Walking the razor's edge
This post was originally sent to my newsletter subscribers on February 13, 2025. Click here to subscribe.
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and how I wish that's what this email was about - a lovely message of love, bedecked with little pink hearts. Or a cute historical story that ends with a perfect happily ever after...
But that's not what this message is about.
You see, ever since the inauguration, I've felt like I've been teetering on a razor's edge.
On one side is a deep need to acknowledge and fight the US's descent into dictatorship and sanctioned cruelty. The darkness on this side is deep, complex and overwhelming. It holds sadness, anger, confusion, discomfort and fear in its depths.
On the other side is the ever present temptation to simply ignore it all. To bury my head in the sand, stop reading the news and rest in my ignorance, blithely selling books and chatting about mundane things with my friends.
I've vacillated between the two, not feeling good about either. Confronting the world in a real and public way is completely outside of my comfort zone. It feels intensely vulnerable. But ignoring the problem is disingenuous. It's not who I am.
And of course, there's the prevailing author wisdom that in order to sell books, an author must avoid politics at all costs.
Needless to say, I was stuck. My feet were being sliced up by that razor and I simply did not know which way to go.
Then Monday happened.
As many of you know, I drive Uber part time to help pay the bills. One of my first rides on Monday morning took me to a small town just outside Madison. I pulled up to a suburban house where a middle aged white man was smoking a cigarette in the driveway.
He smiled, stubbed out his cigarette and climbed into the backseat.
It was a longish ride back to city, thirty minutes or so, and at first everything was normal. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, talked about the weather and the neighborhood... he took a call...
Then without warning, he launched into a story.
He explained that he works in maintenance for a national hotel chain (I was driving him to one of the hotels.) He regularly travels all over Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois.
Three weeks ago, he was in downtown Milwaukee driving to a job site with a crew of five Latino men. He was speeding, so when sirens sounded behind him, he assumed he was being pulled over by the police.
But it wasn't the police.
It was Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE), and they took two of his coworkers.
Both men were United States citizens, with ID and social security numbers. One of them my passenger had known since childhood, and he was certain that man had been born in the United States. He has a wife and three little kids.
When my passenger tried to explain all of this to the ICE officers, he was warned: "Shut up, or you're next."
This story just came pouring out. Clearly, my passenger was traumatized - I got the feeling he was telling anyone who would listen. He said he'd never go back to Milwaukee, but he's been doing his best to help his friend's wife. They've managed to track her husband to a detention camp in Texas, but he hasn't been allowed a call home.
For three weeks a US Citizen has been held against his will, and not even allowed a call to his wife.
I can't even comprehend what she's going through.
Could my passenger have made this all up? I suppose so, though I don't know why he would. It's certainly not the first story I've heard like this, simply the closest to home.
I dropped the man off, and gradually, as the shock wore off something shifted inside me. There was no longer a choice, or a quandary, or a lack of balance. There was only a duty.
People are being disappeared.
The richest man in the world is dismantling an agency dedicated to sustaining the world's poorest, most vulnerable citizens.
Funding for research on cancer, Alzheimer's and other life threatening diseases is being slashed.
Books are being banned.
The child care center down the street from my house - a center known for providing high quality care for poor and disadvantaged children - was without mandated federal funding for more than a week because rich men in Washington decided to (illegally) shut it off. They didn't have money to buy milk for the kids, or pay their employees.
The list goes on.
And I can not be silent. I can't look back on this time and know that I didn't do everything I could.
Then, as if my magic, I came across this quote from Toni Morrison:
“I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls... he asks, ‘How are you?' and instead of ‘Oh, fine... and you?', I blurt out the truth: ‘Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything... I’ve never felt this way before…' I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting:
‘No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work... not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job.'
I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed... this is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
So I will write. I will love. I will listen and seek to understand. I will make myself vulnerable, and I will lean into the discomfort. I will do everything I can to shine a light in the dark.
Thank you for reading, and for being part of my community. We truly are in this together.
All my best,
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