Remember when I last posted here almost two years ago and wrapped up with, “May [2024] bring us all a few sparks of good, and may we find them easily when we need them most”?
Lol, as the kids say. Lmao.
Pick your load-bearing meme to cope: We stay silly. The horrors persist but so do I. Survive out of spite. Honestly, though, with my dinged-up neurochemistry, I have to remind myself on the daily that giving up is giving them what they want. I do my best to follow Sydette Harry’s community care maxim, Does Baby Have Hat?, and go out to put metaphorical (and literal) hats on babies as often as I can, using small, tangible actions to manage the overwhelm. But sometimes, “not giving up” just means I drag my queer nonbinary ass through another day in a country that isn’t even pretending to respect the rights of those not pale, male, and Yale anymore.
So that means dragging myself through a literal military occupation that’s taken over the city I’ve called home for almost 17 years, as our unemployment rate hits 6% because the federal government has been eviscerated. It means wondering, also on the daily, how we will ever rebuild in the mythical After, and struggling to accept that the answer might be we won’t. I am at the midpoint of my life – maybe a little less than, God willing, and hopefully not significantly more – so if I’m lucky, I might get to spend my remaining years helping to piece this country back together after a bunch of fuckheaded fascists smashed it on the floor in a fit of pique. And the work won’t be anywhere near done by the time I die.
But the work isn’t ever done, is it?
And here’s the thing. A few days after the DC occupation started, I had a coffee date with someone new down near U St. We talked for almost three hours, then walked back to the Metro together, passing cop car after cop car – it’s not an exaggeration that one whole block was lined on either side with cops, their lights throwing red and blue streaks over everything. (And this was before the checkpoints started in earnest.)
Every single one of those cars had at least three phones trained on it. People walking to and from the Metro, like us; folks dressed up to party, waiting in line to get into one of the clubs; an elderly couple seated at a bus stop. All of them visibly ready to intervene if shit went down against one of our neighbors.
We will only get through this with each other.
I think that’s the load-bearing meme I’ll pick.