Fun fact #1: Today, in Putin’s Russia, abortion is legal up to 12 weeks.
Fun fact #2: In 1920, in Lenin’s Russia, abortion was fully legalized.
It’s a difficult night. I feel anger, a useless anger, one that imagines that I could hurt, just by my words, strangers who can’t even hear me. Should I curse and shout at you, who already agree with me? Should we all imagine there’s someone here in front of us to yell at, and instead yell at each other?
Then I feel hopelessness, this deep overriding hopelessness, and shame that I ever bought into the system and voted, shame that I’m an American. There’s a debate in me, between hopelessness and renewed resolve.
My daughter is 9. The fact that she will grow up in a world like this, a world that ended a decade before I was born, is … gut-wrenching, in the truest sense. It’s an unraveling feeling. The measurable moment of regress. I’ve been, with youthful arrogance, gnawing for years at the notion of “progress,” that paternalistic idea that things are “getting better.” And so have most academics, to be fair, for a long time been critiquing that view. But despite all that hand-wringing and complaining, did any of us really believe, until tonight, that we are in fact regressing?
My children’s lives will be poorer, scarier, and more limited than mine has been. Their generation will be less educated, less prosperous, less safe. Our life expectancy is already decreasing. It makes my heart heavy. Is this what it feels like to transition from the-beginning-of-the-end to the-middle-of-the-end?
And I know, I know that it isn’t so cut-and-dry, that things can still rebound. I know just how dire the world felt 80-90 years ago, as Fascism and then War engulfed half the world, but they lost, didn’t they? The Apocalypse was averted, or so we’ve always been taught. There can still be ebbs and flows; neither progress nor regress need be linear, and no story is ever truly over. At least, this is what I tell myself.
I keep writing angry paragraphs and deleting them. It’s not a productive feeling, but it keeps rising to the surface, slow-walking back to me like that beast from the movie It Follows. I’m proud, at least, of whoever leaked this draft; honestly, maybe the leak stands a chance, albeit a small one, of convincing a Justice to change his mind. Leaking it like this was an outrageous, bold, and brave thing to have done.
I’ve heard for a few years now about “cancel culture” — this supposedly mighty power of the “liberals” to bring about change through media pressure. I was sad that it didn’t materialize around Texas, last summer. Texas needed to be canceled. “Liberals” needed to refuse to go there, refuse to buy Texas products (AT&T, for example, which donated heavily to the Texas Taliban chieftain Abbot). Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions — Texas.
Do we have the courage for that, starting today? BDS — America? Can we all, at the very least, take down our American flags, remain seated for the national anthem, instruct our children not to pledge any allegiances? Can we talk about a national general strike in protest? Can we actually, with conviction, deplatform and disinvite any Republicans? Ostracize them at work, refuse to publish their words, refuse to interview them, and when possible refuse to hire them?
In the second week of November, 2016, I stopped for coffee at a Starbucks on 125th St in Harlem. It was crowded. I was alone at a small table when a man approached, asking if he could share the table with me. He was in late middle-age, a white man, a bit overweight with glasses and a disheveled coat; a very gentle look about him. I started to say “of course,” but stopped myself, feeling the recent pain brought on politics, and instead asked him, “Should I ask you who you voted for first?”
You are probably thinking, How rude! How could you ask that? But try to recapture the sorrow and disillusionment, which trust me was compounded in a place like Harlem. People were walking around stunned, listless. They cried. I cried, on the subway, that week. So the gentleman in the Starbucks actually agreed with my approach. He said, “Sure, you can ask,” and stood there calmly.
“Who did you vote for?” I asked.
“Hilary,” he replied. “You?”
I said, “me, too,” and he sat down. Both of us as much pleased as unnerved by the encounter — pleased because we had assured one another that we weren’t sharing the table with The Enemy, but unnerved that both of us had thought it necessary to do so, when at least for me, never in my life before had I sought to avoid a conversation with someone for their political beliefs. On the contrary, I’ve always preferred a challenge, a difference of opinion! In college, I made close friends with a girl whose deepest secret was that she was a Republican; in multiple workplaces as an adult, I found myself in honest conversations with the most religious individual there. I’ve always loved those debates and exchanges, and always prided myself on being able to see and take seriously both, or all, sides. But in November 2016, that ended for me.
But only for a time; I, like the rest of you, had to get along. I re-engaged with a world of diverse people with diverse opinions. Sarah Silverman did a whole show on Hulu about getting to know Republicans. We all went back to being basically polite.
Then, in the immediate aftermath January 6th, there was this unexpected universal outrage. Anyone even remotely suspected of supporting the attempted insurrection was swiftly condemned and, where possible, deplatformed. It felt like 4 years of trying to be polite just imploded and, for a moment, everyone seemed in unison. I remember saying, naively, that they had “shown their true colors,” and that I was glad, because it would no longer be necessary to be polite.
But again, we got over it, didn’t we? Each of us has broken bread, in the past year, with a Republican. We’ve had the opportunity to spit into their face, “YOU FUCKING FASCIST! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE YOU HORRIBLE PIECE OF SHIT!” We have been polite. We have been Americans.
We have fallen victim to “both sides” platitudes. One side accuses the other of trying to treat women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ individuals as second-class citizens, hinting towards something worse; the other side accuses the first of being communist pedophiles or something, and since both sides are making wild accusations, they’re obviously both just extremists. In the fever dreams of Republicans, Democrats are psychotic cabal that wants to groom their children, through the schools, into being liberal and also transgender. In the fever dreams of Democrats, Republicans want to … overturn Roe v Wade.
Ask yourself, what’s your next nightmare scenario? A worse crackdown against trans, and then gay, Americans? Another surge of Islamophobia, with more teeth? A true, Nazi, White Nationalist regime coming power to America and murdering everyone of the wrong race or gender or sexuality?
Part of you, the sane part of you, the part of you that you need in order to exist in polite society — that part can’t entertain such paranoia. Isn’t that just what the Other Side does, feed itself paranoid fantasies about us? Don’t we need to guard against that, to be the calm ones, the rational ones, the polite ones?
And the other part of you knows that this is where we’re headed.
So, start tomorrow. Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Republicans. Stop doing business with them. Find someone else to plumb your bathroom, to sell you pizza, to manage your investments. When you’re having coffee with them, and you think, “Maybe he’s one of the ‘good ones,’ just wants lower taxes; he’s not some racist fascist transphobic homophobic islamophobic ultra-religious bigot who wants to force women to carry his children,” remind yourself: Yes, yes he actually is all of those things, and perhaps that should be his new nickname.
That’s what I want to see. That’s what I’m going to try to do. Help me out; do your part. Cancel them. Cancel Republicans, and so long as it is a Taliban-style state, cancel America.
