What Happens Next

With Inauguration Day looming, it’s difficult for me not to think back to 2017, to the anxiety and fear I felt after Donald Trump’s first election, to the way conversations usually hidden behind closed doors, hatreds long felt but often concealed, were now suddenly ubiquitous. Swastikas drawn on subway car walls were now just a thing that happened on Tuesday, rather than a national embarrassment. Fascism and Nazism commonplace, somehow accepted, if not encouraged.

I talked about a lot of this on the Writing Stories and Beaconites podcasts—how writing Amerikaland became a place for me to channel those overwhelming anxieties into a fictional world, both for myself and, I hope, others. And though the novel is about a great many things, at its heart it’s a novel about wielding love for each other to battle against the very real forces of darkness. Foreword called the novel “a riveting novel about fascism in America,” and Independent Book Review said “it reminds us that the evil always threatening to return is the tragedy everyday people inflict upon each other.”

And while I wonder how we’re here again, how this country could continue to burn, both literally and figuratively, I know how. I spent much of Amerikaland trying to make sense of that idea, understand it, in the hopes that, by understanding, I could start to move forward. But now, here we are once more. I hate it, and I hate that I understand it. I’m afraid all over again, and I know so many others are, too.

This excerpt from the novel still says it best for me, as it did five year ago.

What happens, happens around us.

We exist and we hurt, we shake our heads and our fists in disgust. We condemn. We march in the streets. We raise funds. We prattle. We meme. We vote, and under our breaths we are resigned. We are loud because we know the truth, because we must be heard. We boycott and we burn.

We are lawyers and doctors and schoolteachers and taxi drivers and train conductors and servers and managers and successes and failures. We are politicians. We join hands and we disagree. Lines are drawn, whims that will ripple through time, tear apart towns and cities and families and generations and countries. We are thrown into camps, thrown from restaurants, thrown from schools and hospitals and pulled from our very streets, cars, houses. We listen to those who say it is right; we punch and we protest. We see the hate, the way it grows, evolves, spreads, when left unchecked. When fertilized. We know there is no longer a place for peace…

…and people are disappeared or attacked in daylight because of who they are or where they are from or who they love or who they have always been inside. These things are real and not the fodder of history or fiction. Right now is nothing like we imagined it could be.

What happens, happens inside us.

More than anything, I hope we can be there for one another. Wielding that love, that energy, because it’s a power like none other, and we’re going to need it for the fight to come.