American Flight or Fight
writing as therapy after the election ☼ an acceptance of the world as it is ☼ what america needs
For many, writing is an act of knowing. It starts with a question and ends with some semblance of clarity, though rarely a concrete answer. These days, though, it feels like there is too much to know. Too little that I already do know. Too scarce time with which to do the knowing. What I do know with certainty is that this is a critical time for American life. And perhaps for life everywhere. No matter how many critical times there seem to have been in the past two decades, this is another. Perhaps it is simply human to always be at a turning point, to always need to fight to survive.
Trump is the American president. No matter how many articles I read in an attempt to understand how that statement is a descriptor of reality, as opposed to an absurd once possibility, I come to the only conclusion I can: This is where we are. And after spending a week in a haze of panic and sap of anxiety, cold and unprocessed and suffocating, I am attempting to understand the only question left that seems to matter: Where do we go from here?
When Trump became president in 2016, I experienced a shattering. What seemed impossible to my twenty one year old brain suddenly became the foreground of the country I walked in. Above all, I felt angry. I felt eager to fight and understand, understand how this could happen. For four years, the anger grew and took on different shapes, looked like grief and hopelessness on certain days, action and revolution on others, and I continued to try to understand how this could happen: Black death, Asian hate, police brutality set against a growing budget, despite public demands for divestment, the mismanagement of a global pandemic and human rights violations against the people who deserve rights the most: trans women, trans men, anyone who looks Muslim, asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants.
November 6th was less of a shattering as it was a solidification of what it means to exist in human society. Of what it means to live in the United States. As naive as it may sound, the first thought that appeared to me was that the world will never be the world we imagined: there will never be a world in which everyone believes a woman has a right to her body, in which everyone believes a body deserves to breathe no matter how it dresses or who it loves, in which everyone believes that equity should be the goal, as opposed to self-preservation. This is something that has taken me a long time to swallow. And yet, it is true. There will always be bigotry. There will always be hate. So again, I ask the question: Where do we go from here?
Do we distrust every person around us, considering the majority of the vote went to Trump? Do we scream and fight? Do we evolve the 1514% surge in Americans looking to move abroad after Trump’s victory to a 1514% surge in Americans leaving the country?
The reality is that most people will not leave. The reality is that America is embedded in our lives like shine in silk, like plastic in society, a political and socioeconomic machine that reverberates across the everyday privileges Americans live on a daily basis: our currency, our passports, our opportunities at financial mobility. These are, of course, privileges that disproportionately benefit some over others. The reality is that the world is disproportionate. The reality is that some people do not care.
Recognizing what is real is sometimes depressing. However, doom leads us nowhere. Skepticism and disbelief—that the world will never change, that we have no chance at trying—is useless. It helps no one. And it convinces the individual that they are just a speck in an ocean, incapable of shifting the current, which can become the deadliest current itself: inaction and apathy towards human injustice, created by millions of specks that decided it was better to give up than to try.
Having asked myself How did we get here? over and over and over again makes me start to wonder if I am missing the point. So I sit here and ask myself: What would it be like to be a Republican? What would it be like to have voted for Trump? It is easy to label millions of people as uneducated, bigoted and blind. It is more difficult to look at those millions of people and wonder what it would be like to be them. When I consider this, I consider how easy it would be. How easy it would be to blame the world for my problems, to frame other people as aberrations to an otherwise unbothered existence: immigrants, queers and people with skin tones that hold more dimension than the dough of a hot dog bun threaten white American life. We threaten the reality of the people who think that America is, and should be, for one type of person: white and cis and male, despite the country having been built by everyone else—as well as people who mistake themselves as one of them, failing to see that they are puppets.
Blame, puppets, uneducated. These are all fighting words that both parties use. When I start to think about the nature of the Republican mind, I am reminded that it resembles, in many ways, the nature of American politics at large. Democrats blame republicans, Republicans blame democrats. When I take a closer look at the social atmosphere of politics, it is shocking how much it reminds me of adolescent behavior. Of saying things we do not believe simply because others are saying the same thing. I wonder how much of politics is groupthink, how much of bigotry is born from wanting to belong to one side because that is the only side you were taught, because belonging to that side means that you belong to something.
The us versus them mentality is boring. I am bored of wondering why, why people vote one way, why people want my people dead, why people believe they have the right to be assholes. What I am interested in is how we can save each other. How we can make sure that our rights are not pummeled into dust. This is real: Donald Trump is our president. Again.
Something I keep hearing is that ignorance is the problem. That miseducation is the deadliest political weapon. It is clear that many miseducated people voted for Trump. However, many miseducated people voted in general. The fact is that our institutions have been, and are, failing us. The fact is that most of us are not civically engaged to the point where we are able to do anything beyond knowing, knowing that we think this and they think that. The fact is that most of us are tired. The fact is that it is easier to be broken than to pick ourselves up and question what a fixed world looks like, considering we have never seen one. We have always needed to fight. The American experiment—and the experiment of capitalism at large—was never equitable, never just. I think, on some level, many of us still need to accept this, in order to do the fighting in the first place.
It will never be perfect. But it can be better. So let’s start from there.
Every day, we have the opportunity to show up and participate in civic life. Every day, over the past four years, I have personally turned down that invitation. I write and post and speak up, but I do not show up in the way that I used to, organizing in little rooms in New York in an attempt to fight for the environment, for asylum seekers, for the queer community. Right now, America needs us to show up. That is all it needs. It does not need us to find an answer as to why people voted for Trump, it does not need us to feel some sense of closure over what happened on November 6th. It just needs us, period.
We need to get together. We need to scramble around the messy art of organizing and do whatever it is that we can. And I do not think it has to be as difficult or challenging as it sounds. A somber occasion can be made into something beautiful, as long as we remember how to laugh, how to dance, how to see each other and recognize that we are—and never have been—alone in any of this.
When Donald Trump was elected, I wanted to leave. Leave the world and find a new one. I felt grateful that I was not in the country when the results came out and reconsidered returning anytime soon. However, the flight only gets you so far. There will always be something else to run away from. When we fight, we learn how to survive. We learn how to face what is scary in order to reach something better.
I want to fight, to show up to the party, no matter how tragic that party is, because all of my friends are there, all of the people I care about, the families and faces and aspirations I have yet to know that so closely resemble my own. I want to be in America in order to show up.
Even if the America we have been fighting for has never been real, it is made real in the fight. In the fighting, we make the most of what we have. We try our best. That is how I want to live my life. ☷
With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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