It’s 2am at Home

It is 4am in Oaxaca. I’m still on Oregon time, which makes it worse. 2am and wide awake. My beautiful partner and I flew here on inauguration day. It felt perfect, and also I was aware of the hypocrisy: the entitlement of vacationing in a county that my country’s policies  have systematically fucked over. But…here I am, and it is a relief to be away. In a crowded market, there’s no need for a sense of fear of being gunned down. There are families everywhere, and artists, and workers, and intellectuals, indigenous people, and so many queers. My whole body is at ease, though I miss the cold ocean, the thick forests, the gorgeous rivers, and all the wild creatures of my home.

So many people who I respect and admire are calling for bridging the widening divide, for setting aside our differences and being kind. That this is the only way to sway individuals towards compassion and understanding, and it may be true. But in this new (old) era, I am asking myself how I want to spend my energy. Is it for being polite at the cafe to someone who wants to log every old growth tree stretching all the way to the border and fill our gorgeous rivers with silt? For smiling at the Covid deniers, the xenophobic racists,  the rapists, and the conspiracy-theorists? Living in a small town, I am aware that it is just as likely that any of these people might be the first to pull over on the side of the highway to help me with a flat tire. But now, what would they do when they found me there? 

Many people I know are calling for setting aside our differences, and calling on hope. Rebecca Solnit and others have helped me reimagine and reinvestigate that word, and the power it holds, as an act of defiance and strategy, and in line with “Don’t let the bastards wear you down.” I am feeling wary and weary of so many things, but mostly of passivity. I feel ready for a fight, at least today. Liberals and conservatives both may view this as a dramatic statement, but I do feel that I could be assaulted or even killed in the next few years. Some of you may be rolling your eyes right now, but in the last couple weeks I’ve put my affairs in order, drawn up a will, and have signed legal documents making it clear what I want to happen with my body in death. 

For the past few years, I’ve been a watcher of small town life. How politics get set aside for community’s sake. How, as one example, even though someone may have abused their wife for years, they’re still invited to the liberal dinner party, they’re at the full-moon bonfire, they’re still in the fold. The other side of this coin—I’ve been struggling with the culture of people being “nice” to one another (ie me) at the grocery store, at the gas station, at the bank or at the beach, while holding the most bigoted ideas about my very existence. There’s a young man I know, friendly and sweet, who believes that I am less than human because of his religion. I would have to set aside everything I believe in, my own experience of being alive, all my values, and my body itself, to be considered acceptable to him in any authentic way. But it’s not just Christians now.

To be honest, I have very few friends where I live. This could be for a lot of reasons, honestly. But also this: I haven’t figured out how to sit down to dinner next to an alt-right hipster who voted for a rapist. And I don’t want to learn that trick. I definitely don’t want to pass them the potato salad. The price for this is relative isolation, and that’s okay with me. Mostly I’m with my partner, or in the forest, or in the river, and perhaps that is enough.

If you read this for any kind of answers, I don’t have any. But if you voted for my annihilation, and the annihilation of the natural world, indigenous people, women, queer/trans people, and immigrants, there’s absolutely no need to smile at me at the grocery store.