We have to face what this means

One of the few "mainstream media" podcasts/shows I still pay attention to is On the Media. I love Brooke Gladstone, without whom I wouldn't have found Cory Doctorow, who lead me down a rabbit hole of other Very Good Things. (And I've found some good books from OTM as well, including Fearing the Black Body, which was amazing.) 

On their Wednesday show, Gladstone and her co-host Micah Loewinger dissected their role in not preventing Trump's win. While I applaud them for the self-examination, and I agree that Trump's win is one of the expected consequences of the long-term project of gutting local media, they're mistaken if they think that voters didn't know what they were voting for. Yes, they did. People knew Donald Trump was a fascist and they voted for him anyway.

More than half of the people who turned out this year wanted a fascist for president. They not only heard what he promised to do in this term--chief among them, the deportation of 13 million immigrants--they know what he did in his last term. And even if they just couldn't keep up with all of it--and that was part of the point--they saw the attempted coup in 2021. It doesn't matter that Trump and his people BS'd why he wasn't responsible; anyone with eyes and/or ears knew that he was. Everyone saw, and millions of people didn't care. In fact, some of those people may have welcomed it.

When you infantilize large groups of people for decades, don't be surprised when they're vulnerable to believing someone who wants to play daddy is going to take care of them.

It also cannot be overlooked that sexism played a huge role in this. It's really chicken-and-egg: did toxic misogyny and misogynoir give people the final push into fascism, or has fascism been part of why misogyny has become so murderous? I think Kamala Harris was an excellent candidate, and people who follow these things said she had all the right moves on the campaign. But I had a pit in my stomach as I did in 2016 as soon as Biden stepped down and endorsed her. It's not that America isn't ready for a female president, as if we're in some larval stage on the way to sprouting our beautiful wings of pluralistic acceptance; we're fully formed, and we reject anything that changes the environment we're used to.

(I was worried because Harris was a woman, not because she was Black and South Asian, but maybe I should have been. I should not have forgotten that the intersection of anti-white racism and sexism is one of the ugliest places to inhabit.)

I beg everyone else to stop the nonsensical explanation. (The price of eggs? Are you joking? Trump and his people don't have to make the people who eat eggs happy, the have to make Big Ag happy.) And stop telling yourselves that people didn't understand and they're going to be sorry. No, they're not, not unless they suffer for it. As angry as I am, I'm not wishing that kind of suffering on anyone.

People need to understand what his election means. Assume the worst. Assume that the worst interpretations of Project 2025 will apply. Assume his administration will deport 13 million people. Assume they will try to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens. Assume trans people, and especially the children, will be under concerted attack. Assume they will try to pull back recognition of gay marriage. Assume they will also bring back miscegenation prohibitions, at least in some places. Assume there will be camps. Assume there will be detention centers. Assume people will not be able to avail themselves of due process. Assume there will be politically motivated prosecutions. Assume Taiwan, Ukraine, Gaza, and the West Bank are on their own. (And shame on you for knowing that and voting as if you could indulge purity and not have to choose the best of actual options.)

Assume the worst, because maybe that will drive home how much assistance we who can provide should provide. My time and money are limited for the next year and a half--but that doesn't mean there is nothing I can do. I want to get involved in mutual aid. I want to keep people from being cold on the street (and that was already happening in Massachusetts--don't tell me how Blue we are, please). I want to keep people from starving. I want to keep libraries open. 

I want to preserve everything we have so we can someday reclaim what they are going to try to take away.

Please join me.

Deb in the City

When "They" Come

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

I've known that quote since I was a child -- in the Eighties, the good old days when we talked about totalitarians without perverse admiration -- and I think of it all the time now. Jews do very often still have targets on our backs, but the socialists, trade unionists, and Lutherans seem to be safe. For now.

The people that "they" are coming for now are the LGBTQIA+ among us, with particular emphasis on trans people, especially children. That should horrify anyone who contemplates it, except people with totalitarian streaks never factor in youth as something that should protect anyone. Just ask the Indigenous children of Canada and the United States who were stolen from their parents and killed in institutions. Just ask the poor Black, Brown, and White children who are imprisoned. 

"They" are coming for the children in the schools, and under the guise of protection (from facts, from history), they are limiting what can be both explicitly taught in an official curriculum and implicitly inferred through fiction. And when they come for those children, they come for teachers, who can lose their livelihoods and have reason to fear for their safety.

"They" come for the children, the teachers, the people browsing in a mall, the people shopping for food, when they continue to be unimpressed by the numbers of people killed with assault weapons never meant to see action by civilians. No laws are changed so that fewer guns will make it onto the streets; instead, the laws are being reworked such that it is now that much easier for people to purchase guns.

"They" come for women who aren't wealthy -- and the people who love them -- by making it increasingly impossible to safely terminate a pregnancy. By trying to make it illegal for such women to leave for states where they could have a safe medical procedure. By removing safe and proven drugs for abortions from the markets. By making it illegal for someone to help a woman who needs an abortion. By making women carry unsafe pregnancies to term. 

"They" have consistently been coming for Jews, and since 2001, for Muslims. And Asian Americans. They are killing Black men for being poor and desperate. They are kidnapping, raping, and murdering Indigenous women and children. They piloted all of this on the Indigenous and on enslaved Black people. 

Eventually, "they" will come for all of us. You don't think so? You are wrong. Your wealth does not protect you. Your religion does not protect you. Your ancestry does not protect you. Sooner or later, they come for us all.

You may think that when "they" come, you will be on the winning side. You're safe -- you're white, you're Christian, you don't ask for "handouts". You're just the kind of person "they" say they are doing all of this in the service of. You are wrong, because they are lying. You are just their excuse until they don't need one. 

Eventually, when "they" win, they rewrite reality. 

"They" are already telling your children what is safe to read. They are already taking books out of bookstores. They are already threatening people for living proudly, as they are. They have long been redrawing voting maps to entrench power. (They are even doing it in Boston, but then again, we started it.) They will eventually tell you what you can say. And then they will tell you what you can think.

And this is only the start. One piece of information I always remember from the book Revolution 1989 was the temperature in Romania. There was a law that stated that when the temperature dropped low enough, the state was required to turn the central heating in buildings on. Toward the end of the Soviet era, the Iron Bloc countries were looking to save money (when they weren't trying to siphon it off). Their solution? The temperature rarely reached the cutoff. The result? Hundreds of elderly Romanians froze to death in their homes. 

The Ceausescu government could control the temperature in the winter because they could control reality. And what was going to stop them? A thermometer? Another scientific instrument? Please.

Living like that is madness, and the price of survival is your sanity. And that is how they get us all.

Don't fool yourself that you can find a safe haven. Somehow, in the midst of all of this, you must have missed anti-Muslim activity (and massacres) in India. You must have missed the anti-LGBTQIA+ statements out of Turkey made by Erdogan before his dreaded victory. You must have missed Viktor Orban in Hungary. You must have missed the Arab League welcoming a butcher back into their fold. You must have missed China committing genocide. You must have missed the president of South Korea getting rid of the Gender Equality Ministry. (But surely you have not missed Russia.) When "they" finally arrive in full force, there is nowhere you can go where they can't eventually find you. There is no escape -- so let's change it now.

Go vote, but let's be real and acknowledge that the corruption of all three branches at the federal and local levels means that our votes are dulled -- which doesn't mean there's no point in voting, but that everyone needs to participate. 

Voting isn't everyday, but opportunities to speak out are. Protect those who are vulnerable (there is no "most" at this point). Protect LGBTQIA+ people. Protect the Indigenous. Protect Black and Brown people. Protect women. Protect the disabled. Protect Jews. Protect Muslims. Protect children. Protect the elderly. Protect the poor. (And understand how many of those identities frequently intersect.) Protect anyone who is endangered by speaking out. Be that annoying person who never "lets it go", because what you're not letting go is the reality that other people are in danger. It might not work even if you try, but it definitely won't if you don't. 

"They" are coming, but they can still be met.

Deb in the City

The War on Pregnant Women

Even my feel good reading doesn't always leave me feeling good.

I try to keep abreast of current events without being in danger of winning a Breaking News-Off, and I continue to dig into historical topics, in part because it affects my fiction, in part because I have a responsibility to know what came before me, and in part because it's genuinely interesting. But I will be the first to admit that it can wear on one's psyche, and my reading list isn't the first thing I'd recommend to anyone feeling Age of COVID, Corruption, and Fascism Angst. I think there is cause for hope in history -- humanity has endured so far -- but it's hard to criticize anyone for focusing on, for example, genocide. It's a lot for anyone.

I am not, however, traumatized by the news (just incredibly annoyed with its simplistic delivery). Who knows why -- everyone's triggers are different -- but part of the credit also goes to the other things I read, including news from other countries (particularly South Korea), business and economics (boy, has that been fun lately), and science news. I don't call those things light, and it would be a mistake to say that none of it is influenced by the larger conditions around us (for some reason, a lot of science news seems concerned with the effects of rising temperatures), but there is less of a sense of doom in all of those, and it's also fair to say that business and economics is actually a place where you can sometimes find better if not good news. I think those topics give me a psychological buffer, and I encourage people who want to be "informed" but not traumatized to, generally, look at those sources.

So you can imagine how genuinely upset I was when I came across this piece a few months ago about maternal deaths in the United States two months ago. 

Did you guess that Black women died at disproportionate rates during their pregnancies and in the six weeks after? And that the problems -- the racism -- in our system make this discrepancy worse? And that the pandemic didn't do anything to alleviate those problems? Good guesses, and what I would have surmised going in.

What stopped me cold was that for all of the inequities in the medical care that so many pregnant women are subject to, what kills them and new mothers more than anything else is homicide. Raise your hand if you did not know that in the majority of those cases the perpetrator is an intimate partner, but you already know that what they are killed with more often than not is a gun. And being pregnant makes you uniquely vulnerable, in case that wasn't obvious -- women in the same age range who aren't pregnant do not die in the same numbers.

(Now just throw in that another leading cause of death for these women is suicide, and you can appreciate why this science news was more disturbing than "current events".)

This doesn't present a question, and this isn't a topic that anyone needs to "have a serious discussion" about. We do not need to ask why it is that some of the most vulnerable people among us live in such great danger and so frequently don't survive it. We need to do something about it, now. And we are doing something...it just happens to be exactly the wrong thing.

Serious question: which one is more important to you?

Our Supreme Court, which last year overturned the right to abortions and upended the lives of millions, is poised to rule on a case about -- you guessed it -- whether or not someone who has a restraining order for domestic violence against them can keep their guns. This nightmare comes from the Fifth U.S. Circuit Appeals Court, who held that the federal law violated the Second Amendment. (Fun fact: the Fifth Circuit ruling cited a dissent written by Judge Amy Coney Barrett when she was on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.) 

No, who am I kidding, this comes from the Supreme Court of the United States and their originalist ruling in Bruen last year, which set the standard the lower courts are using now. Since everyone is doing so well with my quizzes, do you remember who is responsible for the current composition of that court? I'll wait.

I was born in the Seventies, and I know what sexism looks like. I appreciate that women have made some genuine gains since then, but it is impossible to look at recent legal decisions and not see much of them being reversed. Not only is it more difficult for women to exercise agency over their bodies and protect their health -- really, what is the medical justification for forcing a woman to remain pregnant with an unviable fetus? -- these same people will not protect pregnant women. I don't need to explain it along a fascist metric; it is callous and cruel to the point of being monstrous, and we have to stop it. In other words: go vote.

Excuse me, I'm going to read more about the bizarre culture of collecting and collectors. We get our feel-goods where we can these days.

Deb in the City