The horrors persist

But so do we

Friends, it’s been a week. (A couple of weeks, honestly, but I’ll get to that.) My heart has been broken and then knitted back together, broken and knitted, over and over again.

The breaking, I probably don’t need to illuminate for you at length. Like many of you, I hope, I’ve been pushing back for months against the GOP budget bill that cleared the U.S. House of Representatives for the second time yesterday. Watching Republicans gleefully celebrate the passage of legislation that will kick 17 million people off their healthcare, tear food assistance away from millions of poor children, cause rural hospitals to close, and elderly people to be unable to afford care, all to fund tax cuts for the rich and an explosion of Gestapo-like immigration enforcement guts me. I want to say that it’s “not who we are”, but that would be willfully ignoring our country’s history.

As Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Rev. Dr. William Barber Jr. of the Poor People’s Campaign wrote just this morning:

As bad as things are, we cannot forget that others faced worse with less resources than we have. We are not the first Americans to face a power-drunk minority in public office, determined to hold onto power at any cost. This was the everyday reality of Black Americans in the Mississippi Delta for nearly a century after the Klan and white conservatives carried out the Mississippi Plan in the 1870s, erasing the gains of Reconstruction and enshrining white supremacy in law.

And nearly two hundred years before American heroes like Fannie Lou Hamer took the fight for democracy straight into the middle of the halls of power, the Declaration of Independence was issued to fight back against the tyranny of kings:

We have always been, in these United States, a project in process. A project that has often betrayed its stated ideals. A project that, like any garden, any family, any creative and never-before-seen endeavor, must be tended. That many of us looked away long enough to let the foxes take over the hen house under the mistaken impression that what we had gained could not subsequently be taken away again isn’t exclusively a personal failing. We were encouraged to do it. Encouraged to believe in American exceptionalism, even as we were also encouraged to see the poor as undeserving, people of color as sub-human, and women as endless sources of reproductive and emotional labor.

Even now, through book and curriculum bans, we are encouraged to ignore the realities of our history to stroke the egos of white men.

And we are actively discouraged from building communities of resilience, resistance, and care. Which, ironically, is what the Declaration of Independence called us to do. It concludes, “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

So, that’s what we’re going to do, friends. We’re going to pledge our lives and fortunes to each other. We’re going to commit to the communities we can touch, love, and impact positively and continually. We’re going to support and protect each other.

And we’re going to live. We’re going to read poetry and tell jokes and make art, host potlucks and dance parties, fall in love with people, our children, and the land we walk on. We’re going to be grateful for the Earth, which is the most direct and concrete evidence we have of providence.

We are not going to shuffle meekly towards fascism. We’re going to make them labor for every inch of ground they steal. We’re going to be joyful and defiant, strategic and united.

And we will win. Not forever. That’s not how this project works. But we will fight the fights that are ours to win, and pass the resources and love we manage to accumulate onto those who will fight after we are gone.

Speaking of those who will fight after we are gone, of hearts being knit back together, of family and resilience and communities of care, I was not here last week because my baby graduated from high school.

My mom came for the week, cane and all, riding the ten-hour bus from D.C. to Ithaca. And my best friend, and my bonus kid, and my son and his partner, and my baby’s partner, who was also graduating. The troops assembled, y’all. A joyful love army. It was glorious.

I have never had the feeling, not even when I was still married, of having my birth family, the people I had chosen, and the people I was lucky enough to have birthed coming together with unbridled love for each other. If you have had that experience, imagine, if you will, living well into your fifties without it. What a wild revelation it was, watching my best friend of forty years talk animatedly with my mom for hours. Watching my grown, genderqueer kids and their partners be loved on unabashedly by my mom, and loving her in return. Watching my kids show up enthusiastically for each other.

Feeling all of them gathered around me, loving me and the life I have built, in which we all get to be exactly who we are without shame or hiding, or bartering for love.

What a miracle my life is. How absolutely brimming over with love, which, I’ll admit, is mildly disorienting when I look out at the malice that seems to increasingly pervade this country’s policies and politics. How can my country be descending so rapidly into hell while my life is the best it’s ever been? How?

But, I have to believe that is the great gift of this moment. The opportunity to catalog our resources and love, and then pour them back out onto those around us. To remind ourselves that we built all of this, the suffering, but also the joy. So, what will we turn our hands to now? More suffering or more joy? More separation or more community?

I choose joy and community, and you. I pledge to you my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor.

Happy Fourth, loves.

XO, Asha