Grieving a lost past

I feel a great deal of grief these days. For a lost past and a lost future, for a time when it felt like it was possible to keep some bits of our lives sacred and untouched by the rot infecting our country. I leave the smallest interactions with strangers - a high-five at a basketball game, a quick laugh on the train - wondering if that person cheers on the destruction, if they are the collaborators helping to carry it out. I am resentful of this sense of paranoia, but I am more resentful that it does not necessarily feel misplaced or extreme. Things are now black and white, and the gray belongs to the collaborationists. I know this, and I know where I stand, but I still grieve for the time when fascism belonged to the history books and these questions weren't mine to consider. I grieve for the time when I didn't feel like I had to know what the person next to me believed, when it was generally understood that despite our differences of opinion, we all still followed a similar moral compass.

Worse, for me, than the knowledge that there are those who support this hatred and destruction is the knowledge that there are more who are willing to ignore it. They might ignore it because they are busy, or because they assume that institutions will hold, or because the lucky hand they've been dealt in life has mostly insulated them from ever really having to think about their government. I find that ignorance an extraordinarily difficult thing to understand. The paths that lead a person to hate feel more intelligible to me than those that lead a person to feel nothing, and to do nothing, in the face of the kinds of horrors we're seeing carried out in our names as Americans.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm living in an alternate reality, as I watch my little corner of rural America continue on as if nothing has changed. It reminds me of the first few months of 2020, when the pandemic was racing across the globe and the devastation it would cause us was clear, but it had not yet hit us in full. It's lonelier this time, somehow, because fewer people seem to understand the threat facing us today than the one that faced us five years ago. I've seen this described as "the unbearable normality of creeping authoritarianism," and it really does feel unbearable. I often fear that most people won't see this for what it is until it's too late. We're far enough down this road that I am beginning to think that fear will come true.

The veneer of normality, the lack of urgency I'll see in people, often makes me question myself. I'll wonder if what my eyes and ears are telling me about this fascist threat is true, and whether it really is as bad as I think it is. But then I'll remember that it has been just over fifty days, and this administration has already disappeared people to concentration camps, allowed the richest man in the world to shut down foreign aid in a move that has already killed people and will kill millions more, betrayed our allies and upended eighty years of foreign policy, arrested an activist for protests they don't like, and started erasing the histories and achievements of servicepeople who aren't white men. And after I remember those things any questions I had are answered.

This, too, is part of authoritarianism. Authoritarians want to make you question whether things really are as bad as they seem, until "the voice in your head crying out that something is wrong grows fainter and fainter," and you stop resisting them at all.

It is entirely impossible for me not to feel the weight of all of this every day, even when there are times for laughter and distraction. And I don't think that feeling this way – sick over each new onslaught – is a sign that they've won. I would argue it's a sign they haven't. It means that I haven't let them take away my soul, that I've retained a part of myself they would rather strip away from me. They mean to demoralize, certainly, and I remind myself frequently to guard against that particular feeling. But to be angry, to be disturbed, to be so appalled it can be hard to focus or sleep some days - these feelings tell me that they have not succeeded in taking me away from myself.

As a writer and scholar I've followed since Donald Trump's first campaign wrote in 2016, "authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are. It makes you afraid, and fear can make you cruel. It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things that you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do."

As long as I feel this outrage, I'll know I'm still in the ring, still holding fast to the principles and values that will get us out of this someday.