When things were bad when I was a kid, and they often were, my mom got more determined. Rather than idle in despair, or pass it down to my brother and I, she became more resolved to get to the end of the month, through another day without electricity, or standing in line for bread or peanut butter.
I learned about determination from my mom.
She, being of her generation, also never really talked about how bad things got. Part of getting through it was just getting through it. I was a talker, though. I liked to share. The mute button got pressed on me a lot, until finally I just didn’t say much at all.
What can you say?
What words do any justice to the injustice of American citizens being gunned down in the street? Regular, hard-working people with families and lives butchered by a gang of masked boys cosplaying as men, and then slandered as bloody-thirsty terrorists by a pathological liar who somehow got back in the White House after inciting a mob of terrorists to attack the Capitol building in an attempted coup of his own government?
What is happening in Minnesota, and all over this country, is sickening. It’s without cause and without any legal justification. Not that the law matters to the murderers of unarmed civilians. What matter is justification when the primary selling point to join ICE is absolute immunity? All that hate, anger, and malformed sense of patriotism has to go somewhere. What does it matter if you shoot unarmed civilians in the face or in the back? What do civilians matter at all when you’re not protecting civility? These goons and their Nazi-romancing chief officers aren’t interested making America safer or stronger. They want it weaker, smaller, and most of all, silent.
What can you say?
As a writer, you’re using your voice all the time. Yet we live in a culture that generally minimizes an artist’s contribution. To be an artist is to be selfish. Lazy. Foolish. You’re conditioned to think of your work as not actually work, because all that matters in America is productivity. If you do manage to become a success (at which point everyone always believed in you, knew it all along, Darby), then you are expected to shut up anytime something terrible happens. Discount Barbie dolls on cable news stations and podcasts foam at the mouth every day, all day, but you the artist are to be quiet. They want you to be quiet because your voice has power. They want you to be afraid because if you do nothing, they’ll keep on doing everything. They want you to feel pointless, hopeless, and scared, because if you do, you’ll stay quiet.
What can you say?
This government is murdering people in the street. It will continue to do so, as it cancels funding for cancer research, strips health care away from millions, incites wars with countries whose primary defense is snowballs, until and unless we speak up. I am afraid. I feel hopeless. I am also determined. The worse this gets, and this will get worse, the more I am certain this will get better. There will be an end to this. Someday, all the champions of this violence and rhetoric will have been against this.
But what can they say?