these days will define us

[note #11]

I was part of the worldwide HANDS OFF protests yesterday, against the fuckery that we are in the midst of these days. I was in New York but could feel it happening everywhere. I’ve been to a lot of protests over the years, but this one felt different. One thing was the signs—it was clear that some had been generated by the organizers (Indivisible etc), but most were handmade, spontaneous expressions of frustration, sadness, rage. Many were playful, the whole thing felt joyous. At one point a firetruck needed to cut through the crowd, and the people parted, and applauded the firefighters, who waved back. Even the cops, the ones I saw, seemed to understand that people were also marching for them, for their jobs, for their rights. No one wants to be caught up in this fuckery.

Here’s another possible beginning to the book I’ve been circling around for the past couple years:

I’m telling my daughter about my years on boats. We’re on our backs in the dunes, looking into the night sky. She believes we have only twenty years left—all her friends believe this. They see themselves everywhere—children buried in rubble, mountains on fire. The earth will keep spinning, she tells me—maybe hotter, maybe wetter—it’s just us who will be gone. It’s us, mostly, who cause all the suffering anyway. How to convince her otherwise, when I half-believe it myself?

The benefit of this as a beginning is that it introduces another character (my daughter) and propels us into the imagined (if bleak) future. So far this book seems to be mostly wrestling with memory and the past, which leads us to think about time. This beginning also touches on what I imagine many of us were feeling yesterday as we took to the streets.