If The Smoke Clears

The air quality in Portland is 502 today.

I have no idea what that means scientifically, but I can tell you that it feels apocalyptic.

I am in a state of mind somewhere between heartland stoicism, urban investigative curiosity and coastal denial. I follow the air quality numbers like a day trader on coke, yet I do not look out the window. 

Not that I could see anything if I did look out the window. No visibility. All smoke. Fire. Covid. Racism. 

That night, a million years ago, when Trump won, my son Zach said to me on the phone, "Well, democracy is over." And I told him that he was being an alarmist.

If he was, he comes by it honestly. Alarmism runs in the veins of a few of our family tree's leaves. During the pogroms in Russia, it worked for us because it got us the hell outta there. In the 21st century, however, with no pogroms from which to flee, the alarmist siren in me tends to go off at somewhat less urgencies. Like when I run out of vanilla coffee creamer. Or I lose my phone.

Until now.

Yesterday, I was talking to Zach on the phone and I apologized for calling him an alarmist that election night. I said, "but, fuuuuuck, did you ever think it would be this bad?"

He answered, "Yes. What do you think fascism looks like?"

And I looked out the window.

Fascism is not just a word or an insult or an easy way to describe authoritarianism. Fascism, I see now, is a breakdown of everything. No safety net. No one answering phones in federal offices. No prisoners to fight the California fires because the prisons are Covid incubators because the Republicans in power aren't doing a damn thing about the pandemic. Fascism is no response from the motherfucking president when the Oregon governor calls him over and over again, needing relief for our state. Which is unlivable right now. We are choking over here.

I have never felt so expendable in my life as I do today.

Fascism is not orderly like a parade of goose-stepping brownshirts; it's chaotic. It's right-wing vigilantes stopping evacuees in their cars because they believe that antifa is starting the fires here and they - ignorant, crazed, armed - have given themselves the power to search us for suspicious items in our cars.

So, no, Zach was not being an alarmist. He had read history. 

And it breaks my fucking heart that my child, my children, your children, all of us are seeing it all play out in 2020. I hope we understand that the unraveling didn't start in 2020, however. Or in 2016. Or before that. Unraveling is a slow process, requiring patience and strategy. It can fly under the radar until it's nearly complete.

November is around the corner and now, so many displaced West coast residents from the fires, I worry how those people will vote. How will they get their mail-in ballots? This just adds to the plethora of voter suppression tactics going on in the country.

Fascism.

And I am against it.

I am ANTI fascism, you ugly knuckle-dragging, uneducated, spittle-spewing, unAmerican, puffed up, wanna-be action figures with accessories sold separately.

Being against fascism is the most American thing a person can be.

So when the smoke clears - if the smoke ever clears - and I can return to being terrified and enraged by the fact that there is a runaway pandemic over us, that babies are still in ICE jail, that black lives still do not matter, that our natural resources are still in peril, that education is still being Betsy'ed to death, that our social infrastructure is still cracking under the federal leadership of hate and greed, well, then I am going to go outside (wearing my mask. Because God is not going to protect me from Covid. God is so over all the asinine declarations about Her works. The one where the MAGAs credit Her for bringing Trump to them has really pissed Her the fuck off), and start screaming again.

Louder this time.