Day 1316 of 1456

Day 1316 of 1456

I don’t even want to say “in trump’s America” anymore. It’s insulting, to everybody.

What redeems us here? What is the final game? How does this all shake out?

The ultimate show and tell here was about letting someone (usually me) know exactly what’s happening here. To try and untangle something. To get at least a little certainty. I’m not dumb or vapid enough to become cynical and say that certainty is impossible, but it’s certainly tricky.

I know that I love my neighborhood, that’s one certainty. There are so many lives going on around me, loud ones, that I’ll never understand. Part of me wonders if I ought to write something deep to report on them, to make sure they’re not forgotten. But I feel like they don’t need me. As if I’m incidental, which I am. “Hey, now your lives are being written about, now they’re important!” What a crock of shit.

They don’t even bother me when I’m trying to read. If it gets so loud that I can’t concentrate, that means it was something important enough to break my concentration. Someone a house or two down is working with power tools on a piece of wood, building something. I don’t even need or want to look and see what they’re making, I’m just glad someone nearby has a project, something they’re looking forward to completing. Something with an eye to the future. Stuff like that is small miracle magic.

Sometimes it can be really hard to stay angry all the time. But I think that’s also due to the fact that sometimes you can get stuck thinking that anger is the only right emotion for what we’re all going through. That it’s either anger or self-pity, those are the only two options.

Far be it from me to tell anyone to not feel angry right now. I’ve been riding that wave for one thousand three hundred and sixteen days. It hurts. I’m not telling you not to hurt. I’m just saying that you don’t have to feel like you let yourself down if you occasionally give yourself moments to feel something besides anger. Speaking to myself, I know I have trouble with that sometimes.

You can stick a knife in your heart and drag a line down to your crotch and pull your guts out and fall front side first onto a pile of burning coals – not to prove that you care to someone else, but just to prove it to yourself – and think it counts as doing something. And, like I said, speaking from experience, it feels good. Even great sometimes.

How do you let go while still holding on? How do you stop an enemy without hating them? There has to be a way to cure poison without drinking more poison. Because this needs to stop. Everything we’re seeing everyday cannot continue. It literally can’t. I don’t mean it’s bad for the economy, or it’s degrading, or embarrassing politically on an international scale. All those things are true, but I mean it feels like the whole human race won’t have a future unless we get this figured out. Unless we unlock this paradox. This is for everything we’ve ever done and for everything we’re ever going to do. There will be no more, unless we get through this. There is no future in this.

I don’t think I can love cops. I feel like it would be preposterous to even try. Is that strength? Is that weakness? Because a lot of them are the enemy. That’s a fact. We literally need to get rid of them in order to survive. That’s the truth of the matter. How do we grow from these ashes? I know that it’s possible, I know that’s how things work – that the natural cycle of new out of the death of the old is how everything works – but I still never believe it until it happens.

How do you pump something other than hot blood in your veins? How does a burned out street give birth? How do you get an entire city to stop being what it has been? How do you do that in a country?

I don’t know. I don’t know these things. I don’t know how you destroy something without also destroying a part of yourself. That’s been the only trick I’ve known, but it can’t last. I have to learn how to build while building. I don’t know how to get there, but it feels like the only solution.

Day 1309 of 1456

Day 1309 of 1456 in trump’s America.

“Abolish the police” was not a phrase that I ever thought could hold any real political weight in my lifetime. It was part of the utopian cloud of phrases I thought about, like Galactic Federation or Dissolving Capitalism. It’s strange how a time lived with so much violence could also float on a current of so much hope, all at the same time. Combine that with the fact that never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that anything that happened in Minnesota would be impetus for it all. History was like a thing that happened around the edges of the Midwest, and we’d just sit quietly, hoping to be invited.

We burned down a police precinct. That has literally never happened in American history. When has Minnesota been recorded as being first for any kind of justice action, on anywhere near the same caliber, in all its 162 year lifespan? Other than a handful of Bob Dylan albums, and being the only state to not vote Republican in 1984, “Causin’ Trouble” has never really been our state motto. Either that’s how bad things have gotten, or Minnesota is ahead of the curve of something for once, compared to the rest of the country. Either possibility is hard to comprehend.

And now we’re going to defund the police. We’re going to take away their toys. Serious, sober, boring politicians are talking about putting communities back in the hands of community members. Something that has literally only been done once in American history – in 2013, when Camden, New Jersey did what we are trying to do. Keeping in mind that Minneapolis does not have different problems than Camden had, but it does have more than 5 times the population. This is a Major Metropolitan City, one of the top 50 biggest cities in the country. I haven’t read much of the results from Camden – again, not a real journalist, no one’s paying me to write this, and you are getting what you pay for – but a cursory glance shows a significant drop in most of their violent crime since then.

I’ll tell you what I am reading – and since no one’s reading this, I can safely vent about the facts without being self-conscious that someone might think I’m literarily virtue signaling – and that’s two books, A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Both started about 5 days before George Floyd was murdered. Yeah, I know, serendipitous, right? Apparently the last couple of weeks is all my fault. I did not know that the universe was using my personal reading list as a setup for its punchlines. If I had known, I would have started something more genteel, like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Gentleman’s Guide to the Golden Age of Blowjobs.

I’m not going to stretch this bullshit out any further than I need to. This is still only supposed to be fun for just me, so I’ll just get to the closing statement. One of the books – Invisible Man – is about a never-named black main character who is constantly seen by other people as everything in the world (slave, savior, token, worker, godless primitive, sex maniac, social taboo, union worker, union breaker, puppet, threat, and disappointment), everything except a human being. It’s an amazing book, one that I’d suggest every cop in America look into if I thought they could read.

The other one – A People’s History of the United States – is the strangest motivation to write that I’ve ever found. It’s a compendium of hundreds of years of written history of things that took place on the American continent – but the specific part below Canada, above Mexico, and between the oceans – as told by attempting to historically represent American Indigenous People, African slaves, women, farmers, industrial workers, unskilled labor, and every other racial and economic minority from 1492 up to the almost-present of the early 2000s. Over 500 years of struggle, some victories, mostly failures. Mostly the underhanded attempts to get the oppressed people in question to strike “compromise” just enough to get them to stop setting everything on fire forever, which is something that we apparently every so often remember we are totally capable of.

The thing I notice when I read this book is that none of this would be known – I wouldn’t even be reading it if Zinn hadn’t written it, if the sources he gleaned hadn’t written their books before him, and if the original sources hadn’t written it down when they were boots on the ground in the first place when these things happened – if no one had recorded anything. And every single person, names mostly lost in time, who wrote those things – reporting from the front lines when cops were clubbing strikers, or bringing machine guns on mothers and children in bread lines, or rolling tanks on war veterans in homeless camps – was writing in opposition to a thousand other people writing for the other side of the fight, the one that said that everything was going perfectly fine and no one has any reason to complain.

Sometimes it feels like the whole of human history is that battle played out a hundred times an hour, everywhere. People who think it’s good enough and the people who don’t. And if it wasn’t written down, we’d be even worse off right now. We’d be even more lost.

So everything is almost within our grasp again. We have another chance to climb another rung higher to ascend to our ultimate liberty, as they say. And just like always, we are the ones who can make these decisions. All the power is ours. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is trying to get things back to normal. They’ve done it before. Luckily someone was there to write it all down every time. A people’s right to their own agency includes solving their problems the way they want them to be solved. Every time it is diverted, it circles back again. Every time, for over 500 years.

We have all the power here. Or, to put it more precisely, we have as much power as we think we do.

Day 1302 of 1456

Day 1302 of 1456 in trump's America

What a week, huh?

It’s times like this that I wished I’d actually kept at being a writer. Or at least a half-assed journalist. There’s so much going on that I don’t really have the talent to describe, and that makes it feel so insurmountable. What does a college dropout (a philosophy major one at that) possibly have to say about a dozen week long race riots and a violent fascist literally hiding out in a bunker while it all happens. Did he do it ironically, like a meta-callback to his most similar predecessor? “Get it? You see what I’m doing? Yeah, you get it. I’m so clever.”

I don’t know how I’m going to express to anyone who would ever read this that America is simultaneously going through a triplicate of unimaginable democratic tragedies – a fascist take over, a worldwide pandemic with a body count in the hundreds of thousands and rising, and nationwide riots and protests against violent cops in a dozen major cities – all at the same time. I can’t even explain it to myself, so I don’t know how anyone else is going to understand it. What is there to do? What is there to say?

I think about the guy I saw making a music video in front of a burned out building – using tragedy and destruction as inspiration for creativity, simply because nothing else was given to him to work with. I think about the dozens of groups spread out over parking lots and schools and churches who are gathering supplies – so many it’s impossible to keep track of – to get in the hands of people who can’t help themselves; communities trying to fix a problem that someone else put them in. I think about the Facebook groups with strangers who have never met, who might never meet, coordinating block watches and guards. White allies announcing and declaring themselves as allies, with clear lit pictures, and minority community members vouching for those white allies as One of the Good Ones. And those same white allies are not incensed at their intent being called into question; they know why they’re being treated suspiciously. They know who they look like. They’re the ones offering the information. They are also dealing with solving a problem that someone else put them in – crappy white people ruined it for the rest of us, so we’re going to have to try to rebuild trust that we had no hand in dismantling. Those are just the facts. Take the cues needed to fix it or get out of the way. We have no time for anything else; our streets are burning to death.

I think about how inconceivably, galactically enormous words like “pandemic,” “fascist takeover,” and “entrenched systemic racism” can sound and feel to a single human being watching it all, all day every day for 7 days straight. Much less if you’ve felt it for the last 1302 days, or for your entire life, or if you’ve perceived it happening for 500 years to people who look like you. Any of it is too much for one person.

But I can handle “food drive.” I can handle “we’re looking for donations of tampons and pads.” That’s not too much of a stretch of imagination for me. I can handle “liquor and cigarettes, some people can’t leave their house, and they might die from withdrawals.” I’ve been there, at least a little bit. I can imagine what that small comfort means. And there’s nothing wrong with asking for it; if someone can help, they help. If not, they can help something else. I can handle the words, “we need paper towels on 3^rd avenue.” Someone else can manage the words “block captain.”

I always get distracted by the phrase, “Do your part.” What is my part? Do I wait for orders? Who picks parts? Is this a destiny thing? Those are exhausting. When you see something like this Cerberus head of triplet demon agonies that is currently sucking the blood from all of us simultaneously, you can see so many billions and billions of moving parts over hundreds and hundreds of years that your feeble human mind recoils in horror. Millions of bad actors over hundreds of years of oppression and organization and back scratching favors and legal loopholes and shady paperwork and blind eyes and everyone’s just so tired what does it matter we’re all going to die in the end anyway. Where could one human being possibly choose One Part to pick and dash themselves against the rocks of that particular tragedy?

When it gets too big – which is often – I just let myself Do A Part. Just one. It doesn’t matter what. Just one thing. Right now, I’m obviously not talking to the Unstoppable Altruism Machines who march astride god’s glory of the firmament giving comfort to all creatures great and small, redeeming the race of humanity for the final judgment to the space people who will appear one day and demand an answer to why our species deserves to live and join the galactic federation. You’re all heroes, keep doing what you’re doing. I’m talking right now to the people who have 36 rolls of toilet paper and can probably make it on 24 rolls until shopping day this Friday. You know who you are, and we know why you did it. No one’s judging you, I was scared too. This whole thing right now is about no judgement. But things have changed a little bit. Those resources can go somewhere else for a minute. And I know it feels like it’s unbearable. It’s unfair to even imagine one of these kinds of things happening in your life, much less three at the same time. I know you’ve never faced something like this before in your entire lives. But I also know that our species has faced all of this before, at the same time, and worse. With a fourth, fifth, or sixth asshole coming to crash the party, too. We’ve been through worse. And the way things are going, we’ll probably have more worse soon. And when that worse happens, I will say we’ve been through worse than that too, because we will have been then, also. Don’t think about it, it’ll make sense at the time.

That’ll be my overall advice; don’t think about it too hard. Thinking is fine, as long as it leads to acting. And the acting redeems the thinking. And you only need to think long enough to come up with A Part You Can Do. Just one. Right in front of you, if you’d like. That’s fine. Just so there’s one less part for someone else to have to worry about later. Take on two if you can handle it, go ahead. But one is enough, I promise. Remember that. The only number that isn’t enough is zero.