Be brave, not careless..

and practical, not performative

This is not my most well-put-together newsletter ever. I apologize. However, I think I am saying a couple of important things and so I want to send it anyways.

Well, here we are.

Every couple of hours I feel overwhelmed with despair and I think “why do I feel so bad?” and then I remember. A friend reassures me over text that it’s nearly impossible to be upbeat at this time for more than an hour or two, even assuming that you are not, like me, a person who is congenitally suicidal. “I know, I know,” I write back to him, “but I like it better when I’m crying over ostensibly private, personal, or merely existential pain than when I find that I’m holding all this anxiety, paranoia, and grief in my body due to very real actual wanton and cruel destruction.”

Still, here we are. We persist. I will do what I always try to do and tell you how I’m persisting these days.

First, and this is really important, I’ve heard people say “oh, the resistance has just collapsed, this time around” and that does seem true, from the external looks of things. In prior years it felt like we were all out protesting all the damn time, it seemed, with the crowds in the streets in their pussy hats and the crowds at the airports welcoming immigrants, we were all very loud. And we yelled especially loudly on social media, with our black squares and our slogans.

In contrast, right now, resistance does appear muted.

I don’t really find this to be a sign that resistance has collapsed so much as an accurate reflection of the facts on the ground.

We do not have the organizational capacity or unity or coalition to, for example, mount a general strike, here in the U.S., a thing which truly can be so disruptive as to move even our billionaire overlords to make concessions. We just don’t. I think we are building it — the labor movement has been building it, we can continue to be building structures and engaging in person to person political education that might later result in the ability to call a general strike, but right now I think the best anyone could muster would be something large enough to get the national guard or the military or a bunch of proud boys out there to crush it, but not large enough to actually bring the entire economy to a grinding halt. (Of course between deportations and tariffs, Trump may manage to do that himself).

N.B., I’m not a political strategist or a union organizer or an expert in protest movements or organizing, I have no idea really what I’m talking about here, but this is, in any case, how I see things.

Instead of these loud masses of short-lived street protests and performative agonizing on social media, I think something different is going on.

First, people are scared, and rightfully so. And the fear feels different than in 2017, less hysterical, more real. For me anyways, for the people I am closest to.

I think people are working hard to resist the urge to fall victim to the shock and awe campaign being waged now from the Oval Office and the billionaire’s supervillain superyachts. Which is really important, not to become paralyzed by hysterical fear.

And yet at the same time, pretty much everyone who isn’t a billionaire does have something real and urgent to fear: from their passport being invalidated because of a gender marker to being fired outright for being a ‘DEI hire’ to retroactively LOSING BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP (!?) even though we all know perfectly well that’s wildly unconstitutional, to not being able to get hormonal contraception to losing their livelihood to having their entire construction team or kitchen crew deported or go into hiding to not being able to get their crops harvested to not being able to get the parts to repair their refrigerator to not knowing whether bird flu is coming for us or their same-sex marriage will be made illegal or their children will be taken away from them for the crime of being trans or their health insurer will drop them for the crime of being sick. WHO IS NOT FACING A REAL AND PRESENT DANGER here, except for the billionaires? (If you believe you are not, I urge you to re-examine that assumption.)

In such circumstances, loud resistance, resistance that is obvious to everyone, is a choice, but it is not the only choice. In such circumstances, what you say in writing and to whom you tell your (or other peoples’) secrets — well, there’s bravery, and there’s carelessness, and this is a time to be brave, absolutely, but carelessness is not bravery, it’s just carelessness.

I am a person who writes a lot, publicly, but believe me, I haven’t told you everything I’m up to these days and every single opinion I have on everything, and I won’t. I don’t write down everything I think about and everything I wish for and hope for and plan for. I’ve been using Signal a lot more, and I would encourage you to also. I’m also prioritizing in-person conversations.

There is more to my own resistance than meets the eye, is my point, and I don’t believe I am the only person for whom this is true.

*****

There are of course some kinds of institutions and groups we expect to be brave in public writing. (Looking at you, every single media outlet that decided to make a “maybe it is, maybe it isn’t” story about Elon Musk’s “enthusiastic gesture”.) And all of us are going to have to be brave in speech and in writing, AT SOME TIMES. But, again, being brave is different from being careless. I think it is a very good time for each of us to make sure that if we get in trouble for something, it was for being brave, and not for careless words written under false assumptions of privacy or ideas about free speech on ‘public’ platforms.

Relatedly: I’m reminding myself that information I have about other people, for example, their gender identity, sex assigned at birth, sexuality, pregnancy or reproductive status, immigration status, parents’ immigration status, disability status — is not mine to share. Like, it’s time to err on the side of caution and assume people would like their privacy EVEN IF in the past I know this information wasn’t considered especially secret. In the current environment, some things people may have considered to be uncontroversial, open knowledge, they may no longer consider to be that way.

It is not my job to be ‘brave’ (careless) for other people by assuming their calculations of risk have not been radically altered by the federal government changeover.

So basically, overall, I am thinking carefully right now about what I say, when I say it, to whom, and to what end. I do not think this is a sign that I am “obeying in advance” but rather a sign that I’m being strategic about risk. You might just call me paranoid, and certainly I have always been on the paranoid side of things. I guess I’m okay with that.

I wrote an essay sort of about this a couple years back, called On Trigger Discipline. You’re likely not clicking through to read it because who has time for that, so here’s the money quote:

Will I stand by everything I said and the tone in which I said it in five years? Can’t be sure. Do I stand by it now? As best as I can, yes. What’s my point? My point is that if you think I can be ignored because I’m just mean or emotional or angry or ranting, I’m just some woman with a newsletter, after all, I’m just shooting my mouth off — then you misunderstand the project in which I am here engaged.

A newsletter issue that’s been through three rounds of review with three different people isn’t a rant.

To the extent that it sounds angry, that is intentional. To the extent that it feels accusatory, that is intentional. To the extent that its audience is not in fact the audience it pretends is its audience, that is intentional.

It just feels like a good time to exercise trigger discipline with our words, both what we say and where we say it, is all. (This does not actually come easy for me, which is probably why I keep exhorting you to do it).

*****

The other side of this is that I’m trying to remember to give grace to other people who I perceive as just ‘going on with their lives’.

I don’t know what other people are doing privately, what they are talking about at their dinner table, what they are quietly slow-rolling at work or stocking up on at home, what they are learning how to do or what they are reading or who they are protecting or befriending or quietly covering for in one way or another.

The age of context-collapsed performative social media “shocked, shocked” reactions is over, and I think it is our job to resist in practical, concrete ways and to continue to live, continue to insist on our right to live, and to be brave when we can be and to be careful when we must, to educate one another on what it means to live under autocracy, to cultivate our quiet little mutual aid networks and private spaces where we can be free and honest and authentic with one another, and to build that connected power for whatever comes next, while saving our breath and our energy from being depleted on every little insanity that is being thrown our way.

The Democratic establishment will not protect us. I fear that for those of us proud to live in Blue states, our blue states will also not protect us. Our media will not protect us. WE PROTECT US.

****

Here are a few other things:

• I have been in tech since 1999 and one thing I can assure you of is it has never, never, never lacked for masculine energy.

• There’s a lot of issues happening right now. We have to pick and choose what things we specifically can focus on. I keep myself up-to-date on:

  • reproductive health stuff - largely but not entirely via Jessica Valenti’s abortion every day.

  • LGBTQ+ stuff, largely but not entirely via Erin in the Morning

  • tech stuff: 404 media, paris marx, people

  • Brookline stuff, in part via our local news org, Brookline.news

  • Everything else, I look at The Guardian a couple times a day.

• a friend sent me a link to this reel (I know, I am also tired of IG) about hypernormalization, i.e. we all know this ship is sinking but we sort of pretend not to know it. I found it helpful.

• this is a very small book. it has some very useful lessons. I’ve talked about it before. It’s good. I like to re-read it.

• I liked this thread on bluesky about continuing to live anyways because time is always short.

• I’m on bluesky but I’m really trying not to spend too much time on any social media at all because it makes me hysterical while also rotting my brain. I’m instead prioritizing: reading books that I checked out from the library (saves money, also prevents governments from closing libraries down because nobody uses them anymore!!!), reading and writing essays, writing long emails to people I may or may not know well enough to be writing long emails to (hi!) and hanging out in person or on the phone.

• thru-hike book update: I continue to write it, my goal (not big, hairy, or audacious) is to have a first draft of it done by my next birthday.

• art update: I continue to make art, and now you can see some of it on my website.

• coaching: yeah I still do this, have a free call to discuss here.

• feel free to smash reply and write me a long email.

this picture is just cool. there is no other reason it is here.