personally for me, turning 30 did not usher in an era of existential terror, very possibly because my dad died when i was 23 and i spent the next several years in the grips of twin crises: a newly acquired fear of dying myself, and the dizzying terror of finding a love i would hate to lose. understanding physical and spiritual death. the epic highs and lows of high school football, if you will. but when i turned 30 i did come to terms with one unfortunate reality; i understood then, as i had not before, that the pain of my childhood would not wither and fall away, that i had completed my transformation less as a butterfly and more as a cicada. every 7 years my trauma reemerges to scream at me. that's the circle of life, baby.
the screams have been louder than usual lately and it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the impact of current events, even cyclical as they are. the never-ending ratcheting-up of gop-fascism is climate change and my brain is the confused cicada, coming out once every six years rather than seven, screaming at weird times, reproducing too much or not at all. none of us who live in america can escape the terror of an unknown and decidedly hostile future. in 2012 i thought if the gop keeps trying to kill us i will lose my mind, and in 2019 i understood that i would have to get comfortable with being insane.
here is a lucid thought, however: it bothers me that white liberal america is so dedicated to the project of forgetting jim crow that we have deliberately forgotten what federalism means and how it functions in a single-party context. and obviously when i say "single-party" i mean: fascist, a fascist context. we are so squeamish about our past that even while pretending our squeamishness is shame, we reach across the atlantic ocean for examples we feel best serve as allegories for our current predicaments: hitler, obviously. mussolini, if you've never read a book. putin, for the greenspanheads. berlusconi, for people who like to pretend they got in on the ground floor of it all. eventually someone important is going to post something unhinged like "nikki haley is just like iwane matsui" and then we will all descend into a blood frenzy and perhaps, if we are very lucky, elon musk will delete twitter, but it's unlikely to fix our determination to look everywhere except in the mirror.
it is a fact that the jim crow era in the american south was an era in which violence and intimidation prevented democracy from functioning. it is a fact that people like jeff sessions were raised with stories and in some cases memories of a time when to be white and southern was to vote democrat, and to vote democrat was to commit to terror and subjugation of black people. we all know this but we don't know it; we treat our past as a chronology with timestamps indicating when to look away. we memorialize the big uns, plessy v ferguson and bus boycotts, the kkk and lunch counter sit-ins; we viralize lesser-known crimes like the tulsa massacre and the wilmington insurrection. but we refuse to ask precise questions about how these events came to pass. we look away from the day to day stories our grandparents don't tell us, about how they helped build a world in which roving gangs and state laws alike restricted flow of information and freedom of movement to a degree that re-subjugated generations of black people. we close our eyes and we point east and we say omg ron desantis is LITERALLY a fascist, like they had in italy. but he's not. ron desantis is literally a fascist like any of our southern grandads were.
my point in saying all of this is that my cicada screams not for the gop's fascism, which has been encroaching and increasing and whatnot since before i was born. my cicada screams for the people who are determined to believe that this has never happened before. american fascism is an odd beast specifically because of federalism. we have theoretical freedom of movement between vastly different sociopolitical contexts. fascism at the state level seeks to limit this freedom of movement. it seeks to limit information that might inform queer children of a world beyond their parents' belts; it seeks to limit a woman's ability to travel to a place that acknowledges her bodily autonomy; it seeks to prevent black children from understanding their families' histories in the cradle of chattel slavery. the control of movement and information has been a special project of the gop for a very long time. i was raised with textbooks that advocated for slavery, textbooks provided by texan companies for a curriculum approved by people proud of their inherited blood money. it is very fashionable to point out that racism, enslavement, homophobia, misogyny, etc never ended. that is true. but it's also true that in 1992 north carolina outlawed marital rape, and in 1997 books in my rural nc teacher's classroom taught me about bodily autonomy, and in 2009 a north carolina police detective asked if i was a lesbian and subsequently declined to investigate my claims of childhood sexual assault. we exist upon a continuum and that continuum sucks shit.
i would like for more of us to ask our grandparents about life-back-then. i would like for more of us to stop believing our grandparents about life-back-then. i would like for us to understand what it means to exist under a regime that disappears when you cross an open and unguarded border, and i would like for us to ask questions about how, in our specific context, fascism can still thrive absent a concrete wall or passport checkpoint.
