Welcome to Meditations in an Emergency

We are very clearly in a lot of emergencies right now. They demand action. But action demands thought and thoughtfulness: who are we, what are our values, our goals, our allies, our possibilities, and our powers? What can we learn from those who've faced similar crises, what's distinct about this one, and what equipment is at hand? The title of this newsletter I'm launching today, the lovely oxymoron of "Meditations in an Emergency," I borrowed from a poem by the great gay poet Frank O'Hara. It felt like exactly the description for what I hope to do here: think for and with you about the emergencies we're in and what to do about them, to meditate on causes, meanings, openings. Sometimes even in an emergency, or rather especially in an emergency, meditation as gathering ourselves and deepening our understanding is exactly what we need to do.

It's worth noting that the word emergency is built out of emerge, as in to exit or rise out of something, the opposite of merge, when things come together. An emergency is when things come apart--it can be breakage but also opening. and it's related to the words emergence and emergent. "Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of multiplicity of simple interactions," writes Adrienne Maree Brown in her book Emergent Strategy.

Here's why I'm hypervigilant, alarmed, and outraged about what's happening in the USA right now, heartbroken about the devastation to targeted communities and the climate itself--but far from defeated. We are in an emergency. The nature of this emergency is pushback against the long emergence of a new, more egalitarian, inclusive, empathic, and aware society, of the way that new ideas and new rights and policies add up to nothing less than a better society. Better when it comes to justice because it protects rights that were previously not even recognized, better when it comes to truth because it includes historically excluded voices, better when it comes to nature, because it recognizes both the elegant intricacy of natural systems and our inseparability from them.

This new society is offensive to an elite who perceive enough for the many as deprivation of the few, who are driven by a mindset of scarcity, a hungry-ghost insatiability for power and wealth. By an inability to perceive how their own moral, spiritual, and emotional poverty is inseparable from the brutality of the unequal society they want to impose to aggrandize that power and material wealth. Who perceive the centuries of affirmative action for white men as meritocracy and the steps to grant more equal access as unfairness. Who while being beneficiaries of unearned privilege imagine themselves as naturally superior even while demonstrating their clownish mediocrity again and again. Who furiously deny the truth that is not only moral but scientific that everything is connected to everything else, which is why they take the facts of climate change as an insult to their notion of freedom as the ability to do whatever they want without consequences.

But they are few and we are many. A coup, which is what we are having this week, is never the end of the story: all across the world we can find examples of how people resisted kings and dictators and wrote the next chapter themselves as civil society. I'm here to coauthor those chapters with you here in the USA. And we will be writing them soon. This coup stands out for its stupidities. The belief that nothing is connected to anything else is idiotic; right now we're seeing it as the inability to understand consequences. Which I think is part of not understanding that everything is connected and that true power comes through alliance and persuasion, not attack and isolation. Not understanding that alienating relationships with other nations weakens this nation and its economy, that Greenland is part of Denmark, politically, which is part of NATO and the EU, and you fuck with them at your peril. That tariffs against Canada and Mexico are not primarily punishments of those countries; they are punishments of American people and industries and are already incurring retaliation. That attacks on immigrants are also attacks on the crucial industries that depend on immigrant labor. They do not understand what the federal government does, how healthcare and environmental protection at home and across the world protect the whole, including the economies that their wealth is inseparable from, how wrecking the economy will put them at odds with even many among the wealthy and powerful.

They do not understand that the reason they need to be authoritarian is because they are at war with the will of the people (not all the American people, of course, but a whole lot of us). Much of what they are doing is wildly unpopular and will only become more so. They do not understand power itself, and the limits on theirs. They do not understand that they cannot strong-arm all of us into abandoning our beliefs, values, commitments, and knowledge. Jason Stanley writes in his book How Fascism Works, "Fascist ideology conflicts in principle with expertise, science, and truth." Authoritarians see fact, truth, history, science and law as rival systems of information and power that they must vanquish so that they alone can rule. One way we resist and check that power is by holding onto and speaking up about fact, truth, history, science and law, as well as preserving our independence of mind and pursuing good sources of information and analysis outside the propaganda hose. A sad part of the state of things is that a lot of powerful institutions, including major news media, are watering down the truth or amplifying the lies as they genuflect to power or just operate within their own elite worldviews. Which is why so many of us have turned to other sources--including newsletters like this one.

No one knows what happens next. But I do know what happens next can and must be in part what we do next, in a thousand ways, depending for each of us on our situations and resources. On how we find solidarity and understand possibility. I say this not as a promise that it will happen of its own accord, only as a belief that there are possibilities in the face of this would-be dictatorship. There always are. I'm here to explore them and act on them with you. We are in an emergency right now. That emergency is, as I said above, an attack on the long emergence of a new society, and I do not believe they can stop it no matter how much they harm it. Trump's promise all along, to "make America great again," has been a promise to make time run backward, to restore the old inequalities, repressions, hierarchies, and silences, to make most of us shut up and knuckle under.

Time does not run backward. And we do not have to surrender.

In 2018, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay that's stayed with me as a touchstone. She wrote that we are not the resistance, they are. She used the metaphor of rivers and dams, to say we are not trying to dam the river of change they are: "Donald Trump’s election represents a surge of resistance to this rapidly swelling river, an effort to build not just a wall but a dam. A new nation is struggling to be born, a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters." And less than a month ago, Anand Giridharadas wrote a similar essay on his (highly recommended) newsletter The Ink, with the ringing title "January 6 was a revolt against the future. The future will prevail." He writes, "We must understand that what we've been living through is backlash. Backlash. It's not the engine of history. It is the revolt against the engine of history." I'm with them. You can dismantle the institutions, violate the law, attack the vulnerable. But you can't convince most of us we don't deserve our rights or our democracy; you can't convince us to forget what we know.

A few more words about Meditations In an Emergency. Part of why I love this wide-open title is: I'm not committing to one kind of essay or subject here; during the current emergency I will do my best to keep people informed and encouraged (a word a writer friend reminded me means to instill courage) with up-to-date short essays and analyses. But that's not all you'll find here. Expect political essays and analysis, on the current crisis, links to actions and campaigns, but also on the great emergence, on what Michelle Alexander described as a river of change, on feminism and climate, on places where victories are possible or realized, on the nature of power and change, on the case for hope or, when hope seems too much, on being resolute in the face of destruction. And also the more personal and lyrical and literary stuff I've been looking for a home for, outside my books.

I can't promise a regular schedule but I can promise that I have a lot to say, and I'll be saying a lot of it here. I'm also starting this because I've long felt compromised by how present I am on Facebook--it is a platform on which I connect with many wonderful people and follow organizations and movements, but it is also one owned by one of the sinister oligarchs of our age. I want to step back from it to some extent and let who are not there at all or don't want to be there much find this content of mine here instead. There have been many periods over the past decade where I've been day after day posting essay-analyses there, and that content will now appear here instead (probably with links there to come here). And while all content is free here, I'm grateful to those who want to support my work with a paid subscription.

Thank you for joining me.