Panic! At the Discovery that America can be Bad

Vive la France

Yesterday, during the coup, I was on the phone with a taxidermist in Ohio trying to get him to send me his W-9 for work. The man on the phone asked me “what business” we’ve done with them before. I responded- uh- I think we’ve bought animals from you? Yes, the US Capitol was under attack, but I am an accounting clerk first and an American citizen second.

I’m not going to talk about the events in DC yesterday. They were scary to watch, but my friends from home have been marching and protesting and getting tear-gassed for months, so this display of violence is not news to me. If I wanted to watch police fail to protect people I could just watch Batman. 

I want to talk about what goes on in the background. In the meantime. My mom referred to yesterday as a “9/11 day” where everyone in the country was glued to the TV, streaming cable news. But even then, everyone’s experience of that day was different. While my parents were watching the news and trying to get in touch with family and friends in New York, I was finger painting and laughing with my friends in a classroom. When events happen that seem to stop the world, the world doesn’t stop. When you wake up the morning after losing a loved one, your world is fuzzy, but everyone else’s is clear. 

Yesterday, while the nation’s estranged aunts and uncles broke into a building in DC, nurses and doctors were treating Covid patients in the ICU. Single mothers were bagging groceries and underpaid, uninsured workers all over the country were cleaning up messes that somebody else made. Yesterday was a spectacle. It was a visual and spiritual attack on democracy, but that’s not news here. People are under attack all the time, whether or not Rachel Maddow is talking about it.

It’s important to take note right now of the ways you can survive during this time. Financially, emotionally, intellectually. To put on your own oxygen mask and then the person next to you. God I fucking hate planes. People are not okay right now, and how can we expect them to be? Caillou was just taken off PBS after a 20 year run. 

It can’t all be doomed. I don’t believe in that. While a man in an Auschwitz sweatshirt broke into a building in DC, someone gave birth to their first child. Someone turned in their thesis, someone turned in their novel, and someone tried asparagus for the first time, and liked it. Someone got married over zoom, someone got baptized over zoom, and someone missed both of these events because they couldn't figure out how to load zoom.

Yesterday was a scary visual, but hate and fear are not new in this country. We practically invented it. Bad, harmful people will always exist, so we need to show up for each other in smaller ways. People are all we have! Go get drinks outside in the freezing cold with your old college improv group. Go on a walk and call your sister to make fun of her for still having to go to school. Adopt a cat and name it “peanut butter,” nobody can stop you. Go stand outside a movie theater, let out a big sigh, and turn around and go back home for a few more months. 

Writing my thoughts down every week for the past 6 months has saved my brain. I don’t know what you love to do, or what you feel like you need to do, but please do what you can to prioritize it. I’m not going to ask you to read a book or “write every day” or grow scallions in your windowsill. And I definitely won’t ask you to start making sourdough. (Jackie if you’re reading this, you can keep making sourdough, you’re very good at it and I’m running low.) Those things we did to keep us sane almost a year ago might not be doing the trick anymore. In March I bought 2 different facial toners and guess what, every day I use the green CeraVe from CVS to wash my face and then I go to bed. 

In conclusion, prioritize the people in your life. (Unless they are trying to stop the steal.) Make them laugh and hold them tight when you can, and when you can’t, send them a letter or a bouquet of flowers. Flowers are always awesome. From one tired Jew to all of you, take a deep breath and have a good night.