SOS

I keep coming back to the same question. What are we supposed to do?

What are we supposed to do, those of us who grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, those of us who were taught to stand and put our hands over our hearts at the sound of our national anthem, those of us who grew up believing our country was something special, a melting pot of different cultures and nations and languages all mixed together into something greater than the sum of its parts, those of us who were taught over and over again that the United States, despite its faults and its blind spots and its dark history, was overall a force for good, when taken on the greater balance, that Europe owed its freedom and safety to it, that without the United States, all of Europe, even Britain, would be living in the Greater Germanic Reich today, what are we supposed to do, those of us who were taught that voting and jury duty are sacred civic duties, that participating in politics and activism and upholding the Constitution is what good citizens are supposed to do, that its contents are so important that federal officials are required to swear a binding oath to uphold it—words that seem laughably meaningless today—that the real good guys, even those who were born elsewhere, think so highly of it that they walk around with pocket-sized versions of it in their jackets, what are we supposed to do with all of this information that runs in our veins and in our hearts and minds, what are we supposed to do with our feelings as we watch masked thugs murder American citizens, use defenseless children as lures to get to their parents, tear communities apart with glee, relishing their unfettered access to violence and power, what are we supposed to do as we watch these outrages, over and over and over again, slowed down for maximum trauma and fury, set to music that makes your skin crawl, what are we supposed to do when the man who murdered Renee Good already has a GoFundMe filled with nearly a million dollars, donated by the people who think she deserved to die, or at least, that he doesn’t deserve to suffer the consequences of murdering someone in cold blood and then calling her a fucking bitch as she bleeds out in the car that smashes slowly, obscenely, into a pole, footage which we all watch over and over again, what are we supposed do when the good people of Minnesota put their bodies on the line for their neighbors and an ICU nurse for the VA lies defenseless on a frozen Minneapolis street with a phone in his hand, surrounded by eight of these people who dare to call themselves patriots and then riddle his body with bullets—a nurse, a fucking nurse—what are we supposed to do when we have been inculcated over and and over again with the supremacy of the Constitution, with the American values we thought meant something, with the quotes of one murdered President and then another murdered President and then a murdered civil rights leader emblazoned across our collective consciousness, and we realize that it was all empty, all of it, meaningless in the face of one’s man malignant narcissism and his army of angry thugs and in that army I include the regular people who voted for him, those who may be watching all of this unfold in secret horror or with public joy or maybe an unholy mixture of both and who dare to proclaim with glee that not only is all of this God’s plan but that they, the people doing this to us and reveling in it, are the real Americans, like an abusive husband who beats his wife and then tells her how much it hurts him to have to hurt her, these are the kind of people who revel in the pain and suffering of others, watching the violence porn on their phones with satisfaction rather than rage, what are those of us who are watching the country we thought we knew and love disappear before our eyes, torn down by the very same forces that Americans of all stripes used to unite against, what are we supposed to do?

We vote, while we still can, we call our representatives, we write anguished emails and letters and social media posts and newsletters, we donate money and money and more money, we suck down the news from morning til night, we lose sleep, we agonize, we watch from afar, helpless and enraged, we demonstrate, we donate money again, we tear our hair out, we wonder when a general strike will happen, we beg our elected officials to take a stand, we scream at our newspapers to do a better job of calling things by their name, we smash away at the glowing screens at our hands, liking and sharing and hearting and leaving comments all in a desperate bid to make something stick, make something happen, make someone change their mind, take a stand, do something, something, anything that will make this nightmare end, that will release us all from the toxic stranglehold this maniac has over all of us, not just us Americans, but the entire world, because even though we know this is what he wants and we want desperately not to comply, we can’t help it, we acquiesce over and over again, because to look away feels impossible, to ignore it feels antithetical to everything we were ever taught about our country and our national soul and what it means to be a citizen, so we keep going, we keep looking, we keep paying attention, we keep screaming, we keep donating. Our hearts are breaking and our rage is choking us and we keep going.

What else are we supposed to do?

What else can we do?