by Lindy West
We canceled our plans.
The mural is spectacular, at the intersection of the two major arterials that carry drivers from fully gentrified central Seattle to quickly gentrifying south Seattle. Images of Black Panthers distributing food and registering black voters stretch forty feet along the sidewalk outside the high school, which is 93 percent kids of color. Portraits of Seattle Black Panther Party members stand defiant among pamphlets about COINTELPRO and swaths of West African wax prints. I asked her if they had treated the paint somehow to make it easier to remove graffiti. “No one would tag this mural,” she said. At the time of this writing, no one has.
I asked her what, if anything, they had been taught about the Black Panther Party at her old school, also a public school, only forty-five minutes away. “That they were terrorists,” she said.
The world feels really bad right now. If anything, obviously, attending a Bobby Seale teach-in at an underfunded public school in a city that is minting overnight millionaires should be a reminder that, for many people in this country, that “bad” feeling has been normal for a very long time. Donald Trump may be singularly jarring in his recreational cruelty and callous incompetence, but there has never been an America that is safe and just for black people. Ever. Trump was a foregone conclusion, an inevitable effluvient of the systemic rot in the deepest heart of the American experiment. Yes, his America is terrifying, but only the most privileged could claim that things were fine before or that a return to the “normal” of November 7, 2016, would be anything approaching justice. The problem with America is that we refuse to look at the problem with America.
Still, though, there is something about this moment—perhaps it’s David Attenborough finally hammering the reality of climate catastrophe into our lazy, avoidant little brains—that inspires a particular hopelessness, a contagious, nihilistic fatigue. Shit just feels weird right now. But standing in a high school cafeteria watching a hundred teenagers raptly raising black power fists, all sincerity, all determination, while eighty-two-year-old Bobby Seale calls them to remember the past, reminds them that others know the secrets of how to fight this battle because this battle is as old as this nation—that’s hope.
Activism comes so naturally to my girls. They are native to it. They are not afraid of sincerity. They’re at every protest, ones I haven’t even heard about. Sure, there’s a concomitant swell among young people on the right, of conservative kids encouraged by Trumpism to keep their parents’ prejudices fresh, to memeify cruelty, roast Priuses, and own the libs with their hats. But this generation wasn’t fed activism as a punch line the way I was, and as Trump emboldens conservative teenagers, my daughters and their friends aren’t cowed—they’re galvanized.
Think of sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg, whose stone-faced protest outside the Swedish Parliament in 2018 inspired student strikes in more than a dozen countries and made her a global voice on climate change. Thunberg, addressing the United Nations when she was just fifteen, told world leaders that they were “behaving like children” and said, “For 25 years countless people have come to the UN climate conferences begging our world leaders to stop emissions and clearly that has not worked as emissions are continuing to rise. So I will not beg the world leaders to care for our future. I will instead let them know change is coming whether they like it or not.”
Think of the Parkland mass shooting survivors, who, in the thick of unimaginable trauma, rejected the typical thoughts, prayers, and shrugs from their government—the blatant lie that there simply is no way to keep children from being slaughtered at school—and helped pass sixty-seven new gun laws in 2018.
Those kids were born after 9/11 into a fractured place. They didn’t get any quiet years, I guess, when, in many communities (not all, of course) the end of the world felt abstract and far away. Young people are here and strong and smart and fierce, and they do not intend to die. They are artists and scientists and leaders, and we just have to show up and fight for them, and with them, every day until we die. It is not their job to save us—we are the parents—but may they inspire us to help them save themselves. I feel afraid in this moment, but I do not feel hopeless.
In the auditorium, my stepdaughter takes the mic.
“They are scared when we march, they are scared when we sit,” she chants with disgust as her poem builds to its conclusion. “They are scared of the fact that we are tired of their shit. We are tired of the fact that we still have to fight for what the white man gets to call his inalienable rights. And it’s not how we fight, it’s that we dare to.” She takes a deep breath. “So we, as a people, will keep fighting, whether it’s peaceful or scary, until we reach justice by whatever means necessary.”
Tomorrow Is the First Day
The INS Building—formerly the US Immigration Station & Assay Office—processed all immigrants arriving in and departing from Seattle from 1932 to 2004 and has since been converted into low-cost artist studios. I have a little corner room there, which I inherited from a musician friend and share with another writer. A placard outside the wing where my office is located reads, “SOLITARY CONFINEMENT: The three isolation cells that occupied this corner of the detention dorm were original to the building. INS would isolate detainees who were disruptive in here, though they were often people with mental health issues.”
My mother, who still lives by a pregentrification (pre-Amazon-dot-com) mental map of which parts of Seattle are “seedy” and which ones are “safe,” often warns me not to walk to the train too late. The neighborhood, once a desolate industrial triangle nestled between Chinatown and the football stadium, is now bustling with tech workers and food trucks, though casualties of Seattle’s homeless epidemic still beg for help from the alleys. She needn’t worry either way. The building is a haunted place, haunted enough in broad daylight, too haunted to work till midnight.
My mom remembers her older brothers and sisters going to the INS Building with their dad maybe once a year, until they became naturalized citizens at eighteen. She was the sixth child of seven, the first born in the United States after her parents moved to Seattle from Norway in the late 1940s. She didn’t understand why her siblings got to go down to the INS Building and she didn’t, but it seemed special, a ritual they got to do with Dad. She felt jealous.
My extended family is beamingly, fawningly proud of our immigrant story: My great grandparents moved from Norway to North Dakota thanks to the Homestead Act, which offered “free,” “unoccupied” acreage to settlers willing to cultivate it, forcing native tribes off their ancestral lands to make way for huge waves of white immigration. When the Great Depression hit, my grandmother, then eighteen years old and the eldest of ten, was sent back to Norway with two of her little sisters to ease the burden on the family. There she married my grandfather, and the two eventually emigrated to Seattle. Those are the three branches of my family: Seattle, North Dakota, and Norway.
Some of my conservative family members occasionally post about politics on Facebook, as most of us do. I’ve seen anti-immigration screeds from these proud children of immigrants, regurgitating Trumpisms about dangerous migrants taking over “our” country. I’ve seen relatives decry the Standing Rock water protectors from their homes on land stolen and given to us—not an abstract “us,” as in white colonial settlers and their descendants, but literally us, literally our family.
In my office, where “disruptive” human beings were once imprisoned because they violated the Chinese Exclusion Act by seeking a new life on their own terms, I procrastinate by checking the news. In 2019, that meant reading a lot about Trump’s sadistic, symbolic border wall; Trump calling the mayor of London a “loser”; Trump not seeming to care that the country in his charge averages one mass shooting a day.
Maybe that’s the news today. Does it have to be the news tomorrow?
Diet culture is a coercive, misogynist pyramid scheme that saps women’s economic and political power, but there is one tenet I still hang on to: Every day is new. Broke
your diet and ate a Snickers1 today? Fine. Tomorrow is the day you start. You fail again, you start again. No matter how many times you fail, you can still start. Don’t let today swallow tomorrow.
I recently rewatched the 1978 Hal Ashby film Coming Home, starring Jane Fonda as a bored officer’s wife during the Vietnam War and Jon Voight as the sweet, angry, paraplegic veteran who captivates her—both in Oscar-winning turns. To pass the time, Fonda volunteers at a hospital for wounded veterans—a hospital for kids coming back in pieces, too poor to afford private care—and she’s shocked by what she finds: short supplies, shorter staff, poor sanitation, blood and urine on the floor, traumatized young men with nowhere to go. She runs to the other officers’ wives to tell them what she’s seen—we have to do something! They brush her off. That’s not really their thing. They don’t want to get their hands dirty.
That moment knocked me over, that moment in 1968, when the film takes place, when those veterans were still boys, when we, as a society, could have caught them and we didn’t. Americans love to overwrite their own memory—to remake cruelty as clumsiness, victims as perpetrators—but this wasn’t an accident. We knew we were failing them even then, and we let it happen. We chose it.
And we knew we were failing them still, ten years later, when Fonda and Ashby made Coming Home, and we could have started then, begun shoring up the damage done by the previous decade of inaction. We didn’t.
Coming Home is fictional, obviously, but those kids in the hospital existed in real life in hospitals all over the country. They’re old men now, and a good number of Vietnam veterans are currently without housing on the streets of San Francisco, Portland, New York, and Seattle, my city, a city absolutely thick with millionaires thanks to Washington state’s outrageous lack of an income tax. We, and they, couldn’t even have fathomed how hard we were going to fail them.
There is always a day, crystalline, tantalizing, diminishing behind us, that was just before the point of no return. When we knew, but we didn’t act. If only we could go back. Well, today is that day. Tomorrow is that day.
Tomorrow is that day if we start telling the right stories, start living in the truth, and holding the line even when it hurts—if the art we create reinforces the idea that we have the power to change all this if we choose, and that all people have the right to decide what happens tomorrow.
After Trump was elected, when people found out that I write political columns for a living, they’d often say something like “Trump must be great for business! Plenty to write about!” Um, yeah, it’s great. I love it. In this moment, it seems as though there is more noise than ever before in my lifetime—more atrocities per minute, more scandals per second. It can feel difficult to know what to say. Because if there’s one perversely welcome side effect of the Trump era, it’s that everything is on the table.
I used to think of my job as digesting the news, digesting the chatter, then saying what still needed to be said—whatever hard truths people were avoiding or invisible biases they were overlooking. What is different now—in this moment, as we try to decide where to go after Trump and how much we are still willing to let them do—is that we have finally managed to name so many problems that were so long in shadow. We know that lax gun laws turn male rage into massacres. We know that we have about ten years to mitigate irreversible, catastrophic climate disaster. There is no longer any pretense among the intellectually honest that the people who have enabled this president’s rise to power are anything but a white supremacist organized crime network and its willing dupes. It’s increasingly clear that borders are ghoulish.
As the 2020 campaign kicks into gear already—sooner than I am ready for yet not soon enough—I have been thinking of 2016, of the time before.
In the last days of that campaign, my husband said to me, “This election is part of the Civil War.” On Trump’s inauguration day, my friend Tracy Rector, an Indigenous activist and filmmaker, wrote on Facebook, “The slave masters have taken control.” Those who believe that straight white men have a mandate to burn the rest of us as fuel, to sell us for parts, to mow us down and climb up the pile, never truly conceded that war. They have been biding their time, and this is their last great gambit. But I live in the America that won—the America with art and empathy and a free press and fierce protest to dig out the rot. The truth is our power and our craft.
We’ve won this war before, and we will win it again.
Tomorrow can be the first day.
The witches are coming, but not for your life. We’re coming for your lies. We’re coming for your legacy. We’re coming for our future.
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1 GOOD FOR YOU! THOSE ARE GOOD! IT IS OKAY TO FEEL PLEASURE!
Acknowledgments
This book would not exist without the brilliance and unflagging support of Rachel Dry, Gary Morris, Samantha Irby, Amelia Bonow, Guy Branum, Angela Garbes, Lauren Hoffman, Martha Plimpton, Mary Ann Naples, Mauro DiPreta, Michelle Aielli, Jason Richman, Krishan Trotman, the Shrill TV team, the Hachette Books team, all my precious bros, Musashi’s, Dough Zone, Canton Wonton House, Vientiane Asian Grocery, Beard Papa, SweeTarts, Dill Pickle Spitz, Coke Zero, Diet Coke, Coca-Cola Classic, coffee, water, milk, whipped cream, and my dear family: mom, dad, Charley, Penelope, Ijeoma, Jacque, Basil, Susan, and Ahamefule J. Oluo most of all. Words are inadequate to express my thanks. Not a single all-nighter was pulled during the writing of this book, and for that I thank myself. Maybe people really can change.