Murmur In The Night
Last night was the hardest day for me…I finally got home, I was praying at night, I said, ‘You gotta keep praying for him, you gotta keep praying for him. Maybe there’s some hope.’
—Nancy Pelosi, January 7th, 2021
These are the hardest ones for me personally. The ones that grow darker and chillier concurrently. The ones that shorten by a minute each afternoon. It will be cold from now until May, and I will complain about it, just like I did when it was eighty-five degrees in October. It shouldn’t be sweltering in New York in October! Understand, it isn’t that I can never be satisfied; it’s that I can rarely be satisfied. If I could never be satisfied, I’d get used to it and stop complaining.
But they throw us a bone every now and then.
The humidity will be low, the sun will be warm, the light in the late afternoon will be soft and forgiving, and some district judge will have reversed or halted or enjoined some excruciating action, some previously only before-seen-in-nightmares or movies or far-away-country scenario. Every now and then, between the rash of horror, a judge who believes in the laws they studied and the oaths they took will say:
NO.
You must stop it now, you must cease. That’s illegal. Unconstitutional. You cannot do it anymore. Not here. Not in this country. And in the orgy of omnishambolic headlines shrieking from the ether, some kind of sense will be made. Against the lowering curtain of ever-earlier darkness, glinting like a diamond caught by a polaroid flash, my body will register something old and familiar, a blink of relief.
Relief from the men who rappelled from helicopters in the middle of the night onto a building in Chicago’s South Shore, where they fired flashbangs, broke down doors, terrified sleeping children, zip-tied, and then hauled unsuspecting humans out of their homes. Relief from the dragging of a young teacher from the daycare facility where she worked. Relief from the violent detainment of an Alderwoman whose crime was questioning an arrest warrant being served inside a hospital. Relief from the green-card-holding doctoral student researching Lyme Disease, who they kept for a week without access to daylight or legal counsel or anywhere to sleep in the basement of the San Francisco airport back in July, before shipping him to various ‘facilities’ around the country, premised on a misdemeanor pot-possession charge from 2011.1
Relief from the thousands of similarly diabolical stories they are systematically numbing us to, the ones captured by our cameras, the ones that presumably are not. Separation, abuse, heedless cruelty, intentional, irreparable trauma. Authored by our government, ghostwritten in our name.
And why?
Why is any of it happening?
Because hollowed out men have been suckered into cosplaying Stormtroopers by the walking id of an ex-gameshow host and his Santa Barbara-raised Goebbels-aspiring architect. Never forget that this stream of monstrousness is the vision of a man whose own great-grandfather immigrated to America a century ago, having barely escaped Imperial Russia’s pogroms.
The witless conscription of these attention-starved thugs. Agents of the mehstapo. Gator-disguised, grabbing anyone non-white or whose first language isn’t English from places of hard, honest work, from courthouses where they are meeting their legal obligations, from fucking hospitals where they are seeking treatment for everything from tuberculosis to giving birth. Believing one of the most facially absurd propositions I can conceive of, which is that the people who literally risked their lives coming to the United States want to destroy it.
The power of projection could fuel a medium-sized country.
And yet.
Still.
I am a binge drinker of hope.
I toss back anything I can find. I down the TV recaps and online clips, one after the other. Maddow’s reading of the cleverest signs. Pop-up protests in tiny towns. Footage of the throngs winding their way through city streets, purposeful and organized, fanning out like starlings, an opposition murmuring, No Kings across the land.
And so it was, I swallowed two weeks ago Tuesday in wide-eyed, thirsty gulps.
Do you remember two weeks ago?
Believe me, I know — it’s hard. But things happened that day, and they were…good?
Very good, actually.
I swear.
In Virginia and New Jersey, brand-new Democratic governors were elected, not only that, but LADY democratic governors, if you can believe. In Pennsylvania, three justices essential to protecting voting rights and defending against election subversion were retained. In New York, two Black women became mayors for the first time in the history of both Albany and Syracuse.
Two Democrats in Georgia flipped seats on a critical Public Services Commission. Gavin Newsom’s unapologetic effort to claw back effectively stolen ground via Prop 50, overwhelmingly passed in California. And, for all the calcified conservatism of the oft-dismissed deep South, Mississippi’s red Senate supermajority was overturned by way of three legislative seats flipped.
Turned ‘em blue. Just like that.
In Mississippi!
What went down in my hometown requires a whole separate piece, but as far as I’m concerned, it goes under the big hope umbrella that the billionaires who invested in one candidate’s last-ditch fear weaponization strategy, pitting vulnerable minorities against each other, were met with a fairly bracing defeat.
Why am I flinging all this precious font at you only to reiterate election results widely reported two weeks ago? Because, just like the last ten months of batshit bananas relentless insanity we’ve been forced to consume every second of each day, November 4th, 2025, needs to be accounted for. Placed firmly in the record. Not just mentioned passingly, but integrated.
Those results should remind anyone who’s felt flattened by the fever dream of apocalyptic grotesquery masquerading as a Presidential Administration that our nearly 250-year-old experiment in constitutional democracy isn’t fully cooked.
Not yet.
No matter the depth or darkness of the money. No matter the breadth or shamelessness of the propaganda. Proof was delivered that people don’t have to worship at the altar of someone or something to choose it.
Pollsters will tell you that the Democratic Party as a whole remains historically unpopular, and I’m sure that’s true. But, based on the level of electoral alchemy we just witnessed, it’s clear that the vast majority of Americans flatly reject what’s been laid before them by this equally sinister and stupid regime.
And, if the attendant buoyancy of those recent results had rippled out beyond the 24 hours your algorithm likely permitted, if you had been allowed time to metabolize the essential vitamins of hope your mind deserves, or to digest the nutrients of possibility your spirit craves, your body would absorb the following:
WE, the Majority of People, are NOT complete idiots.
WE, The Majority of People, are NOT foaming at the mouth bigots.
WE, The Majority of People, do NOT want our neighbors terrorized.
WE, the Majority of People, are NOT crazy.
The majority of people do not want this evil shit enacted in their name.
—
Gosh, I’ve never hated anyone, people will tell you. Hate is a very strong word, they’ll say, And, I mean. Okay. Sure. I don’t believe you, but okay. Hatred definitely doesn’t feel good, and it doesn’t help anything. But denying the existence of difficult feelings doesn’t typically turn out well, in my experience.
Nancy Pelosi announced her retirement last week. She’s 85, so yeah, it’s time.
But also?
The Affordable Care Act. The COVID relief package. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Dodd-Frank. Same-sex and Interacial marriage protections. Billions of dollars for HIV treatment, research, and prevention. Expanded health care coverage to include millions of children. The largest college aid buildout since the G.I. Bill. She led the fight for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Really, just to name a few. All in all, a breathtaking forty-year Congressional career, separate and apart from the groundbreaking first female Speakership, running her caucus with a deftness that was consistently both muscular and elegant.
The thing Pelosi said, more than once during the first term, about praying every day for him, and how it was never harder than on the night of January 6th? We’d learn a couple of years later, from her daughter’s excellent documentary, that when the Capitol was under siege, that is, the day of the 6th, Nancy said something else.
I’m gonna punch him out, I’m gonna go to jail, and I’m gonna be happy.
Nancy Pelosi taught me some things.
You don’t have to choose.
It’s both. Everything. All of it. At once.
Stand up from the table surrounded by henchmen and point your finger directly at the President.
Turn around and tell the person pretending to be a reporter, lying about your record:
SHUT UP.
Listen politely and then rip his hollow-hearted, mendacious speech up in front of the world.
Go back to the rotunda where they chanted your name. Go back to the Capitol they tried to raze. Back through the halls where they hunted you. Insist the votes are counted. Demand that the transition be made.
You can pray for people you hate. You can grieve for the loss of what’s gone while fighting for what takes its place. You can name the darkness while you slowly build a tunnel back toward light.
All of it can and, in fact, does exist at once.
Praying isn’t about pulse-lowering, although that can be a pleasant side-effect. It’s not about a Man in the Sky determining your degree of goodness — that is Santa Claus, and put some respect on his name. When I pray, anyway, it’s not religious. I do it to directly connect with the energy that preceded, will outlast, and forever entangles us. It’s a quantum conversation held in perfect confidence, a dialogue without any noise.
I pray for the bodies of the people I love to feel whole and well. I pray for the minds of those who are struggling to find clarity and ease. I pray for every sentient being to be at peace.
It’s simple, of course, to pray for the people I love.
The way of Pelosi is something else entirely.
You might be rolling your eyes. You may decide to unsubscribe.
I don’t know what to tell you.
Praying for people I want to punch is helping me survive.
The days will shorten by a minute for the next four weeks, and then they’ll flip back again.
Just like that.
The light we’ve been losing since the fourth week in June will start to get longer by a minute each afternoon. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, it will become brighter. By the end of January, you can see it if you choose to.
Listen to Nancy.
We’re in the night now.
Maybe there’s some hope.
As a result of ceaseless collective action, Will Kim was finally released from ICE custody several days ago.
Bravo. From across the Atlantic, I salute you. Brighter days will come and we will continue to shine a light through the current darkness.
That was the best article I’ve ever read here. Thank you so much for showing me exactly how I feel! I’ve recently gone through a transformative experience and ended up right where you’re coming from :)