For Tomorrow
Terror, past and present, and how we might now face it.
How are you?
Breathing feels difficult this week, and it felt difficult the week before that as well. It has felt hard to even think straight, imagining the kind of pain ripping through families across the country right now.
To be a whole 26-years-old feels like a privilege today, not even a right. It makes me think of another privilege, of a sunny day spent in Barcelona at the famous Sagrada Familia, a basilica by Antoni Gaudi that is the truest definition of enchanting. It is considered to be unlike any other church or architectural building in Church history. It feels like a place God could visit.
We had previously trotted through a number of imposing, darkened cathedrals by this point. But this building was alive and jubilant with natural light and fantastical shapes. Walking through, it continually inspires a different kind of awe. There are details of snails and people and leaves so small you gasp when you find them. The stone walls are alive, crawling with animals on one side, tortured and in skeletal agony on the other. The doors pulse with handcrafted foliage of iron or the divine names of Christ in various languages. Everything in this building matters, and it is clear in a thousand, beautiful ways that everyone is welcome to find life here.
Construction for the Sagrada Familia was started in 1882 and it was in many ways built by the people for the people, as it didn’t enjoy the kind of financial and political backing given to similar projects. This makes sense, as it is utterly singular in its construction and design. When I was there four years ago, tourists swarmed below, with an army of construction workers above. We watched as they methodically hoisted various objects and stomped about in construction boots. I was not prepared for this. I didn’t know the building wasn’t finished! I had been on the verge of tears since arrival (which one friend says doesn’t mean anything since I cry at everything but it was that glorious). But Gaudi, dead since the year 1926, finally got me and my tears halfway through our tour. We were told that this man had a beautiful vision for this place of worship and peace, that he sketched it out with care, ran into zany obstacle after obstacle, and spent his entire life on this work he damn well knew he would never finish.
I was supposed to write something else this week, but I find myself fixated with -of all things- the Sesame Street social media team, and the way that the account has been pouring out the same kind of posts for the last couple of years now. Advice to parents about how to comfort their child after a shooting. Reminders that no one is alone. Slides on how to belly breathe through the anxiety that comes with living in a country where young men are free to live out their terrorist fantasies, unchecked. I wonder how many more iterations of the same message Sesame Street has to keep frantically broadcasting, attempting to coax American children into relaxing one more time, until the next time.
I think about all the people who stand around the sites of these tragedies. How they hold their heads in their hands and reach out in anguish for the strangers next to them. Or this week, how parents were attacked and screamed at by the police when the police - our good guys with guns - did not enter an attacked school for an unaccounted hour. The multiple failures of duty, policy, of planning. How we have more or less accepted that we will always be outgunned and out planned by disturbed teenagers who countdown the days till they are legal to buy enough rounds and guns to kill hundreds of Americans at a time. It is either deeply unsettling or coldly numbing, steeling for the predicable violence we refuse to curtail, the unpredictability of who will be sacrificed next. We die so boys like the ones in Uvalde and Buffalo can do what they want.
We are supposed to accept that this is freedom and that we will pay for it with a percentage of our children and friends and family each year. That to implement any of the 8, data-backed safety measures that have worked around the world would spell the end of some God-given liberty. We are asked to imagine how horrible it would be to live in a country where 18-year-olds cannot arm themselves to the teeth and wipe out our neighbors in minutes. We are told that some terrorists should be watched, screened, infiltrated, and fought in billion-dollar wars, but not others with lighter skin and American passports. I have been asked to consider how we won’t be able to overthrow the US government if we have any kind of common-sense safety measures in place. Never mind that we long passed the point where ordinary citizens could go toe to toe with the US government in any long-term, meaningful way. We don’t each have the capacity to operate private military tanks and stealth drones and erect a surveillance system to rival the one our taxes built.
We all need breaks from information overload and what can turn into debilitating hopelessness, from mulling over the same kind of trauma in ways that burn everyone out and numb us into inaction.
But at some point, after we’ve drunk our water and called our friends to cry, rant, and tearfully watch Princess Diaries 2, the dots have to be connected if we are to break this very American cycle ( also, seriously: watching something sweet and kind for a break helps. Now is not the time to easy button out of your feelings).
I am supposed to be writing to you about Lee County, and a tragedy that took place a hundred years ago this week. I was supposed to write about the dots that we don’t connect in these historical attacks. I was supposed to ask you somehow to stretch yourself to witness one more tragedy and jump up and down about why it matters. I was looking for examples, for modern-day correlations that show how the unthinkable can become thinkable in a certain context. How there is an American context, a tradition really, for defending, protecting, and shielding young men who choose to violently unleash their rage and hatred on other people. I was supposed to write about how important it is to see and remember lynchings as terror attacks, here in Florida and across the nation, because when we remember and grieve we can acknowledge the fear, dignity, and resilience of generations of Americans. We can remind ourselves how easily we can lose our neighbors when we refuse to hold legal and social and community systems accountable for equal protection under the law.
13 days ago, I clicked off Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s excellent article A Most American Terrorist. I don’t know an appropriate way to describe someone’s deft, engaging piece about the making of a little White boy who armed himself with racist propaganda and a gun and killed nine Black people in Charleston. But the piece does something important. Rachel places a young White boy in this tradition of terror that almost everyone she tries to speak to would not acknowledge. The piece is uplifting, in that by remembering the pain of the victims and the survivors, by articulating an age-old hatred and entitlement, she resurrected that which the gunman could not kill. Rachel affirms the dignity of the community, the survivors, and the dead. Lynchings and shootings like these are attempts at snuffing out that dignity and humanity. They are last-ditch attempts to reassert a dying power over people you hate. Rachel reminds us that while the bodies of Black people have been available over the years for White people to desecrate and destroy, the dignity of Black people has never been on the table. When we memorialize and remember what many Americans refuse to remember, we acknowledge what can’t be taken. But the piece is sorrowful because the gunman is found completely, totally apathetic. And it is that apathy that wore me down. I was wary, and foolishly gave myself three days to reset.
That very next day, day one of my Break From Thinking About White Supremacy, a young White supremacist, legally armed himself for his personal war against Black people, walked into a grocery store and executed them. His terrorism was to operate on two levels of violence, and it worked. First, there is the violence against his immediate victims physically. The second level is the rest of us, the fear this instills in every Black and Brown person, or anyone deemed not White Enough for protection, all the people he, Tucker Carlson, and a host of Republicans have decided are “replacing” them.
And then we lost the children and two teachers in Texas to another young gunman days later.
To lose a child is some kind of unthinkable agony. To lose a child and know it was preventable, but for the policies that enrich a small group of people and a gun lobby organization is infuriating.
When I think about the parents of the dead today, I can’t help but think of the Floridian mothers of the 14 and 15-year-old R.J. Johnson and Milton Williams, two young boys lynched at the hands of a Lee County mob with zero accountability or protection from the Lee County police and judicial system in 1922. We find ourselves in 2022 struggling to remember this. We see that there is a sick Venn Diagram, this overlap between a police force tasked to police, but not protect, men who feel entitled to take other people’s children, and the apathetic political body that refuses to make changes to protect its people.
Where does one begin, in a page or less?
Racist terror and terror, in general, get a good chunk of their power from patterns. We who witness or endure it, feel a kind of stuck hopelessness, and helplessness. Siri Hustvedt says that perception first requires memory, and we perceive these acts through the memory of past subjugation and fear. The same kind of noose and guns. The same kind of victims. The same, tired manifestos of bitterness and hatred toward children, women, Black people, Mexicans, Girls Who Didn’t Like Them Back, or Fill In The Blank.
Anxious people like me are often told to remember and write down the Greater Purpose or The Goal and think about how the risks and the fears are so much smaller than the goal. That courage and a life of meaning are found by moving towards what you value and believe, in spite of whatever is in the way. If we can learn from and honor anything about the lives of Americans who have unjustly lost their children to acts of unmitigated terror, it is that we must let what we know deep down to be true about our own dignity and our neighbors be made greater than any failure of legislation or society. That we have to stop long enough to really grieve and memorialize them because our dead matter. That we do have it in us to still imagine a country where no one is made afraid, where data can inform our votes and protest and action, and where the general will of the American people prevails over the profits of a handful of any one corporate lobby. Amanda Doyle recently said that hope is a discipline we exercise through action and that so many of the seemingly impossible American freedoms we experience today were won through 100-year struggles. So, for those of us five minutes away from selling everything and moving to a snowy cabin in Geneva to homeschool our kids in the woods, let us think about great laws and battles won and rights secured, and basilicas built that took the slow, good work of a lifetime. To remember the ways different ethnicities in this country have struggled and died and lived and hoped. To continually let their memory propel us to participate in a democracy that has been and can be made more just and whole. To sketch out, for ourselves, a thousand different ways our children can live their whole lives here. It will take so much work. It will take so much discipline. Today we grieve. Yet “Tomorrow”, as Antoni Gaudi once said, “we will do beautiful things.”
Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action on this podcast talks about how we can support our kids mentally and physically, how Americans are not deeply divided, but overwhelmingly united on the issue of gun safety, and who is profiting from our current legislation.
This book by Dr. Emily Nagoski, Burnout, will change your life. Unlock the stress cycle, process your emotions, and live your life with more rest and peace. There is a lot to do, burning out and losing our collective minds doesn't help us or the kids.
You can help prevent shootings and learn how to do your part from the couch (and maybe one day in the streets) with this organization with Everytown.
Donate and support the families from the Buffalo and Uvalde community using some of these links as a launching point.
The Equal Justice Initiative Community Remembrance Project is a great resource to help you and your community remember and honor the people and places who were taken by lynchings and racial terror.
They also have an incredibly helpful lynching report that educates and informs that is a must-read.
We are still looking for a proper history and report for the children lynched in Lee County. Lee County officials declined the offer by EJI to put up a community marker for the Lynching Tree.
Please meet Ida B. Wells, who fought to expose the American lynching terror and remember the lives lost.
Some CDC information about shootings and Sesame Street resources to help kids through traumatic experiences
Take care this week, you matter.