I read the news and my hair fell out
Now's the time to do something.
I’m someone who consumes a lot of media.
Before November, I was feeling safe and secure and like the world had hope. But since, IDK, the third week in January, the media I consume has become less funny, less focused on ways to improve our lives, and more focused on how to keep our entire way of life from being destroyed by a few bad men.
The dismantling of the f3deral government isn’t just people losing jobs, it’s all of us losing security and health and comfort. I wish everyone in this country thought long and hard about what how the FDA keeps (kept?) us from eating poisoned food, how NIH was conducting and funding critical disease research, the necessity of the CDC in keeping infectious diseases at bay, the way NOAA lets us know if that’s a tornado outside or just rain, the FAA keeps planes from crashing into each other, USAID not only supported people’s health and safety overseas but fended off ter&orism through diplomacy, the way the Department of Education supported special ed, and the list goes on and on… Yesterday, they went after the Peace Corps. There are no words.
I actually thought about it all too much and a bunch of my hair fell out from the stress. So I get why people don’t want to think about how more deeply unsafe and unhealthy and poor this imperfect country is about to become.
Then I got scared. I got scared of talking about what’s going on — on the internet or in emails or even texts. I know fear is the tool of the oppressor. But fear comes and goes. Denial is a more effective tool for keeping the people down. Just because the U.S. hasn’t experienced fa$cism fully or a Great D3pression in nearly a century doesn’t mean that’s not the path we’re on. If you can convince yourself that you have enough resources to ride out a fa$cistic regime, then maybe denial is the place your brain goes to stay “safe.” We aren’t safe, we’re under attack.
If you know me, you know that I’ve been underemployed for nearly two years now. I’m a canary in the coal mine. There was a stalled jobs market, sure. And I’ve complained about the rise of ChatGPT. But The New York Times best explained why and how people like me who pursued creative careers and are now f*cked. Our skills are obsolete. I think they said it’s like being a candlemaker when electricity was introduced.
None of this is in a vacuum. It does seem like fa$cism is able to rise because people power can be replaced with robots. What the hell are we all going to do as robots do our jobs is beyond me. I guess the techn0crats will just let us die and the richest will enjoy the beauty of the natural world through their stretched M@r-a-Lago faces. Sounds extreme? I wish.
It’s hard to wrap our heads around why our leaders would want us to starve and get sick, and why they would halt public health or environmental protections — I mean they live in this world, too, right? — but they don’t think like us. They only want to put money in their pocketbooks at our expense. We are not humans to them, we are roadblocks. I don’t care if you’re a surgeon or a banker, you are “the help.”
We the people don’t want our kids to live in a very unsafe and literally hungry and sick world. We the people need to build our hopeful world together. This our moment.
I’m done lecturing. My hair is growing back. I am done living in the trauma space of realizing how terrible things are going to get. I am ready to get to get to work.