Bedfellows

I don't know, guys, I don't know.

The good and beautiful people of my good and beautiful city are walking around like survivors in a blast zone. Strangers embrace. The detonation has happened and now the concussion and devastation will ripple on for a long time. I find I'm not interested in food. That's never good.

We can all see each other now. The really, really bad people are lit up like flares. They're celebrating in their white robes and waving their Confederate flags and terrorizing their fellow citizens in the street. Their unwitting partners--almost half the country--are not really bad people, probably. They're just full of shit.

I don't mean that in the normal disparaging way. I mean that a systematic propaganda apparatus has been cranking away for decades now, and its architects have concocted a poisonous stew of lies and distractions, and seasoned it with honey, and people have tipped their heads back and allowed the funnel to be placed in their mouths, and all that shit got pumped in. A party devoted only to increasing the wealth of the wealthy was rebranded as the champion of the middle class. A good, smart, hard-working woman was recast as a devil. Sound science became fantasy. Demonstrable falsehoods were propagated with glee. But folks on the left as well as the right sucked on that funnel and accepted the particular load of shit that was curated just for them. Truth is the first victim, but there are so many more. When you've been pumped full of shit, you actually begin to believe certain of your compatriots threaten you, when clearly those people have much more to fear from you.

Muslim citizens do not like to be mischaracterized as terrorists, nor Hispanics as criminals, and so too, Trump voters are outraged to be called racists and xenophobes. That's not who they are! That stuff is peripheral. They had other concerns. And you know what? They're probably telling the truth.

But the ability to filter out and discard as irrelevant the flagrant racism metastasizing all around them, and the demagogue at its epicenter, the Igniter-In-Chief, does not speak well of their capacity for empathy. To them I say: these are the people you have cast your lot with. To discount them is to reveal yourselves to be comfortably cocooned and unwilling to take a step outside your own experience and imagine someone else's: your neighbor now afraid to wear her head-scarf to the grocery store. The gay man now second-guessing his usual route home in the dark. The Latina betrayed by her own facial features and subject to derision and terror. The black man assumed to be a gangster, and subject to execution. This is what's happening in America today. We marginalize and dehumanize people who frighten us. Every single time we generalize about people, we're wrong. We're wrong, and we're lazy, and we're also less safe, if that is the point of the exercise. We are all far, far less safe now.



So what do we do? Deliberately, we do not have all the options embraced by some of our political foes: most of us are not armed. That's not the way we roll. One thing we do is band together for peace. We keep our eyes and ears open, and when any of us is under attack, we stand with that person. Literally. Physically. We stand together and we give each other strength. And we reject violence.

And we mobilize. There is so much to defend: our civil rights, our health care, our environment, our standing in the world. Everything we've ever cared about is under attack. Everything that actually does make America great is to be dismantled. It has not escaped us that international terrorists will take this opportunity to goad our new president, an insecure, easily-bruised, childish bully, into the all-out holy war they have yearned for. They've got their man, now. As bad as that is, we don't need an external enemy if we're rotting from within.

And with all that, there are even worse things.  We are many years too late to undo the damage we've already done to our planet. But we must keep things from getting worse. We have to at least try. We are out of time to waste. And we can't do it by pulling out the rest of the fossil fuel and burning it up. We have an international climate change agreement signed now--baby steps, far from adequate--but even at that, our new president wants to rip it up and drill, baby, drill. He wants to shovel ever more coal into the boiler of a runaway train. He is a simple, uninformed man: he thinks he's creating jobs. He wants to give us full employment--as grave diggers. When we're done we can all jump in.

We can't let him. We need to stand, march, and holler. We need to fill the streets with our good and beautiful selves and hold each other up. Someone talked about building a wall. We need to be that wall.

Jesus Loves The Food Containers Of The World

Everybody on the planet wishes everyone else would just stay put. That's about the nut of it. Everyone's used to the people they were forced to get used to, and they don't really want to get used to anyone new. It's hard enough getting used to the regular people. Trouble is, we're going to have to get used to new people. Folks are on the move. And not always just for fun.

Sometimes their entire country dries up and blows away. Sometimes they get run out at the point of a spear, or a whole lot of penises that are up to no good. Sometimes they get bombed out by a really nice other country that is only trying to drop the bad guys into a crater, and kind-of misses. Sometimes there's a plague. A lot of times it isn't even a matter of scarcity. It's a matter of a small number of people hoarding all the resources and screwing everyone else.

Coming up soon, there will be people on the move because their land is underwater to a degree incompatible with breathing. Or there will be a spectacularly awful new virus. There are billions of people on this marble and maybe we could figure out how to have most of us stay put if we could learn to share, but wealth does not work that way. Wealth is a virus that leads to blindness and hardening of the heart. And if it comes down to a choice of moving or having no water or food and having your family tortured and shot, people are going to move.

God, we hate that! New people don't even smell right. They smell like some stupid thing they're cooking out of pounded plant roots and ground-up seed pods. They believe completely different weird things from the weird things we believe. Their women are tiny and their men are hairy. They change everything. We don't like them.

What we need is a world-wide exchange program. We need to learn about each other and discover our common humanity. I propose we model it after the International Sisterhood Of Food Storage Containers. Your Tupperwares, your Rubbermaids, your Snap-Tights. They've got it down. In some technical respects, food storage containers are not strictly alive, but they do have the ability to move on their own. They have autonomy.

We first met them long ago at parties in their honor and took them home. Later a religious element was introduced, when they convened in church basements, filled with green bean casseroles and marshmallow salads, and everyone got a good look at them in all their diversity. Then they showed up at people's doors like evangelists, saying "Have you heard the Good News about quinoa," and stayed for dinner, and never left. The people they ended up with strained to remember the provenance of the new food storage containers, and eventually gave up and put their own leftovers in them.

Now I have yours, and you have mine.

So when I look in the cupboard for something to stow the potato salad in, I see foreign Tupperware. "You're not from around here," I say. "You look different. Mine has a blue gasket and snappy sides. You have a red flexible hat. You're not like mine, but you know? You're not so bad." Food storage containers are the masters of ecumenical outreach. We Are All One. Red and yellow, black and white, we will snap together tight.

In the meantime, we should probably isolate those Syrian boat refugees who want to undergo a rigorous two-year naturalization process in order to commit terrorist acts on us more conveniently. We can stick them in with all the transgendered people who victimize people in public restrooms and the people who impersonate other people to vote. Somebody must have a broom closet about that size.