Flaw Salad

On Friday evening, I attended a women’s soccer game here in southern California. I sat in a stadium full of women’s sports fans, visibly queer people, trans pride flags and people with whom I have had personal, meaningful conversations about the state of our country. As the national anthem swelled, I watched in disbelief as every other person I could see stood in honor of our nation. If any other people sat as a show of civic disapproval, I was unable to find them. This shocked me. I wondered, who were the people who brought trans flags and still wanted to stand for this country? What are they thinking? (Are they?) 

I cannot understand why Americans are so allergic to even the simplest displays of political expression. In the oft-repeated words of my partner, “We are so housebroken.”

Rhetoric has taken a sharp turn in the past week, and I wonder if many of my friends and family have noticed. Do they feel the boots coming down? I don’t know how many more days I will be able to write like this without significant consequence. People are getting fired for directly quoting Charlie Kirk. The man told his followers that people like me are “a social contagion,” and we are not allowed to repeat his words? Jimmy Kimmel was canceled for making fun of the president. Please understand: we are not “land of the free.” Not in any meaningful sense. 

People need to get quicker on the uptake. I’ve spent the past two days watching people online make arguments in favor of registering for a protest. This during a week when the president has declared war on leftist organizing. Astonishing. Who are these people who still think registering your name to a list of “people the president has declared war on” is a good idea? They shout, “DO NOT COMPLY IN ADVANCE,” as if fighting fascism requires a roll call. They still think, deep down, that they will be safe. They’re not heeding warnings because it is human nature not to heed warnings.

Start heeding warnings. 

Listen to the people who are closest to the fire when we tell you it’s coming faster than you think. We are not trying to control you. We are trying to protect you. We are trying to protect ourselves. We are just coming from a different vantage point, one where the threat is at our door. NewsMax is repeating rabid rhetoric about trans people, accusing them of all kinds of easily disprovable horrors, including and especially the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The killer’s roommate was trans, you see, so this must be her fault. They are saying, explicitly, that trans people are a virus and should not be allowed to communicate with each other, that trans people should be shut out of public life.

You probably won’t take it from me, but I’m telling you now: the party is over. We can no longer afford, as a society, to continue operating as little individual pleasure-seeking pods. For the safety of our persons and our souls, we must start changing our lives, habits and frameworks. We have to start seeing the environment we’re in and rejecting the parts of it that demoralize us. 

I write this knowing writing this is futile. People will only move at the speed they can, and so many are still invested in the idea that salvation is coming; something will stop this; surely, an adult will enter the room and set things right. While I can sympathize with the desperate need to cling to this belief, I think it’s long past time for everyone to wake up to the reality that we have only each other and the communities we build. No one is coming to save us. We have to be our own salvation.

For most of my more-liberal-than-leftist friends, the most uncomfortable step in the process will be getting disliked. Or even just judged. But you cannot survive what’s coming with your soul intact if you fear breaking from the herd. I think a lot of us were raised to believe that when push comes to shove, we will do the right thing. We’ll be willing to take ethical stands. We would all have been helping on the Underground Railroad. At least, that’s how I was raised. But what they don’t tell you is that what you know to be morally correct will shift with the mores of your community. It is easy to become permissive of harm when everyone around you is doing it. Choosing not to follow groups into harmful norms will mean getting left behind. It will often mean standing alone. Or sitting, as it were.

Take it from the person who sat while the rest of a stadium rose for the national anthem.