Yesterday's post kind of freaked me out
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?*
Writing is magic. I can feel blocked and not want to write for a long time, but when the muse hits, it is a gift. I felt an urgency to start this Substack, and I always appreciate the insights I get from writing. But I have to be honest, yesterday’s post freaked me out. I had already known all the elements of the filibuster, but writing about it connected the dots for me in a new way. It was like seeing all the components of a nefarious machine that had been built over decades: foundations, layers built on top of it, corruption gaining steam and going largely unchallenged, goodwill being thrown out the door, the capture of the Supreme Court and the justices starting to embrace political posturing instead of running away from it, and the Republicans being willing to latch on to many previously unimaginable ideas (such as totally blocking the crucial voting rights bills), if that is the lever they need to pull to stay in power. In my own model thinking about the ongoing cognitive process of “Perceive, Believe, Act,” to protect ourselves, I started to really perceive and believe in the precariousness of our situation in a new way yesterday.
Writing about the filibuster boiled down to all the ways that the “bad guys” can tear things down or restrict rights with a 51% vote, while the “good guys” need to overcome a highly unrealistic 60% vote threshold, hampered by voter suppression in so many forms. It all added up to tell me that as fortunate as we are to have President Joe Biden instead of a second term of Trump, were really are in big trouble.
A friend sent me an article today which captured my profound sadness, America must take steps now to avoid a slide into authoritarianism, by Thomas Zimmer. He concludes by saying:
Will the US finally become a functioning multiracial, pluralistic democracy – or will the history books record the years from the mid-1960s through the early 2020s as a fairly short-lived and ultimately aborted experiment, before a more restricted, white man’s democracy was restored? It is crucial we acknowledge that the stakes in the current fight over voting rights legislation are enormously high. And not just for America: as we are witnessing a similar conflict shape the political, social and cultural landscape in many western democracies, this is a struggle of world-historic significance.
I write a lot about being a member of Generation X, and that comes into play here. Our generation is defined by children born between 1965 and 1980, meaning that we were the first kids to grow up entirely after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. We might remember Watergate and the Vietnam War, but just vaguely, through a child’s eyes. (I resented “Watergate” as something that my kept my mom glued to the TV when I wanted her attention!) We Gen Xers were taught, and experienced, much forward progress with civil rights. I learned about Martin Luther King Junior as history, not as a future warning. At least that is what my white middle class midwestern upbringing taught me; obviously others had different perspectives. As recently as January 2017, we still had a President who could sincerely quote, The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.*
The friend who sent me the Zimmer article asked me whether I have read authoritarianism scholar Timothy Snyder, who had the incredible foresight to publish On Tyranny in February 2017. Of course I have read Snyder’s amazing, prescient, crucial writing. The funny thing is that I learned a while back that 30 years ago, Snyder was a college student a year behind me at Brown. In January 1992, he was a first-year student in the dorm next to mine, where I was a sophomore resident counselor. We ate meals at the same dining hall. I didn’t know him then or now, but just thinking about that time, we were two random undergraduates, planning lives that didn’t include any of what we are facing in 2022. We GenXers grew up and came of age during an amazingly optimistic slice of American history. Once you got beyond the stock market crash of 1987, we got to witness the Berlin Wall coming down, the end of the Cold War and the hope that the Soviet Union would split up into democracies, a young Bill Clinton elected in 1992, the end of apartheid and elevation of Nelson Mandela from political prisoner to President of South Africa, and so much more. Bad things did happen, but the arc of American history, as far as our self-governance and democracy were concerned, seemed to be trending in a positive direction. It was certainly not something I ever questioned about whether or not it would continue into the foreseeable future. So we built lives, created families, raised our kids, and now—we are called to rise to the occasion to face a future we never planned for. I feel very guilty as a parent, knowing that we led our children to this point. Many GenXers have adult children, and some have grandchildren. My son left his college campus his junior year for spring break and basically never came back for in-person classes due to Covid. Now he is launching his own adult life into to both a continued pandemic and an ongoing attempted autocratic capture of our government. Our children, we are in danger of failing them.
I don’t mean to just complain, and I know that I can’t stay in this place. It feels unseemly and unproductive. At the same time, I want to be honest and say that when I read what I wrote yesterday, it worried me on a new level, because I do not see an all-hands-on-deck fight to defend democracy that we need coming from many of our Democratic leaders. Some of them are trying, see the Jan 6 Select Committee, but it is not enough. As in, if you are an elected official or candidate, defending democracy had better be your top priority, whether or not it is popular, or any calculation about whether you think it will help or hurt you get elected. We are beyond that point now! We all need to do what we can to fight now for a better future.
Today feels like the scene in Lost when Jack tells Kate about the time that he had a terrifying mishap threaten his patient’s life in the middle of a surgery. It was his mistake, and he had to fix it:
…the terror was just so crazy. So real. And I knew I had to deal with it. So I just made a choice. I'd let the fear in, let it take over, let it do its thing, but only for five seconds, that's all I was going to give it. So I started to count: one, two, three, four, five. Then it was gone. I went back to work, sewed her up and she was fine.
Today I am counting to five. Tomorrow I am back to the fight. Thanks for listening.
Let me know in the comments what you do to keep going on dark days.