All Curled Up
An appropriate reaction to the news of the day.
This article first appeared in Flaming Hydra, a creator-owned newsletter you should subscribe to.
I’m going to be moving subscriptions over to a more general newsletter in the next week or so. Civil Wars will still exist — more than ever — but I’m transitioning to a new personal business model where I’m not going to bother trying to cleave off separate interests and obsessions. (Check out anamariecox.substack.com for a bit more; I will be adding a bit more to your email overload as well. Apologies in advance.)
How does one know when one is done lying on the floor in the fetal position?
I had just gotten off a call with a friend who is a reporter for a large mainstream news organization. Our conversation had been serious but, you know, wonky. “How’s she polling here, is X type of voter being represented in the cross-tabs, what about the Taylor Swift effect,” etc. Then as we were wrapping up and agreeing that it was impossible to predict who would win, this: “I’m prepared. My kids have passports and I’ve talked to a Canadian immigration lawyer.”
Look, that wasn't the first time I'd heard someone remark on a possible escape plan if the wrong guy became president. Literally it wasn’t even the first time that day. But if every left-leaning person in the past twenty years who threatened to leave the country if the Republicans won actually left, this election would a lot be less close than it’s going to be. My friend’s revelation laid me low because my friend is not particularly left-leaning; my friend is just a person who has been covering politics for half a lifetime and was admitting to never having been this scared before.
I got off the call and melted down onto my dog’s bed. Then, perhaps before I was ready, I had another meeting to go to. I could bike to it, so I did.
My neighborhood in South Austin had been lurching ungracefully toward gentrification when interest rates exploded, halting that journey in mid-stride; my house is one of a handful of studiously tasteful flips, situated amid somewhat shabby rentals and colorful houses with elaborate yard art whose owners have just about finished paying off their mortgages. There’s a few Trump signs, and a lot more Harris signs, including homemade homages (one house has a painted sheet hanging off the porch); there are Halloween inflatables and lots of large fake cobwebs sticking to brick walls. There are some For Sale signs, eroded by months of summer sun.
My chest unlocked as I pedaled. “There’s a house I could go to. There’s a family I could go to. There’s a couple I could go to.” Breath. “The guy with the prosthetic leg and an Airedale terrier lives in that house.” Breath. “There’s a child in that house. I know that person. I know that person’s dog.” Breath.
Leaving the country isn’t an option for me. I doubt that it’s an option for even a few—if any—of my neighbors. I do not begrudge those who can. But for most of us, if things go wrong, our best bet is the opposite of leaving home: We might need to live closer to one another than we ever have before.
I know some of my neighbors, but not enough of them; I think there is a worst-case scenario to be considered, when either their lives or mine will depend on risking a knock on the other person’s door. But there’s a medium-case scenario that may unfold (or, since this is Texas, simply is unfolding): We won’t have to participate in an underground railroad, I don't think, anytime soon, but we will need to keep putting up holiday decorations and saying hi when we’re mowing the lawn even though there are atrocities on the news. (After all, there are always atrocities on the news.) That is not pretending that life is normal; that is providing a safety net for one another, for when life has become anything but normal. How do you know who is safe (in either direction) if you’re not asking, “How are you?”
On my way back from the meeting, I snapped a picture of a pumpkin sitting on a neighbor’s fence, painted green, hand-lettered with a lowercase “brat.”
Later I got on a Zoom call for people doing practical support for activists and/or people in crisis. I got hooked up with this organization after Dobbs, with visions of driving young women to the airport or delivering clandestine abortion pills. Instead, I keep showing up for trainings, and I keep not getting a call to go do heroic things, which I have chosen to interpret as a good sign. “We have redundancy after redundancy after redundancy,” one of the leaders said. The goal, the organizer said, is to plan for the crisis you don’t know to plan for.
Some of the training was about sexy hero stuff: Where to look for exits when things go south and keeping communications offline. “InfoSec” and all that, which is both easy to make fun of and a very real thing. As an example of keeping as much out of the public domain as possible, the training leader said those people who can get periods should not give the date of last period at the doctors’. “Just say you’re regular if you’re regular. We don’t know if authorities will be able to subpoena or otherwise access that information at some point in the future.”
But most of the training centered on an entirely different kind of preparedness and security. “Have you been to the playground lately?” the trainer asked. “Have you done shadow work or gotten in touch with your inner child?” Mantras can be helpful. The litany of fear from Dune, if you don’t know any other (“Fear is the mind-killer”). What do you do for fun? Who do you see when you need to talk to someone? What games do you play? How do you take care of yourself so you can take care of another?
Politics doesn’t disappear if you stop thinking about it, not even if you go outside and “touch grass.” To not think about politics is a luxury millions, even billions of people don’t have. If you are stressed about the election, may I suggest that the problem isn’t that you’re thinking about politics too much, it’s that you’re not thinking about politics enough.
Lying on my side with my hands tucked up under my head, looking at the dog hair and dust drift. Going to stay there for as long as I need to. But I will get up. We’ve got work to do.
Thank you.
Read this in Hydra, but good to read again, scary days