The Only Way Out is Through
On this very strange birthday of America
1,514 souls perished when the Titanic sank, but the deaths were not evenly distributed. First class passengers fared quite a bit better than third class—62% survived versus 25%. As a metaphor for our country, this might be a little bombastic, but I believe we have hit the proverbial iceberg. America as we have known it is sunk.
With DOGE’s demolition of federal agencies, squads of masked goons roving our cities, and now the GOP’s big shitty bill that passed the House on July 3, we have codified our national character. We have opted to defund the already meager institutions that promote human health, environmental health, food assistance, science, education, public safety, and government oversight. Instead of fixing crumbling schools, feeding hungry children, housing the elderly and destitute, addressing climate change, providing medicines and healthcare, or even building much-needed infrastructure, we will deploy thousands more masked agents1 to terrorize communities and disappear people whose only crime is lacking a certain piece of paper. We will build more detention camps for the ones they catch. We will make more bombs and bombers and something called a Golden Dome. And we will let the wealthiest people in America keep a few more of their dollars. And since all of this—especially that last one—will cost a lot more money than the country has in its coffers, we will add 6 trillion dollars to the national debt.
This summary hardly does justice to the damage being done on so many fronts. There are also the attacks on protesters, law firms, media outlets, and most frighteningly birthright citizenship. There are hints at a campaign of denaturalizations. Dark ideas that hit more darkly when considered alongside military leadership purges and dealings with sketchy leaders of third countries to find places willing to accommodate any undesirables we might exile, South Sudan for example. There are continued threats directed at Canada, capitulations to Russia, and abandonment of longtime allies and treaties. All that and still so much more I could mention.
Things in America are about to get very much worse. It seems unavoidable at this point. It will happen gradually and then suddenly. If you will indulge the Titanic metaphor for another minute though, I myself am a first class passenger on this voyage. Not like an Astor or a Guggenheim (i.e. Bezos, Musk, et al). People of that strata are the only ones who might actually benefit from what is coming. I’m not remotely of that ilk, but I’m still somewhere in first class, meaning I have a decent chance of making it through the coming crises with my world basically intact. A “decent chance” isn’t a guarantee and probably still involves some time spent floating in the freezing waves, but it’s not really my personal prospects that I’m thinking about. My heart breaks for those who are more vulnerable than me. Many people are already suffering and dying as a result of callous and cruel decisions made during the first few months of this regime, and things will get much worse.
Despite all that, I was not altogether morose on our country’s 249th birthday. I’ve been flip-flopping through various feelings, trying to find an orientation on the holiday that feels right. Yesterday we made our way to the main street of Truckee, California for a pancake breakfast at the firehouse and to watch the parade. Truckee is a small city, or maybe a big town, home to about 17,000 people, plus vacationers like us in the summers and winters mostly. The July 4 parade here is exactly what you’d expect—fire trucks, vintage cars, school bands and sports teams, veterans, small businesses promoting themselves, and mysterious groups I should probably know more about (Rotary Club, Order of Elks). Truckee’s main street by the way is Donner Pass Road, and it’s not difficult to find another metaphor for current events in the story of the Donner Party. Maybe something about blindly following ignorant blowhards into disaster instead of listening to experts.
At one point a group of kids started chanting USA USA in a way that might have triggered me if it came from college dudes or bros wearing t-shirts with “blue lives matter” slogans or the Punisher. Instead what I felt in that moment was a mix of nostalgia and something like solidarity. I appreciated their patriotic enthusiasm, and it nudged me to search for some in myself. I landed on the founding fathers—not the men themselves, but their courage, and their principles, and what they tried to wrestle into being. At home after the parade we watched Hamilton, and I savored the idealized story of America’s birth.
Then this morning my son and I volunteered with Keep Tahoe Blue to clean up beaches after last night’s festivities. This, plus the Truckee pancake breakfast and parade added up to something wholesome, a grassroots America that is genuinely beautiful. The people are okay, I thought, and people are where it’s at.
The other thing I feel is something like resignation. There’s a bit of FAFO mixed in as well. MAGA won and is imposing its will on the country. I feel pretty confident that even the people who thought they wanted this will hate what it actually brings to their real lives. I can’t deny the schadenfreude I feel when I see a MAGA voter personally testify to that effect. I’m not proud of it, but I can’t deny feeling it. Resignation is the word that comes to mind because the approaching storm feels unstoppable. I’m still motivated to fight and protest and campaign and vote against this shit, but I no longer feel like it can be stopped. The phrase that keeps going through my head is “the only way out is through,” and what I think it means right now is that yes we are sunk, but it’s also not the end of the world, or even the country.
I’ve been reading about countries that went through serious self-inflicted shit in the twentieth century—Russia, Germany, Japan, China. In each case there were clear-eyed dissenting voices that were drowned out or actively crushed. Then the storm, different for each but bringing near total destruction to all of them. Germany and Japan were flattened. China consumed itself. But the countries eventually rose again. And people endured (except the ones who didn’t).
It our turn, I suppose.
The GOP’s big shitty bill makes ICE the largest “law enforcement” organization in the world—bigger than the FBI, DEA, ATF, and US Bureau of Prisons combined. That’s how obsessive they are about rounding up and removing all immigrants.