The End of All Things

I was a writer. I used to be a writer. I am a writer who stopped writing because I lost faith in my ability to use words to change the world and because I am firmly of the opinion that words are far inferior to actions. If my words risked making my actions harder, or impossible, they were not worth sending into the world.

I also took heed when people critiqued the writing of women, the personal writing that I prefer to do, as more suited to private journal entries. Perhaps it is. I stepped back so that others could step forward and claim the time of readers — writers more marginalised or smarter or with the right credentials. I wanted to make space for those who claimed to have answers or a new way of looking at our problems, one that could support more effective resistance.

Perhaps that’s a way of copping out, of shirking my civic duties. Or maybe that’s just another manifestation of internalised misogyny and elitism whose structural purpose was to silence my voice, and the voice of women like myself. But every now and again I find myself with something that I think is perhaps worth saying, worth asking people to pause in their eternal doomscrooling and take a moment to consider.

Today is one of those times.

200,000 Americans are dead. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has left a seat on the Court that will certainly be filled by the fascist wing of the American elite. The uteruses of immigrant women are being stolen by privatised agents of the state. The prisons and camps burst at the seams with the unlucky, but much loved. California burns so fiercely the skies are orange. Hurricanes fill the Atlantic basin. China and India rattle sabres at each other. The world as we knew it is over. The new world looks grimmer and darker, a confluence of unsolved problems and injustices marching towards a conflagration. The end of the world will not end well.

It’s a strange position I find myself in right now. Foreseeing the collapse of the American empire, I moved my family outside of the US a few years ago. It was the only way I could see for us to escape. The only path to avoiding what has now sped up and fills our days as we try to maintain a semblance of normalcy. We left behind family, friends, pets, and perhaps a stable and enduring personal identity as well. That’s the part of migration that I think we overlook. You lose who you were, because of course who you are is defined by your relationships and your place in the world. Migration as a reimagining of the self is almost always underappreciated, material needs taking precedence as they must for creatures with bodies in need of food and shelter.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. My twitter is full of Good Liberals devising schemes to keep the collapsing structures and forms of what was once the American state afloat. People warn against despair, threaten violence, promote voting. The ability of American elites, and those who wish to align themselves with elites, to blind themselves to what is in front of them is breathtaking. There will not be free and fair elections. Trump supporters are already blocking early voting locations, already disrupting the boring processes of administration that mark a transfer of power in a healthy polity. Biden’s camp is threatening legal challenges. Trump is promising them. Political violence was once a thing for over there, for the periphery, for the semi-periphery. But now it threatens the elites at the core, a chill wind their imperial education did not prepare them for.

But it is this question of hope that I wish to discuss.

There was a tweet yesterday going around suggesting that there would be a billion Americans because that was the right thing to do — to accept climate migrants, as though the displaced within America itself were nonexistent. As though migrants would want to find shelter in a facsist state. Hope is a discipline, but its current role in our discourse is to feed denial. To encourage people to invest energy and resources into shoring up what is falling to bits around them. You can’t focus on the new, on new imaginaries and new material relations if your energy is going into dead institutions and failed states.

And you can’t understand the need to focus on the new if your gaze is focused upwards, on the antics of elites. It may look as though America is collapsing from the top. But it isn’t. America has collapsed from within, from the bottom up. What we see now is a crumpling inward as the load bearing beams that used to hold up America have rotted.

It’s like this, you see. My Uncle Bob wasn’t really my uncle, he was my mother’s step-brother. Step-siblings can be experienced as full siblings, but in this case he was the son of my grandmother’s second husband, who she married after my mother was mostly grown. But it was before I was born, so I knew him all my life as part of our family.

Bob died of untreated cancer at some point in the past few weeks. We don’t have a time or a date of death. He died alone at home having had no treatment for the cancer that spread throughout his body. He died alone and it took weeks for someone to realise he was gone, that he had died.

America falls one family at a time.

It is also like this. My 19 year old niece had a stillborn baby at home early this year. She named him and loved him. She was 20 or so weeks along and, being 19, didn’t know what to do when the birth happened. Her baby was born dead and she had to go to work. So she wrapped him in a towel and put him in her refrigerator. She went to work. At some point during her shift, she realised that she needed some help and so she called my sister, her mother. When they arrived at the hospital, the police were there. They terrified her, threatened her with a murder charge when my sister stepped out, and ended up nearly destroying her small shitty apartment searching it. My niece was terrorised and so heartbroken for the loss of her precious baby. He was the first of his generation in our family.

So much of our discourse is abstract. It’s focused on big structural issues, on national level policy ideas, on grave historical injustices. But at the end of the day all of those issues boil down to millions of versions of my uncle Bob dying alone at home, his cancer untreated and his passage into death unattended. Or my niece birthing alone in a tiny apartment and feeling she couldn’t miss a shift, even for a newly born dead son.

We do not have the wherewithal as a family or as a society to honour our dead or ease their passage.

Abstraction is one of the tools of power. It’s in this move from the specific to the general — from a person to a policy, from a community to a polity — where the logics of white supremacy and capitalism seep in. It’s where the media and academic writers use sleight of hand to transition the reader from being a community member mourning a tragic act of state violence into a disinterested analyst examining rigidly defined policy issues. It’s where white supremacy asserts itself and the dominance of elite epistemologies is asserted.

This split helps to create and sustain the tension between white moderates and radicals. In contemporary discourse, we call those white moderates Good Liberals. They’re the #Resistance, the defenders of the Deep State, the pussy hat crowd out enjoying a properly permitted march through DC. They’re the ones on twitter today demanding votes for Biden and urging people to call their Senators. Their ideology and commitment is to working within the system to achieve power, rather than dismantling it. They want the apparatus of a failed and illegitimate state for themselves.

Hope has become the discursive tool that feeds this hunger for power, a bludgeon used to break down solidarity and support American elites and their allies. I do not believe that most who wield this bludgeon intend harm. I think rather that they cannot see the potential, the power in what comes next. Like those who in clamouring for the end of COVID lockdowns and restrictions have confused the damage done by the pandemic itself for damage from public health measures. So the Good Liberal hope advocates have confused the damage done by fascism for that done by resistance to fascism.

And so we need to talk about time, struggle, and what it means to live here, in this liminal time at the end of one world and the beginning of the next.

Black writers have told us again and again and again that justice delayed is justice denied. They have spoken of the fierce urgency of now. Songs have been sung about whispering of revolution while waiting in unemployment lines and poems have been written the about the Great Wait. Over and over Black people have demanded of us, “How much time do you want for your progress?”

The demand that Black people wait, wait now, wait during their parents’ and grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ times is the same demand being made of all of us now, by those who would work to sustain a dying state and uphold its norms, values and laws.

Wait is the demand made of children on climate strike and of those waiting for freedom in COVID infected prisons. It is the demand made of those suffering under colonial governments and those whose land is being poisoned by industrial agriculture and fossil fuel extraction.

It is the eternal demand placed on all who suffer oppression.

How long must they wait? How long must we all wait? And what are we waiting for, what are we hoping for, as America burns and a facsist President calls for a return to a golden age of white American power?

Time is the currency of oppression. Day by day and hour by hour the lives of the oppressed — and what is life but time — are spent, squandered by systems designed to grind us down. The theft of dignity and joy is the theft of time. It is the theft of rest. Of childhood. Of elders who will never be because their lives were cut short by police, or COVID, or a hurricane. Or they are trapped behind the prison walls, isolated from loved ones and their communities.

I stopped writing about climate because I didn’t have the clout or patience or the skill with words to push back against those who would turn the struggle for justice into a technocractic project designed to preserve the status quo. Reduced to promoting emissions trading schemes and carbon offset start-ups, some who call themselves climate activists would salvage that which is not worthy of salvation. Much like the call from 8 Can’t Wait to reduce police violence by 72% through reforms and policy interventions — so too the climate technocrats would funnel calls for justice through the lens of neoliberalised reforms.

These are projects designed to enforce more waiting on us all. The righteous call for hope transmutes under these conditions into calls for waiting, for patience, for investing in the forms and structures of a violent and failed imperium. And so it is with those whose response to the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is to urge us all to vote and support the Democratic party.

It is like this, you see. When I was a girl my mother married an abusive man. He dominated us all and inflicted physical, emotional, and sexual torture on myself and my sisters and my mother. I thought for a long time that these crimes were private, secrets. My secrets that no one could ever know and that could never be shared. And then one day a cousin told my sister about his witnessing of my abuse. And my sister told me. And then, slowly over about a year, it came out that my aunts knew. Everyone knew. Everyone knew my darkest secrets, all of them. And more than that, not only were they not secrets at all, they weren’t even mine. There were other victims, others he harmed.

Everyone knew but no one did anything because no one knew what to do and the word of children is unreliable and anyway who knew if what came next might be worse. Best to keep quiet and maintain the outer forms of a normal family, even though apparently everyone knew the truth.

It is in this commitment to the forms over the reality that calls for hope dampen our imagination and serve the powerful. Dark logics are fed by this technocratic discourse. Ecofascists and violent white supremists thrive when our attention is on policy-led interventions over justice. When we move our attention from values to metrics, from Black Lives Matter to “community policing,” from supporting Indigenous self-determination to selling carbon offsets — we make space for those who value death over life and those who would sacrifice justice on the altar of quantification.

I know you want everything to be ok. But it isn’t. What never really was is no more.

We are not at the beginning of our collapse. We are at the end. Policy discourse and commitment to the structures that brought us to this moment — which is what I believe underlie demands to maintain hope — serve power through sanitised technobabble and obfuscating complexity. They divert energy from power building and sap democratic will. We do the work of white supremacy when we direct our attention away from power structures and toward irrelevant detail.

What we lose when we succumb to the sedating power of representational politics and the preservation of a democracy that never was is the opportunity to be guided by those people with the longest and most nuanced understanding of the struggle for liberation. It is not enough to invite people to the table — the whole matter of whether we all agree that we need a table is up for debate. Perhaps we’d prefer a sofa, or maybe we’d like to head to the beach and talk over a bonfire while the tide comes in.

You cannot make policy for a world whose contours are not known. You can not focus on the details of a world yet to come. To attempt to do so is to exert power without legitimacy. To enact without vision. To dictate the shape of the future, while claiming to share power. To rebuild collapsing and collapsed structures of power only reinforces the inequities that brought us to this moment.

Let the system that is now oppressing and killing and imprisoning so many go. You cannot save it anyway. Ruth Bader Ginburg could not and did not save it. Joe Biden cannot save it. Barack Obama did not save it.

It is not worth saving.

Moreover, until we all lose hope of preserving it and instead start resisting like our lives and the lives of those we love depend upon it, we will not get past the bad times into better times. You are there now living in a fascist totalitarian state. If you are lucky enough that this seems an overreach or alarmist, recognise your own good fortune and cling to your uterus when agents of the state arrive to steal it from you.

It is like this, you see. When I was a young adult I forgot my own personal history. I forgot my childhood, my teenage years, I forgot how I came to be where I was. Like many trauma victims, I pushed away the bad things so far and so deeply, that my conscious self was no longer aware of them. I lived in the moment, tight, rigid. Focused on my immediate life and the overwhelming project of early motherhood and a career. I lost myself in this project. Quite literally, there were times when I didn’t recognise or realise that I was a human being, a person with a history and a future and a body with a purpose beyond reproduction and the care of children. I’d sometimes lose whole days in a dissociative trance state.

And then one day something happened and it all broke. I remembered. The shock of it knocked me down and it took everyone around me to reassemble me. The collapse was terrible. It hurt. It confused me and left me reeling and unmoored.

But it was temporary. What came after was better.

The hard part couldn’t be ignored. It couldn’t be skipped over. And I couldn’t plan, organise, and executive function my way out of it. It had to be endured. The only way out of it was through it.

I am not a wild eyed accelerationist. I am an extremely dull white American middle-class educated mother of two children. I do not want to live through the apocalypse anymore than you do. But fascism has come to America and the only way out is through. The systems of power have been subverted. The forms are still there but the spirit is changed, altered. It is what it is. The bad thing has happened and we can’t pretend it away.

Doing the work of maintaining the status quo by advocating for voting or trying to buy stamps to save the post office or any of the other inane and inadequate responses Good Liberals of Twitter have been advocating are forms of denial. Claims about pragmatism and realism are just ways of saying you won’t confront power relations, that your response to facsism is to support the system that brought it to us. Trump is a contextual catastrophe. He didn’t fall from the sky onto the body politic. We conjured him with our failures and refusal to solve our problems, namely our refusal to confront and dismantle white supremacy.

It is like this, you see. Before I could get through my own collapse my kind and patient therapist told me that I had to talk to my family, that she was worried about my sister’s children. She was worried he might harm them, be harming them now even as we sat there in relative calm and peace far away in time and space from the events that had brought me there.

But I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t do it because I didn’t accept what was real. I was too deep into denial to see the wisdom of her concerns. If the bad things were real, it would pull my mind into shards and fragments and I was busy. There was work to do and children to feed and laundry to fold and I had no time to collapse into a moaning heap. And anyway who is to say that what came next would be better anyway? And the word of children, even once they are adults, is unreliable. Best to keep quiet and maintain the outer forms of a normal family, even though on some level I knew the truth.

And so it went that a second generation was harmed.

And now the ashes of the third generation rest in a small piece of jewelry offered by the crematorium.

You cannot escape the bad things by pretending they aren’t happening.

But you can resist. You can do what I couldn’t do and work closely with those around you to refuse to contribute your labor and time to the evil that has arisen. You can build safe havens and places of comfort for those in the direct line of fire. You can work now to build what must come next.

But it cannot look like that which brought us here.

If there is one thing that children who have suffered abuse know, it is how to resist without drawing attention, without provoking violence. If you cannot confront the state on the streets, there are other ways to help. Other means of enacting resistance and building a space to ensure that as many of us as possible make it out together.

And you must do it now. Voting is not the way out of this mess. Vote all you want, but don’t expect it to change anything. Work instead in your immediate area. Work in your family. Work in your workplace. Work in your kids’ school. Being a self-governing human being is work. There’s a reason anarchists are known for our meetings. Show up to the meetings that matter and demand a different world. Work with those near you to build that world, rather than waiting for an authority figure to give it to you. You are a free adult. Build that world yourself and invite others to join you. Join those already doing the work. But don’t think that voting is going to build the world we need.

Do more.

Experience technical difficulties.
Give out A’s that have not been earned.
Sign timesheets made of lies.
Write code that defeats facial recognition, especially if your job is to write code that enables facial recognition.
Run into mysterious and confusing technical problems at work and from your home office.
Refuse to learn Microsoft Teams and always make your manager walk you through everything, as though you were an idiot.
Do not join the Slack.
Break your webcam and have a sudden need to update your Zoom at least once a day, preferably during important meetings.
Download a computer virus, even though you have passed the mandatory security training.

Invite the unhoused into your home.
Feed the hungry from your own kitchen.
When you see the police, warn your neighbors and invite their children into the safety of your home.
Fuck 12, but make slow wet love to each other without regard for gender and while you are supposed to be working.
Teach critical race theory, especially if you are white and safe.
Read Howard Zinn from a soapbox in the park and then read Ruth Wilson Gilmore through a loudspeaker to the joggers going past.
Vote in the local school board election and attend city council meetings.
Consider that the town crank might have a damn fine point.
Wear a mask.
Return the stolen land and pay reparations from the pocket of Jeff Bezos.
Arrest the Walton family for wage theft and then give them a fair trial.

Give away your money, if you happen have any.
Emigrate and help others to emigrate, once borders are again open to Americans.
Empty the prisons and camps, even if it is your job to keep them full.
Take your best bottle of booze to the local homeless camp and share generously.
Respect drunkenness and carry Narcan. Know when to use it.

Call evil by its true name and do not minimise the catastrophes.
Name the atrocities as they happen and mourn the victims.
Honor the dead and remember them.
Build a secret room in your house and protect immigrants from ICE.
Learn good opsec and do not get caught for something stupid.
Steal your employers time.
Hide from debt collectors and protect others from them.
Cash out your 401k and give the money to whores and druggies.
Pretend it is possible to steal an abstract socially constructed concept and then steal your local police officers’ gender when the sheriff sends his goons after you.
Become the mayor of an anarchist jurisdiction.

Remember that we know how this ends and you won’t make it out alive no matter what.