Be Happy, Be Free. No REALLY!

Day 19 of The Working Injury

“You have to be in the moment in order to get through the moment, and of course it’s natural to be distressed or upset. But what you shouldn’t be is anxious or lonely. Because that is the state that makes authoritarianism possible.” –The great Timothy Snyder, historian, see bottom for transcript.

“We have soup, we have bread and chilled butter, books by the fire! What could be wrong?” I jollied to my dad the butter lover, where we sat side by side being served like royals before the woodstove. My kind husband had roasted garden peppers with parsnips and herbs and butternut squash, and had blended the lot into a real triumph. There were dogs flung about dozing in the warmth. And the bread!

The bread is a point of local pride and a destination purchase for many. The dad who makes it owns with his wife a restaurant where everything is that good, and where kids in town often get their first jobs. One time our family ran into the bread baker’s daughter outside a detention camp on the U.S.-Mexico border. She was waiting in 105-degree heat with a news crew, for a group of elected officials to arrive. “Are you from home?” she asked. It was the “Winner” t-shirt our daughter wore that did it. Just 60 of these very local shirts are printed each year, for the winning 4^th of July tug-of-war teams, no consolations awarded. Yes, was the answer. We stood together in a slim band of shade hearing how her father had tinkered for years to get that bread starter right. I looked past her shoulder at the low, tent-like buildings that made up the detention camp. It was distant and silent behind cyclone fences and razor-wire.

There was a rustling of cameras. The electeds had arrived at our sunblasted outpost and were gathering to speak. Our family had had no plan when three of us flew the 1200 miles from home to be here. But we did have markers and posterboard, because I believed then and am trying to believe now, that one should always have markers and posterboard.

We used the open hours that morning to squat on asphalt in that same band of shade, making signs with our markers just in case. As the speakers now assembled before microphones, and the tiniest of crowds pulled in close, a low voice nudged us and our signs to sidle into camera view behind the people speaking. I knew from old days organizing, that a livelier photograph for the press was the key to getting stories run.

“America is Brown–Get Over It” said my sign. A border shack guard had been talking to me as I started in with my markers, of his Mexican and his Native American great-grandmothers. Both grannies remembered brown Texas before it was white America, and neither paid much attention to the border as it shifted up and down around their lives. “And black people?” he added, “Been here 400 years! COME ONNNN.”

 “God Bless The Press” read our daughter’s sign, cheeky to left and to right. The vitriol against journalists was still a new thing then. A national newsman had bent to say he was moved to see her making that sign. He had been harassed earlier at his hotel there in deep Texas, and was still shocked. The press, the news, was imperfect then, but it still felt big, sturdy, and defendable enough against attack that day. Now MSNBC is for sale, CNN lays off by the bushel, Twitter no no now Bluesky accounts get more eyes, there is no real economy for reporters, and I won’t even mention the papers.

News, intact, was the only reason we were there at the border that day. Word of the family separations had started breaking big across all channels earlier in the week. Archaically, we had been watching the news on TV together when we saw an anchor having a hard time reading the awful story as it hit. We sat in such dismay, our faces wet with shame.  There was no answer but yes when an anguished journalist said into the camera from the darkness outside a camp, “People need to get DOWN HERE.”

My dad, watching with us that night, said, “That’s the look the journalists had in Vietnam.”

This all happened 6 years ago. I don’t want to be a harder, more isolated, careful and selfish person today, just because these ghastly dope crimers and their jackass voters grabbed another election. A yoga prayer this morning went: “May all beings everywhere be happy, may all beings everywhere be free.” I sat sweating and thought first, BUT EVERYONE’S MISERABLE! until I booted that thought on through, and reminded myself, It is a prayer, schmuck, pray it.

I don’t know how this slipped under my door when I like so many others had bunkered myself away from all noise since the night of the 5^th, but I managed to hear the great historian and author Timothy Snyder on with Ali Velshi of MSNBC. Here is one exchange:

Velshi: “While it feels hopeless to some who may be watching and maybe some who aren’t because they can’t take any more news this week, the point is, you are not a different person than you were. The circumstances around you have changed by virtue of this election…You remain the same person despite who becomes the President of the United States..”

Snyder: “That is EXACTLY what the lesson is. You have stated it so beautifully. You have to make sure you remain that person, which is what freedom means. When things change around you, you continue to be that person and in so doing, you do constructive work, set an example for others, meet new people trying to remain themselves.”   

That is the answer to a puzzle texted by a dear friend treading water in this same November distress: “I am not sure of anything anymore. I thought good was the way to go.”

Good is the way to go. Be who you were before the election, because it is the key to remembering how to stay free. Another Synderism is “Countries aren’t free, only people are free.” We just have to be more complex people now. Elections reduce all values to a binary and simplified intensity, when in true life, many things must manage to be true at the same time. It is true that I am happy and I am free, in my insides and in this big gorgeous world and with my people and books and in this helpful body. But it is true as Snyder writes, “Harris voters are upset because they love our country.” I am upset. I am anguished for my country, for young people, the free world, and for the more suffering and great wrongs ahead.

Happiness and anguish have to wrap together like whipped cream and lemon curd. Taste how sweet it is you feel as keenly as you do. Because mostly, it’s not a time for passivity, for diminishment, for entombment. “Warm cooperation,” says Snyder. “Not so much guardrails, but wellsprings and safehouses, things we build together that flower, that bloom, that encourage other people to act,” he continues on Velshi. He says, “The things that exist are going to be things we create.”

Recall that the separations were stopped. Our earnest spectacle of speakers, bodies and cameras in heat and desolation was repeated, one camp after another, and it worked. Most but by no means all of the children we saw hooded on flights and loaded off busses by night to locations unknown and for what, were eventually, painfully, located and reunited. The press as we knew it may be in collapse, but there is a riot of excellent voices and wisdom rampaging onward through books, podcasts, Substack, YouTube, town meetings, independent efforts like ProPublica, The Guardian, Courier News, Civic Media, PBS Newshour, Amanpour & Co, local papers that keep chugging along, and each other. You can’t put free back in the box that easy.

Some even more interesting news is that we are all somehow morally and energetically ridiculously connected. As the 48.3% of total votes cast that were for Harris, we are a bit of an organism. Together as though by bat signal, people, us, felt the same voltage surge through us in those same hours, that afternoon of July 21st when the big change happened. Together as though by bat signal, we all by the millions jumped right tf off of whatever news was left, 19 days ago, with similar parting cries. “Long-form!” we shouted. “Books! The moon! Art and tending my own s’t! Their bed, their lay!” As I resolved, “Historians, philosophers, my god so much I do not know about women!” and “Season finally f’g 2 of The Diplomat? O grace and mercy.”

You can’t explain away these electric moves through the 48.3% of votes cast organism, by silos or choirs or bubbles or media. It just happened too fast and the same on July 21^st , and it happened too fast on November 5^th.

Again together (if anyone cares to know), the pro-us hearts and minds boosted that cheerful platform BlueSky past 22 million users in a great surge away from the bad Mad Max troll-trenches of Twitter. Yes the blue side just left Twitter smoking on the horizon behind them, fighting amongst themselves. No expert institutional leadership or press or structure made that happen all at once. In other oddities, an unusual number of people have been mentioning their nervous systems, and the tiny yoga class I go to more than doubled in size since the 5th and is holding. This animal sensibility that is connected enough to react without prompt in the same minutes of the same day is not everything, but it’s something.

Just as the family separations earthquaked across us in 2018, and shock went to action and eventually remedy, so we are this odd giant organism again this time, reacting morally again. Let’s pay attention to our unspeaking connection. Protect our consciousness against a repeat orange occupation in these next years, and still! Figure out who to help, who to read, what to create, and maybe: how to make every problem harder for those aspiring thugs thumbs-upping it at their perpetual Dacron monster’s ball at Mar-A-Largo.

Back by that fire mentioned pages ago, spoons in our soup, I note the butter is cold enough to hold its own against our bread’s toasty roughness. Our books are entrancing. We both only read a few best lines out loud to each other, or clank a knife through more butter, but are otherwise silent.

We’ll wake to the pall again tomorrow, as we have the past 18 mornings, but as our own selves. Anguished and curious on one layer, remembering how to chase happy and free on another, and mostly, just ready to be more complex. Let more be true at the same time. As Synder writes in another of his post-election pieces, while we can’t change everything, “We can change the way we think. We can clear away the cliches, and make ourselves more lively.”

TRANSCRIPT, SNYDER ON VELSHI 11/9

SNYDER: Well, you have to be in the moment in order to get through the moment and of course it’s natural to be distressed or upset. But what you shouldn’t be is anxious or lonely. Because that is the state that makes authoritarianism possible. After all, Donald Trump is just one person…The group we elected along with Donald Trump, which means Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Vladimir Putin, JD Vance, these people are not necessarily going to get along with one another over the long term. It’s easier for them to defeat another candidate than it is to govern. What we need to be able to see is that he can’t do it on his own. He can’t do it without us. We have to imagine all the little ways that we can fill in the gaps. We should speak not so much of guardrails…but rather of wellsprings or safe houses or things we build together that flower, that bloom, that encourage other people to act…The things that exist are going to be things we create. The institutions, the states – they’re more important when we believe in them, recognize their constitutional authority. But also when we lend them our ears, our time. We say oh, yes, we like what our state or city or city council is doing and we’re going to support it along the way…Many of us are distressed because Trump won, but the reasons why he won are very different from the reasons he might succeed in transforming our system into a different kind of system. So we have to shift from our distress into tactical thinking and into warm cooperation. The whole idea of Don’t Obey in Advance is about everything that tyrannical rule can do and every effort it makes. The idea is these people can’t do it on their own and if you allow yourself to believe they can, they you’re going to find yourself helping them or at least being passive. It means you try to define your reality as a free person and that makes a huge difference. Who am I? What do I stand for? What’s normal to me? What am I not going to do? Not despairing knowing what you think is right and not conformin in advance. Unfortunately we have a lot of examples around us of people doing that and we should note those examples and try to do the opposite. Do what state governors are doing. DEFY IN ADVANCE.

ALI VELSHI: While it feels hopeless to some who may be watching and maybe some who aren’t because they can’t take any more news this week, the point is, you are not a different person than you were a week ago. The circumstances around you have changed by virtue of this election, but if you were fighting to preserve abortion abortion rights [before the election], you’re still fighting for that. If you were fighting to keep books on shelves, you’re still fighting for that. You remain the same person despite who becomes the President of the United States..”

SNYDER: That is EXACTLY what the lesson is. You have stated it so beautifully. You have to make sure you remain that person, which is what freedom means. When things change around you, you continue to be that person and in so doing, you do constructive work, set an example for others, meet new people trying to remain themselves…I’m going to note an anniversary, that 35 years ago, communism came to an end. Not because the Berlin Wall fell. The Berlin Wall never fell. There was never some barrier which fell on its own. The reason it came to an end is because there was a messy authoritarian regime governed by a group of people, the Politboro, who couldn’t get along. People managed to find ways to cooperate especially by an important labor union for Poland called Solidarity. It was the cooperation, the courage, the non-obeying in advance, which made conditions better. This is going to be true of all aspiring authoritarian regimes. They have their own problems and when we work together, we make their problems worse and give ourselves a chance,