Growing up in the Willamette Valley of the Pacific Northwest, natural disasters always felt distant. Earthquakes and droughts? Those were for the Californians. Wildfires? Central Oregon was nearby, and so while we’d always check in with relatives, the smoke and blaze didn’t feel real. Tornadoes and hurricanes were for the movies, floods for nightly news, and volcanoes for history. The closest I ever got to a disaster as a child was when my family went to see relatives in Blackfoot, Idaho, and missed a 5.5 Earthquake in Oregon. At age 9, I felt like I had missed my one chance in life to experience existential crisis; every other moment in life in Oregon was relatively placid, if a bit wet.
Of course, other crises came. My parents divorced when I was in primary school, which meant a bit of poverty, conflict, and maturing too quickly. My ex and I had our wonderful accident at age 21, and while we were mature for our age, there was still nothing particularly easy about being young, poor parents, out of step with our generation. We eventually got separated and divorced in my first few years of faculty life, and I must say, raising a 7 year old, split across Lake Washington, while chasing tenure and paying off $100,000 in student loans, was no easy life. And all the while, I had my own internal gender troubles, buying and purging clothes to cross dress, illegally mail ordering estradiol from Vietnam, and pushing that gender dysphoria down so deep that I nearly killed myself.
But I didn’t. And so after more than 40 years of dodging natural crises but drowning in human ones, crisis became normal. Of course something is going wrong; that is part of life. My job is to march forward despite it, focused on my goals, tending to the disruptions as best I can, while not losing sight of my mission.
When Donald Trump was once again elected President of the United States last Tuesday, while I was sad and angry, I was not shocked or in shock. Crisis is normal, surviving them is normal. I was still recovering from a sinus infection last week, and struggling with a cough, fatigue, and brain fog, but I still reflexively brought out my figurative toolbox to prepare for the coming storm.
The first and most important tool is to calibrate. Don’t catastrophize, don’t ignore, but be realistic. Find out what is really likely to happen. The reality is, at least in my corner of trans rights, that there are many very real horrible things to come. My trans siblings and I will lose civil rights and our lives will get harder. In some cases, intractably hard, and in others, less convenient. Focus on the folks in intractably hard situations, making sure they stay alive, have a way to escape, get the resources they need, and know they are loved. But we won’t be rounded up in camps, like the U.S. has done with other groups throughout its history. Some of us will be put in jail for resisting and breaking laws, but this is part of resistance injustice. Demonization has a cost, and this is it, and we will overcome it with great strain, and probably some loss. While we will not be sentenced to death, or imprisoned, or burned at the stake, some of us will be forcibly de-transitioned by the state. Fifty years from now, it will one of a long list of horrors committed by the United States to its people, but it will not compare to some of its worst horrors.
Tool number two: prioritize. We can spend a lot of time trying to retroactively assign blame for the election, or debating about whether trans people deserve the left’s support, or try to litigate degrees of support for Palestine. Maybe in some universe those debates are worth the time, but in my opinion, there are far more important things to be doing other than litigating the past. Helping each other stockpile medication that will be taken away. Building mutual aid networks to ensure trans refugees in danger have a way to flee. Continuing to be visible, even at our own risk, to continue to build the global coalition of allies that will come to our defense. And because trans people are in every group, it also means continuing the interconnected fights for disability justice, racial justice, gender justice, and climate justice, and reckoning with the left’s dismissal of class inequality. All of these problems are the problems are trans lives too, and so we each pick our fight and fight it, together.
The third? Focus. In a time of distractions, there’s nothing more important than remembering your goal. There are certainly going to be events that pull you away from your mission, and some of them might be big enough to make you change your mission. That is okay. But in all other moments, resist the urge to get caught up on social media pointlessly dogpiling, try not to doomscroll the latest fascist shock from. Get the information you need, decide whether it is relevant to your goal, and if it is not, get back to work. Even consider logging off: there’s little evidence that anything we do in public social media is particularly helpful to our cause, unless that cause is to sow distrust, erode institutions, and march toward fascism. Find somewhere else to laugh.
Tool four: laugh. When one is in a crisis, especially an ongoing one like this administration will be, much of our attention will be on managing it. But it shouldn’t be all of our attention. Even in a hurricane, a family that finds refuge up a hill, soaked in the rain, dodging wind-fueled debris, can find a moment of safety and a reason to laugh. This is also true when led by an agent of chaos: even though we will wake up with a new press release each day that centers inhumanity, bigotry, and destruction, we will also hold hands with our loved ones on walks, have an amazing slice of pizza, and sing songs as we transit across state lines for abortions, medications, or a new home. Never forget that most humor comes from tragedy and suffering. That might be what laughter is for.
And five: grieve. Crying is not something you save for later. Especially in crisis that lasts years. Find a place and people with whom you are safe, whether friends, a therapist, your family, or a private room, and feel the fear, the anger, the despair. These emotions aren’t optional when we face violence, threat, loss, or oppression. They are routine, and must be built-in to your day. I remember after I separated from my ex, for example, I would sit at home alone petting my cat, listen to the recently released In Rainbows, and sully a box of tissues every night for months. And then I would work on my dissertation. Last week, I told my wife I would say all of the worst case scenarios out loud, cry uncontrollably, and we’d worry about reality another day. And then I conducted interviews for a staff leader for my academic unit and wrote a letter of recommendation.
If all of this sounds a bit robotic, consider: what could be more human than facing down uncertainty, feeling our feelings, creating opportunities for joy, and then rationally making a plan for how to survive? This is what we do. We are amazing at it. It is, far more than most other distinctive qualities of our species, what we excel at. Getting good at this is, in my opinion, is part of growing up, living a full life, and earning wisdom. It is the most human we can be.
I wish I could say these skills are optional. But I can’t, because Trump is not the only crisis that is happening, or will be happening in the coming years. Climate change will continue to escalate, creating more uncertainty in all of our lives, and that uncertainty will likely be exacerbated by Trump and Congress. These will interact to foment wars, which will destabilize the economy, and our ability to preserve any sense of material stability. There will probably be other global pandemics too, given the right’s dismissal of climate change and public health, and our governments’ refusal to invest in anything that would prevent or mitigate the next one. Crisis will be a part of our lives, probably the rest of our lives, and so building the skills to weather these many storms is essential. It’s just that many folks in the U.S. haven’t had to, unlike most others in the world.
So what does one do when a hurricane is coming? An ignorant human ignores the forecasts, pulls the shades, and says it will be fine, risking their lives and others. A smart human either flees to shelter, or gets the right tools to survive it, working closely with others to keep everyone safe until it passes. And then after, there is not a reversion to normal, but grieving, rebuilding, and a kind of tragic beauty in seeing our selves and our society for what it has always been: fragile and flawed, but also incredible and sometimes magical. Let us prepare together, weather together, and recover together, to keep this beautiful Earth, its life, and our collective dreams alive for another day.
