I remember waking up on the morning of November 8, 2000, and heading to work. I had dropped out of college after my freshman year, moved to Juneau, Alaska, and taken a job at a day-care center. I heard my coworkers whispering to each other during nap time. “Can you believe it?” one said to the other. “I can’t believe it.” “I know,” I said excitedly. “It’s crazy, but it’s gonna be Gore, right?” The women looked at each other, looked at me, and didn’t answer. They walked away to check diapers, and no one spoke about politics around me for the rest of the time I was there.
In hindsight, I probably should have known. The day care played nothing but VeggieTales, and when I would look for books to read to the kids for story time, there were only kids’ versions of Bible myths. I had moved to Alaska because I wanted to experience something different. I had arrived on the last ferry of the season with a little less than $800, with no idea where to stay and knowing only one person. I think I was almost daring myself to fail. My life before this had been defined by the knife-edge anxiety of poverty. I had been my high school’s valedictorian but wasn’t allowed to officially graduate because my mother had to decide between paying a $100 school fee or our electric bill. In the end, the rich woman who funded the family therapy clinic my mom worked for paid the bill. At least in this version of reality, if I failed and no safety net caught me, it would be on my own terms.
Alaska was the first time I had lived around anyone other than Massachusetts liberals. That experience in high school, plus the thousand other ways that even liberals make you feel worthless if you are poor, had made me give the whole blue state the side-eye. So I went as far as I could from it without a passport. Alaska was, though I did not know it then, my first glimpse of the future, of how we would all be forced to live now. On the ferry ride up to Alaska from Washington State, my friend and I were arguing about Car Talk, and our conversation caught the attention of another passenger. He asked us some questions, and we revealed ourselves to be massive NPR fans. “I run the public radio station in Juneau,” he told us. “Give me a call when you settle in.” This was the kind of chance run-in I had read about in books, and it felt miraculous that one was finally happening to me. When we called the producer and spoke again, he promised to hire us in the winter, after the election, to work for the public television station’s version of C-SPAN, covering the Alaska State Legislature’s annual session.
Our first day on that job, my friend and I got in trouble for not standing up during the Pledge of Allegiance. “I’m Canadian. I’m not even part of this,” my friend protested. I wanted to say, “I’m Black, so, same.” The compromise we reached was that we had to stand, but we did not have to say the pledge. Every legislative session started with the Pledge of Allegiance, and this one lawmaker with a beet-red face would always watch our faces closely to see if our lips were moving.
We covered a hearing where a woman proudly announced she was a pediatric emergency-room nurse. In the next breath, she testified that illegal immigrants were traveling specifically to Alaska to trick emergency rooms into giving their dying children free health care. “Even if that was true,” my friend said to me that night over dinner, as we tried to unpack what we had heard, “wouldn’t you want to save a dying child regardless?” One session, the senators were debating making drunk-driving laws tougher in order to receive much needed federal funds to build highways to connect isolated communities. A lawmaker stood up, tears running down his face. He listed, one by one, all of his family members who had died because of drunk drivers. Then he reiterated his view that drunk-driving laws were tyranny, to rounds of applause.
I got the heck out of Alaska. The next year, I was back in college, and I told these stories the first week there, astounded. “Isn’t it crazy?” I said. I assumed that whatever political psychosis was happening in Alaska—the ideological rigidity that said it was better to let children die if they weren’t American than to try to save them—would stay up there, not seep down to the Lower 48. But then September 11 happened. And Afghanistan and Bush’s second term and the 2008 economic collapse and Obama and Romney and Trump and Trump and now Trump again. Each of those elections, I was told, was the election of my lifetime. The final showdown between justice and tyranny. “Don’t worry, we’ll get them this time.” I turned 43 the week after this past Election Day, and I have been told that every single presidential election I have voted in—and I’ve voted in all of them—has been the defining moment of our democracy. In 2000, in the days of chaos following election night, while people made weak jokes about hanging chads, my friend’s mother called us on the phone. “I hope you girls don’t think this is normal,” she said. “It’s your first election, so maybe you think it’s always like this. But it’s not.”
What if these are less ideological battlegrounds and more the final heartbeats of a dying empire?
“IF ONLY I could make the RIGHT ARGUMENT … I could sway someone’s BELIEF.” It’s scary to say, because when empires die, no one knows what comes next. And in our country, we have a force of billionaires, religious extremists, and amoral politicians who would happily usher in a future of even more severe state repression and torture than we currently live under; their 10-year plan depends on it. But I don’t know how we get out of this cycle of being told to vote as if our lives depend on it and then going back to closing our eyes if the party of our choice wins. I think the first step to breaking out of it is to name it—to name what we are living through now, in the least.
I started writing this the day after the state of Missouri chose to execute Marcellus Williams, despite the county prosecutor’s office’s demand that the 2001 conviction be vacated. In the week leading up to his execution, the governor’s office received so many calls that it turned off its phone lines. People showed up in droves outside his prison. The state’s supreme court, and the governor of Missouri, still chose to kill an innocent man. Neither presidential candidate even remarked on it, and our nation’s Supreme Court blithely turned away from stopping it. I am not sure what words are for anymore. I became a writer because, daughter of a lawyer that I am, a core belief of mine was that if only I could make the right argument, find the right words, I could sway someone’s belief, could make them love justice. I don’t think that’s what writing is for anymore—not in this version of a world we are living in. I think writing is for naming reality. When I was in Alaska, we never went out at night because the three bars in town knew we were 19 and from out of state. My friend and I spent a lot of time reading at night, and I reread most of Gabriel García Márquez. He often talked about how all of the fantastic things in his work—the men floating in a sea of tears; the bodies pushed out of planes over banana fields; the women forced into sex trafficking, raped until their bodies took on a different form—are not magical realism, as Americans insist on calling it, but merely the reality of living under an empire.
We live in a time when so many people profit off of telling you to ignore what you see in front of you or getting you to doubt the fabric of reality itself. My early life was spent in an abusive household, and one of the things about domestic abuse is that it rests on everyone participating creating multiple separate realities. It also rests on those outside of the abuse circle denying the reality of the abused and upholding the reality of the abuser. It is suffocating to see this dynamic writ large, on a global scale. It can feel like there will never be any escape. The only one available to me as a writer is to tell the truth of this moment, over and over again, as it shifts and changes. A defense in times like these is to remind one another of what is real, what has happened, even if our institutions try to say otherwise. You speak the truth, even if it’s only to yourself.
