We answer the truth with possibility.
This shit sucks.
A woman has come forward with allegations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh, nominee to the Supreme Court, and has been rewarded with harassment and death threats so severe she has taken leave from her job, uprooted her family, and gone into hiding. His defense is that it never happened. The rest of his party insists that even if it did happen, it wasn’t that bad. What’s a little attempted rape between friends?
The injustice of it all is almost too much to bear. After letting Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court languish for over a year without a hearing, its desperately necessary that Kavanaugh become a Supreme Court justice immediately. After demands that each allegation of each man be investigated fully before there are consequences, they have denied Dr. Ford the investigation she asked for. After years of pretending to be moderate Republicans, pretending to represent women, pretending to care about women’s health, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are prostrating themselves before Mitch McConnell’s soulless power grabs and the Koch brothers bank accounts.
And all the while health care costs are rising and parents are being deported without their children. Climate change and violent storms are wreaking havoc on our coasts and we still haven’t adequately responded to last year’s hurricanes. Income inequality is deepening, the wealth gap is widening, and it feels like all the progress we made in the decade previously hasn’t just been undone but burned with tiki torches. And honestly might not have been as much progress as we thought anyway.
Like I said, this shit sucks.
This morning I was, as usual, listening to a podcast from Crooked Media (*resists urge to call self trash because I get joy from things*) and Jon Favreau, as usual, said something that really resonated with me. He said that when we’re all caught up in twitter and the news, and everything is awful and garbage and everyone’s angry all the time, it can very easily lead us to cynicism and this belief that, “Well, we fucked up and here’s Donald Trump. This is what we deserve and we’re never going to get out of this.”
It was a gut punch, because this week in particular it really does feel like that. After the election, the country resounded with cries of “this is not who we are!” only to be reminded that in the country of slavery and internment and Native American genocide, this is who we are. The election of Donald Trump is the result of our worst impulses, the darkest moments of our history and their insidious infection in our culture coming back to the surface. And in weeks like this it feels impossible. It feels like we haven’t learned a damn thing.
But Favreau said this in a context that I think is particularly important to remember at times like these. He and Ben Rhodes and Cody Keenan were talking about how the ethos of the Obama presidency was that you had to say the true thing first, you had to bring history out into the open and acknowledge where we’ve been before you could say where we were going. That however bad things are, and however bad they’ve been, we always have the capacity (as J.K Rowling said) to imagine better, and to work toward that world of our imagination.
We did fuck up. And we’re still fucking up. And it would be so easy, especially after weeks like this one, to sink into that feeling and to relish the cynicism of punishment. If this is what comes of the things we try to build, let them burn.
But the world doesn’t work in just desserts, though it would be a lot easier if it did. And when it’s impossible to sleep, when the knot in your stomach just won’t go away, when you’re panicked and tired and sad and scared and you’d rather not care anymore, that’s when its most important to make a phone call, to volunteer, to donate your stuff or your time or your money.
And listen — it doesn’t always work. I went canvassing on Sunday. I went to yoga on monday and phone banking on Tuesday and last night I sat in my arm chair and read. Nothing has made that knot loosen. Nothing has made me sleep better. That happens sometimes too. But I think we owe it to ourselves to believe in the possibility of a better world, with our hearts when we can and with our heads when we have to fake it ’til we make it. I have to believe we fight that cynicism not just by acknowledging the truth of where we’ve been, but our plan to make it better. We answer the truth with possibility. We always say yes, and.
There are people flocking to DC to protest Kavanaugh — they are hanging out in Grassley’s office and storming the capital. In between tweets about him vetting his female clerks for femininity and retweets of dumb misogynists like Ben Shapiro, I see them. And I’m grateful.
We might lose this fight. And if we do it will make the next fights harder. But I don’t have much to say to that besides this:
Yes. And?
