When I was a kid, there was a woman in our neighborhood who had a tracheotomy due to throat cancer. She continued to smoke through the hole in her throat.
I have known way too many people over my lifetime who refused to do anything about their drinking until they woke up in the hospital after a 3-day diabetic coma, or ended up in the ER with liver failure. Some of them heard the words of the doctor: “You can live, or you can drink,” and turned things around and managed to recover. Some went on the biggest bender of their lives and died within weeks, if not days.
Some ignored their eating disorder until they weighed over 600 pounds, or until their body started consuming muscle tissue, or until they started to lose other functionality.
There is no judgment here. I get it. I have ignored a lot of things until I had no choice.
I didn’t stop drinking because I wanted to be healthier and more clear headed; I stopped because it was causing me migraine-level pain in my head after just one glass of wine.
I stopped because I couldn’t live with that pain. I didn’t have a choice anymore. Fortunately, my drinking was never so bad that it endangered my liver or my pancreas.
This describes the US right now, really well. Nation of Denial. Imagine the conversation: “Mur’ka,” the doctor says, putting on his compassionate face, “I’m sorry to have to give you such bad news, but I’m afraid you have stage 4 racism, which has metastasized into systemic misogyny and stage 4 fascism. We were hoping you had enough RBG cells to allow us to fight this, but those have been depleted. The only chance you have to survive now is to stop arresting Black people for breathing in and out, allow women to make choices about their own bodies, invest in a real plan to address climate change, nationalize your healthcare system, and support a Universal Basic Income for all.” Mur’ka sat quietly for a moment before answering, “I think I’d rather die.”
This is the struggle we are facing.
We don’t have to accept that scenario. Shit, yes, I know, you’re tired. I think I’m in shock. The passing of Ruth Bader Ginsberg hit me like . . . I don’t even know. It’s still hitting me. I am profoundly saddened and worried for the soul of my country. I know we’ve incurred no small amount of Karma over the centuries, but does it all have to come due right now? Between the pandemic, the derecho, the fire tornadoes, the endless horrific shootings of people of color, the endless barrage of incompetence, callousness and criminality that is the shit show currently running the place, and now the passing of one of the only voices of reason left in a position of authority in this country, I am ready to crawl into a deep cave and go full Rip Van Winkle. Wake me up when the UN shows up and says, “No more human rights violations for you.” (Where the hell are they, by the way?)
But we have our work cut out for us if we’re going to make it through this. Send more letters. Make more calls. Ring their phones off the hook and tell them, tell them, tell them until it hurts, that we won’t accept the status quo.
And here’s where we run into resistance and denial again: Change is terrifying for a lot of people. People stay with abusive partners for years because they don’t know how they will survive if they leave. People keep drinking until they go into a coma because they don’t know how to live without alcohol. Fascists have been actively trying to take over our government since Ronald Reagan was president, since 1980, not even 40 fucking years after the fall of the Third Reich, and they are breathing down the neck of it now. But change is scary, so we think, “Oh, it’ll all work out for the best in the end, things always do. Rocking the boat is never good. I’m just one tiny person, I can’t make a difference, and even so, what right do I have to upset any apple carts?”
So maybe we don’t have a choice anymore. RBG is gone. The Criminality Party is going to do it’s level best to stick us with the worst possible replacement, as fast as they can. So time is up. Denial be damned. Make the calls. Write the letters. It’s time to turn resistance into Resistance.
No Justice, No Peace.