what was implicit is now overt. hello stephen bannon.
dear loved ones, this is my being gentle and kind and stern:
if you are surprised by the results of this election, then you haven’t been paying attention. there are many books to read that will help you understand why your facebook newsfeed says one thing and the life experiences of those around you say another. please read these books. also recommend them for me to read. we all have so much to get primed on, and so fast.
also, now you know. there are going to be many things over the next months that make you feel like what you know now is not what you know. that your fear was an overreaction. that trump can be a normal guy. example: it’s normal for the president to split his time between his fortified tower in new york city & the white house (da fuck is that?). or, it’s normal for a known anti-semitic white supremacist (who our media has labeled, nearly lovingly, as a simple provocateur) to be the chief advisor to the president. or, it’s normal for a 70 year old man to have a ten year old son named Barron.
resist that seduction. resist the excuses to go back to normal. i know it sounds exhausting. trust me, i’m exhausted. each day a mess of: nausea, jittery body, a subtle dark pinging in my ears saying no. nothing about this is normal, and we must cling to that reality. in many ways the world we thought we were living in has ended. the world that is coming hasn’t come yet. this is what is vital: each one of us is as much a person as anyone else, and that’s the power we all have to push press or pull social reality into shape. resist the false reassurance of words spoken by friends with good intention and do hold your gut intuitions very tight.
i hate the word fascism because it’s such a blanket, and all too frequently used to justify gross imperial action elsewhere. as americans we’ve used the word fascism a million times to describe other far away people that we don’t understand. our pictures of those people are sharp and cutting. more than cutting– precise. candle wax drips on their faces during autocratic marches for the republic, the greyness of concrete strips away all public color. it’s a word that is big, in it’s messy imprecision, and it therefore implies, to our clutching minds, some large climactic moment of change. obvious to everyone. (the moment when we went from being free to living under fascism, says the grandmother, eyes rolled back in nostalgia.) the reality is it’s a slip and slide. often behind closed doors. often right in front of our faces. my plea is to stay vigilant. resist the fear of the other. we’re being smothered in every terror fantasy imaginable. go outside and feel the sun and remember what you can to make sure that in thirty years you don’t say that you did nothing. love big. love everyone. love so hard. but also know deeply that this isn’t a matter of love versus hate, it’s a matter of people being greedy and paranoid and hoarding what they have. if we don’t also open our pockets and raise our fists alongside our love, then it will be as beautiful and useless as the pink sky before sunset.
and fine if i had to have a definition for fascism it would be the quiet murder of many people while others watched TV and thought it was all going to be alright.
