This post was originally published on April 27, 2021
In this issue: Intro | Essay | Read Local | The Big Picture | Now Hear This | Final Frame |
I've been a busy bee these past few weeks, but I wanted to drop in to introduce everyone to GftM's new digs here at Letterdrop. So far, so great! If you missed why I decided I couldn't stay at Substack, these are both good reads on the state of affairs.
If you're a subscriber, nothing should change for you/you don't have to do a thing! Just keep on keepin' on with your beautiful selves. If you haven't yet subscribed, go ahead and do it! It's free (although here is the option of sending me some $, if you feel so inclined--it's always appreciated). Now, onward:
A nation of ostriches
It has been an extra difficult few weeks and I hope y'all are doing what you need to do to care for yourselves and your loved ones. The trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin necessitated re-hashing all of the Black trauma inherent in the incident (George Floyd's agonizing death at Chauvin's hands, the witnessing and testimony of Darnella Frazier, who was just 17 at the time, and countless others involved in the case and George's life). Several other Black and Brown people murdered by police just during the course of that trial, including 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant, who was shot by police in Columbus, Ohio on the same day as the guilty verdict was read in the Chauvin trial (within 30 minutes of the verdict, in fact).
Meanwhile, a toxic wave of anti-transgender legislation has been crashing over the nation, including two bills here in Wisconsin aimed at barring trans and non-binary kids from participating in school sports (those bills head to committee soon and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has asserted they will get floor votes, because he's an unrelenting asshole).
Through all of this, we still haven't even begun to have any real national reckoning with the attempted coup / violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that was [checks watch] only 3.5 months ago.
Legislators who openly aided and abetted the rioters, and/or voted to overturn the results of a democratic election that was the "most secure in American history," are still serving in their offices, writing and voting on bills, and generally being treated as good-faith public servants by too many fellow lawmakers, media outlets, and others.
Specifically, just hours after the violent attempted insurrection at the Capitol, 147 Republican lawmakers voted to overturn the results of the election and most have continued to actively spread the Big Lie, refusing to acknowledge that Biden won fair and square. Dozens (if not more) of state, local, and national GOP elected officials and party chapters have been implicated in helping to fan the flames of the riot, attending it themselves, and/or mobilizing resources to bring people to it.
So far, none of been held to account.
An effort to form a bipartisan commission to investigate the riot has so far gone nowhere, with Democrats now mostly doing the work themselves. It should come as no surprise, though: Why would the GOP want to shine a light on the truth of what led up to and happened during the Jan. 6 insurrection? There's no political gain in it--in fact, I'd argue the opposite is true. Nearly half of Republican voters still believe the events that day were either "largely peaceful" or that that violence was the result of "left-wing activists trying to make Trump look bad." That's when they don't just support it outright.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that "Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election 'was stolen' from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024."
Far from the wake-up call that many hoped would happen in the aftermath of the attempted insurrection and drubbing taken at the polls by Republicans generally, it appears the hold on the Grand Old Party by Trump loyalists and other far-right extremists has only strengthened its grip. I honestly don't see a path back to anything approaching legitimacy for them. The battle is lost (or won, depending on your POV). What I do see is a pressing threat to the ongoing and still imperfect experiment of American democracy.
Which is why I'm frankly fed up with Democratic politicians who continue to engage with Republicans as though they're meeting on the same plane of reality, let alone one of good faith. There is no reaching across the aisle to work with people who deny reality at every turn, denigrate and demonize those protesting in the name of racial justice and equality, and openly embrace a white supremacist ideology. There's no collaboration with people who refuse to recognize the humanity of people who aren't them.
I'm also honestly terrified at the idea that we're currently headed down a sadly over-trafficked route in American history: Willful forgetting of just how bad an event or era was and who was responsible for it (see also: the fucked up rehab of GW Bush and the 9/11 era).
I can't help but think of the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War (the ramifications of which we are still feeling now, so many years later), when the overwhelming desire for reconciliation and restoration of the status quo by the majority of white America overrode the real need for meaningful accountability and the repairing of harm done to Black citizens. Ex-Confederates were allowed to run for and win public office, attempts to provide economic reparations and education for ex-slaves were undermined and scuttled, the Lost Cause myth was allowed to permeate, and Jim Crow (and its ill-gotten offspring) ensured that the South won the peace, if not the war.
Now we have the combination of understandable exhaustion and active attempts to hide what really happened on Jan. 6, to gaslight the country into believing it wasn't all that bad, or that it was the result of a few "bad apples" (sound familiar?), and no, no need to reexamine the very systems upon which our country is built.
I see something similar happening in (largely white folks') reaction to the guilty verdict in the Chauvin trial. "Justice was done!" we say, "or at least accountability!" "Thank you for your sacrifice," was Speaker Nancy Pelosi's absolutely astounding statement about a man who did not choose to be murdered and martyred.
It is a comforting fiction to think that, because we finally saw one police officer punished for murdering an unarmed Black person, all is well or at least on its way to being better. But this is just a single case among hundreds, thousands, over the history of policing in America that went/are going un-addressed. And even this flimsy accountability is too much for police.
We let up, turn away, tire out, ignore, wave off, at our very real peril.
Thankfully, as always, there are people working hard not only to demand accountability and change, but who offer us different, healthier, transformative ways forward. They are largely underfunded, misunderstood, slandered, written off, and/or actively undermined by those people who fear those changes and the loss of unearned privilege they entail.
If there's any hope of our avoiding making the same damn mistakes we've made, over and over, throughout the history of the United States--mistakes that have cost us more than a dollar amount could ever entail--we have to be willing to dive headlong into learning about and supporting our visionaries. We have to be willing to make sacrifices, to be challenged, to be made uncomfortable. We have to embrace a radical compassion and sense of both connection to our communities--not just folks we know and like, but those who are strangers, too. We have to understand that living in a just society means having equal rights, yes, but also equal responsibilities. We have to take care of each other.
We can't do any of that if our heads are collectively buried in the sand, if we let our (understandable!) fatigue and short attention spans get the better of us.
Some of the visionaries/visions:
Read Local.
"What a Right Wing Militant in Wisconsin County Politics Reveals About Extremism" [John McCracken for In These Times]
"A Short History of McPike Park’s 'Tent City'” [Reid Kurkerewicz for Tone Madison]
"Check the crying about restaurant labor shortages" [Alice Herman for Tone Madison]
The Big Picture.
"Erasing January 6" [Justin Hendrix for Ctrl Alt Right Del]
“'History shows that burying violence creates the conditions for its repetition,' wrote Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an NYU historian and expert on illiberal figures such as Mussolini, earlier this week. 'If there is no accountability for Jan. 6, we can be sure that unscrupulous elements within the GOP will take that as a green light for them to try other lawless maneuvers in the future in order to return to power -- and stay there. The time to set the record straight is now.'”
Washington Post analysis of failures of police planning at Capitol riot: Important, harrowing reporting and analysis from WaPo about the failures of planning that contributed to the breakdown of security at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
"The Road to TERFdom" [Katie J.M. Baker for Lux] An important look at how anti-transgender ideology infiltrated mom's spaces and is on the rise generally in the UK:
As I read thread after thread, I noticed that many of the posters wrote about feeling newly disenfranchised and isolated after giving birth for the first time; cast out of a society in which they had previously enjoyed power by virtue of their relative wealth and education. Through organizing around this “taboo” issue (we’ll get to that later) they were experiencing solidarity and a sense of purpose that had been missing in their postnatal lives.
Lyz Lenz and Talia Levin on surviving internet harassment:
It is absolutely crazy that we're at least a decade, if not more, into this kind of, like, pick them out and shoot them off the line approach to attacking people, especially journalists and women of color online and newsrooms have kind of just considered it an acceptable loss. They seem to rarely stick up for their journalists. So, okay, we'll just keep losing journalist after journalist after journalist. Which just shows how they think you can just replace one person with the next and, of course, it's disproportionately women, disproportionately gay, women of color, and trans women.
Roxann Gay on donuts, pandemics, and fatphobia
The real health crisis this country is facing is not fatness or free doughnuts or pandemic weight gain or any such nonsense. The real crisis is that we live in a country where tens of millions of people politicized wearing face masks, and made surviving a modern plague a matter of the survival of the fittest and sheer luck. Our elected leaders, despite a pandemic, refuse to make universal healthcare a reality. Healthcare remains a privilege for the people we decide are worthy of it. It is all so grotesque. Those of us in our all too human, unruly bodies, are abandoned, discarded, derided, while social media physicians and Instagram fitness influencers and those lucky people whose bodies have not yet failed them, preen in their cruelty, peacocking for public approval of their physiological rectitude while the rest of us are subjected to their fear and loathing. We are all fragile creatures but only some of us are able to understand our fragilities as the strengths they actually are.
"Civilizations don't really die. They just take new forms." [Annalee Newitz for The Washington Post]
The idea of collapse is appealing because it allows us to handwave away the political reality of how civilizations transform. Sometimes cultures are abandoned at gunpoint, as they were in many parts of the Americas. Sometimes a culture changes over thousands of years the way the Indus Valley civilization did, slowly evolving from urban to rural to urban again. Still, it doesn’t disappear. Its tribulations, failures and successes remain with us. And that means we aren’t headed into doom, but change — and we, the people, will survive.
HOLY SHIT. I guess I shouldn't be surprised but did you know that the LA county police has its own internal gangs?!
“White Christianity is Killing America” [Lyz Lenz]
White Christians are always preparing for a future tribulation. But for Americans of color, for women, for trans Americans, for other marginalized people, the tribulation is now. Mass death and violence are here now. And part of this disaster is a direct result of White Christians gathering together in defiance, preaching conspiracy, and not caring who lives or dies as a result.
Now Hear This.
Look, if you haven't yet listened to and watched Lil Nas X's new single, "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)," I assume you've been living under a very boring rock. It is a joyously queer journey of exploration and personal discovery and he rides a stripper pole into hell. What's not to love?!
Final Frame.
I've been spending more time outside for work in the past month, helping with a tree planting and a couple of prescribed burns, and it's been very good for my soul (if rough on the ol' body). Here's a shot from the woodland burn our crew conducted at TNC's Hemlock Draw preserve last week. Standing at the bottom of the draw, watching flames lick up the sides of the gorge, smoke tinting the otherwise green landscape a sort of yellow-orange, was pretty breathtaking.
If you've never been to Hemlock Draw, I can't recommend it enough.
‘Til next time.
Thanks for reading! Hit me up with questions, comments, suggestions, and tips on great hiking spots.