A beginning

I have never been a particularly hopeful person. It's always come more naturally for me to sit with melancholy than with joy, even before I started accumulating enough life experiences to warrant it. These days, it often feels like my tendency to hold a pessimistic worldview has been vindicated. The first vote I was old enough to cast was in 2016. It was a vote against fascism. Ten years later, after a global pandemic, an insurrection that marked the end of more than two hundred years of the peaceful transition of power, the loss of abortion rights at the hands of Christian nationalists on the Supreme Court, and the reelection of a career criminal and Russian lackey to the highest office in the land, that fascist threat is now here. And the fight against it is now the fight of our lives.

I take some solace in the fact that we are far from the first to fight against tyranny. Generations of Americans have fought to get us where we are today. It took a century after the Civil War for Jim Crow to fall and for the Voting Rights Act to finally make the 15th Amendment more than words on a page. The women's suffrage movement did not see success until seventy years after the Seneca Falls Convention. None of these achievements came easily or quickly. But come they did, due to the refusal of ordinary people to accept injustice, no matter how fierce the oppressors.

Still, thinking of fascism in the present tense feels unusual and disconcerting, even if it's been haunting us over the last decade. I've spent more time thinking about it in a European context. It's from that past that I've drawn inspiration for this site.

In 1944, shortly before D-Day, Radio Londres broadcast a message containing lines from Chanson d'automne, an 1866 poem by Paul Verlaine that he published in a collection titled Poèmes saturniens. Those lines indicated to the French Resistance that the invasion of Normandy was near, and that they could begin their planned sabotage of the railroads. You can listen to the original broadcast here. I've chosen to name this little place The Saturnien in reference to that moment. But saturnien has other meanings, too. Verlaine's original use of the word references the Roman god, and, in a literary sense, it's also translated as melancholic.

I am not a journalist or a foreign affairs expert, a professor or a lawyer. I once might have called myself a historian, in another life. For these reasons – and because there are many extraordinary people doing it much better than I ever could – I am not planning to use this space to break down the week's news or analyze the historical trends that got us here. I will reflect on both, no doubt, but that is not the foundation of these little letters. I think, more than anything, this will be a place for me to try and process the changes around me. The fear, the anxiety, the anger, the despair, the sadness - it all has to go somewhere. Sometimes those feelings will be turned into action offline. But other times they will come to rest here.

That said, my goal is to write myself into hope. When I look at these next four years, I feel certain that we won't recognize the America that comes out the other side of them. But I have to hope that the America that emerges after all of this will be unfamiliar because we'll have fought to make it more just and more equitable in ways that the generations who came before us could only have dreamed of. It's hard to see that possibility, but I know that I won't stop fighting for it, even when I fear that we won't see a democracy again in our lifetimes. By writing here, I hope to keep the belief in a brighter future for this country alive, both for myself, but also for anyone else who might need a little help connecting to hope.

It's uncomfortable to even consider doing this for eyes other than my own. It's been a long time since I've done any writing, let alone writing that might be read by others. But I know that I don't want to feel alone, and maybe you don't either. I know that those of us who believe in the worth and dignity of all human beings are more numerous than those who do not. I know that there are more of us devoted to the unfinished work than there are those who would tear that work down. I also believe that advancing that work will take all of us, and it will take all of us being willing to do the uncomfortable, to stand up in ways we never have before.

So this is my start to doing the uncomfortable in pursuit of that better and brighter future. I hope you'll join me here, and out in the real world, to make that future our reality.