knew the Berlin Wall.  She never knew presidential scandal and impeachment. She never knew 9/11.  She never knew a world where a Black man didn't live in the White House.  She has no memory of a time when gays couldn't marry.  She doesn't understand people who hate.  She is confused by people who don't love.  She grew up in the generation of Hope.

So what do we tell them, this new generation, Generation Hope, children born or raised in past 10 years.  What do we tell them now at the end of an era?  How do we protect them?  How do we help them grow?  I see teenagers today, raised in this world where hope and change were possible, grow to be more socially aware, more progressive, than any generation before it.  These flowers could blossom because the world was fertile for their imaginations, the land was full of hope.  What will become of them in the new world?  What will become of us all?

It is the end.  It is not the end of all hope, but it is the end of an era where hope was the norm.  Maybe someday we will return to that world if we all make it out the other side.  I know we won't all make it, though.  Some of us will.  Some of us. How will those of us who make it out remember this time?  What will we say? How will history look at us? Are we in Berlin in the 20s?  Are we something new?  Will we take the stories of resistance we have worshipped in our popular culture to heart?  Will we fight?  Will we be able to?  So many questions.  So much uncertainty.

This I know: it is the end.  Tomorrow will be something new and what that new thing is we cannot yet know.  It will be bad.  That much is certain.  We have received the call from our physician and we wait anxiously in the lobby. Will the doctor tell us that the disease has spread, is inoperable?  Or will the doctor tell us that the tumor can be removed.  I believe, I have to believe, that this cancer is treatable, that this malignant festering thing can be destroyed.  Perhaps the treatment of the disease will make us feel sicker than we were before.  Perhaps the treatment of the cancer will be long and painful.  Perhaps we may not make it even after all the treatments.  But perhaps it can.  And this is what I hope.  This is what I will continue to hope.  Because I have to.

He told us to hope.  He told us to be the change we wanted to see in the world.  Now we must live by his example without him to lead us.  We owe it to him, to the memory of this era, to try.

The Terrorists Have Won

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a morning that I remember very clearly, my fellow college students and I gathered in the common room of our dorm to watch the news.  It was scary, the images we saw on TV.  We huddled together, some of us scared, some of us angry, all of us confused and uncertain.  Over the days and weeks that followed we learned more about this “Act of Terror” about the terrorists responsible, about how we should get back to our lives and not allow the terrorists to win.  The terrorists winning, it was claimed, meant that we would be too scared to go to shops and markets, that we wouldn’t be able to continue on with our normal lives.  The terrorists, it was claimed, hated our way of life and so we had to come together to preserve our way of life.  This rationale lead many to believe that the best course of action was to go to war against “terrorists,” against nations who harbored terrorists or funded them.  If you aren’t with us you are against us, the common refrain of the Bush administration.  To be “with us” meant that you did not harbor terrorists, you did not fund them, you did not allow them to flourish in your land.  To be “with us” meant you gave us financial and military support to American interests, to be “with us” meant that you believed in “Freedom.”

There were people then, back in those strange early years of this millennium, who saw through the lies and refused to believe that foreign wars were a good idea.  They were mocked, their music CDs burned, their ideas challenged.  We had to go to war, don’t you see?  We need to fight the terrorists who hate our American values, values like freedom of speech and of the press, freedom of religion.   The terrorists don’t like those things, they said, and so we have to stop them before they destroy us. We couldn’t let these terrorist win.  These terrorists who destroy art, who persecute gays and religious minorities, who treat women like chattel.  We couldn’t let the terrorists win.  How would they destroy us?  Did they have aircraft carriers and airplanes to fly over our cities?  No they had suicide bombers.  They had people who could come into American cities and blow themselves up.  We need to be watchful of them, distrustful of people who are different, mindful.  We have to watch out because these terrorists could be lurking on every corner.  But we can’t let the terrorist win by being too scared.  So we need to keep shopping, keep spending, keep living our lives, keep upholding our American values, “come together” as a nation, “united and strong.”  

In the years that followed we learned that the reasons for going to war had been somewhat fabricated, but really it didn’t matter TOO too much.  I mean we were still justified going there weren’t we?  They hated our American values, still.  They hated everything it was to be American. Maybe the wars weren’t 100% justified, but they were still, ya know, bad.  There were still people out there who wanted to harm America, who wanted to unravel our nation, who wanted to make us scared.  Terrorists.  We couldn’t let them win.  Don’t let the terrorists win.

Un-American.  That was what we were called if we opposed Bush and his policies.  Un-American.  A true American supports their country, supports their president, supports our troops.  Un-American.  Back in the 50s they called people Un-American when they spied for the Russians, or if they had “sympathies” or if they “consorted” with people who were or were suspected of being Communists, socialists, anarchists.   Those weren’t American values.  Or something.  Real Americans care about America, protect America, believe in America.  Only people who are Un-American would support foreigners over their own people, only terrorists would try to create fear and chaos.  Don’t let the terrorists win.

Then, in November 2008, a young Senator from Illinois was elected President of the United States.  Immediately, from the moment he was elected, there were questions regarding his legitimacy, his origin of birth, his “allegiances.”  These same people who called me Un-American for questioning a war we should have never started were now openly calling their president racial slurs, disrespecting him and his family, insisting that he wasn’t a “real” American, that he was a Muslim, that he was false.  Republican Congresspeople, obstructionists to their very core, did everything they could to block as much as they could, even things that would help the fundamentals of government to run.  They simply could not allow him to be in control.  

It was at this time that I finally began my awakening.  You can’t really choose when you begin to see.  For me it started with the early days of Obama’s presidency.  I attended his inauguration, I was so hopeful about the future, and then I heard months and months and years of nothing but vitriol spewed about this man, our president.  Wasn’t that, dare I say it, Un-American?  How were these same people who said we must stand by Bush at all costs now doing just the opposite with Obama?  Oh right.  They are racists.  Now, I knew there were racists out there.  In middle school and high school I was called anti Semitic slurs by a few classmates.  In college in St Louis I saw how segregation and racist attitudes affected people I knew.   But I guess, and here’s where I am really showing my naivete, I just thought that the racists were an anomaly, a thing of the past, or a thing of the “South” or a thing for “hillbillies.”  Now with Obama in charge I saw something different.  I saw racism everywhere.  I saw that even some of these racists who called Obama a Muslim and questioned his legitimacy, who called him the worst president ever (which is, just patently false really), did not consider themselves racists.  In fact, they would proclaim from the highest mountain that it has nothing to do with race that they like Black people but it’s just about policies right, they just don’t agree with him.  That’s all it is.  Uh huh.  I saw through them, I began to really see.   

A thing happened with the expansion of social media, with the growth of the internet: I saw things, heard things, listened to things that I never saw before.  Young black men being gunned down in the streets by cops, people facing harassment for being Muslim, transwomen beaten or killed.  Certainly this had gone on for ages, for as long as our nation has been around but how was I do know, young white woman that I was.  When had they talked about this in high school, in COLLEGE.  When had somebody explained to me what was going on?  Nobody did. I never heard those voices before.  Certainly the news never showed the whole story.  All we used to get was a brief mention of a police involved shooting occasionally, most of the time the stories never even made the nightly news.  So I listened, I read and I came to my second awakening, my second realization.  The idea of America, that America those flag waving Bush followers told us we must love and support against all costs, is an America for white straight Christian men.  When America starts to become too “gay,” too “Black,” too “Latino,” too “Muslim,” too “Jewish,” too “elite,” to them it ceases to be America. Therefore in their minds it is not un-American to disrespect or challenge this false America.  

The changing demographics, the changing attitudes of young people, all of these were taking away the thing they thought of as most American: white supremacy.   And it was true, white supremacy is as essential to our American experiment as anything.  This fetishization of the flag, of the idealized past, are all attempts at recapturing an era where their white supremacy went unchallenged.  It wasn’t so much that things were different in practice, after all there were still so many oppressed by our white supremacist culture, only that people knew about them now in way they ignored before, only that people in power said something about it, people who were oppressed had a voice and a medium with which to express their discontent.  These white supremacists wanted to go back to a time when those people talking about white supremacy, challenging it, would go back in their place and just love this beautiful flag, this beautiful emblem of colonization, control, and racial oppression.  As a white woman I have a place of privilege in this America. As a Jew and as a woman not quite as high a place as a Christian man, but still a place.  I benefited and continue to benefit from the white supremacy in my ignorance, and as I grew to learn just how much I became disheartened, angry.  We needed to do more.  

So I knew.  This whole campaign I knew. I knew that Drumpf and those who followed him were white supremacists, I knew that there were people who hated the few progressive changes we had made and wanted to fight back against them.  I knew that the people who defended cops who shot unarmed people of color had racial biases.  I knew that the justice system didn’t serve them, that they were left behind.  I thought I understood.  I thought I understood all that.  What I didn’t know, what I foolishly, foolishly didn’t know, was how many of them there were.  I didn’t understand.  When I saw the KKK support him I thought that surely this would mean that people would open their eyes and realize who it was they were voting for.  When he talked about Mexicans as rapists, when he talked about deporting Muslims, I thought that surely his supports must be a minority, surely.  Many established Republicans spoke out against him, though certainly not enough, but I thought that their voices were echoed in other Republicans throughout the nation.  I thought more of them would vote for Gary Johnson if they really hated Hillary so much.  Surely they would have to vote for somebody else but Trump, right?  How could they vote for him?  He wasn’t just a product of white supremacy like every other candidate, like Hillary was even.  He was something different from Bush, from Nixon, from just a regular Conservative.  Couldn’t they see?  He was… he is…

What was he?  Who is he? A man who talks openly about taking our freedoms away.  A man who flagrantly spits on the Constitution.  A man who disrespects women and treats them like property.  A man who was supported by shady operatives of a foreign government.  A man who stokes the flames of racial divisiveness without even a gloss of caring about others. A man who is beloved by hate groups. He was… he is… The word was there on the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t find it until I woke up this morning.  Last night as I cried in bed hold my knees to my chest, my whole body shaking, I went online to see that many of my friends and family were the same.  They were drinking, they were crying, they were holding each other.  What was going to happen?  How could this happen?  What were we going to do?  Who is responsible for this?  How can we stop them?  What can we do?  What can we do?  I have had chronic anxiety before.  This was different from the generalized anxiety I had years ago.  This was collective.  People weren’t just sad, it went beyond sadness.  People weren’t just angry, it went beyond anger.  People weren’t just scared.  It was more than being scared or anxious.  It was…

Terror.  It was terror.  The feeling we were experiencing was terror.  It was a terror that people felt in marketplaces in Iraq.  It was terror with a capital T.  It was Terror.  I thought back to the last time I felt so scared and it was on that morning 15 years ago in the lounge of my dorm room, a 19 year old girl watching buildings falling down.  This time it wasn’t buildings.  It was the entire fabric of everything I thought was real, everything I understood that was collapsing around me.  And who had caused this?  Who did this?  

I had a name for him, the man who will live in the White House but whom I will never call my president: terrorist.   I thought I understood things but I didn’t.  I thought the only monsters were the ones at his rallies.  I didn’t realize there were so many among us, so many terror cells lurking in every state, in every city throughout our nation.  Every day people of color go out the door in fear of their lives from police.  Every time they are pulled over they have a lingering dread.  This kind of terror might not be new for some of them, but certainly this election means something more.  This Terror with a capital T has swept this nation.  And I have no good solutions.  As we’ve learned from previous wars on terror, they very rarely go our way.  We always underestimate the terrorists, and our actions are often the cause of even more hatred.  I have no answers.  I don’t know what to do right now.  Dreams of Star Wars rebellion or armed insurrection are nonsensical fantasies.  

Here is what I know.  We spent well over a decade fighting terrorism abroad.  Fruitlessly, pointlessly we killed men, women, and children in the name of our “War on Terror.”  We had to stop the terrorists from taking hold.  We couldn’t let the terrorists win.  Today, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a swastika inside the name of our occupier was painted on a wall, a Nazi flag was flown over a house in San Francisco, a woman was accosted by white supremacists and threatened while getting gas.  The terrorists, hiding before, are now out in the daylight.  Hate crimes are way up in England after Brexit.  Expect more of the same.  Now they have a chief among them, their figurehead, a man with no real moral character, no real zealotry, only the money and the power they need.  Qaddafi was the same in a way.  And our nation has elected him.  Terrorist in Chief.  The terrorists have won.  Now we just learn to live.