Half-Baked Inauguration Day Thoughts
On my mind: what it might mean to continue to care about politics now that politics might mainly be about holding the Democrats accountable instead of just opposing you-know-who
Hello! I’m on the market for jumper cables, but for my brain. It’s hard to feel motivated and to feel like anything has a point. In case you missed it, last week I wrote about how I think I know people through their social media presence and how we fail to listen to those closest to us. I’m more proud of that one than this one, just so you know. Here’s an accurate meme representation that Uma sent me:
This week a lot of my thoughts were very much about whether I have the capacity for real hope anymore and whether I can ever believe in humanity at large after 400,000 American COVID deaths and 10 months in pandemic. But I didn’t want to write about that because I’m trying to not preserve these feelings. Instead, I present to you some thoughts about how my relationship to politics feels like it should shift now.
Also, because according to link clicking data it seems like sharing some things I read this week is appealing, I’ll do that first.
'Colonialism had never really ended': my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes, an essay from a professor at Oxford who grew up in Zimbabwe. This was a really interesting read because I don’t think I really understand how the BLM movement affected other countries and also because the Black British experience is one that I want to learn more about. Britain was, after all, THE colonizer. I am personally still guilty of assuming whiteness when I say or hear the “British” or “European” even though there are Black Europeans.
Snapchat Wants You to Post. It’s Willing to Pay Millions. on how Snapchat is trying to jump into the influencer/creator economy with its own TikTok rip-off called Spotlight.
Flint Has Clean Water Now. Why Won’t People Drink It? on the broken trust that continues to have consequences in Flint, Michigan. Thanks to Emma for sending this, I really have been struggling to think about how we reconcile with groups that have been wronged and lied to and abused for so long.
How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted on the American Nothingness Industry, AKA how we’ve turned to numbness and minimalism to ease the pains of late-stage capitalism. I liked this quote: “The spring brought an era of quarantine consumerism, the feathering of our respective nests to a state of benumbed comfort enabled by essential workers, whose lives were valued less than the continued flow of Amazon boxes.” I am personally off Amazon now because I think it encouraged an instant gratification mindset and sometimes let me to buying things I did not need. Also because Amazon as a company terrifies me.
A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling, ok so I’ve been reading a lot about QAnon with this kind of dark fascination where I am just very worried about the long-term implications. Something that’s been bothering me is how many of these individual interviews with QAnoners seem to put forth the idea that these people are lonely and lacking purpose in their lives and that’s part of why they turned to QAnon as it filled that void and as their friends and family cut them off because they’re conspiracy theorists, that only drives them deeper into the hole.
may you live in text-your-ex times, an essay on witnessing disaster and the impulses to protect or wish protection upon anyone you love or have ever loved. My favorite quote: “I hope everyone is still alive, and healthy. I hope no one is a name on a list anywhere. I hope no one is in a hospital bed, is calling an ambulance, is running the numbers on their health insurance and medications and ventilators. I hope the most everyone is doing is watching the news. I hope everyone I have ever cared about and ever lost in small or large ways, through personal atrocities or simply through the gentle negligence of time and forgetting, is sitting on a couch tonight and the couch is comfortable.”
Again, thank you to anyone actually reading this. Unprompted proposals of marriage and donated buildings in my name counts remain at zero.
If you’d like to help me finish baking the below thoughts, feel free to reply to this email directly or message me through some other social media platform that is about to hopefully be held more accountable for its role in radicalizing misinformation.
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I am far from a political expert. I find trying to understand and keep up with all the inner workings of electoral and legislative politics dizzying and have immense respect for the journalists and politicos who do it if they’re not condescending and obnoxious about it. There are lots of plans and executive orders and speculation and hot takes and cold takes about what’s about to go down now that we’re slightly less the clowns of the entire world. I liked this run through of what the Democrats can and can’t do in healthcare, and here’s AP on what President Biden is doing executive order-wise on his first day. We rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement and the eviction moratorium has been extended. These are things to celebrate. Bernie’s inauguration fit has produced so many quality memes. I love his mittens. Amanda Gorman recited a wonderful poem.
Something on my mind now regarding Trump is how his pugnacious, racist, sexist, xenophobic rhetoric in some ways made politics feel easier to process. Let me explain—when the choice was between Trump and Biden, I really didn’t feel like I needed to deeply research Biden to know he was who I was going to vote for. When it becomes a viable political stance to simply oppose white supremacy, the whole political spectrum is clearly whack. It all collapses into a binary. Notably, many people are still choosing the wrong side of that binary and upholding and condoning white supremacy, but that is a different problem that I am going to set aside for now. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s words on Trump’s legacy are excellent. Something about Coates’s writing is always beautiful and physically brutal. ALSO, this is not to suggest that the Democratic Party isn’t also grappling with / swimming in white supremacy.
Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Right now, a politician can tweet something like “People deserve to live” or “Science is real” and get hundreds of thousands of likes and lavished with praise in the replies. The bar is very low. I don’t think that’s pure and unfounded virtue signalling, but I would like a little bit more. For us normal people, feel free to put up a “Black Lives Matter” sign in your yard or on your Instagram story, but I need everyone to be able to articulate what else they’re up to in their own lives that aligns with that.
There is also a balance I think everyone is having trouble finding between centering everything on extremely basic human rights tenets that most people probably agree upon and realizing that actually executing to achieve these ideas would require a lot more consideration and attention paid to unintended consequences. Believing everyone deserves healthcare is important, but there are lots of ways for us to get there, do you have any thoughts on how we get there? Public option, Bismarck model, single-payer, etc. etc. etc. This is a point where I feel like many of us exit the conversation, don’t ever feel qualified to speak, don’t know much, but that’s also kind of the point that differentiates Democrats from each other (when we need to vote again ahhhh) and differentiates different proposals. We’ve spent the last four years trying to defend the existing structures from being made worse. Now we’re switching gears. Things can maybe get better instead of us desperately clinging to the status quo. I don’t expect everyone to know the ins and outs of everything, but I want to be able to have meaningful public discourse (and conversations with my friends *eyes emoji*) on policy that doesn’t come down to me wondering if a lot of people lack basic empathy.
In so many ways, today marks a beginning. It does not mark a resumption to pre-2016. There is no going back. Messes are not that easily cleaned up, and many suffered the consequences of the Trump presidency in irreversible ways. It was easy to see things the Trump Administration did and conclude they were definitively bad in many cases. It will be harder now to evaluate political decisions. It will be easier to look away. Now that our President has all the trappings of a real, dignified president, we have to pay attention differently. You can’t just be anti-Trump, with an identity built on opposition. It’s time (perhaps overdue) for political opinions to evolve. Which is hard. Voluntarily following the news feels like standing in the path of a firehose.
Obviously, I don’t have a solution or a prescription or anything like that. I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do, I guess. I am not trying to be any sort of expert on the whole gamut of issues facing the United States. I can say very little substantive about foreign policy and so I do not really say anything on foreign policy. Personally, I read a lot about healthcare (which involves but isn’t 100% about COVID, but boy has COVID made it a different experience to read), and try to follow climate change.
I’m really easily intimidated by very confident well-informed people and often doubt myself in my qualifications to hold an opinion and I’m working on it. Part of that is not having the bold and undeserved confidence of a white man. I am working on not assuming that my opinions and thoughts are worth less than other peoples’. It’s a process and part of it is feeling like I can articulate well my beliefs and defenses. But also, it’s taken me a long time to realize that the best way to feel like you’re developing any sort of sense of fluency/knowledge base in the politics of a certain issue is to build it up over time, almost passively. Not cramming. Some recommendations in this realm are HEATED, a newsletter for people who are mad about the climate crisis (which should be everybody), Popular Information, a newsletter that holds corporations and politicians accountable, and Out of Pocket, a newsletter on our joke of a healthcare system.
Also, I find myself sliding into generalized and simplistic moral arguments, which are obviously the arguments that are most attractive because they’re approachable and require no real background knowledge. I’m trying to do that less. Another personal resolution of mine is to not hold certain experts or politicians in such high esteem that I take their opinion as the Correct Opinion. For the last four years, “seeing both sides” was pretty ridiculous considering the sycophancy that much of the right had/has devolved into. But there are still multiple sides to debates that don’t involve anyone being okay with the suffering and deaths of millions. The less of the nuance we are able to comprehend, the less convincing we are to other people and the more really blatant misinformation spreads. Maybe this is just me trying to figure out how I will argue with my mom from now on, but maybe this is relatable to you? I’m not talking QAnon. I’m talking about how issues like Prop 22 get spun into something they are not in the eyes of the public. I mean like how a lot of people, even Democrats, think that socialism is inherently bad or mischaracterize a lot of things or people that are not socialist as socialist. Side note, I do not recall being taught the explicit definitions of socialism and communism? I just remember being told they were bad and led to lots of people in Russia starving. The bias of the US public school history curriculum is relentless.
Joe Biden was not my first choice. He’s going to disappoint us at some point, and the Democrats aren’t going to be as much of a united front anymore (this was already true since post-Nov. 3). I want to be able to feel knowledgable enough and pay attention enough to critically evaluate what happens in the next four years and whatever happens after that. 2016 was the year I graduated high school and started college, and while I was kind of politically active in high school, college is definitely where I learned a lot more about the world and my own values, but that was in the Trump era, which I think shaped the flaws I’m talking about here in my own thinking. This has all been a long and roundabout way of saying I need to read more books and have better justifications for more complicated opinions.
Well anyways, it’s January 20th and America is going to behave a differently from now on. Things will tangibly change for a lot of Americans, but in many ways they won’t change enough. Our president isn’t deeply embarrassing, and the first Black and South Asian VP has been sworn in. At least Trump wasn’t permanent, although it remains to be seen if Trumpism is. I hope you keep paying attention. I’m going to try. There’s a lot to be done, and the individual change narrative is often a lie, but together maybe there’s hope? Progress is, to my profound disappointment, never a straight line.