Almost 100 Days: On Trump and Daily Life

As we near 100 horrible days of Trump, a number of things are clearer than ever:

1. Trump and his complicit party are an absolute threat to this country’s national security, to world peace and stability, and to the basic tenets of democracy and governing norms on which this country has rested for many decades. The ongoing and unprecedented corruption and lies of this president, his family, his cabinet, his transition team, and those who enable his kleptocratic and racist and ignorant nonsense, threaten the very ability of this country to continue as a viable democracy. Their policies and rhetoric, animated by otherization, blaming, and hatred, are geared toward depriving immigrants, Muslims, people of color, women, LGTBQIA people, and Jews of equal rights in our society.

2. There will be no pivot. Ever. He is who is is, which is who he always was, which is a militantly ignorant, narcissistic, cruel, misogynist, xenophobic, racist, pathological liar and fraudster. He is an unalterably sordid, tawdry, crass, and mediocre man of extraordinary privilege who has used his privilege solely to help himself and those he views as his extensions. He sought and obtained the presidency to enrich himself/family/friends and he has sold it and will continue to sell it — our foreign policy, our history, our ideals, our rights, our people, and our future be damned.

3. The resistance is real, it matters, and it is working. But it requires sustained effort and outrage. Unless we were already full-time activists, if we have not altered in any way how we live our lives since he was elected, then we are helping Trump, perpetuating his corruption and attacks on our society; and everything we say about how we are outraged or afraid is meaningless masturbation and we may as well say we support him.

I am not saying we should all quit our non-activist jobs and work for the ACLU. I am not saying we all run for office. But every single one of us can and must be doing something more than we did before.

What do I mean by “something more”?

It can be donating more money to specific groups/causes to help others. It can be going to protests. It can be organizing protests or educational events. It can be writing letters/emails to politicians. It can be calling our representatives. It can be supporting in local and state (not only national) races Democratic candidates who will support our values, whether by donating money directly to those candidates or sharing information about them or holding a fundraiser or phone banking or volunteering our time to develop and distribute information about them. (And if we are not Democrats or live in totally red districts, we can help by supporting non-extremist, moderate Republicans and voicing to our GOP reps our opposition to horrible policies and to corruption.) It can be engaging Republicans and non-voters and alt-leftists one-on-one to try to persuade them. It can be working on a specific issue — immigration; science; voter reform; incarceration; education; anything. It can be forming or joining, and actually participating in, a local resistance group. It can be helping register new voters. It can be educating our neighbors on their voting or other rights, and helping them advocate for those rights. It can be giving more money to a local charity to ensure that the national/statewide attacks on people’s rights and education are at least staved off or offset by local action. It can be being more active in your church or temple or mosque to assist with anti-poverty (or other) programs. It can be volunteering at a soup kitchen more often. It can be changing the way you interact with strangers, to be more open and accepting, to spread decency and humanity and positivity into the world. It can be all of these or a combination of these, and it can be many other things I haven’t thought to list here.

Even if it is just one thing, we must all do something more than we did before because “before” is not enough. And especially if you are not the ones on the front lines — if we are not the ones who are being deported, whose families are being broken up, whose access to reproductive choice is being denied, whose children are being tased or worse, who are afraid of being arrested and detained, who are being accosted because we are wearing a head scarf or a turban—those of us who have more privileges than the vulnerable that this administration is overtly targeting have a duty to step up because we have the means. We have the voice. Some of us have the access.

We are in very ugly and dangerous times and only we can save our neighbors and our democracy. The DNC isn’t saving us. Bernie Sanders and Tom Perez and Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff are not saving us. It is our collective voices and bodies that are going to prevail and show every politician, including and especially the GOP, that our will matters, and that Trump & Co’s horrific and disgusting vision for America is not right and we reject it and we will not stand for it.

What I’m Doing Differently Now

After the election, I knew I had to do more. I had started blogging during the election season because I was in a state of constant anxiety and disgust and rage that needed an outlet. I had volunteered for the Clinton campaign. I registered voters and knocked on doors in PA. I phone banked during the primary and the general, both from home and at Clinton campaign HQ. I donated money. I shared information on FB and exhorted people to help phone bank and volunteer and convince others to vote — constantly. I talked to everyone I could about the election. It wasn’t enough.

I was in a state of despair, outrage, and disgust after the election. But it was different from before the election because the sense of sick anxiety and foreboding that had been preventing me from sleeping well for months was gone. What I had feared and warned about in blog posts and endless Facebook rants, and had tried to prevent, had come to pass. The vicious racism and misogyny that I had predicted during the primary would drive the general election had also come to pass and had prevailed — yet I of course had had no idea that the Access Hollywood tape would emerge and that this disgusting misogynist’s abuse would, on top of his racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia, in effect be validated by millions. And so after November 8, 2016, the anxiety about what might happen was replaced by pain and fear and despair about what I knew would happen. I knew how bad Trump would be; not only from everything he said and did during the campaign, not only from the reporting that showed who he was; I had also read every article about his transition team prior to the election, and I knew what they were planning, just as I knew what the GOP was like, and so my expectations were that his presidency would be norm-shattering in multiple ways and that his corruption would be unprecedented and would likely go unchecked by a power-mad GOP. And so while the sense of despair and helplessness was new, the rage and revulsion remained and increased.

But these emotions were infecting my life in deeply negative ways. I could not have a conversation without discussing Trump. I was modeling misery and despair and anger and defeat and fear and even bitterness for our son, who had turned 13 less than a week before the election, and our daughter, who was then 14. Shortly before Christmas, as my husband and I were en route to meet friends for dinner, and I was spewing outrage about whatever disgusting thing or statement Trump had unveiled that day, he turned to me and quietly said, “I can’t live like this.” He reminded me, “every day we are alive is a gift” and that if we continued down this route, then Trump would have won so much more than the election; he would have robbed us of the peace and joy of our daily lives, lives that used to not include thinking about Trump. I also thought about this in the context of analyses I had read of authoritarian regimes and how they infiltrate even the home life, depriving people of a space separate from politics and policy. (Ignore for the moment the link between domestic violence and state violence and terrorism.) My husband is a natural optimist (he’s a privileged straight white guy, after all) and he believes in the fundamental decency of people. But he’s not naive; he has been a public defender for twenty years. His words were like a jolt for me. I realized he was right — something had to change. I couldn’t change the election results. So what needed to change was how I responded to the election defeat, both on a daily basis and from a general perspective.

Even before this conversation with my husband, I had tried to put in perspective the loss. I certainly recognized that “the arc of history is long,” that the leaders of the civil rights and women’s and anti-slavery and workers’ rights and gay rights movements didn’t simply crawl into a hole in defeat and despair when their efforts at justice were blocked and set back — and in those cases, the setbacks were far worse; people were murdered and otherwise harmed. This was an election loss and the response had to be not defeat but redoubled effort and dedication and energy, and simple rage and disgust at those who live in this country with us for bringing about this result, however justified it might be or feel in the moment, would not get us very far. And I thought about the incredible body of creativity — literature and music and art — that has been the result of years of systemic oppression of people of color in this country, and I knew I wouldn’t be capable of creating a new art form (blues, jazz, gospel, hip hop…) in response to Donald Trump’s election. I was reading Michelle Alexander and others and listening to the comments of a number of black friends, especially women, about “oh, so now you get it what it feels like?” Their words, and my husband’s (though his came from a different place) and the following clip together really helped me put my reaction and the privileged nature of it in perspective (you must watch to the end to get it):

This Hilarious Video Absolutely Nails "What It's Felt Like Since The Election"

So I realized that what I was modeling for my kids was purely negative. It was not resilience in the face of a setback. People have faced so many greater challenges than I ever have or will, and not succumbed to all-consuming defeat and anger. People persevere and find grace in the face of defeat, and even of atrocity. Only a person of privilege has time to wallow in a defeat — no matter how horrible, no matter what it signifies and portends — for weeks on end.

But given what this administration promised to do and is trying to do and is doing, given its awfulness, conducting ourselves as if nothing has changed — even if our personal circumstances have not yet changed except existentially —cannot be an option. So, yes, while every day is a gift that we should seize if we can, we must not normalize this administration. We must oppose this administration meaningfully and continuously. Because the undermining of democracy and world peace and human rights and civil rights and women’s rights and transparent government and truth and science and basic human decency and at least an attempt to obtain justice and equality is not okay. This administration actively rejects these principles. It is engaged in an assault upon this country, upon our governing norms, upon the climate, and upon our people. And for those who have the luxury, for now, of continuing to live our lives as usual, we cannot do so. To do so is to give Trump a blank check and to be complicit in his depredations.

And so, since the election, my family and I have done a lot of things I listed in the above section. FWIW, here, specifically, is what I’ve/we’ve done/been doing:

• I marched with my family in Washington the day after the inauguration. We drove down from NY and after it was over I stayed for the Rise Above conference that took place Sat afternoon/evening and Sunday morning/afternoon.
• I joined Lawyers For Good Government and a number of resistance groups. I am supporting their efforts and am involved in a committee, though not nearly enough.
• I have attended conferences, including Rise Above, on how to rise up and organize and shared the information I learned there with others.
• I joined a local resistance group that is largely organized and run by some seriously fabulous millenial women, though there are people of all ages in the group (and some men). We named ourselves Brooklyn Persists. Most of these people have never been activists before, including me. We are working on a voter registration drive; on adopting at least one non-blue district to flip — meaning we will choose one or two in Long Island or Dutchess county and we will donate money, GOTV, and phone bank in order to flip those districts; on making sure local elections including for state senators are won by progressives— meaning we are identifying members of the IDC (Democrats who have caucused with Republicans in NY and are undermining progressive legislation at the state level), and are working on a project to make them stop doing them or get them kicked out of the party or vote them out; we are identifying and supporting specific legislative issues at the state level to support or target; we are identifying ways to hold Cuomo to account and finding women to support for office locally and at other levels; etc. We are partnering with Indivisible groups to harness our local efforts and expand and amplify them through coordinated collective action. There are groups like these all over the country now and they are empowering. And shockingly enough, they don’t take that much time if everyone does a little bit. Together these small efforts add up to make a huge difference. (A friend of mine and some of her friends started 50 Ways Rockbridge in VA, in a deep red county, to make a difference there, and they are doing spectacular work.)
• We have donated more money to the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, gun reform groups, and a number of other non-profits devoted to protecting people’s rights, the climate, and other issues we care about.
• We have expanded our support for good journalism to ensure there are publications and people being paid to hold this lying administration to account and to combat the epidemic of fake and partisan “news.” We subscribe not only to the NYT but to WaPo, TalkingPointsMemo, the Guardian, The Washington Monthly, Mother Jones, the Atlantic, and Harper’s. (There may be more.)
• We have donated to Democratic candidates including those from other states to support their election and re-election bids for local and state and national office . These include would-be mayors and Congressmen or would-be congressmen and senators in NY, MI, MT, MO, GA, TN, LA, WI, UT, NC, and MA. These are not large donations, but they are still money. And we will continue to do so, because as we have seen, people like Devin Nunez and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and Jason Chaffetz get elected in their states and are safe forever, and then are empowered to fuck with us and ruin the whole country. People like this conspire with Trump to advance his agenda and allow his corruption to run unchecked and his violation of the Constitution and democratic norms to continue, when they could stop it in a heartbeat by passing legislation that would force him and his perjuring cabinet and his family to behave ethically. They also consistently advance and support legislative agendas antithetical to our values.
• I have called my representatives and other representatives, repeatedly, though still not enough. I have called congressional oversight committees and intelligence committees the judiciary committee and other committees and hotlines to protest Trump and demand that they hold him accountable.
• I have participated in the JFK protests against the immigration EO, heeding the call of a friend who is an immigration rights activist who was seeking attorneys to help detainees at the airport, and sharing the plea on FB so that other attorneys joined the call for help and raced to airport to do their parts, too.
• I am trying to step up my pro bono work for my firm.
• I am blogging (although too sporadically), I am tweeting, I am sharing info on FB and conversing endlessly with friends and colleagues and acquaintances and people I know professionally.
• I am sending letters and postcards to representatives.
• I have attended a variety of local protests.
• I have stopped saying “no” to most people begging for money in the subway and street. Instead I now just give some money without worrying if I am being scammed or perpetuating begging. I don’t care any more. If I have some money on me, I give it.
• I am actively attempting to be kind on the subway. This is huge for me, and an effort. I am taking extra care to engage strangers in pleasantries, however minor — whether it is the people cleaning my firm’s office or the person at the cash register or a random person waiting for the light with me to cross the street. I am trying to have kind interactions with people. Maybe this sounds ridiculous but as a New Yorker I tend to keep my head down, a mean “don’t fuck with me” face on, and go about my business. But I am trying an “I see you” approach grounded in common humanity as a means to cut through the awful, othering, and blind hatred rising up around me. And in a world where racism is on the rise I am trying to go out of my way to make my white face a face that is not lumped in with that hate.
• I have tried (and failed) to get a meeting with my senators.
• I have tried (and failed — it was overflowing and I could not get in) to get into my congresswoman’s town hall.
• I have called my state senator to protest his role in the IDC.
• I have met individually with well-off friends to urge them to do more and give them ideas of what to do.
• I am continuing to co-chair the board of Community-Word Project, an arts-in-education non-profit that serves underprivileged and underserved NYC public school children, many of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants, and whose lives are being directly negatively impacted by this administration.
• We are continuing to educate ourselves and our children about white supremacy and structural racism, learning to unpack our privilege and fight against it.
• When I get material from the White House soliciting my input (and I do), I respond with negative and specific feedback.
• I have signed various petitions on various issues. Even if they don’t help…
• We are also giving more money to local organizations to stave off the devastating effects of this administration in our own community.
• Where we can, we engage in boycotts and we let corporations know when we support or disagree with their choices. (It’s hard to threaten to boycott Breitbart News when you couldn’t pay us to read it, but we can certainly tell advertisers that we will not buy their products if they advertise in that “publication.”)

When you look at all these bullet points, it might look like a lot, or a little, depending on your perspective; but I can tell you, I know it isn’t much. I know what I’ve done is too sporadic and not enough. And what I have done doesn’t take much time. That’s the truth — it looks like more than it is, but if everyone did some of these things, even one or two, we’d be unstoppable, because even though more people than ever are involved, too many are still sitting on the sidelines. Consider this — there have been over 39,000 calls to the government ethics office since Trump was inaugurated, compared to a couple of hundred for Obama. 39,000 is amazing comparatively, but I can’t believe there are not 39 million calls! And yet I am not sure I personally called — I’ve called many different D.C. offices about Trump’s lack of ethics but not sure if this was one. I bet almost anyone reading this hasn’t called either, even though you likely agree. This is what I mean: do something, however small. Look at Wall of Us, or subscribe to an Indivisible Group, or Brooklyn Persists, if you need ideas.

Let me explain a bit more for those who might think the list above is daunting, about why it isn’t much and looks like more than it is, and why nothing should daunt you and that what matters is doing something differently than you did before the election.

Take the protests, for starters. The woman’s march wasn’t nearly enough. That was a necessary but not sufficient beginning of organized and sustained protest against this administration. I didn’t like how it was organized and I’m not a fan of some of the organizers, but that was a march I believed in and felt it was critical to attend. (See here for why.) But even though Trump’s corruption and nepotism and business conflicts make me so angry sometimes I think I might have an aneurysm, I didn’t go to the tax march on April 15. We were on vacation in another state and instead of going to one there, we saw friends we haven’t seen in years. I felt and still feel guilty. I did not go to the science march today because I had too much work, although I intended to. There are a ton of protests I’ve missed. You know what? I can’t go to all of them, but I need to do a better job of going to more. I’ll be at the climate march next weekend, for example.

And I don’t make every phone call that I might post and urge others to make.

I don’t give to enough organizations. I don’t send enough letters — in fact I do it rarely.

I tried once to phone bank for Ossoff but it didn’t work so I gave up instead of persisting.

But Brooklyn Persists meets once a month and I do my assignments and joined a committee and that work is real — we are doing our first voter registration drive on May 6, because we recognize the work of electing progressives who support reproductive choice can’t all be done in the two months before an election. And the beauty of that is I didn’t have to organize it; these young women did! I love their leadership, energy, drive, and quick turn around of ideas into concrete action.

So I get it if you feel like you can’t do enough or it is all overwhelming. I get it you look around and either everyone seems to be doing more, or no one else seems to be doing anything. Ignore all that. Don’t be overwhelmed, just act; and the more you act to make a difference, the better you will feel and more equipped to move forward productively you will be. And even though I castigate myself for not doing enough, I forgive myself too. I aspire to more, and some weeks or days I do more than others. The key is I am doing so much more than what I ever did before. And my list above is a list of what I’ve done since January. If you wrote a single letter and made one phone call and signed one petition and donated to one candidate, you’d have a list too — and you’d be aware that your efforts took you less than a half hour. (You may have a much better list than I do, in which case, way to go!) It’s easy. You can help without beating yourself up for not doing more; and when you do something, you see how easy it is and you see that you can do more than you are.

This is the long haul, folks. It’s critical that we continue with the resistance. I know there is a risk of fatigue and burn-out, and it’s frightening the degree to which people have already lapsed into fatalistic humor expecting others to do the work and going about their business. That is why the clip of above of white people screaming as they go about their daily lives doing nothing different is genius. We can’t just be screaming into the wind our outrage. We must all take action. Otherwise we are also responsible for what this corroded and despicable administration is doing in our names, and we are no better than those nice Germans in the 1930s.

#resist

#protect democracy