What We Did While Fascists Roamed the Streets

We would wake up and reach for our phones to check our mails, offer codes and subscription notices, and newsletters summarizing the horrors that had transpired the day before, which we had learned not to read before bed.

We’d go to pee and think about what to pack for our kids’ lunch and share posts on our social media about what areas required visibility or invisibility from its residents, depending on the geographic coordinates of their birth, or perhaps their appearance.

We struggled to get our children to brush their teeth and we escaped into three pages of a novel while they watched some morning television and we begged them to put their shoes on so we could leave the house on time, the world carrying on with a schedule despite it all. We checked the weather because we had no idea what late October called for anymore, and we pressed our cheeks against our toddler’s, thankful amid the chaotic morning for the luck in our lives. There are much worse ways to press your cheek lovingly against your toddler’s, just beyond your door, in fear, in terror, shielding them not just from the hypothetical dangers of the world, but the real ones. How, how, how can people have this luck and not want it extended to others? Why is it a human impulse to want to hoard luck rather than share it?

Biking to daycare, we saw the ghosts of tear-gas, clawed-off stickers on lightposts, posters in storefront windows. We went about our jobs, sometimes with abandon, thankful for mundane tasks, for problems that were not existential in nature, did not threaten to snowball in our minds. We opened up social media to repost valuable information, then scrolled past ads, people creating content to give us all stuff to scroll past. We scrolled past videos of horrors, videos of people mocking horrors, ads, a funny cartoon, a sports highlight, horrors, content, memes, horrors disguised as content.

We limited ourselves to reading the words of government officials, lest the head-spinning lies force us to scream into a pillow again. We turned the televison on, thankful for art and entertainment and sports. This was a cowardly distraction from life and yet absolutely crucial in order to continue with the will to go to work, to build up some tolerance for the next day’s events. We had to pick which calamity to think about, and stories cushioned the blow these calamities imparted. Laughter to build up the spirit, emoitions other than rage and powerlessness.

We rummaged through the fridge trying to find ideas for dinner. We stayed strong and did not glance at our phones for an hour, knowing the havoc it wrought on our minds. Little match for the havoc the world itself was bringing to our doorsteps, but at least here we were in control.

We went apple-picking and to pumpkin patches and found joy and made necessary purchases, sat outside on nice days, peered into dark-tinted cars wondering if today was the day we’d have to face masked, unaccountable cowards who point guns at pregnant women and tear gas children and lie, and lie, and lie. We read lighthearted books when we went to bed, and begged our minds to be quiet in the time between setting the book down on the nightstand and blessed sleep. We signed petitions and we made donations to organizations in need, we bought stupid shit online and we took to the streets, sometimes to raise our voices, sometimes because we needed milk.

We thought about our luck and whether it would last, whether we were letting something slip through our fingers, this moment in time before things got worse, the opportunity to do more.

ICIRR