A few days ago, Charlotte came across this quote by Toni Morrison and sent it to me.

Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to. That is their peril.
 
Ours is of another sort. How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves.
 
We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself.

Morrison, Toni. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. Vintage, 2019.

I’ve read it every day since like a kind of prayer.

Right now, my hold on my ambitions is tenuous at best. I’m in school full time and won’t graduate until December; I’ve had a terrible time finding work in New Orleans; Charlotte is no longer safe in the South and will move to a Northeast Atlantic blue state in June; I plan to pursue an MFA and, with that, a teaching career on the college level, a spectacularly poor ambition to have at this moment in history; and, if we’re being honest, I’ve done almost nothing to pursue a literary agent or publication of any sort because I have been loathe to face continual rejection. (Listen, my original craft was dance; I can take criticism and rejection better than your average Marine recruit, but that doesn’t mean I’m perpetually dying to do so.)

I am, at literally all times, trying very hard not to dissolve into a panic attack.

The only thing standing between me and the psych ward is the completely irrational (and perhaps a bit narcissistic) belief that the world needs to hear what I have to say. But if I’ve learned just one thing in the last three years, it’s that no one is going to believe in me for me. I once thought, foolishly, one could outsource that responsibility; I didn’t really need to believe in myself, my talent, or my world of words as long as there was someone else around to do it for me. Then, suddenly, there was no one. And I had a choice to make.

I choose to write.

Even as a little girl, I knew my life was very different from most other people’s. While my own family has never been particularly wealthy, because of the nature of my dad’s job, I grew up sort of “wealth-adjacent,” you might say. It was a life of privilege, but it was also lonely*, and it was only recently that I figured out exactly why.

*Don’t feel bad for me. Lonely is almost always better than hungry or homeless.

I didn’t have peers, as such – while my family, say, enjoyed private air travel a couple times, I went to public schools in a place where the poverty rate is very high. Most of the kids of my dad’s business associates were cool, but they were so deeply ensconced in The World of the One Percent that, for example, they never had to wonder how, exactly, they ended up standing in line at lunch, jet-lagged, while the cafeteria lady humiliates the kid in front of me because he doesn’t have the 75 cents or whatever he needs to buy a tray of shitty food. Of course, at the time, I had no way to make sense of that. Neither did any of the other kids.

(To this day, I am instantly Friends Until Proven Otherwise with anyone who had a weirder childhood than I did.)

The point is I grew up in the middle of a lot of crossroads: wealth versus poverty, urban versus rural, Republican versus Democrat, Catholic versus Protestant, queer versus straight. And all these juxtapositions, besides making me neurotic, gave me a unique perspective on the world. At this moment when the world, particularly our country, is so fractured and hurting, I think the point of view of a person who’s seen so many different facets of life up close and personally may just prove to be valuable.

Clearly, I’ve chosen my sides: urban, liberal, atheist, lesbian. But that doesn’t preclude me understanding why the other side has chosen as they do. Which is hard for me – I’m an opinionated person, and most of my opinions are extremely considered. But writers’ work in the Resistance could never be as simple as vomiting our streams of consciousness onto the page, could it? This moment demands more of all of us, myself most definitely included. It’s no longer good enough to run from and shun the contradictions and juxtapositions in my life; my job now is to mine them.

Though it pains me to my very soul to admit this, all of us together in this mess we call the United States have a lot more in common than we realize. I assure you, the oligarchy in no way benefits from Americans’ unity. Why do you think Bezos has now decided to transform the Washington Post, home of Woodward and Bernstein, into a propaganda rag? Why now?

Y’all, more of us are getting angry with Trump, Musk, Vance, et al., every day. Add to that America’s hard-on for guns – our government doesn’t just allow us to have them, our elected officials insist upon it. Angry citizens plus guns equal the very last thing on earth they need is us coming together.

Which is precisely why we must.

On the bright side, I think some Americans are increasingly motivated to find common ground (some have made Trump-worship the foundation of their worldview, and it will be much harder for them to disentangle themselves from the MAGA cult even as the cognitive dissonance becomes too profound for them to ignore). Let’s be honest: It’s hard to admit you were sold a bill of goods. Regardless of their individual whys and wherefores, thousands of U.S. voters are, in the midst of the chaos Musk, et al., are unleashing upon the entire world, doing the inner work and acknowledging their fear and hate (which is just fear masquerading as anger) overcame their consciences and common sense. And, while that’s ultimately a good thing for everyone, y’all, that shit is hard. We, especially me – I’m about to get a psychology degree, for Christ’s sake – can empathize with the discomfort and, yes, bravery it takes to sit in and process the emotions that come with that.

Most of us, at the moment, are scared. There is, as always, a tiny subset of incel goblins who are absolutely delighting in the world going to hell. But the rest of us, even those who are still, to a greater or lesser degree, on the Trump train, are frightened of the enormous changes in our country and the rapidity with which they keep happening.

In the coming weeks, we’re going to explore some of the different crossroads I mentioned and what they might represent to different groups among us. In the meantime, find a way to reach for someone’s hand. Life is complicated and tenuous right now, but if we’re going to get through it, there’s no way forward except together.

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