Shortly after the election, I had an odd moment while checking Facebook. A friend of mine whose family is going to be extremely vulnerable to Trump’s minions had posted a reply to one of my posts saying she was scared. She lives in a red state bordering my blue one. I started typing something out about how, you know, if the red state gets to be too much you can always come visit us…and I had a kind of little mini panic attack.
Because part of me meant, “Come out and see us sometime, it’ll be fun.” And part of me meant, “If you ever need to escape, you can stay with us.”
At that moment I realized: whatever happens, we will be resisting it. That’s who I am, that’s who I married, that’s who I’m raising.
It didn’t make me feel good about myself. It made me feel sick to my stomach. For a while. Because if in fact it gets that bad, people like me and my family are fucked. Some people can keep their heads down and come through it unscathed. We are not going to be those people. We can’t be those people and at the same time be ourselves. Without the will to resist, our family itself cannot exist.
I think my brain did that to me as a kind of dry run. As a way of saying, this is who you are, so start thinking about what that’s maybe going to mean.
As part of that, I’ve been thinking about heroes, and how distorted our understanding of heroism and bravery has become. I think this is damaging because we need to know that heroism as we see it in popular culture is a myth. We in the real world are not heroes and that’s OK because we don’t need to be heroes. We only need to be ordinary people with compassion for other ordinary people.
Feeling this again today, definitely. Also, this was bracing to reread: “We’re going to be feeling, all the time, as if we’re failing the test, because it isn’t over yet.” It is easy to get demoralized by the feeling that you are not brave and good enough to do enough. But since none of us is alone, none of us has to do it all, and certainly none of us can do enough to end this crisis. But if you do something, it’s better than nothing, which is a start.
Brave
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