Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
When I was an undergrad, I can’t remember in what class or exactly why, we were invited to share our biggest fears. I don’t remember most answers at this point, 20+ years later—I don’t even remember my own answer—but one young woman’s answer surprised and has stuck with me all these years. When it was her turn, she quietly and very seriously, eyes cast down avoiding eye contact with her fellow students, said her biggest fear was her own capacity for cruelty. At the end of this first day post 2024 US election that is the sort of thing I’m struggling with most. Not that Harris lost but that so many Americans voted for someone and a party and a platform that is incapable of empathy, incapable of intentionally considering the limitations of their personal experience and resulting biases, incapable of truly embracing necessary change.
I did my biweekly update last week because I wasn’t sure what this week would bring. I am upset. I am angry. I am fearful. I feel betrayed. And I think there is a place and time for all of those feelings, but I know I shouldn’t hold on to this rage for too long. Here are a few things I’ve read that have helped me get through the day:
Last night, when things started to look particularly grim for Democrats, I put my phone down and started watching Donnie Darko instead. It was a random selection, found in the featured free section of our Roku. But it was a fitting thing to rewatch, set during the 1988 election when Michael Dukakis ran against—and lost to—George H.W. Bush. In one school scene Donnie offers his take on a short story they’ve been assigned to read, Graham Greene’s The Destructors. In the story a group of teenage boys destroys a house from the inside out while the owner is away and later locked in an outhouse, even burning a mattress stuffed with cash—his life savings—at one point. “‘We’d do it from inside. I’ve found a way in.’ [Trevor/T] said with a sort of intensity, ‘We’d be like worms, don’t you see, in an apple. When we came out again there’d be nothing there.’” And later on, mid-destruction: “Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators—and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become.”
Such cruel little boys. I’ve been thinking about that line all day—destruction is a form of creation—and how this must be how the other side feels today, that they must destroy the thing they think is broken in order to rebuild it. When all I see is a cruel little boy without a creative bone in his body who simply wants to blow shit up.
Anyway, back to art and stuff in the next week or two. After all, as Sister Corita Kent said, “doing and making are acts of hope.”