‘I often wonder whether, a few years from now, we will really be able to remember what it was like these past four years’
On Wednesday, at the end of a very full to do list, because sometimes when working in media the moments when you could really use a time out are the moments when you’re also the busiest, I wrote, “BE HAPPY FOR A SECOND” (my longhand is all caps).
That is something far more earnest, far more likely to appear on a crocheted pillow than on my usual daily to do lists, which on that day also included “EMAIL LIZ.” But halfway through the day, I got concerned for logistic and neurotic reasons that I would find myself falling asleep and realizing that I never considered what it was like to have this farcical, blackhearted constant of the past four nightmare years finally extinguished.
And sure enough, at about 11:15pm, I realized I had almost done just that. So I went to Jamie who is, you may recall *my wife* and said I have a weird thing I have to ask you I need your help with something. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but we settled on sitting at the kitchen table and just listing some of our experiences from the past four years to force ourselves to remember what it was like, and then to think about what it is like now that it is over.
At the beginning of organizing meetings, sometimes you’ll do a grounding exercise where you take a few deep breaths and take stock of what is happening in the moment and sit with the associated thoughts and feelings. This was something like that and it only took about 15 or 20 minutes, but I feel like in some ways I am still working through a similar space. I’ve been reading so much already about immediate obstruction, reminders from the left that we need to challenge Joe Biden, reminders that the underlying problems that gave us the past four years haven’t gone anywhere and have probably gotten worse, the endless debate about unity and division, Biden’s pandemic plan, his climate plan, what climate action actually looks like (good and bad) under a US president that has made it a central plank in his agenda.
But I guess I still kind of feel like I need a minute. So I thought today I would write up what those reflections were during our 11th hour on Wednesday night, as a way to document them for posterity, and so I don’t know maybe you can get something out of it, do a purge of your own by revisiting what it was like for you and what it’s like now. As Susan Glasser, who wrote a regular column for The New Yorker about the administration, wrote in her Obituary for a Failed Presidency, “I often wonder whether, a few years from now, we will really be able to remember what it was like these past four years.” So here’s a list of things I thought about when reflecting on the last four years, though necessarily, vastly incomplete.
- First we think about election night. The disappointment and shame, the fear of how bad it was about to get.
- Now we think about those first few days. The night after, going to the Common for an instantly formed rally and marching with Jamie and her cousin Joey through downtown. The waking up again and remembering, walking through Forest Hills Cemetery to get perspective.
- Now we think about Inauguration Day 2017, DC a ghost town except for angry protestors, flash-bang grenades and riot gear, nonviolent actions blocking access to the mall, and a scattering of spooked tourists. Trump’s American Carnage speech echoing through half empty streets.
- Now we think about the Women’s March the next day, getting on the Metro and looking out the window and seeing endless crowds packed into station after station, flying past as they waited for a train that wasn’t full, beginning to understand the scale of what was happening.
- Now we think about the Muslim ban, and the thousands who flocked to airports across the country to protest as people were being detained, to say no we are not doing this, enough, even though it was really just the beginning.
- Now we think about the protests that happened the day after that, and the next day, and the next weekend, and the next weekend.
- Now we think about going to my aloof state rep’s office hours, which she never attended herself, and hearing panicked immigration lawyers asking her sympathetic staffers for any help at all for their endangered clients.
- Now we think about the push to pass the Safe Communities Act, packing hearing rooms, a massive Immigrants’ Day at the State House, and a legislature that ultimately did nothing.
- Now we think of his failure after dramatic failure. His horde would eventually pivot to behind the scenes rulemaking, hundreds of rules, chipping away and rolling back environmental protections, protections for immigrants and refugees.
- Now we think of the thousands of children systematically separated from their parents at the border, many kept in cages, a fully intentional outcome of a “zero tolerance” policy. We think about the bottomless cruelty.
- Now we think about Charlottesville and Unite the Right and when white supremacists planned a similar rally in Boston, and tens of thousands of people marched to the Common to drown out and chase away the tiny group, you are not welcome here leave.
- Now we think about the people who didn’t survive these four years. We think about mass shootings, Tree of Life and Parkland. We think about federal executions. We think about wildfires and flooding and storms that wouldn’t end.
- Now we think about the time lost that we didn’t have to lose.
- Now we think about the 400,000 people with lives and loved ones, some unknowable percentage who died as a result of his ignorance and incompetence and pettiness. We think about how we knew something very bad would happen on his watch, but we couldn’t know it would be this bad.
- Now we think about friends we lost, who would have loved to watch it all come to an end, but didn’t get the chance. We feel it now on their behalf.
- Now we think about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Atatiana Jefferson, Botham Jean, Stephon Clark. We will never forget them.
- Now we think about the largest protest movement in national history.
- Now we think about Ayanna Pressley, Ricardo Arroyo and the leaders we helped elect who took office, not just to vote, but to fight.
- Now we think about when he lost, again and again and again and again. And when he woke up one day and whimpered into a microphone and then he left. And how right now, he’s alone and watching TV, burning with rage and resentment, but can’t call a press conference. Can’t even tweet.
- Now we think about the harm he can no longer do. We are proud and grateful and in solidarity with everyone who put an end to this.
- Now we think about how everything everyone did over the past four years in resistance needs to be redoubled, because instead of just stopping the bleeding or bracing for the next abuse, we have new opportunities to respond to crisis and build a just world and dismantle the conditions that allowed it to happen in the first place.
- And now we think about all of it, and we say goodbye.
Links
- “What stands out in hindsight is the stalking menace of these past few years.”
- Barbara Smith: White people now realize white supremacy is coming for them.
- The Civil War and Reconstruction teach us that accountability, not denial, is essential to healing.
- The Tiger King was inexplicably certain he was going to be pardoned.
- Goodbye Andrew Jackson, hello Cesar Chavez and Rosa Parks.
- “No more broken treaties … We urge you to fulfill the United States promise of sovereign relations with Tribes, and your commitment to robust climate action.”
- Paris Agreement rejoined; Keystone XL pipeline canceled.
- Roxane Gay: “His children are exactly like him. His wife is exactly like him. I wish nothing but the very worst for them, for the rest of their days.”
- Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The temptation to look away is strong. This summer I watched as whole barrels of ink were emptied to champion free speech and denounce ‘cancel culture.’ Meanwhile, from the most powerful office in the world, Trump issued executive orders targeting a journalistic institution and promoted ‘patriotic education.’”
- An environmental rollback that sought to bind the new administration’s hands on climate was shredded in court.
- Instead of a Big Climate Bill, the Biden administration will make climate action a part of everything it does.
- The Boston Globe started a new initiative that will allow people who have appeared in its crime reporting (crime reporting is terrible) to appeal to have their names removed so they can get on with their damn lives.
Super-Link
I linked to this last week, but I wanted to re-up this opinion piece, “Only Democracy Reform Can Stop Trumpism” by Waleed Shahid and Nelini Stamp, because the past week has seen a ton of takes about how Republicans must denounce x and commit to y to move forward or this is why the country must unite and work together now. They overlook the basic reality that anti-democratic structures in our electoral system provide zero incentive for Republicans to work in coalition with moderates or the left, and every incentive to cater to an increasingly extreme, increasingly isolated, all-white minority. It is well worth a read.
Democracy is how we resolve conflict through elections and laws. But the systems and rules established under a compromise with slavery in the late eighteenth century aren’t up to the challenges we face today. There are few ways to end our democratic crisis without dramatically changing how we organize our democracy. We find ourselves in a pitched battle between the forces of minority rule and multiracial democracy—and without updating the structures that shape incentives in our democracy, the antidemocratic forces may well prevail.
This morning Jamie had zoom therapy and in the one hour she was in the other room, the cat spit up a hairball and one of the dogs puked and also shit all over the kitchen. It was as though they were manifesting her psychic energy as she talked out the emotions of the last four years or maybe the pets were just working through their own emotions coincidentally. I imagine it’s been tough on animals too even though they don’t know anything about politics and one of our dogs is a libertarian despite our best efforts.
I did watch some of the inauguration and the television special later on, which was one of the most bizarre, hokey, cornball things I have ever witnessed but also so comforting in its blandness that in spite of all my best efforts I sort of enjoyed it. There’s something so cloyingly inoffensive about Tom Hanks introducing the Foo Fighters and then a dancing montage of nurses and the president and a baby dancing to Demi Lovato. I guess I didn’t exactly like it, but I also didn’t hate it with the passion of 1,000 burning suns, and after these four years, I will take it.
Tate