There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
— W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939
I felt the turn happen around 9 p.m. She wasn’t winning the counties she needed to win. The New York Times election tracker, which, a few hours before, had confidently projected her chance at victory at somewhere around 90 percent, now put the election at a dead heat. CNN didn’t have enough data to call Florida for Trump, but you could see, in real time, the faces of the Clinton surrogates on the network’s panel begin to sag.
It might have been different for you. For me, the experience was like watching the moral inverse of the moon landing. The polar opposite of that sense of wonder our grandparents felt as they as they rose from their living room couches, stunned by what their televisions had shown them, and went outside into that warm July night and looked up at the air-- sharpened blade of the moon.
Some time ago, the 20th-century poet W. H. Auden stood on the brink of the second World War and waited for the reasonable nations of the world to once again sprint toward horror. He understood, then, that all he had previously known — of literature, of history, of how one lives — was being evacuated out of reality through a hole in the sky.
He felt the world turn. That November night, stimulated and in terror, we, too, watched as the sky ripped itself open and a new world descended, howling and full of teeth.
...
I am a descendant of a Lithuanian rabbi. He immigrated to New York sometime before 1900, fleeing from anti-Semitic pogroms that, over the centuries, periodically terrorized and murdered Jews across the continent. Far from his ancestral home in Eastern Europe, my grandfather was raised in Brooklyn as an American citizen. He attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and became a sociology professor.
They were lucky that they arrived at a time when the American public wasn’t binging itself on Jewish ethno-hatred. Had my family waited a generation to migrate across the Atlantic during World War II, they may very well have been turned away at the dock by an America that held only disdain for Jewish refugees, an America that felt perfectly fine with sending them back to the gas chambers, an America that would rather send children to their deaths than be made, for a single second, to feel uncomfortable. (It shouldn’t surprise you that the Lithuanian Jewish community was virtually erased from the earth. America shares its shame for that.)
Our country’s current state isn’t just similar — it is, in a broader sense and in its particulars, exactly the same. Conflagrations between dictators have driven millions, on foot, across entire continents. Before the Muslim ban, (let’s call it what it is, huh?) tens of thousands were already making their way through complex and rigorous refugee screening processes, looking for a way out.
They waited, with gunfire at their backs, for the helicopters and boats to come and take them away.
And then, consciously and with purpose, the American need for comfort strangled its empathetic response. It bent each of us under the power of man who, under even the most lenient definition of personhood, is less a person than a loose accumulation of social addictions.
It was an act of boundless cruelty to give them hope.
…
I meet Kelly Villwock over a cup of evening coffee at Cool Beans. It’s nearly full, and the chatter around us hums at a steady pitch. The lights are on the fritz, sending the cafe into intermittent darkness.
For nearly two years, Villwock was one of the most ardent Clinton operatives on campus.
When we worked together at The Daily Gamecock, she would sometimes slip out of the newsroom during slow periods to make campaign calls.
On the night the sky opened up, she was at a party with friends who had worked with her on the campaign — some of the senior members of the USC College Democrats, mostly.
The night began as something of a celebration. And then it wasn’t. Some were crying over lost opportunities to work in D.C. Villwock lost something greater.
“I don’t think that I can call my abuela in Panama and say, ‘We’re the best.’ Which hurts. If you grow up and had any connection at all to the country, you have this sense of American pride. I didn’t know that I did, until this election. Until you see the possibility that everything is slipping away.”
…
Here’s a thought experiment for the young: Imagine yourself some decades into the future. It’s a bright fall afternoon and you are sitting at a kitchen table. You can hear, through the window, a school bus approach and screech to a stop. Seconds later, a child opens and SLAMS the front door closed, storms into the kitchen, shuffles a book bag off of their back and plops down next to you. You — parent of the year — ask them how their day at school went, and, curiously, instead of giving you some glib answer and speeding off, they sit down next to you.
“Dearest parent,” they say, “who has nurtured me and has cared for me throughout my short time on this planet, who has shaped the world in which I live, I was in school today and they taught us in history class about HISTORICAL EVENT. Where were you as HISTORICAL EVENT happened? What did you do about it?”
Now, this hypothetical has problems, sure. It assumes a great number of things about the person who entertains it (and has a whiff of emotional manipulation about the whole thing). But it is a useful, if blunt, way of putting yourself into history. Of removing yourself from the present, hurtling decades forward and looking back over a long distance.
I, myself, have run this simulation a couple times in my mind, and the question the hypothetical child asks changes slightly each time I repeat it.
The current state of the question is something like this:
“Dearest parent, who [etc.,] I learned in my history class about the election of Donald Trump. How is it possible that 27 percent of the voting populace cast their ballot for a man who boasted, to strangers and on tape, of pushing his fingers against the vaginal canals of young women without their consent? Who campaigned and was elected on a platform that spit on the most needful among us, who deserve, above all else, our empathy and support? How could he have been elected? What did you do about it?”
I don’t have an answer for this child-phantom (although, if I did, it would have something to do with how quickly the American public is to act unthinkingly and “really feel bad about it,” later).
More important than any answer, however, is the truth that sits underneath the hypothetical: that there are millions of soon-to-be people, who, cumulatively, represent the future of the world. We have elected someone who shares the mad, authoritarian belief that he will never die and, therefore, cares nothing for the future.
In his stead, it falls to us to do the thinking and acting on their behalf.
…
The protest ended 20 or so minutes before I got there. From what I could piece together from social media, the front lawn of the Statehouse had just hosted a hundreds-strong crowd in protest of the Muslim ban. Now the lawn stood virtually empty. A few dozen stragglers formed themselves into a line along the south of Gervais Street, one person deep. A few local PD and SLED agents stationed behind them, near the Confederate memorial. One was visibly bored, shifting pendulously on one foot, then another. Another was mesmerized by his phone and spent his time swiping horizontally and texting.
Fed with attention from the honking of sympathetic drivers, the demonstrators stood and smiled and waved their signs.
“No human is illegal!” “No human is illegal!” “No human is illegal!”
Soon enough, they dissolved back into the city, trundling off to their parked cars. The moon was a swooping crescent in the clear winter dark and, beyond the light pollution, one could find stars, too, if one chose to stand and look for them.
