The Dystopian Now

I used to listen to the news. I used to read the Times. I used to like podcasts. But I haven’t done any of that for a few years now…maybe since the mid 2010s. I don’t know if it was intentional, but I think it had to do with how news coverage focused on every tweet or gaffe or diatribe that some racist politician was making. And I just couldn’t anymore.

I used to think that being up to date on these things was important.

I feel different now, but not because of some principled stance. I just don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with the news cycle. It takes away from what I’m trying to do.

This is brutally honest. And I’m a bit embarrassed. A bit ashamed of what a privilege that is. It isn’t that the policies of this dystopian now don’t affect me. I’m fucking sensitive. But I shut down. I want to wrap myself in a blanket and shrink away. I used to destroy myself over what I perceived as this political machine’s constant desire to erase, belittle, demean, in short, to eliminate me from the world.

I decided, slowly, that my work—whatever that is—the work of care, of kinship. The work of being in relation. Doing art. Doing gatherings. Doing decolonial love. All that work doesn’t depend on the spasms of an empire on the verge of collapse.

I don’t need to know what Trump is tweeting to know that the US is an Imperial power based on the dispossession of Indigenous land and the enslavement of Black people. I don’t need to know what [insert politician] is saying to know that the system, the structure, is predicated on the elimination of those who have never been part of what has always been a violently racist, misogynist, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic nation. It is and always has been that.

I start with this confession because I have been surprised by how many white men I have seen in meetings or professional (or non-professional) settings express a sense of alarm at the executive orders, the deportations, the defunding, the draconian, fascist playbook now on offer. A “what are we going to do now?!” that is meant—I interpret—to include me, but has never actually included me. A “we” that is not really us, but in its sudden emergence, an alarmist reaction to this reactionary moment, points not to a coalition of different people, but a flash of surprise, a deer-in-the-headlights approach that is meant—again I interpret—to elicit sympathy.

Their surprise is not surprising. I mean that I shouldn’t be caught off guard when people in nominally powerful positions suddenly find themselves fearful. The fear is what they are expressing, at the end of the day. They utter out loud, “What are we going to do!?” but they mean: “I’m afraid”. Afraid of what most people have been afraid of for years, centuries. And I don’t think this fear is unwarranted, but it is a feeling that, at least in my recent experience, white liberal men have been suddenly forced to contend with in a way that they (what? seriously?) didn’t expect to be contending with. I mean…

I don’t watch the news, but I do watch and listen to people around me. And this is one of those moments when, the first time, I felt my eyebrow dip, but tried to keep myself from saying anything. And then it happened again. And again. And three times in the last week can’t be a coincidence. It isn’t the women in my life or trans folks, or queers, or Indigenous people, or other people of color. All of a sudden cis white men are alarmed. And my sense is that they expect other people to understand their alarm, but what is more, to help them deal with it.

Perhaps I am being too harsh. A few other qualities of these men: most of them are capital L liberal, grew up in or live in urban areas, have decent jobs, white collar jobs in finance (but have a heart they might say), in tech (but not like those other ones, they might say), or education (we must save the university, they’ll cry). I don’t doubt that these men are fearful. I don’t doubt that they are waking to a world they no longer recognize. But I wonder where they were just moments ago, when Gaza was being bombed. I wonder how much discomfort they were able to feel—how they were able to sympathize, but not empathize?—when it was not their own lives but the lives of others being upended, being eliminated.

I wonder, but I don’t have to wonder too much. We know where they were. We know where they’ve been.

Let me try to put some of this together: I don’t think these white men grew up in rural areas where there are actual Klan members with actual plans to kill people of color. I don’t think they grew up around people who are not secretly, but very openly racist and homophobic. If they did, then they wouldn’t be surprised when these things are suddenly out in the open. They aren’t hidden everywhere. They simmer beneath the surface of DEI programs (another topic for another day) and multicultural vision workshops. They simmer under the surface of every facet of this “America”. These men, those suddenly faced with the reality of most of America, somehow thought that the world was not so sinister. But it is sinister precisely for their benefit. So they don’t have to face the ramifications of the very policies they now seem to realize, oh horror, might affect them.

Meanwhile, speaking for myself, I want to write and do the work of gathering and loving and fighting and growing tobacco and praying and finding the ways to say things that need to be said. I want to support those who have supported me. I want to build reciprocity. I want to build freedom. I want to do all this whether or not the government is defunding people to death. I want to do all this not because all of a sudden there is an urgency to it, but because it is the thing I know is the right thing to do. The right way to be.

I’m not so naive as to think that coalitions and political organizing and resistance doesn’t need to be responsive to its context, but I do think that having such a myopic view of the politics of this dystopian now leads people to forget that there are systems and forms of resistance that have endured and will continue to endure long after this political cycle, this presidency, this country, this empire.