Three Months After the Election
I started out November 5th watching election results in a taqueria with friends, and the news wasn't looking good, then went to a local election party (for the most progressive candidate for San Francisco mayor, who didn't win) but spent a lot of my time there refreshing my phone for more not-good news, and then I went home. By 11pm it was pretty clear Kamala Harris had not won the presidential race, though I don't think it had been called yet.
I knew that people were going to be devastated, and I was devastated myself. But resolute. And I wanted to prevent people from turning this real electoral defeat (an unimpressive one in which 39% of the electorate stayed home and she lost by only 1.3%) into a total defeat in which we just gave up and let them do their worst.
That election night, I wrote the three paragraphs below and posted them about 11:20pm online and they spread more rapidly and widely than anything else I've ever done. The actress Amber Tamblyn recorded herself reading them the next morning , and they got shared online by all sorts of people in the next few days. It was satisfying to be able to meet the moment.
It was interesting to reread the text for the first time in a while last night. Here it is:
They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.
The Wobblies used to say don't mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.
People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.
It's raining right now here in the Bay Area--winter rain's mostly a blessing here, the end of fire season, the beginning of the greening hills, the recharging of water systems--and I see a lot of people across the country persevering. For the week after the January 27th attack on federal funding, I felt like a geyser of adrenaline and I put that energy to use writing, watching, interpreting what was going on to the best of my ability and posting about it, organizing various kinds of activity, pulling together a rapid-response team with some brilliant organizers, launching this newsletter. In the last few days, fatigue caught up with me, and yesterday I slowed down enough to feel something between sadness and horror. I suspect a lot of you feel something similar. But I'm not stopping. And I see millions of people who are not stopping either. Ordinary citizens, state attorneys general (here's a statement from 15 of them defending gender-affirming care), the fiercest of our congresspeople, organizers, activists, experts.
That line about the single garment of destiny recycled a famous phrase of Martin Luther King's: "In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." I wanted to extend his beautiful metaphor --that garment of destiny, imagined as an actual textile--who wove it, who washed it, who mended it when it was damaged? I wrote it because I knew who they are--men who do not understand that everything is connected, which is a moral truth and also an ecological one and a reality of the systems of finance, international relations, and the rest that are woven together to make a world of interrelated systems and relationships and processes that cannot be severed without harm.
Even to the ultra-rich: what do they think money is, if not part of a national and international economy; where did their wealth come from if not a system that protected them and their products and even their consumers in many ways; what do they think air traffic control does– as they prepare to meddle with it--if not assure the safety even of private jets?
Yesterday, in response to the attacks on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that include an order to stop cooperating with 'foreign nationals,' the great climate science communicator Katherine Hayhoe said on BlueSky, "By definition, numerical weather models require international data. The atmosphere knows no geopolitical boundaries: any model that begins and ends at its country’s border is unable to generate reliable predictions until after a weather system crosses its boundaries. Which defeats the purpose!" A whole lot of the economy--shipping, farming, fishing, transport and travel, recreation--depends on accurate weather reports, and so does public safety when it comes to events like floods, heat waves, and hurricanes. The sky has no borders. It is itself a single garment of destiny.
These men imagine that they themselves are autonomous beings, lone heroes, that disconnection is the ideal state, an ideology popular in libertarian Silicon Valley. They operate on right-wing fantasies that there is no network of mutuality (even as Silicon Valley's primary products are network-dependent or the networks themselves). They are severing ties everywhere in their fantasy that the USA can go it alone and break all its relationships, alliances, memberships--with NATO, with the World Health Organization, with Canada and Mexico, with the Paris climate treaty, for starters. They're also trying to re-segregate the country with their fantasies that we don't need the immigrants who do the most essential work in this country, that everyone who's not a white male is a less qualified worker, that women should be subjugated and denied reproductive rights, that the consequences of wrecking healthcare and public health at home and abroad and education and sabotaging scientific work--well in their fantasies of disconnection I'm not even sure they believe in consequences.
But I do. This will bring catastrophe. Is bringing it now. Maybe they will learn something the rest of us know, maybe they won't. Being loud and clear about consequences–and responsibility for those consequences--is one of our jobs going forward. The end of the story isn't what they do and they clearly don't imagine a chapter after this one in which they wield power, but there will be a next chapter and one after that. The end of the story is not in sight, and what we do in opposition will write some of that story.
p.s. This Bay Area city affirmed its values and support of human rights for all its residents and commitment to the constitution. It's not a big city, but this kind of standing on principle and upholding the law and the truth matters, and I was moved by how they did it here.
