What I Wish I Could Hear from Carrie Fisher Today
A moment of righteous indignation from General Leia
It’s gonna be ok. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it? Well, I’m sorry, because it won’t. It is not going to be ok. It is not at all going to be ok.
We’ve opened a Pandora’s box, and now we have to watch the ills of humanity stream out, dust themselves off, and proceed through Senate confirmation hearings. Some of them will try to dismantle things that we love. Others will just be too stupid to keep the lights on. They will so frustrate and harass good civil servants that some of the people who have kept those lights on for decades will leave. The Jedi temple will be defiled. The Imperial Senate will become a rubber stamp for Jabba the Hut. Jar Jar Binks will be appointed undersecretary for education.
We thought that George Lucas was making a fantasy film, but maybe he’s just a time traveler sent from our own future to try to warn us before we make another terrible mistake. Unfortunately, we ignored his message, Emperor Palpatine has taken power, and we’re doomed. Donald Trump in this scenario is Jabba the Hut, by the way. Maybe Pence is Palpatine. Or maybe we just aren’t at the point in the movie yet where you figure out which member of the Imperial Senate is actually the Dark Lord secretly pulling the strings. It could be Lindsay Graham.
Well I’m not taking any chances. I’m assuming my fictional role as general, wrapping braids around my head and getting to work.
The good news is that the last thing to escape that surprisingly poorly secured box of humanity’s ills was hope. There’s always hope. I don’t mean the kind of hope that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. Not the kind of hope that’s in movies with dogs that talk, or the hope that you’ll one day go out with that cute guy in your physics class that said hi to you that one time.
I’m talking about the type of hope that burns a hole in your gut. It feels like an ulcer, but the good kind. The kind that compels you. The hope that makes your leg bounce while you sit in a meeting that is just so pointless when you know that there is real work to be done. Because there is work to be done, lots of it. The only thing that will keep this country — hell, let’s just be honest and go with “world” — from turning into a disaster movie starring Elijah Wood is the constant and determined work of the good and the righteous.
See my face? This is RGF — Resting General Face. Practice it in the mirror twelve times before bed every night.
There are many of us. The Rebellion is strong and there’s lots to do. You’re your senator so much that the intern at the front desk starts recognizing your cell number, and then get a new phone. Call on that one until they block it, then toss the phone in a public trash can and torch it. Lather, rinse, and repeat until your senator doesn’t vote to gut Obamacare.
Give away all of your money to the NAACP, or the ACLU, or Save the Children — any organization doing good things — and spend all your time painting clever signs for the next march.
March this weekend. March on other weekends. And some weekdays. Not because marching will bring immediate change, but because our history books are watching. Complacency can’t be how history remembers America. Every mention of the Trump inauguration in our textbooks must be followed by the sentence: “The following day, twice as many Americans protested as had attended the inauguration itself.” Let’s make the Trump Administration “marred by protests.” Make the historians sit on panels in 2067 and say, “the Trump administration failed to win hearts and minds” because it was “hopelessly out of touch with history on transgendered people’s right to use whichever bathroom damned well suited them,” and “most Americans didn’t believe that whale oil was legitimate clean energy source.”
“This Isn’t OK!” should be shouted regularly and loud enough to be heard overseas, because we need the world to know that the rotting jack-o-lantern doesn’t speak for all of us. And if we ever want to travel abroad again, we’re going to need to make buttons to that effect.
Honestly, I would personally march just because it’d piss Trump off. I’m envisioning a system of assigning one or two protesters to shout “Keep your impractically petite hands off my health care!” outside the White House every day for four years. He’d hate that.
Let’s upset their order. Let’s walk into their pristine house and rearrange all the perfectly-dusted figurines on their mantle and add some ancient fertility statues — the ones that celebrate the female form in its most voluptuous fatness. Let’s parade in front of them in all of our various shapes, colors, preferences, and questionable fashion choices, and make it absolutely clear that we think their strain of nationalist purism is mean, a little creepy, and will not be accepted.
I’m General Goddamn Leia — who’s with me?
