I have never been to war.
There are times, however, when I have felt at war, for fleeting moments. As a child, breaking up a fight between two neighborhood cats, and finding myself their new target. In 7th grade passing periods, on high alert every day, monitoring for my bully, who stalked and shoved and punched me against metal and sheetrock. In my first marriage, in the chaos of my beloved partner’s bipolar mind, trying to find an anchor in a choppy sea of her mania. In my own mind, as my id, and the world, stepped on my trans neck, demanding I choose between liberty and death.
The past 10 days of information, policy, and fiscal assaults on me, my communities, and my loved ones, have felt like those kinds of war. Not visceral, in a material sense, but certainly emotional, psychological, and existential. Is my passport valid anymore? Will my doctoral students and postdocs lose their funding? Am I really to cease all of my research? Is it legal for me or my queer daughter to be in schools anymore as teachers? Next time I need to pee at a post office, a courthouse, or at a D.C. meeting, who will be checking my birth certificate at the door?
Of course, all of these dystopian, cruel decrees from our bully in chief are not actual war. They are psychological war. They are designed to destabilize, to shrink, to pacify, to restrain. This is war that is not about death — though I am certain death will come to many, indirectly—but war about submission, and about horror.
While it has been a surreal week, my childhood instincts to hide and dissociate were not at work. Instead, I found myself focused, not on direct resistance, but a kind of joyful dismissal. I went to a benefit show for the gender justice league, and hung out with artists and activists, and had a good communal cry. I went to queer board game nights to laugh and learn and joke and smile. I had long sits by a fire with my cat, massaging her neck, while I focused on my breathing. I joined an all hands meeting for volunteers at our local LGBTQ youth center, strategizing on how to keep our kids safe, from others and themselves, while also loving and supporting each other. And I boldly told my undergraduates that yes, the NSF had told us to cease our federally-funded justice work, but we would not comply until made to. These ten days have been mostly overwork, care work, crisis management, and disarray have been punctuated by the most incredible heights of delight.
I imagine that the horrors of war sometimes heighten these small pleasures in a similar way. My grandfathers fought, as did my father and his mother, and their stories, while always backdropped by horror, were always full of distinct moments of pleasure. My Danish grandfather talked of his time on the seas, peering into endless horizons. My Chinese grandfather of the gallows humor of peeling 10,000 potatoes to feed the racist white troops. My father of his failures as a sharpshooter, leaning in to the most stereotypical of racist Asian slant eye jokes. And my grandmother, after the Japanese invaded her hometown, of the flowers she grew after most of her friends and family had been slaughtered and buried. These moments of true war, were life too, even has the calamities of conflict defined their lives.
This little war, on our democracy, our most vulnerable, our children, is still horrific. And everyone, some more than others, are having to find moments of relief, while fleeing ICE, or becoming homeless, or navigating unemployment. I imagine that many will suffer the same psychological harms as real war, such as PTSD, depression, anxiety, dissociation. There is a figurative kind of shell shock that comes with hourly erosion of one’s liberties, livelihood, and life, even if one is not in mortal danger.
But like war, it will end. And we will heal, and the flowers will grow, and our memories of this time will fade, and be replaced by more muted times or other less cruel crises. We will not miss the horrors of this President, but we will not forget the quite moments of peaceful resistance or the joyful collective rage that will take back our communities, our rights, and our peace.
