Perfect Little Baby

Grace Byron ruminates on despair and hope in the wake of the election.

By Grace ByronNovember 17, 2024

• Politics

I WENT BACK to sleep, unsurprised. I stumbled into my living room and made the coffee like always. I tried to turn off my phone and write a piece under a tight deadline. There was no point in reading everyone’s gut reactions. They would not suffice and would be, after all, contradictory. Some would argue this was inevitable and some would start placing blame. Some would say we should rest and some would say we should buy guns. Jokes about homos with straps inevitably followed. Even anarchists seemed to be having an intense reaction to the news. Socialists joked about killing themselves. Canada was raised once again. I kissed my boyfriend goodbye as they left for work. My cat found her sunspot, whining for her breakfast.

After navigating various apologies that I did not ask for and a long line of tears and texts, I decided to go on a walk. Tired of being trapped inside after having a surgery a few weeks earlier. (Yes, the kind that Donald Trump would like to outlaw.) Fascism creeps into our lives with a whimper. Not a bang. It limits our political and emotional imaginations. We struggle to think beyond the grammar the Far Right imposes on us. People were citing Project 2025’s various aims. Telling everyone to change their name, to make sure they didn’t end up on any lists. Abortion resources were shared. Misinformation and idyllic memes about going out to pasture. Emails started popping up in my inbox, rallying cries for resistance saying “Here we go again.” That we have always been here and always will. A tight, hot tautology for those in need.

My friend called from Texas to ask me how I was. Instead, I just listened. I didn’t have much to offer in the way of comfort. As we talked, I walked by the apartment with a Confederate flag in the window and a blow-up Thanksgiving turkey. Ted Cruz had won again despite her attempts at canvassing. It paid well, $29 an hour. Inflation, we were told, played a big part in the election’s outcome. So did racism and climate change and Palestine and the lack of a politics of love, in the words of Marianne Williamson. My friend cried softly as we talked about the last time Trump had won. We both lived in Mike Pence’s Indiana at the time, though she was traveling the day the victory came down. Apparently, we talked on the phone before I decided to go to a party of lesbians. I wanted to kiss the butch that I danced with, but at the time I was not a woman, so she rebuffed me. Instead, we got insanely high and I tried to drive her home on the back roads of Bloomington. On the exit ramp, I stopped the car, afraid that it would tip and we would fall out into the ether. With the car in park, I got out and made her drive us the rest of the way.

There wasn’t much said then to comfort us, naive as we were about the purpose of electoral politics. Now, I simply tried to explain that there were limitations to the context we worked in. We would have to invest in one another on a granular level. How can we expect to revolt if we do not deliver soup for one another when we’re sick? No bitterness, mine or yours, will build a bridge.

Despair is easy. It whistles through the weeds, blending all sights and sounds into gray slush. At times, loneliness overwhelms us. Projects seem insurmountable. It can seem idealistic to believe in a better world, to imagine attending to the daily rhythms of life under the grim canopy of fascism. Bread and roses seem like luxuries.

I started rambling about Ursula K. Le Guin. Her stories and novels offer small acts of redemption in the face of galactic and fantastical evil. There is no winning. There is only continuing on the path. Read “Betrayals.” Read A Wizard of Earthsea (1968). Read Tehanu (1990). Women’s work is small. Women’s work needs to get done. Not in an overt Gaia-Earth Mother-Thirteenth-Moon way. I mean in terms of the kinds of care anyone can do but which is always gendered as feminine. Listening. Waiting. Patience. Empathy even for those one does not like or agree with. These seem naive in the face of evil. But they can take strong shapes too—think of the nuns who protested nuclear arms and were arrested. Think of the men in Gaza singing to each other. Think of the Palestinian gardener Medo Halimy, who, even in the face of complete destruction, continued to make videos of planting amid genocide.

“Maybe we need some words of weakness,” Le Guin said in 1983 to the Mills College graduating class. “[W]hat I hope for you,” she continued, “is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place.” While weakness can sound flat against the mighty power of empire, there is a need for all kinds of resistance. Both the muscular kind and the kind that churns quietly in the background, feeding and listening to those on the front lines. This is not an excuse to not act or donate or organize, only resolution that the loud kind is not the only way forward. Le Guin advised the graduates:

I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing—instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there.

Yes, hope. Even now, it is important. A facile, simple word that sounds unsophisticated in the context of the above. I’m not arguing against violent resistance or protest—far from it. We will need action. But in addition to the kind of action that requires a great deal of overt, showy effort, we will need those doing their thing “in the background,” as Fiona Apple once sang. Mutual aid, Food Not Bombs volunteers, donations to the houseless, resistance to encampment sweeps, DIY HRT networks, bail funds. Since the election results have come in, many queer and trans writers have been quoting The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions (1977). A powerful text on resistance, queerness, and tenderness. Not as giving in, but as enduring. We will need to find ways to support one another that allow for connection and coalition-building. In the book, Larry Mitchell writes: “The strong women told the faggots that there are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.” Perhaps it is important to note winning may not mean getting a president we agree with. Zoe Leonard’s iconic I want a president (1992) is a protest, not a desire for a true leader. To have what Leonard really wants, the United States must give up its arms, land, and military. Octavia Butler quotes resurface that remind us there is no single answer or magic bullet. We must all become the answers. Victory may need to be reframed.

After I discussed the idea of care with my friend, I walked into a wine shop. The shopkeeper asked me how I was, and I could tell she wanted me to give an emotional answer of some kind. I said I was okay. I moved on. As I walked home, a lone cat appeared underneath the subway tracks and scurried away into the darkness.

In the past year, I’ve traveled to Montana, Maine, Illinois, Japan, New York, and California. Everywhere I went, red or blue, people were fighting for dignity. Carving out space in the darkness. I found solidarity with Palestine everywhere I went. In Tokyo, Palestinian flags hung on record store windows and in Shibuya Crossing. Trans people in Montana were still finding ways to exist under a system that would prefer them to be gone. Driving around Chicago, we saw encampments on university campuses.

“Once a perfect little baby, who’s now a jerk,” MJ Lenderman sings on “Manning Fireworks.” We are all acting like the American babies that Patricia Lockwood claimed we are. There is blood on our hands, all of us. There’s a genocide against the Palestinian people and a heavy propaganda campaign to justify it. There are women dying from a lack of access to abortion. Trans children are murdered and dying by suicide. Unions are under attack. Inflation is very, very bad. These struggles are interconnected. And we would rather disentangle them, stay in our little spheres and talk to those like us. “It feels as though a lot of people have given up on each other,” Kelly Hayes recently wrote. It is important to turn to writers like Sarah Aziza, Sarah Thankam Mathews, and Charlotte Shane who believe we must “debride reality, to carve away the necrotic tissue that encroaches on and obscures the truth.” There is enough despair and Greek tragedy. Doomscroll anywhere for more of that. The truth is grim. I wish to tell you instead what I hope for.

Bread for the anorexic and money for the poor. Space for the lonely and hedonistic sex for the seeker. Wrenches in empire and fruit for the food deserts. Lower prices for eggs and more stability for the farmer who harvests them. Less abandoned animals on the street and more resources for doctors who put down their egos. There is a way out. The only way out there has ever been: to simply stop. To stop calling on higher powers alone, but to drive a friend to and from the hospital. Not just to ask if there’s anything you can do for your neighbor or friend or relative but simply to do it. To learn interdependence rather than individualism, to believe coalitions are more important than being right all the time. Free countries, not in the name of democracy but in the name of freedom for its own sake without the chokehold of imperial power. The ability to love one another and gather even under the boot of cruel lawmakers. To listen to faggots and women and Black abolitionists, to not fall prey to divisive wanderers with no stake in the game other than vicious nihilism. That you do not look away from those in pain, no matter their religious affiliation or dogma, that we believe the only way forward is rent strikes, abortions, imams and priests and Buddhists and Catholics all demanding an end to war. They were always so—if borders exist, someone will always be cast out. It is an eternal struggle to tear down fences. What does the Left want? Not just the ability to go forward without ever thinking again about politics. Surely not. A free Palestine. More robust food stamps. The ability to protest without being violently arrested. Less cops. Solidarity with Stop Cop City. Greenhouse gas emissions to halt. No more poetry about the way things are different.

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Featured image: Rockwell Kent, The End, 1927. Gift of the Associates in Fine Arts, Yale University Art Gallery (1943.297). CC0, artgallery.yale.edu. Accessed November 14, 2024. Image has been cropped.