Just a dream
Someone please wake me up now
I’d like to begin this post with an excerpt from another newsletter that graced my inbox today:
I’m beginning with an excerpt from someone else because I’m struggling to find the words. Not that a personal connection to what happened Saturday night has any relevance here, but I spent the summer after college working on a trail crew outside of Colorado Springs. Even before acknowledging I was queer, I remember how it felt to walk through downtown. It was the first time I’d been in a predominantly military and conservative Christian environment. I sensed a mostly—but not always—invisible oppression of a kind I’ve felt in only a handful of other towns since. And yet, there was also life, vibrancy. I didn’t go to Club Q that summer, but I can picture it. I suppose I’ve been to other Club Qs, other supposedly safe spaces within conservative, oppressive, and hostile environments. I suppose I’m projecting a bit, thinking of the times I’ve spent in gay bars here in Alaska. Thinking about how one of the two gay bars in Anchorage requires you to enter through an alleyway allegedly because people used to get harassed and assaulted when trying to enter through the front door from the street...1 Thinking about the conversations I’ve had in bars in rural Colorado, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Arizona that made me feel unsafe, even as a straight-passing white woman. Thinking about conversations I’ve had recently with people within my profession who’d like to believe we’re past sexism, that we’ve already entered a “race blind” society.2
I’m thinking about all this and knowing, as someone who used to feel similarly, how much easier it is to hate people who make us feel uncomfortable than it is to comb our own depths and ask: what is it about that person that makes me feel a certain way? What am I feeling when I see someone and can’t immediately identify their gender or what sex they were assigned at birth?
More often than not, if you dig deep enough, it’s jealousy. What seems like rage: “how dare they?” may actually be, “how dare they do that, when I wasn’t allowed to even [express myself in a much less prominent way]?”
How dare they feel safe when I didn’t.
It’s our own repression, our own self-hate projected outward onto someone who has the audacity to be true to themselves. To be visible. To be witnessed in their integrity. So the rage goes outward. And when every unstable white man in the country can legally buy a gun… here we are.
This is such an old story. I’m beginning to think humans really are the dumbest creatures on this planet. I’m not sure what took me so long to get here but, this week has already proven it true. Are we (the U.S. government) really going to spend $10 billion3 to send more people to the moon (including a person of color and a woman, how can I forget such progress), meanwhile the Anchorage mayor is refusing to implement any meaningful plan to house or provide resources to the city’s transient and homeless populations and instead is playing a petulant game of chicken with the more progressive city assembly while people literally die on the streets?
Yes, I went to law school. Sadly I understand that there are “reasons” “why” the space exploration budget has (mostly)4 nothing to do with the funds available to the Anchorage municipality. But that’s also part of the problem. We’ve designed our system in such a way that people in power can see a bad thing happen and still manage to throw up their hands in disbelief, send out their thoughts and prayers, or even say wow yes climate change is real let’s get on it and then still get rich investing in oil stocks5 and veto necessary environmental legislation way back in the 1970s on a technicality, kicking the can down the road until there are no roads left, oops, they’re all flooded.
…
Maybe it’s starting to become clear that I’m angry.
My job both does and doesn’t help. It helps because it keeps my eyes open: we're literally working every day to hold the government accountable.6 But in what I do, the stakes can seem infuriatingly low; for the government, at least. For our clients, everything is on the line. And it's not like I can write a legal brief that says "really? the prosecutor decided to waste government resources on this case??????"--something I've wanted to argue at least three times already.7 Maybe another day, but not now. I'm not saying I'm any better than the rest of them. I'm just part of the system, too.
I really didn’t plan to write about anger. I had a different topic in mind.
But as any good therapist would say, that’s not how feelings work. They come up and they may suck but if you don’t address them, if you tamp them down or distort them or pretend they don’t exist; well, they’re smart buggers. Much smarter than humans, in fact. They’ll find you one way or another. They’re good at sneaking up on you, or leaking out in inappropriate ways. So here we are.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. I’m turning comments off for today—there can be a performative aspect to them that I find draining at the moment. (It’s not you, it’s me.)
As the “fun link of today”8 I’m going to leave you with the next song I plan to debut at karaoke, hopefully soon:
And by god I’m officially a hypocrite but I’m going to let myself still listen to Nelly on occasion despite his pre-Me Too allegations of sexual assault… it’s okay to be mad at me for it. Even if the comments are closed, replying to this email always works. I’d love to chat <3 <3 <3
I haven’t yet verified that rumor. But even if it’s not true, last summer someone put swastika stickers all over the bar’s front door. So there’s that.
I wish this was a joke.
I think that’s what I heard on the radio today, fact checkers welcome.
My friend Carrot informed me this week about the Nobel-winning quantum entanglement research that proves everything everywhere is literally all connected. Boom.
Are oil stocks a thing? Sounds like a weird soup recipe… Halp
A real hero over here, sitting in her condo and all.
And that wouldn't even be enough question marks!!! Sigh.
Segment I made up. Thoughts?