It has been almost 21 years since my mother died and I still remember that night as if it were yesterday. My mother was in a nursing home after brain surgery had taken a turn for the worse. It was the early 00s and cell phone technologies weren’t what they are now. My father had been trying to reach me for hours to tell me that it wasn’t looking good and that I needed to immediately get home to Chicago. She was rushed to the hospital; her organs were shutting down.
By the time he finally got hold of me, it was 5 p.m. Eastern time. I immediately tried to find a flight for that evening, but there were no flights out of the Portland airport and with the two-hour drive to Boston, there were no late-night flights that I could catch that evening. The soonest I could fly out was 6 a.m. the next morning. I booked a flight and started packing to leave first thing in the morning—scared for my mother; scared for myself. Wondering what it would mean if my mother died? How would I even function in a world without my mother? She was the soul and heartbeat of our family. How would life go on?
A little over three hours later, the phone rang, and even before I heard my father’s voice, I knew she was gone. All my dad said was, “Mama passed. Have a good cry and we will talk in the morning about what’s next.”
As the events of the past two weeks have unfolded and I have sat with the collective shock and horror of Trump’s executive orders, lately I have found myself thinking of my dad’s words.
Have a good cry and we will talk about what’s next.
Since the inauguration, I have encountered a steady stream of people who are in shock asking me, “What should we do?” I have been asking myself that question and the first thing that I realized was that we need to face our current reality. Much of what Trump is doing is illegal. Executive orders don’t supersede existing law. But sadly, laws also don’t enforce themselves and the executive branch is supposed to put laws into action, not ignore them or go around them. So what happens when the guy who’s supposed to implement laws passed by Congress just decides to do his own thing? We’re finding out fast.
He has stoked the flames of hate even higher and right now, we are consumed with fear—the paralyzing kind of fear that makes it easy to sit for hours doomscrolling and taking in every piece of the awful.
A steady diet of awful feels like a way to stay informed—and we do need to be informed—but spending too much time in the echo chamber of doom and content that’s out there isn’t helping us to move forward. Honestly, it’s keeping us locked in our homes in fear and, right now, we need to use that fear to become fearless in our efforts to push back.
I’m scared, too, but I can’t allow that fear to take hold. A few days ago, I found myself face-to-face with anxiety and ended up in a doozy of a panic attack. I hate panic attacks, and I have spent a lot of years working to minimize their presence in my life. No longer a daily or monthly occurrence, now they come out only for special occasions.
My most recent panic attack was the result of listening to Trump speak about DEI. Clearly, in his world, DEI is code for saying ni&&ers. I was caught in a spiraling loop of how this man’s hatred of anyone that isn’t white is putting my livelihood at risk. How his hatred and power will impact so many of us and how scared I am that I will lose what few material comforts I have. Spiraling into fear that I will lose my home and end up homeless. Fear for my loved ones who are queer, disabled, and so on. I ended up taking a quick-acting anxiety pill that I have for anxiety emergencies and when my mind and body finally settled back down, I felt rage forming. Rage at how the world is essentially being held hostage by an old crusty bastard and his South African patron who, as I write this, has gained access to the United States Treasury payment system despite not being a federal employee nor having any legally sanctioned position in government.
Suddenly, in my rage, I realized that we can’t allow this to happen and that while we may be powerless alone, we are not powerless as a collective.
In accepting that this is our reality currently, it is not giving up but realizing that what used to serve us no longer does. Collective liberation means coming together and devising new ways to survive at this moment.
First and foremost, we need to make contacting our congressional delegates a daily practice. We need to stay on them to oppose this stream of illegal activities. We need to demand that they remember they are accountable to us, not Trump, and most certainly not Musk. While there are apps such as Resistbot and others that are commonly recommended, I have it on good authority that good old fashion human contact matters when contacting your congressional delegates.
Remember the memo that was issued on freezing government grants and loans? It was rescinded (though it’s still murky on what exactly what that means thanks to the word salads that are coming out of the Press Secretary’s mouth), in part because people pushed back hard. People called and wrote and when enough of us do that, it forces these spineless elected officials to do something. Hell, even Republicans were asking for it to be rescinded. Turns out Billy Ray’s kids down in the holla need childcare subsidies and food, too.
Personally, everyone reading this should commit to contacting their congressional delegates every day. Yes, every day.
It’s an easy lift and you can fit it into your daily schedule. If you have more time, call and talk to the staffer who answers the phone. Did you know they log these calls? The more the merrier. They need to know that we are fed up with their passive acceptance and desire to get along with Trump and his ilk. Trump, Musk and company are terrorists—why the fuck would you be negotiating with terrorists? Make them uncomfortable, make them question their reality. On that note, if you don’t have the ability to make a daily call, send a daily email and personalize it. Our elected officials need to be brought back down to reality and the common person’s issues.
Next up, please support the organizations that are on the front lines of fighting back. Groups like the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild are going to be very busy as this administration works to take away rights, and we need to make sure they have the staff power and bandwidth to do the job. If you still have disposable cash, any organization that is working to fight these people needs your support. That means legal defense work, immigration defense, local food pantries, anti-racism organizations, etc. They almost certainly need volunteers too, so if your cash supply is low but you have a few hours a week—get involved. It also is a way to build your community. I just saw that a food pantry in Chicago that serves immigrant communities has noticed a significant drop-off since the ICE raids have started, so they are looking for volunteers to drive food to individuals and families that would normally show up. I suspect this situation is happening in many locales.
Friends, I know many of you are like me and inhaling the news, but I would suggest you become discerning in what you are consuming. Not all news is created equally and frankly, some of my fellow writers are building sizeable followings by providing information that is designed to keep you tethered to fear. Fear is good for business in the new media market. Unfortunately, it is bad for moving people to action.
Speaking of media, legacy media much like Google is a shell of its former self. Legacy media stopped being journalism and became edutainment and played a huge role in normalizing Trump. If legacy media had done its job, we probably wouldn’t be in this position. I would take their reporting with a grain of salt. Frankly, many news outlets outside the U.S. are providing us with more factual news than our own news organizations. Our news agencies have mostly been corrupted and now with the introduction of what is clearly becoming state-owned media—hello X and Truth Social—you need to accept that the sources you used to trust aren’t always reliable or timely with the truth. Same with Google searches. They aren’t what they used to be; consider Tor and Duck Duck Go as alternatives to Google.
While Substack has become people’s go-to choice of writers and news, never forget the owners have no problem with platforming Nazis and white supremacists. Their model is essentially a Ponzi scheme with a handful of folks earning real money and the rest of us racking up unpaid subscribers. As soon as I can, I am looking for an alternative to using Substack.
Also, if there are writers and others who are nourishing you and informing you, support their work if you have the means. Especially folks who are now at real risk of being targeted by this regime. Every time I write a public piece, it hits me that I am really putting my ass on the line, especially now that Musk has all our data. I will add that if you want to practice equity, make sure you are paying for the content you consume that is created by BIPOC folks. Heather Cox Richardson does amazing work but, as a white woman, I am sure she has far more paying subscribers than any Black, brown or other marginalized writer.
Lastly, as important as it is to stay informed, it is equally important to not feel helpless. To know that all is not lost. We aren’t the first country to find ourselves amid a coup; we just thought it never could happen to us, because we have seen ourselves as special. Turns out we aren’t, but because of our vaunted status, it hits hard. Our lives are changing, and change is uncomfortable, but the reality is that our lives have been changing fast for years, since Trump began his first term and COVID arrived, both of which turned everything upside down.
The funny thing is that COVID’s arrival could have been the beginning of creating something better and more humane for all of us. Instead, we couldn’t sit with the discomfort and allow that tragedy to be the seeds of our collective healing, so we rushed through it and desperately tried to get back to normal. Except the normal we have been playing with for the last several years was an illusion. People with non-stop respiratory illness. Children who now live in a chronic state of illness that we pretend is normal. No one with a healthy immune system should be sick monthly—and it wasn’t like that before COVID, but we pretend it’s normal.
As awful as this situation is, it may force us to wake up from our daze and see our individual and collective humanity as our government attempts to dehumanize us. To realize that we need each other to survive, and we need a compassionate government.
It has become popular to say: Resist! Well, resisting is not without risks. It will not be comfortable, and it will disrupt our lives. You cannot resist without being a disruptor and right now, we all need to have that good cry about this situation and start being real with ourselves about our capacity to resist and assess what level of risk we are willing to tolerate.
I will say this: I am the descendant of enslaved people. My people were brought to this country in chains and forced to toil. We still bear the scars, but those ancestors never lost hope, despite daunting circumstances. They held the line and dared to dream of a day where freedom would come. I hold that hope and that fire in my spirit because the thing about hope and freedom is that true freedom starts in the soul. I encourage you to build a practice of internal hope that will carry you through the darkness as we fight.
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