Not Going Back

"Elections establish what the majority of people desire, rather than what the truth is. And people often desire the truth to be other than what it is.” Yuval Noah Harari (Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI)

I woke up on November 6th with a thought something like “What kind of world am I living in now?” And I hopefully, idealistically, naively pictured the first woman president of the United States being sworn into office. My heart leapt just a tiny bit. I took a deep breath and everything felt OK. If nothing else, that god-awful election cycle was finally over. Why Americans continue to flagellate themselves with over a year of this nonsense, I’ll never understand. But these days, there’s a lot about America that I’ll never understand. 

I ambled on over to the bathroom to, as my dear friend calls it, “ablute”, and I made the mistake of checking my phone. And do I really need to tell you any more than that? No, I don’t. You know what happened next. You lived it, probably hours before I did. Because I got to blissfully sleep through those nail-biting hours, cocooned in my cozy bed in Morocco. While they called one state after the other, one swing state after the other, for an orange clown that I will never call “President”, I sawed logs in Rabat. 

In the following days, I do what I always do when something so bizarre, so unthinkable, so utterly beyond my understanding happens— I tried to make sense of it. I listened to podcasts, I watched analyses, I listened to analyses, I watched podcasts. Hours and hours and hours of them. There were a lot of common themes that came up, of course: it’s the economy, stupid! they’re brainwashed! the electoral college is stupid! they’re stupid! we’re all stupid! None of it really satisfied, but I felt I was getting a handle on things, as much as you can get a handle on a jumbo jet crammed with people, snakes, and some fool with a lighter and a can of hairspray heading directly, swiftly, and unerringly toward the trees, which are getting bigger 

So, I moved on from Trying to Make Sense of It to Trying to Prepare for What’s Coming Next. That one is a little easier to parse, because others have blazed that trail. Hungary, to be specific. I think I’ll write more on that in a future post, but really, I’m sure there are Experts who could tell you all you ever wanted to know about what’s happened to Hungary recently. They’ll also be happy to tell you how to stand up to tyranny and what America looked like the last time we were here (hint: we just rewound the clock to the 1870s! And you thought time travel was impossible…) But in a nutshell, watch for the media to be brought to heel to the will of The Authoritarian, who will continue to blame all of your problems on the weakest and most vulnerable people. In Hungary, it was and continues to be Migrants, even though they barely have anyone trying to cross their borders illegally. In the U.S., sure, it’s Those Migrants, but it will also be Those Trans, Those Gays, Those Browns, Those… 

So finally, I’m at the How to Resist phase. And what I’ve settled on are a few key things: first, stand up for what I believe in, and use whatever voice I have in service of resisting tyranny and standing up for those without a voice. Hence, this blog. Second, build community. Because they can’t divide us if we stand together. We won’t fall for their lies and scapegoating if the very people they try to blame are in our community and we know them. Hence, this space. And third, I want to document (for myself? For you? I don’t know) this moment and what the country of my birth looks like from here— on the other side of the Atlantic. Not everything I plan to write will be political. Not everything will be about how awful everything is, because I don’t believe everything is awful. But I do think that things in the U.S. are about to get Very Very Bad. And I feel very very lucky not to live there. But even if I’m not physically there, my heart will always be there and it will always, in some ways, be my home. But for now, I know one things for sure:

I’m not. Going. Back.