2016 Fucking Happened

The idea behind this quote was also super-racist:
 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/21/sanders-identity-politics/94221972/

"There is no question that Sanders was central to their strategy. He was clearly used as a mechanism to decrease voter turnout for Hillary Clinton," Darren Linvill, associate professor of communications and one of the researchers who worked on the study, told The Post. 

Linvill said the tweets analyzed as part of the study "give us a much clearer understanding of the tactics they were using. It was certainly a higher volume than people thought."

Sanders was "just a tool" to the Russians, Linvill added, and "a wedge to drive into the Democratic Party." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-russian-effort-to-target-sanders-supporters--and-help-elect-trump/2019/04/11/741d7308-5576-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html

Painting the painting above was meant to bring me relief, but it made my blood boil over and over again. It brought back all of the physical sensations of fear and abandonment and shame, tensing up as the notifications rolled in, as stranger friends-of-friends lined up to tell me how stupid I was, what a liar, how if we lost the election, it would be Hillary supporters’ fault for wanting representation—Oh, sure, a woman, just not THIS woman. The horror and sadness and moved-to-loudness I felt when my friends and then even Roxane Gay said they’d been afraid to speak up for Hillary. All this was before it had really sunk in that Trump could be our rapist-in-chief. Before the regrettable, inarticulate fury with which I ruined Thanksgiving and then rage-drove five hours, only able to find comfort in the new Gilmore Girls episodes.

Since then, I’ve learned to use my anger mostly-constructively. I’ve been so heartened and lucky to be in a city with progressive values and frequent marches, so glad that it’s only a day trip to yell directly at the White House or the Supreme Court. I’ve come to rely on visits to the Hope Diamond or long stretches of phone-games-in bed to calm down after protests. I have written every strongly worded letter that came to mind. I made a chart in case I can’t pick what to write to congress about on any given day:

And I’m very happy to be going as Rose Quartz for Halloween, because it means I’ll be ready with a DON’T MAKE ME GET MY PLANT ARMY sign come the Women’s March.

 Over the summer this year, my BFF and I listened to the Lawfare Blog’s Mueller Report podcast (https://www.lawfareblog.com/introducing-report-podcast-series-lawfare) on family trips and on dreamy drives home from the beach. The jazzy music that plays to indicate direct quotes was our song of the summer. It was a weird comfort to listen because so much of the time we’re gaslit into forgetting our election was stolen, but it was. As paranoid, panicked, as fight-flight-or-freeze as I’ve always been, even my anxious imagination could not have come up with THE SHIT THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

As outlined in the epigraph, a tyrannical enemy leader was able to exploit Bernie supporters’ misogyny to commit an act of warfare, to steal our election, and somehow this contingency still thinks they have the moral high ground. And it’s not just bigoted white men on his side—plenty of badass women who have NO ACTUAL NEED of obedience have joined the #BernieSquad rather than supporting any of the wildly qualified women who are running. AND YET I STILL FEEL BAD FOR NOT BEING NICE ABOUT THIS.

Sometimes Bernie/Russia rage comes out when I don’t necessarily want it to, especially when it comes to my better-behaved straight white lady friends. They do plenty of activism in their own ways, but I’m honestly sick of them guarding their social capital by outsourcing their anger to less-gender-conforming women like me. I found myself on a tear during a lovely Longwood Gardens brunch, during a beautiful walk in the autumn woods that is supposed to be abut other things.  I want to ask them to stop being so obedient, so diplomatic, to stop hiding in the shelter of their agreeableness and appeasing the men and the institutions they serve. I seriously hate it when people blame women for Trump, but I also seriously need these ladies to be braver, to close their empathy gaps, honestly to be just better friends to me and to America.

As these conversations progress/dissolve, I become conscious of the other lady’s “civil” moral high ground. Why does everybody have to argue, they ask. Why couldn’t you have been more diplomatic? Just be in community and everything will be okay. Perceiving their assurance of the innate superiority to my unhinged self, I feel more unhinged. I apologize a thousand times for being so mean. I don’t want to apologize any more.

Texting Voters: A Blue Wave Love Story

When Amy and I showed up a the Steelworkers’ Union Hall last Saturday for textbanking training, I started off crabby. We were a little late and missed part of the training. The coffee and donuts supply was already depleted and I couldn’t find a cup. I was super-aggravated not to get started right away, nostalgic for the feeling of being handed a good old-fashioned call sheet and getting to work. I waited grumpy-old-ladily for the lead volunteer to send me the link so that I could join the group on the Hustle app.

BUT THEN!!! I was in. Before I knew it, I’d texted FIFTY voters. Then another fifty! Whoa. They start you off with a pre-typed message, but I later figured out how to customize the canned messages, with all of the blue heart/rainbow/flag/Earth/blue wave emojis I wanted. AND!! It turns out that emoji-use DRAMATICALLY increases the odds that someone will text back—found a new superpower, who knew?!

There were still reasons to be grumpy, of course. As the women (As in 2016, the volunteers were mostly women, I’d say a 4:1 ratio of women to men, with room for the nonbinary, of course.) at our table mentioned the hostile messages they were getting, a middle-aged white guy was intrigued:

“Really?! I’m not getting that! I want to change mine to a woman’s name and see what happens!” He seemed curious and amused, rather than concerned LIKE A PERSON.

Maybe I should have just ignored him and let him try it. Maybe his texbank would have turned into an empathy machine. But he made my blood boil to the degree that this could’ve turned panic attack.

“I’m glad you can just OPT IN to my oppression. I’m glad it sounds fun.” I snapped, feeling like a party-ruiner.

“Well, I’m just a straight white guy, there’s not much I can do.”

            I said something like: “There’s a LOT you can do! You can listen and believe us, stand up for us instead of just being amused.”

            He backed down and I took lots of deep breaths to get to a good place and OH! The texts! The texts. I love them so much.

            This was the first time I was contacting ALL kinds of voters, not just active Democrats. When asked who they were voting for for governor and congress, many people responded with “TRUMP. MAGA.” Etc—we were supposed to just thank them for their time and mark them as Republican rather than arguing, and I MOSTLY followed that instruction. (It took me a little while to recognize the sweet gift that is the “Opt Out” option.) But I loved that I’d been a little ping in their day. Showing Up for Racial Justice (https://www.facebook.com/ShowingUpForRacialJusticesurj/) holds the idea that even when we can’t convince someone to fight white supremacy, we can still be an interruption in their worldview. I love when I have a chance to do that.

            (Of course, I don’t love being called c**t or stupid or crazy or hysterical, but those responses are few and far between.)

            But the BEST, of course, are the Democrats who write back, asking how to volunteer and sending all the blue heart emojis, asking about yard signs and organizing and telling me they’re already pledged to volunteer for Emily’s List. (A dude said this! Swoon!) We wish each other luck and the world feels warmer and more optimistic.

            I even, from time to time, step out of character and try polite disagreement. Then, okay, I step back into character and ask people when they’ll stand up for children who are already born.

            Now that I did the training, I can text voters anywhere, anytime between 9AM and 9PM. In my pajamas! Yesterday I wrote to 500 voters and only a handful were mean. With every try, I feel stronger and happier and more hopeful. Give it a try! <3 a="" href="https://act.padems.com/page/s/volunteer">https://act.padems.com/page/s/volunteer

            AND! When you’re on the receiving end of calls, some things to keep in mind:

My Wonderful, Magical Day of Yelling at Nazis, Part One

I spent a good chunk of last week working on my protest sign and panicking. I had terrible dreams. My best friend/ex-wife can’t walk very fast and I dreamed that we got separated in a crowd—I have recurring dreams of us getting separated and me screaming out “Amy! Amy!” because she’s lost, then getting in trouble for screaming. So you can see that as much as I tend to drag people for being afraid to protest, I was scared of this one.

For anyone who might have missed it, a group of white nationalists planned a rally for Unite the Right II on in Washington, DC on Sunday the 12^th, the anniversary of last year’s tiki-torch hatefest. On the anniversary of a white supremacist murdering Heather Heyer with his car. When I heard that facebook was taking down some of the counter-protesters’ event pages, I sought out a couple that hadn’t been taken down and RSVPed YES. My BFF agreed to go with me and I made her promise not to get lost or murdered. I asked a favorite neighbor to be my check-in person so someone could feed the cats and call my mom if anything happened to me—since the March for Out Lives, this has been my routine, and I’m grateful to have a neighbor who doesn’t mind!

Aside from my #sayhername series, (http://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2018/06/say-her-name-street-art-abolish-police.html) this was probably the saddest protest art I ever painted. I had to put it in the closet for the second half of the week to stem the rolling panic attacks it inspired.

The other side was cheerier, and I was happy to devote some time to my favorite new (to me) cause:

(For more info and the other unratified states, check here: https://www.equalrightsamendment.org/states.htm)

I sproinged out of bed at 4:30 AM on the 12^th, but only so I could read my book for a while before getting ready to go. Amy and I packed water, snacks, and sunscreen. She packed more phone batteries than we could ever need, that’s a very comforting thing about Amy.

Next: Soothing Art and Pondering Antifa

The Stupidest Thing That Ever Happened to Me, Part Two

The tiny altar of my old desk: Dexter the Emotional Support Peacock, "Oprah Rules" on a light-up marquee, a baby eevee that a student drew, a paper snowflake another student made me, Garnet being made of love, My Little Ponies saying "Friendship is magic," the times I met Cecile Richards, John Lewis, Hillary Clinton. Dear Prudence is on the monitor, as he always was when I had a spare moment.

My coworker and I went outside for a while and decided we would just lock up the store until Amy got there, but when I went in to lock up, 7-10 members of the security staff and the maintenance staff had formed a concerned circle alongside the fire chief. A member of the public safety staff, a young woman I’d never met before, said “Miss, you can’t talk to the chief like that.”

So, it was fine for him to come in reprimanding a grown-up citizen and to have to be cajoled into doing his actual job, but I was a serious problem for cursing. And it was more important to soothe this dude’s dignity than to make sure that the other dudes’ mistake had been fixed. Confronting this many uniformed people at once about this cascade of lunacy was too much. My coworker and I left the store with the ego-soothers and went to breakfast, which we admittedly should have done in the first place.

My wonderful treasure of a coworker took this opportunity to direct me to a nearby old-timey diner she’d been wanting me to try. While we ate a big, bacony breakfast and waited for Amy to arrive, my friend gave me some insight about the workings of the campus. She explained that campus public safety often tried to limit and even suppress calls to emergency services outside of campus, including in cases of sexual assault. In other words, the college was completely willing to put their students at risk if that meant fewer official incidents to report. The students and their families were paying thousands of dollars for students to live on a campus that prized its reputation over their safety. Including, it seemed, being willing to sacrifice their own property.

It has taken me a long time to write this down, partly because institutional horrors like this are hard for me to process. Anxiety brain connects the dots, and somehow, the whole world is conspiring against bodily safety for the stupidest of reasons: money, men who are scared to admit they’re wrong, preserving ancient gender, race, and class oppressions and most of all, protecting the institution itself.

In times when I tangle with authority, I tend to self-gaslight, so at the diner, my friend reassured me again and again that I wasn’t crazy, that there hadn’t been a better course of action, that it wasn’t my fault. Amy agreed as she sat down with us and ordered, but the (Rush Limbaugh listener) campus liaison had been on the phone and things didn’t seem good. I knew that Amy wouldn’t want to fire me, but I knew I was probably in trouble. Isn’t it weird as an adult, feeling the same in-trouble feelings you might have felt when you were seven or sixteen? The emotions of a traumatized kid never really leave me, they just find different ways to fight.

            The three of us finished our breakfast and went back to the store, where public safety was guarding the door I hadn’t been able to lock. The smoke smell had dissipated so I guess there wasn’t a fire. But that didn’t make me feel safer on a campus where I now knew that calling for emergency services was restricted, and, as I was about to find out, punishable.

I made some detox tea and turned to Dear Prudence for a few minutes, happy that after that I could finally turn to the online orders and other first-thing-in-the morning tasks, but soon, the Rush Limbaugh listening campus liaison was on the phone again. “I want her off campus,” he said, “Now.”

Amy couldn’t do anything about it. Security would be on the way soon. I lingered for a while, in denial, finishing my tea, my coworker determined to cheer me up with surprisingly hilarious old Veggie Tales episodes. (Rhyming “manatee” with “humanity”!! I can’t even!)

I packed up my pen cup, took some of my favorite employee art and customer thank-you cards off the wall. I left the sticky notes with happy faces and spangle-heart emojis. I’d posted one for each time I snuck some art or writing into my work days. There were so many sticky notes, in rainbow colors. When the store was packed up a few months later for Amy-swears-unrelated reasons, the ladies just left all the sticky notes there.

I wrapped up my archetypical work coffee cup, (Charlie Brown saying “Good grief!”) and all of my brightly colored pens. I would miss (until my next store) checking off purchase orders and dispositions in neon pink and light blue, writing thank-you’s on the online orders so we could all feel (okay, so I could feel) less like cogs in a heartless corporate machine.

The head of security, whom I’d known only as kind and helpful, was there to escort me off campus. I was afraid to tell anyone the story because I was worried that it seemed implausible—it still kind of does. I didn’t want anyone to know (and also I wanted EVERYONE to know) how poorly I was getting along with others, how I hadn’t been able to stop myself from letting a stupid mean man take away yet another thing I liked.

What scared me most, and still does, was that in the moment I called the unwilling fire chief a sexist piece of shit, it didn’t feel like a conscious decision. It felt like a pulse from deeper inside, from all the way in the center of the earth, like it was bigger than me and also totally stupid and mundane. I want to give myself a little time before the next installment, to think about what this all really means.

The Stupidest Thing That Ever Happened to Me, Part One

These past few weeks, with Amy moving to her new store, I’ve been feeling so much grief for the Rosemont Bookstore job. It wasn’t perfect. Amy and I fought like idiots sometimes, the commute was too long, I sometimes got on too much of a soapbox with our wonderful undergrad employees, (currently in the process of taking over the world) but the job was a spate of happiness and stability in a life where I’m not always able to be a non-roller-coaster. I took good care of that little store with my best friend, and we turned something corporate and anonymous into something beautiful.

It was my love and protectiveness of the store that eventually led to me being kicked off campus, ESCORTED off campus really, by security at the command of the Rush-Limbaugh-listening campus liaison.

Strangely, the morning it happened, I had a dream in which the college had gotten together in disagreement with our #enough School Walkout poster on the door. The poster was real. (I love how I ended up spending the walkout: http://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2018/04/activist-kids-rule.html ) In the dream, I told the assembled committee something like “You don’t really care about anything! You just want to control us.”

Really, it was a pretty standard PMS/anxiety/America dream, but it seemed psychic after what happened that day. I was opening the store by myself, happy that Amy was sleeping in and looking forward to catching up on Dear Prudence and easing into the day. But members of the maintenance staff and security team kept buzzing in and out of the store, asking me to turn things on and off, looking worried and urgent, presumably about something electrical. I didn’t like the vibes they were giving off, but I got things up and running and then went back to my desk. A smell permeated the office, an acrid, technical smell, somewhere between electricity and smoke, and poured out towards the front of the store. I grabbed all my stuff (poor second-breakfast half-banana! What did you ever do to anybody?!)

I called to the still-buzzing-around maintenance guys to see if anyone had called 911 yet. They hadn’t, and they told me not to, but that seemed nuts given the smell. I ignored them and called the fire department.

My favorite non-Amy coworker had arrived by then, and we sat in the lounge close to the door, waiting for the fire department to arrive and give the all-clear. Over and over, maintenance and security guys tried to get us to go back in, seemed urgent about it, but I wouldn’t let us go in until the fire department came. Given my distrust of the police and all authority in general, I’m surprised that I had this much faith in the fire department, but Syracuse Fire Department had saved me and my roommates from a blaze back in the Nineties, so I guess I still had gratitude and trust.

One of the maintenance men who kept hovering around and trying to get us to go back in the store was a twenty-something dude who’d been banned from the store a few weeks before that, for trolling us IRL about Star Wars. Don’t EVER tell me Rey is a Mary Sue, ASSHOLE! I swear to god. It seemed gross that someone like that could possibly have bearing on my physical safety, but he did.

I don’t know why I didn’t just send us home, just go off campus for breakfast like we eventually did,and call it a day. I was jangled with the possibility of fire and full of over-the-top protectiveness and love for our little store. Love makes me a crazy person sometimes. I know that’s ableist language, but I don’t have a better word.

After a long, janglesome time, the Bryn Mawr Fire Chief came in mad as hell, because they’d sent him (or he’d just gone) to the library instead of the bookstore. I’m a big, strong lady, but having a six foot something fireman yelling at me when I was already afraid from the smoke smell and generally afraid of white men, especially in the Trump-era Pennsylvania suburbs, is a lot. It was too much.

Besides his frustration/embarrassment about having gone to the library, the fire chief was also mad that I had called at all. After all, he explained, “his guys” had told him there wasn’t a problem. He repeated this a few more times until I just needed to clarify:

“So, you aren’t going to check the smoke smell for us because men told you not to?”

“Yes,” he said, and in the right-but-maybe-not-helpful way that I’ve had a lot lately, I said “Oh. Then you’re a sexist piece of shit.”

And he definitely was. When I finally somehow convinced him to go into the store and check it out, he said that the only thing he smelled was burnt food. Then he looked me up and down to indicate that I’d clearly started the fire by being fat.

Next Time: I’m escorted off campus by security.