Resources for Resistance

Well, well. America woke up and chose fascism. Again.

The day after the election, I wrote a lot, because fury is a great creative motivator for me. In the following days, I had unwise quantities of boba tea in order to fuel myself with pleasure. I bought a new hat that is not as good as my old hat, which I lost in a taxi in NYC on my way home from a nude gay spiritual retreat last month. I cried when I needed to cry, and fought the twin temptations of denial and anxious proliferation of strategies.

Abuse, dysphoria, and the pandemic taught me something about staying present in a crisis I can’t control. I’ve learned not to talk myself out of the future I want, even when it seems impossible. Yes, it is going to be that bad, and no, I don’t know what to do about it, except keep being queer and making art until it’s really obvious that someone will kill me for it (and maybe even then). That’s my version of not obeying tyranny in advance.

At least I will die as the hottest version of myself.

I’m rereading Stephen Dobyns’ 1996 poetry collection Common Carnage, a stoic yet compassionate book about finding beauty in a cruel world. My favorite poem in this book, not available online as far as I can tell, is “Indifference to Consequence”, in which the speaker contrasts the resilient peacefulness of wildflowers in a sidewalk crack with the bloody, miserly competitiveness more typical of human nature. An excerpt:

…What does it mean to be joyous,

to transform one’s frailty into flower?
But even that judgment must be wrong.
To you the image of weakness is a wolf
offering its neck to the pack. Such
sacrifice is beyond your comprehension.

Effortlessly these flowers bear the gifts
that remain to you a mystery. Think
of the boots that will crush them here,
trash cans and car tires yanked over the curb.
Even in life their death couldn’t scare them.

A poem I wrote last year, “These Characters and Themes Cannot Exist”, takes its title from a memo from a Charlotte County, FL education official directing schools to remove all books with LGBTQ content. It’s found a home at The Garlic Press, Issue #3. An excerpt:

…Emily is Nobody
and Abe never shared
his bearded honesty with Speed
in his bed.

Don’t snap
your fingers, butterfly
boy bestie, your whispering sisters
will have to get along

without

your paper to copy
the unspeakable thing
Claggart was willing
to die to say to Billy.

At Electric Literature, Bareerah Ghani interviewed Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who has emerged as a leading voice of artistic resistance to Israeli occupation. Knopf published his second collection, Forest of Noise, last month.

When I write poetry, I’m not trying to humanize Palestinians. I’m an artist. This is how I perceive things. I see details. When I write about the people I love, or the people I see and care about, my students, my neighbors, my house, the garden in our house, the sunset, the clouds, the birds, I don’t see the frame of the picture. I see the picture itself. I’m not trying to humanize Palestinians, so that people in the outside world would say, Oh, you know these people are really kind, oh they deserve to be alive. No, this is another function of the poem. I, as an artist, care about the details of everyone’s life. Not because I’m Palestinian, and I want to humanize my people. But this is the way life is. When there is an airstrike, I don’t see the victim. I don’t see the baby who was beheaded by the Israel airstrike.

I see the pacifier, I see the cot, I see the blanket. It’s visible there as much as the baby is visible. These details indicate that there used to be a life before death happened. I see the full picture. I don’t only see what happened after the airstrike. I also see what was happening before that, which is equally important.

Torrey House Press, a literary publisher with an interest in the cultures and environmental issues of the American West, has revived its blog series “That Thing With Feathers: Hope & Literature in a Time of Upheaval”, which was launched in 2020-21 during the pandemic. Their goal is to publish nature writing that is spiritually replenishing and reminds us to fight alongside our allies in the nonhuman world. In a recent installment, Laura Pritchett shares this advice from Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius:

“Whatever anyone does or says, for my part I’m bound to the good,” Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. “In the same way an emerald or gold or purple might always proclaim: ‘whatever anyone does or says, I must be what I am and show my true colors.’” Whatever happens in life, in world events, in politics, our job is our job, our duty is our duty. How does this stop you, Marcus asks elsewhere in Meditations, from acting with courage, discipline, justice and wisdom? In fact, it may well be that these election results present you with an incredible—and urgent and critical—opportunity to act with virtue.

In case you missed it, this post-election pep talk from Rachel Maddow is good for reviving your fighting spirit (12-minute video).

Boundary-setting queen Captain Awkward is on fire in her latest post about your right to distance yourself from Trump-voting relatives.

…The longer you stay invested in trying to extract accountability or persuade the un-persuadable, the more you expose yourself to people who hurt you. So, do you want to win the argument, or do you want to be free?

You can have space and peace and healing, with time.

You can re-invest all the effort and resources that you spent on them into building community with people who don’t make you feel this bad.

You can have the last word, sort of, in that you can say your piece and then stop responding to whatever they say back.

You can try to maintain a strictly superficial relationship that requires the least possible amount of effort and engagement from you. (Often useful or necessary when the problem person is the gatekeeper to relationships with other family members, like children).

But no matter how hard you try, you can’t fix other people’s hearts for them. These bogus calls for “unity” and “not letting politics distract us from what’s really important” are the same trap they’ve always been: “I get to treat you like shit, and you have to love and forgive me forever no matter how I treat you, and if you ever decide to stop playing this terrible game, I get to play the victim and blame everything on your supposed lack of empathy and commitment. Who wants a hug?”

Le sigh. Patriarchy is nothing if not boringly consistent, and you’ll notice that these articles about “how to coexist peacefully at holidays despite contrasting politics” are always about the concessions and compassion we owe them, and never about the basic human fucking decency they owe us. Continuously debating your own humanity with abusive people is a fruitless project that maintains the illusion that your safety and happiness are something they grant you, and not something that has always been yours. Sometimes all you can do is divest, disengage, and go somewhere safe to lick your wounds and rebuild a life that doesn’t revolve around them.

Finally, I enthusiastically recommend the website Waging Nonviolence for resistance ideas that don’t depend on naïve trust in our institutions, but don’t wholly destroy them either. Daniel Hunter’s article “10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won” encourages us to work on our mental health, avoid despair and isolation, give mutual aid, and remember they can’t execute their plans unless ordinary people cooperate…so what if we just don’t?

Distrust fuels the flame of autocracy because it makes it much easier to divide…

This is a social disease: You know who to trust by who they tell you to distrust.

Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized.

This also means being trustworthy — not just with information, but with emotions. That way you can acknowledge what you know and admit the parts that are uncertain fears nagging at you.

***

We’re not going to convince him not to do these things. No pressure on Republicans will result in more than the tiniest of crumbs (at least initially). We’re not going to stop him from doing these things just by persuasive tactics or showing that there are a LOT of us who oppose them.

It will be helpful to have a power analysis in our minds, specifically that’s known as the upside-down triangle. This tool was built to explain how power moves even under dictatorships.

The central tenet is that like an upside-down triangle, power can be unstable. It naturally topples over without anything supporting it. To prevent that, power relies on pillars of support to keep it upright.
Casually, the left often focuses on pillars of support that include governments, media, corporations, shareholders and policy makers. Describing the pillars of support, Gene Sharp wrote:

“By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes, enforce repressive laws and regulations, keep trains running on time, prepare national budgets, direct traffic, manage ports, print money, repair roads, keep markets supplied with food, make steel, build rockets, train the police and army, issue postage stamps or even milk a cow. People provide these services to the ruler though a variety of organizations and institutions. If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule.”

Removing one pillar of support can often gain major, life-saving concessions. In response to Trump’s 2019 government shutdown, flight attendants prepared a national strike. Such a strike would ground planes across the country and a key transportation network. Within hours of announcing they were “mobilizing immediately” for a strike, Trump capitulated.

“Our grief can help direct us toward what is ours to tend”: check out this 5-minute meditation on post-election grief from the spiritual wellness site Wild Heart.

November Links Roundup: Counting Down the Days

Well, it’s November. Yay. Tonight we turn the clocks back an hour, and Tuesday we find out whether America will turn the clock back to 1850.

In case you’re Jerry the Vampire and only just woke up from a 50-year nap, don’t burst a blood vessel trying to read all 900 pages of Project 2025 before Election Day. Instead, consult the Stop Project 2025 Comic, an online anthology of graphic narratives that summarize the Trump team’s plans to destroy fair elections, internet freedom, reproductive and gender rights, the environment, and pretty much every other good thing in America.

Read Susan Perabo’s devastating flash fiction “The Life of the Mother” at Fractured Lit, inspired by the many real-life news stories about women dying from pregnancy complications after Dobbs. For some resistance vibes, read G.H. Plaag’s poem “Televised” in the journal ANMLY:

…we are posting this
to TikTok so the Chinese government knows
that we are hot and young and slutty
in our artificial cages, in our handcuffs,
in our straps. we need the spies
to learn about femdom and
the Wednesday Dance. we know,
we know—this could threaten everything
that makes this country great, our security
could be at risk, but we don’t care. we don’t believe
in borders or in anything. you have taken that
from us, belief. and you only have
yourselves to blame.

Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn’s feature essay “Ghosts of the Groves”, from the Summer 2024 “Florida” issue of Jewish Currents, takes a deep dive into the political history of orange cultivation, connecting the crop’s rise and climate-change-induced decline in the Sunshine State to Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian orange groves. With agriculture worldwide under threat from global warming and new insect-borne diseases, Florida looks to Israeli technology as a savior. Meanwhile, Palestinians saw their former cash crop being recast as a symbol of Israeli “improvement” of their land.

This budding partnership is a natural extension of the parallel histories of Israeli and Florida citrus. In both places, generations of settler colonists have valued oranges not only as a source of wealth, but also as a treasured part of their mythology. Early Zionist settlers in Palestine saw their agricultural output in morally and socially redemptive terms; their famous promise to “make the desert bloom” positioned cultivation as a route toward seizing the land, and oranges, in particular, became a narrative device to scaffold claims of rightful occupancy. In Florida, where oranges were likely introduced by Spanish colonizers in the 16th century, they came to represent the idea that the terrain was a potential paradise that only Europeans could bring to fruition.

As far-right political projects have consolidated power in both Israel and Florida—with Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration openly working to push leftists, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and other minority groups out of Florida’s social body, and Israel currently perpetrating a genocide in Gaza, seeking to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that it embarked on more than a century ago—shared politics have become the basis for an agricultural alliance.

And what are our preeminent universities doing in this time of crisis? Telling teachers and students to STFU about anything controversial. “Faculty Members Suspended From Harvard’s Main Library After ‘Study-In’ Protest,” The Crimson reported on Oct. 25.

The faculty study-in protested the library’s decision to similarly suspend student protesters who conducted a pro-Palestine study-in last month. The University’s decision to suspend students from the library had already come under fire from free speech groups, including the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.

During the faculty study-in, professors silently read materials on free speech and dissent while placing signs related to free speech and University policy on the tables in front of them. As they did so, Securitas guards noted down their names and ID numbers…

…Though the University has previously disciplined faculty members for academic misconduct or violating policies on sexual harassment, the decision to suspend professors from a library for protesting appears to be unprecedented. The Crimson could not identify any past cases where Harvard barred a group of faculty members from entering a specific campus space as a result of their activism.

Along the same lines, “Yale College admin direct Women’s Center to institute policy of ‘broad neutrality’,” The Yale Daily News reported Oct. 15. Staffers are understandably concerned that this vague, sweeping directive would interfere with their choice of invited speakers and their advocacy for women’s issues like reproductive rights.

The News spoke to three Women’s Center board members about the “broad neutrality” directive. The students were granted anonymity for fear of losing their jobs as board members are employed by Yale College.

The three board members all emphasized that a policy of “broad neutrality” would be a drastic change from the Women’s Center’s feminist mission since its founding.

“The Yale Women’s Center was founded in 1970 when a group of the first women undergraduates staged a sit-in, occupying a space of their own. At the time, their feminist demands were divisive. What is divisive changes over time, and through the decades, the Women’s Center has continued to be a feminist space on campus, working towards collective liberation,” one board member wrote to the News. “Neutrality would contradict our purpose and compromise our daily functions.”

What could possibly have prompted this policy? Three guesses:

Last year, an annual event planned by the Women’s Center titled “Pink-washing and feminism(s) in Gaza” was indefinitely postponed by the board amid threats of disciplinary action from administrators, following their failure to respond to a Jewish student leader seeking to “meet with a representative from the Women’s Center to talk about how Jewish women can feel included and represented in our Yale community,” per the student’s email.

Doubling down, Yale’s Committee on Institutional Voice has extended the gag order to deans, top administrators, and faculty who head up departments or programs. “Yale leaders advised to refrain from statements on issues of public significance,” the Yale Daily News reported Oct. 30. While there’s something to be said for caution and humility in speaking for an ideologically diverse intellectual community, this move feels to me like preemptive compliance with authoritarianism. Yale leaders may fear retaliation from a Trump administration, similar to Jeff Bezos blocking the Washington Post from endorsing Harris. It’s still cowardly. If America’s most powerful individuals and institutions knuckle under to the Mob, who’s going to help the rest of us stand firm?

How about Trans Godzilla? Jude Doyle at Xtra Magazine playfully explores the monster’s many gender possibilities. A gem in this article is the link to Cressa Maeve Ainé’s “Coming Out,” a stop-motion short in which a Godzilla couple affirm their child’s transition.

For more trans joy, read the story “Circles, Triangles, Squares” by Charlie Sorrenson at Electric Lit. My favorite part is towards the end, where the narrator realizes that mutual oversharing isn’t the same as a trusting friendship.

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