I am sitting in the little-used tiny room in our apartment we call "the spongy room," because of its loose old dark-brown carpeting and the way it feels underfoot.  There is nothing interesting in the spongy room, just some spillover kitchen gear and cookbooks, bottles of liquor, an old armchair, and a bicycle.  It's also cold.  Would it help if I noted that my browser is closed?-- the spongy room today is a critical retreat of sensory and information deprivation, desperately needed if I'm ever going to have any hope of writing or thinking something coherent this morning.

It's true that I still have "I can't keep quiet" running relentlessly through my head, as well as a succession of paranoid thoughts about exactly what dastardly plan has been concocted and is being implemented by (some subset of) Vladimir Putin, Steve Bannon, Rex Tillerson, Carter Page, Richard Spencer, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Alexander Nix and (maybe) Donald Trump.  On the other side of the scales there is an obsessive desire to keep looking for data and photos about a protest and impromptu march in which I personally participated yesterday.  Why?--I was there, I know what it was like.  Also-- and I know I'm not alone in this-- I'm thinking about some comments I made on Facebook-- whether they were wise, what people thought about them, whether they contributed to the conversation or were just a bunch of self-important BS.

The browser is closed, I won't look at my phone until this is finished, no one else is home, I don't have anyplace else to be.  But I still can't turn my brain off.

If conversations I've had with others over the past couple of weeks are any indication, we are all in this boat.  So much is happening that consuming news has become (in an immediately overused analogy) "like drinking from  a firehose."   Then, once you consume it, the pressure and obligation to act in response is immense-- but what should you respond to first, and how?  And, while you are beginning to consider action, the firehose blast of new material continues.  Meanwhile, there is also life to be lived, a life that increasingly seems like a trivial aside: going to a job, perhaps, keeping up with the kids' schedule, making dinner, doing the laundry, calling your mother and talking about something other than Donald Trump.  Reading a book published before 2016, in the Days of Irrelevant Yore.  These are all things that have to be fit into the interstices between fits of panic, outrage, and righteous action.

So, for a long time now I've been intending to write and think about how to create an activism schedule, or life balance, or however you want to put it-- some way to gain control back over my time and decision-making-- but ironically I have not been able to find the time to do so.  This, despite the fact that I have only a part-time job and my child is 15 and needs very little direct care and feeding.  There have always been urgent news to read, urgent calls to make to my senators about cabinet appointments, meetings to attend, protests planned and spontaneous... or, on the flip side of all this, a day here or there of total meltdown in which I check out entirely, eat potato chips, and block out the world.

I was going to write this post yesterday, but a major protest and then impromptu march arose downtown, near the White House, in response to Trump's new travel/immigration bans, and I couldn't bear not to be there, so I went.

The situation is dire.  It's great that, all of a sudden, we have an engaged and responsive citizenry, an army of people willing to act at a moment's notice.  But, on a collective level, we need to have enough opportunities to catch our breath that we can coordinate well-considered actions, not just reactions.  We also need to not burn out after a couple of weeks or months.  On an individual level, there's laundry to do, and your teenager wants to tell you about a test score they're really proud of. 

And this liquor isn't going to drink itself.

So-- and I am really asking this question, like, seeking answers-- how do you decide what to do, at any given moment?  I always have trouble with this issue, being a scheduler and a list-maker-- spontaneity does not come naturally to me.  But I'm thinking that maybe, right now, my natural lack of spontaneity could be an asset, something that could keep me from being entirely reactive 100% of the time.  I had some luck-- for, like, one week, right after the new year and admittedly before Donald Trump actually took office and started firing off presidential memoranda-- with a schedule that looked like this (on the days I do not work at the restaurant):

7:00am--12:30 pm  Ingest news and commentary (usually takes until 9:30-10 am).  Shower.  Spend a couple of hours calling congressmen, writing letters, and/or writing my own material.

12:30 pm--1:30 pm  Lunch break.  Read something that isn't news.  Like a book.

1:30 pm--dinnertime  Do Life things.  Try really hard to stay away from Facebook.  Go grocery shopping, do the laundry, errands, bills, cooking.  Don't check Facebook.  Don't.  Even email is shaky now that I receive 80 million action alerts and news digests in it.  Just life things.  And, oh yeah, exercise.

Eat dinner with my family, do dishes, go for a walk around the block with my husband, possibly watch a TV show that is not black comedy about news (possibly).  Now I can check Facebook, but not for too long, because I need to go to sleep at a reasonable hour.

Attend scheduled meetings, protests, volunteering, etc. as needed (probably a couple of evenings a week, plus occasional daytime commitments, usually known in advance).

Sounds like a pretty decent plan, right?  But, oh my God, it requires so much self-discipline.  I've had three big problems right off the bat.  1) It is hard to stick to ingesting news only once per day, when the constant barrage of outrageous activity from this administration (plus fascinating tidbits that seem out of a spy novel) mean that there is something shocking happening pretty much every second.  2) The pretty natural and universal addiction to checking social media to see if anyone has responded to me has now been invested with a whole extra veneer of urgency and importance, so that it is now possible to pretend to oneself that it matters how many people liked one's comment about Putin or the Women's March.  Hint to self: it still doesn't matter that much.  3) (perhaps an extension of #1)  In my 7-12:30 time slot, the news-gathering portion of the time has tended to slowly expand and eat up the action portion until it is all gone.  This kind of defeats the purpose.

All this has led to a fourth problem: quite uncharacteristically, I am finding myself committing to taking actions that I then don't get around to or forget about.  The list of things to do is just getting too long and unwieldy and living in too many different places (emails, calendar, Facebook, written lists, inside my head).  I really need to go back through everything and figure out a) what I said I would do that I still need to do, b) what I said I would do that it is too late to do, and c) what else is most important to do next.  In a block of time like this, where all other inputs are turned off and I don't stop mid-sentence to read the Daily Kos Elections email or the action steps in My Civic Workout.  People who keep recommending new activist tools to me, please stop.  You don't understand: I already have a problem.  I will love your new activist tool, and subscribe to it, and it will slowly crush me along with all the others.

So.  I want to hear your strategies, your problems and solutions, in as much detail as you are willing to give.  It is trivial and yet it is absolutely not trivial, because our lives and futures depend now on our being able to get it together and keep it together, to at least a certain degree.  How do you decide what to do and when to do it?  How do you know which ball to keep your eye on?  Do you spend time thinking about where you direct your energies?  If not, should you?

Please advise.
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And now I'm going to take a shower.

From the Washington Post: Donald Trump is holding a casting call.  He's seeking 'the look.'
​Got facial hair?  Inconvenient melanin?  Are you an unattractive woman?  You probably won't get cast in Donald Trump's D.C. reality show.

From the Root: Woman reports white man choked her son; Fort Worth, Texas police assault, arrest her instead
​Nobody died, but this video needs to be seen widely.  Warning: it's hard to watch, between the white police officer stonewalling the mother of the victim, the same man ultimately tasing her and throwing her to the ground and arresting her teenaged daughter as well, and the girl shooting the video (another family member, I believe) communicating her fear and outrage by screaming nonstop abuse.  All because the mother tried to report a white neighbor for physically disciplining/assaulting her little boy in her absence.

As I was preparing this morning to go to my lily-white safe space, that 10 am Friday yoga class that I missed last week due to work, and hence am attending for the first time since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, I thought to myself: "I don't know if I can go on doing this."
 
It's not a safe space because of its whiteness, per se.  It's a safe space because this is the culture of yoga teachers, to surround us with unconditional love and supportiveness, to encourage self-love.  It's a very feminine space.  Today, there were three men present, and they all stuck together in a rear corner.
 
All three men were white.  And all the women there were white.  The teacher was white.
 
I live in one of the most diverse areas of the country.
 
So, in my lily-white safe space, two things make me uncomfortable.  One is the monolithic whiteness, only rarely interrupted.  And the other is the idea of self-love, of self-care.  Who am I, privileged white bitch with an easy life, to give this to myself?  To allow someone else to caress me with soothing words?    What even is this feel-good crap?
 
And yet the breathing, the movements, the resting, even the chanting--about which I still feel awkward-- they do calm me.  It is a conundrum.
 
Do I deserve more calm?  After the election of a racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, xenophobic, tax-dodging billionaire and climate-change-denier, is more calm something to be desired?  If this mode of increasing calm is not available to everyone, is it something of which I should avail myself?
 
All fair questions.  As a white woman at this moment in time, I feel squeezed.  I feel squeezed on one side by white male and other Trump supporters who said, at best, No, white women, it is not your time, and-- at worst-- it will never be your time, you stupid fucking cunts.  I feel squeezed on another side by women of color who point out, over and over, that 53% of white women voted for Trump, that we are, as a demographic, traitorous or duplicitous-- and make it clear that this is what they always expected of us.   They seem disappointed but not surprised.  I feel squeezed by sadness that an eminently qualified woman lost the election, that the small progress we were making on climate change will be reversed, that we will lose progress on LGBT rights, women's rights, health care, criminal justice reform.  I feel squeezed by the conviction that my sadness is selfish, an undeserved luxury, the personal stake I felt in Hillary Clinton's election insignificant compared to the stakes of others.
 
Sometimes it feels as though, squeezed from all these directions, there is nowhere left to inhabit.  Even action, even activism, feels potentially self-serving, is regarded with suspicion from within and without.  Maybe rightly so. 
 
Under the circumstances, what do we do?  Help others, is one answer.  I've been trying to do more of that.  Listen, obviously.  Take care of ourselves?  Do we do that?  Should we do that?  Is yoga OK?  Cups of tea?  Naps?  How about shouting, is that OK?
 
One thing I've learned over the years of being a white woman: we are so self-hating.  Nobody can hate us more than we hate ourselves.  Many of us, if we could shrink down to the size of a pin, if we could disappear altogether, we would do that.
 
But that is a cop-out.  When I'm mad at my husband for doing or saying something sexist, and he retreats into self-hatred, it makes me madder.  By yelling at himself, he is preventing me from yelling at him.  Then I have to turn around and reassure him.  He means well.  It is infuriating.
 
So maybe this answers my question.  White women should engage in self-care, whether or not they think they deserve it, if only so that others-- others who may be even wearier, with even fewer fucks to give at this point-- are not forced to do the caring for them.  Whatever, yoga on your own time.  Go sleep on your couch, just don't tell me about it (and yes, I'm aware of the inherent irony of this piece, squeezing away).  Eat avocadoes, while also bearing in mind the funniest protest sign ever.  Kvetch with friends.  And stop defensively flipping out every time someone points out that you are, like, the living stereotype of a liberal white woman.  That is what you are, own it.  And take care.

It's over.  Accept it.  Donald Trump won.  Time to move on and heal our divisions.  Time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.  Time to stop talking about politics, which I find boring and divisive anyway.  It's been 36 hours, I mean, come on.  Don't be so melodramatic.

NO I WILL NOT CALM DOWN.

Here are some completely real things that are actual or potential results of this election that will not go away in 36 hours or a week or month or year.  Some of them are forever.  Forever.

1. Once again, we do not have a woman president, and so much of this campaign was rooted in deep sexism, both blatant and subtle, that we women are now painfully aware of just how rigged the system is against us.  Still.  Women of my generation (I'm 45) were brought up by our newly feminist mothers to think we could do anything, be anything.  Not only is that manifestly untrue, but even OUR daughters, 30 years later, now have to doubt it. 
2. My LGBT+ loved ones may lose certain basic rights, such as their right to marry or to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender.
3. Everyone I know or work with who is an undocumented immigrant now has to live with an increased level of fear, and rightfully so.
4. Everyone I know who is a person of color, immigrant, and/or Muslim (screw it, even Jews!  This is so crazy) now has to feel that approximately half the country either hates and fears them, or at the very least cares so little about their rights and well-being that they are willing to casually endanger those things.
5. Women may lose access to abortion.
6. A temperamentally aggressive and impulsive man will be in charge of our extremely sensitive foreign policy.  In addition to being aggressive and impulsive, and having a pathological need to "win" everything, he appears to know no more about the subject matter than I do, possibly less.  And his inability to pay attention to information for more than 3 seconds or listen to the advice of others means that informed counsel will be of limited use.  We could end up in pointless wars over personal affronts, discontinue important alliances, and/or initiate the use of nuclear weapons.
7. We will almost certainly bow out of the Paris climate accords.  We will move backwards on energy and climate policy when it is critical that we move forwards very, very fast, if we are to avoid total disaster.  We will see significantly worse climate change, more severe weather events, lose land to stupid development, lose species at an even faster rate, fail to protect what is fast slipping away.  These effects are forever.  They can't be reversed four years later.  They have permanent planetary impact.
8. The painful, slow, did I mention painful progress that we have been making the past few years in highlighting issues of race, police brutality, and criminal justice reform will likely be erased.
9. Unpredictable worldwide economic effects may change our lives dramatically.  This is a slow-burner one, but still scary in a personal sense.  Last night I pondered whether we should order pizza (because I did not have the heart to cook), or whether we really ought to start carefully hoarding our resources immediately.  (We got the pizza.  I'm not insane.)

I'm sure there are so, so many other things that I would think of over the next two minutes or seven hours or whatever-- I could go on writing this just about forever.  But I think this is enough to convey the point: YES, I AM FREAKING OUT.  IT IS COMPLETELY RATIONAL TO BE FREAKING OUT.  If you are a Trump voter, or a third-party voter, or a disaffected voter, or a low-information voter, or even a Democratic voter who sees this as just another ordinary election that we lost, please don't come along and tell us to settle down or get to work immediately on something positive.  We'll do those positive things once the dust settles and we can identify what the fuck they are.  But for now, there is a real need to grieve, and to do it in an open way such that we can connect with others who are also grieving and freaking out.  Please don't tell us to shut up.  Thank you.
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