Where Does Your Love Lie?

Trans Voices In Trump's America #4

As fascism continues to encroach into the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives, many of us will try and bargain with it to survive. Those in the imperial core, regardless of privilege, have thus far been spared capital’s most ruthless violence. Many are now, for the first time, staring at the sober reality that they face the same violence that their government has exported to innumerable people around the world.

Bargaining takes many forms. For some, it will look like siding with fascism and adjusting principles as necessary in order to avoid immediate destruction. For others, it will look like taking what meager resources they have and fleeing to another country that isn’t America. Others still will believe that the system that has produced this outcome can be salvaged and reformed, and continue to cling to the very institutions that failed them.

What you must realize is that there is no bargain with fascism that keeps you intact. The compromises that must be made to bargain with it require disowning and disavowing critical empathetic facets of identity. Bargaining may preserve you physically, but will kill you spiritually.

In these times, you must investigate where your love lies. As fascism continues to divide and target us, it will be tempting to give up on solidarity to save yourself. If your love lies with you and those few that give you personal comfort (friends, family), you will find that love limited and hollow. A life spent physically intact, watching passively as others are destroyed in ever crueler and haunting ways, will leave you irrevocably damaged. What limited love you have for self-preservation will not be enough to comfort you through the horrors ahead.

We have been taught since birth to think of ourselves as individuals, separate from each other and the natural world. Fascism preys upon this individualistic attitude to undermine solidarity and fracture resistance. If you’re looking for comfort, you must realize that your love must lie outside yourself.

For me, my love lies with all life on earth, who are all my siblings - the maples, the oaks, the birds, the fireflies. It lies with the beautiful humans who reject fascism, at home, around the world, and all of those who came before us.

To have my love lie in such an expansive way means internalizing that I am part of a casual chain of life on this planet. It means acknowledging and honoring my ancestors, both human and every permutation that came before, who struggled so hard so I may experience the present moment, as horrifying as it is.

It means accepting that I will likely die sooner than I’d like, but understanding that death was always the end state. If my love exists outside of my own individualistic hedonism, that gives me far more hope than if my love is constricted to only myself.

The hope that stems from such an expansive network of love, helps me face the current grim reality. If my love exists beyond myself, then I can look further and feel deeper. Beyond the horizon of my own self-interest and self-preservation, lies a future where humanity finally accepts their place within the natural world. Looking into the distance, I can see that fascism always dies out, that it always will pick a fight with an enemy it cannot defeat, and without a liberal hegemony to reinstate itself after fascism’s fall, the world will heal and enter a new age of social and ecological harmony.

I grieve over the fact that it is very unlikely I will see such a world. But what sustains me is being a part of making such a world come to fruition. Building my foundation around a project of solidarity gives me far more strength and resolve than if I were to build a foundation around the myopic project of “live as long as you can, no matter the cost”.

The work that’s required to make such a world doesn’t look like groveling or backstabbing or fleeing or hiding or rationalizing horror after horror after horror. It looks like accepting my place within the course of human history. It looks like being selfless and bold. It looks like showing up for all of my comrades who are scared. It looks like holding space in my heart for all the creatures of this world, even though the threat of violence continues to close in around me.

Doomerism is the last vestige of liberal thought and values. Doomerism presupposes that a better world is not possible, and because it’s not possible, it’s okay to sit on your hands and wait for death - just try and make yourself comfortable, because hey, it’s all fucked anyway.

This is the same line of thinking for the current phase of climate denial. It went from, “Climate change isn’t happening” to, “Okay it’s happening, but it’s not human caused”, to “Okay, it’s happening, it’s human caused, but now it’s too late to do anything about it”. All of these are efforts to make sure nothing changes, so those in power don’t have to give up control.

Both of these lies exist solely to benefit those in power and work to disconnect us from our environment, our communities, and even ourselves.

You’re welcome to watch your neighbors contort themselves into pawns for fascism while they pick apart your other neighbors who are the enemy of the day. I, however, can’t sit by passively. It’s far more uncomfortable to sit in the anxiety of inaction, wondering if I’ll be next on the list, hoping that if I’m just quiet enough and unnoticeable enough, I might be spared.

All the life that came before me so that I may be here now, speaking to you in this moment, wanted to live. That life wanted me too, to live. And if I am to honor that, I have to accept that moving forward, “living” cannot be passive. Because there is little life lived in watching everything you’ve ever known and loved and cherished taken from you, bit by bit, all because you valued the possibility of seeing tomorrow over the possibility of seeing a future.