Reverse Triage
Arrows In the Dark
"Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?"
—George Orwell, 1984
FREEZE
I realize not everyone reading this lives in the US, and if you don’t, hey, big ups, congratulations, and also, will you marry me?
Because, I mean….
Hoooooo boy.
The last two months.
Right?
The last two months have been…a lot. Like, arguably the most? Certainly the most all at once in my lifetime. And, yes, I know it’s by design. Pickled Liver McFourShirts flood-the-zone theory of information warfare went into full effect on Day One.
The truth? In considerable measure, it worked on me.
By turns horrified, grief-stricken, enraged, sometimes numb, often disbelieving, frequently paralyzed, I’ve had to turn every device off, look away from each screen, and lie down long before it’s supposed to be time for bed on more days than I care to count. The cursor of this laptop blinked at me like the lone flare on a blacked-out interstate, redirecting traffic away from the fiery wreckage of some forgotten civic road. Rough beast slouching heedlessly around my hippocampus. Cortisol swimming with the blood-dimmed tide. Gyre so wide the falcon could not hope to hear the falconer because the falconer has a worm carcass rotting in his brain, which would be fine if that brain were not placed in charge of our entire healthcare apparatus.
Meanwhile, my apartment is extremely clean. The multi-step skincare regimen I conduct is done with military precision. Even the three-day fugue of chills, muscle pain, and narcolepsy after a second Shingrix dose was preferable to fashioning something legible out of whatever shambolic shitscramble this season of America is.
Violent explosions coming from all corners. They could be fireworks or bombs, gunshots, or cars backfiring; it all sounds the same. Nerve-splitting.
They come again and again.
And then, again.
The Environment. The Foreign Aid. The Universities. The Institute For Peace. The Medical Research. The Trans community. The Department of Education. The Veterans. The Libraries. The History The Rule of Law.
Not just the groups, the offices, the data, the departments. For years now, they’ve been coming for the very words themselves. Meaning hijacked in plain sight.
Diversity. Equity. Inclusion. Asylum. Efficiency. Entitlement. Criminal. Patriot. Traitor.
Freedom of Speech.
He frees terrorists. He sells a swasticar from the White House Lawn. He seizes the Kennedy Center like a spoil of war. He detains actresses and deports doctors.
It doesn’t stop.
FLIGHT
Sometime last month, after whatever mind-melting craven abuses of political power had occurred that day, I texted one of my oldest friends that I felt—I mean, really felt—like I had to get out. Without missing a beat, he informed me he was about to formalize his Czech citizenship. To which I responded:
Hold the fuck up, cuz, can I do that too?
I called him cuz because Jon is my seventh cousin. Despite our 46-year-long friendship, legit kinship was a very recent and goosebump-inducing discovery, given that he and I had been pretending we were cousins for decades. A pair of dark-haired, lanky Jews with a surplus of early existential angst and a mutual loathing for the demon weed that is cilantro, growing up, people would tell us we looked like siblings often enough that we began saying no; actually, we’re cousins. We found this funny. Or comforting. Maybe both. Either way, it was a sustained invention.
Until it wasn’t.
In case this isn’t clear—it had escaped me almost entirely until Jon explained it—if a person can document ancestral citizenship in any of the countries belonging to what is now the EU, said descendant can potentially claim their own.
Which is to say that though one might not currently be burning with desire to move from Wall Street to Warsaw, one might find themselves compulsively googling housing prices in Vienna, Copenhagen, or the Northern coast of Portugal, and the permanent transition to any of these locales could be a lot more realistically achieved were they already a citizen of, let’s say, the Czech Republic or Poland.
An imaginal portal opened in which I lived a new life ensconced among olive groves, traipsing the cobblestones, traveling by train between cultural cul-de-sacs under an umbrella of universal(ish) healthcare before confirming through a lot of furious research that I had flunked every outside citizenship possibility on both sides of my family, including the one that connects Jon and me. Turns out, all of my great-grandparents left their respective Austro-Hungarian enclaves before 1920, which, yes, I do realize is chief among the reasons I have the luxury of sitting where I currently do, wondering why in the fuck I ever thought starting a Substack was part of a realistic life plan.
The point of telling you all this?
To emphasize the blood-chilling fact that a middle-aged Jewish woman (ME) in the year 2025 tried with all urgent seriousness to figure out how she (again, ME) could escape the roiling tide of autocratic terror that made incontrovertible landfall nine weeks ago on the shores of her freedom-promising, more perfect-union-seeking nation of birth, for the comforting banks of Eastern Europe. You know, the place where, around eighty-five years ago, the inhabitants of her mother’s father’s grandfather’s entire Polish town were slaughtered by Nazis.
Because evidently, that’s how long it took for the United States of America to execute a moral and constitutional backflip off the uneven bars of Democratic republicanism so dizzyingly complete that Olga Korbut would herself be in awe.
FAWN
In Chapter 5 of Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen explains that if Alice should want any jam to go along with her bread and butter, it may be acquired every other day. That is, yesterday or tomorrow. But not today.
Never today.
Shortly after this information is conveyed, the White Queen screams in pain until she pricks her thumb, at which point she stops.
Alice then learns of the King’s Messenger, who is being jailed for an offense he has yet to commit. When Alice objects to the seeming injustice of this, the White Queen insists that to have been prevented from committing a crime before it occurs rather than waiting until after is justice. Hasn’t Alice herself learned from her own prior punishments, the Queen demands? Alice allows that while she has learned by being punished, the lesson is not to do again the thing she shouldn’t have done.
The White Queen is addled. Shrill. Hysterical even. Still, she persists. Having never done criminal things at all, wouldn’t that always be the preferable outcome?
Logic captured. Time’s arrow reversed.
Laws written backward held up to a mirror inside a dream.
FIGHT
For the first few weeks, I couldn’t watch anything, and then, one night, the remote found its way back into my hand, hovering over Rachel’s face. Calling her back to me like an angel I’d cast out of paradise along with the rest of them. Chris. Joy. Ari. Nicole. Even Lawrence. The ones who, when I’m taking less personal responsibility for my own hopium-drenched delusions, I blame for perpetuating the inexorable myth of Kamalot.
Maybe it was liberal muscle memory that allowed my fingers to squeeze the Roku that night and, for the first time since November 5th, watch the A Block that begins each Maddow hour. The twenty-minute monologic prelude traditionally involves some obscure historical event or character or combination thereof, the relevance of which gets woven loop-by-rhetorical loop to the current moment by way of her virtuoso tele-loom.
But the night I tuned in, she was doing something different. Her lens was trained on protests springing up across the country. At Town Halls. In front of Tesla. At State Capitols. Outside Departments where Elon and his pasty-faced code-trolling meme-lords maraud. She featured people, all types of people, using their voices, resisting what’s being broken, and demanding that it be fixed. Parlaying the value of her precious prime-time real estate to acquire the most valuable political commodity that currently exists, Rachel took our gaze and turned it toward what is possible. Not sometime, way back when.
But right now.
HEAL
Maybe I’m not the best person to judge what counts as sane behavior, but everything I’ve studied and practiced in the realm of mental health as an effort to preserve my own for the better part of the last thirty years suggests the instinct of lying down, turning things off, becoming very still in the first few weeks of all this wasn’t madness.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
It was a rational response to an intentional firehose of overwhelming cruelty being sprayed at any moderately conscious being’s brain every hour of every day. It was, and it remains, somatically intelligent for an empathic system encountering enormous distress not only to themselves and to their loved ones but to the observable collective, to shut down in the face of it.
It was a trauma response.
Trauma responses are, by definition, adaptive. They are functional. They are evolved.
But the thing people often neglect to understand about the nature of trauma is that it has as much, if not more, to do with what occurs immediately after the event itself. To paraphrase various people with PhDs:
Trauma is when something that shouldn’t have happened does, and then something that should have happened doesn’t.
In this time of immense, near-constant shattering, this daily, even hourly overwhelm, how we meet each other and the ways we tend to all that’s being torn apart matter as much, perhaps more, than any overtly political response.
Acknowledging out loud as often as necessary that this all feels very, very bad, and truly scary, and deeply wrong is SANE behavior. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Hope is a discipline, and joy is required. Self-love is necessary. Tenderness for the parts you’re so used to quieting. Forgiveness for the things you did or didn’t do in order to survive.
Hearts are only broken when they’re perpetually denied.
Jon’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather’s brother’s son’s son’s daughter turns out to have been my Great-Great-Grandmother.
When I told him that the route to our common ancestor overwhelmed me, shutting down my ability to make sense of the actual connection, my cousin patiently explained that it was simple, really. Like traversing a tree:
Up and up, over to a sibling, then back down again, he said.
I thought about how my own healing has been like this. How progress is never linear.
How wings we grow now might fly distant family from future darkness.
That the arc of morality may be less of an arrow, and more like a spiral.
Take care of yourself, and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn but is still being woven and mended and washed.
—Rebecca Solnit, 11/5/2024
I’m so proud to be your friend and cousin and I just love this piece! xxoo
Amanda has given the world an incredible gift on HER birthday