The long view

Originally published January 20, 2017

I was born the same year as Medicare, Medicaid, and the Voting Rights Act.

My childhood was Vietnam and Watergate, the Great Malaise and the Iran hostages and disco. It included two years spent in a majority-Muslim nation, which forever informed how I would view the world and meant I would always see shadings and subtleties in every political interaction and a profound skepticism of those who deal in demonizing and simplicities.

My adolescence was Reagan and Thatcher, the glittering false facade of grotesque wealth covering profound inequality, the sense of cruelty as a guiding force. It was the existential terror of nuclear armageddon. It was postpunk and androgyny and AIDS and the view of a world that was deeper and darker and beautiful and resistant and angry, pushing hard against the facade. It gave me a sense of where home might be for me, and what I wanted to value and cherish.

My first decade of adulthood was full of failure and missteps and figuring out who I wanted to become, even as my nation entered a period of prosperity and the fear of dying in a nuclear strike waned. I remember less about it than I should–not because of anything exciting or dramatic, but simply because I was not yet a person of full spine and spirit and I didn’t know what I was doing.

My second decade of adulthood was largely spent in the thrall of an abusive, gaslighting narcissist, who took the spine and spirit I had begun to find and pleasured himself with trying to crush and pulverize it out of me. It was also when the towers fell and our nation went with them into its own thrall of terror and endless war and the first stirrings of irreparable division and authoritarian control.

Then came the next decade, and I married a veteran of the endless war who will always bear scars from it, and rebuilt my spine and spirit even stronger than before, and learned my own foolishness and new wisdom, and watched my nation find hope and joy and love and acceptance, even as the division became ever more fraught and damaging. And I failed to listen closely enough to the noise it made, the evil hateful threatening rumble that ran underneath everything.

And then it was the night of November 8, 2016, and everything cracked and broke and the rumble was a full-throated roar crashing over everything I value.

And now it’s January 20, 2017, and there is a new President, and there is ground glass being slowly rubbed into my spirit so that the wounds will stay open and oozing for as long as this reality is in existence and I am already watching the world I value being sliced away in bloody skewed pieces and the fear is as overpowering as it ever was in the old days of nuclear peril.

I dyed my hair the color of deadly nightshade, and I wore blood-red lipstick and a skirt of repurposed fabrics in the tartans of my postpunk heritage and the homely knit of working clothes, and a pair of old stompy boots that are worn but still solid, and necklaces of various links with heart pendants for the love and the energy that must power me, and a jacket painted with wording from a film that had come to represent so much to me even before the election happened and now is a terrifying portent of what could well come.

Of course these things are just symbols, things to show, talismans of what I wish to be. They will not, in themselves, change anything. But like all talismans, they give me the sense of power, and the sense that I can go forward, and the image to others of what I am and what I value.

The Green Place is gone. There is nowhere for us to go back to, no space of bounty and safety and peace. We can only go through the disaster and fight together for the vulnerable and the disadvantaged and the world that we want to see instead of the one we have.

I will continue to work at my non-profit job, the honest, meaningful work that provides income and meaning and value. I will continue to volunteer and pursue my passion, connecting people with the wonder of nature and wildlife and the value of protecting it. I will continue to stand up and provide safety for those in my community who are at risk from the awful roar of hate. I will continue to speak and amplify and counter the distortion and re-shaping of reality, because I have been through it both personally and politically and I understand what it looks like. I will live my life as I can, but I will incorporate resistance and anger and every bit of skill I can bring to this fight into the life that I live, and I will learn new wisdom and try new things to the best of my ability. I am scared that I will be harmed or imprisoned and I am scared that I will fail. But I will still do it, because it must be done, and I will do it for as long as I can. I will build my spine and spirit even stronger.

I have watched a lot pass in the decades I have had so far, and I have learned so much from it. I have never seen what is happening now. Our country as it existed yesterday no longer exists, and this thing we call the United States of America is likely to end. And part of why I will fight is because I believe that those who fight will make something better, in a different shape, and I need to help us make that. And this might take the rest of my life, however long that ends up being; my remaining decades will be so very different from the ones that have already passed. But I will spend them fighting.