Chicken Little 🐓

what if the sky REALLY is falling?

Every single morning I wake up in Trump’s America I have the same thought.

“It feels like the end of the world”.

And yet I get up, put on my business casual, and go to work. I drink my coffee. I call my parents. I kiss my partner. I go on.

The feeling persists.

In my body it feels like a sore throat. First an uncomfortable itching, next an aching, and then a sudden swelling-throbbing-problem that steals your voice.

And so it has. I feel that all the space I had for exploring complex thoughts about ancestry and lineage shrank drastically.

Now I can think only of survival.

Have you packed a go bag yet? A friend asks me over brunch.

Not yet. I think. I cannot admit to myself that it’s time to have that. I don’t think my primitive brain can hold these two big truth;I must go to work every day, and I need to prep for an ever looming chaotic event.

My friend holds my hand while saying, “just because you can’t admit, doesn’t make it less true.”

My emotions and thoughts are stuck in my swelling throat again. A throbbing, uncomfortable thing.

The stated goal of the current governance is to “flood the zone,” or create so many problems at once, that it paralyzes people. Muzzle Velocity , they say. Breaking a few eggs to make an omelette.

In this case, the eggs in question would be any rights gained for minority populations in the last 60 years.

My grandparents are 85. In their lifetime they’ve lived through segregation, integration, and now the rolling back of the very laws they boycotted and protested for.

The losses are staggering. With just a stupid pen stroke, gone.

It’s working, I keep thinking. It’s fucking working. I can’t let them “win”.

Just because you can’t admit it, doesn’t make it less true.

Now more than ever, we need to tell, at least ourselves, the truth. So here goes.

I am overwhelmed. Traditional policy and political systems (hello democrats-are you in the room?!) are failing to meet the moment. A young organizer on Tik Tok was encouraging people to “pick a cause/group to stay abreast of and to champion.” Babbbby I’m black, gay, and neurodivergent. How could I possibly pick one of my identities when they’re all under attack?

It is working.

Not admitting that doesn’t make it any less true. In fact—admitting it might be the only way forward.

It is working. This is bad. Stop gaslighting yourself into thinking the sky isn’t falling.

It is.

But that doesn’t have to be the end of things. Last year I finished a fascinating book called Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond Productivity Culture. It addresses many things; like the history of time, the labor movement, and climate change. In the chapter about prisons, she says something very profound.

If you’re thinking about what to do when the world is ending, consider listening to peoples whose worlds have ended many times before. She lists black peoples, indigenous peoples, the incarcerated, and refugees of conflict as groups that have known world-ending upheaval time and time again.

When I wake up, I think-it feels like the end of the world. And then I pinch myself and say “and it has ended before. It will begin again!”

I think again of my grandparents. Both of whom have seen the world end and begin.

The world might be ending. That MIGHT be true. And what will you do to ensure it begins again-better, even if only by a pinch?

I would love to hear what people are doing, if you’ve found something to do, to ground yourself during the worlds stupidest apocalypse.

Write a comment or send me an email. In my next substack I’ll list the results!