Before I went to Europe for some work and play stuff, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were competing for the 2024 presidency, and nobody I knew was excited to vote for two old white guys, even though one is one of the most effective Presidents we’ve had in decades and the other is a convicted felon. The young people were pissed at Biden because of the Israel/Gaza position he took, but they also couldn’t imagine voting for Trump. I’d never heard so many people sounding so hopeless about our country- and so conflicted about selling out in order to make a solid voting choice.
Then Biden performed poorly at the first debate, and even in Europe, reverberations were sounding and rumors were flying that Biden should drop out of the race.
Then someone tried to assassinate Trump, and it looked like Trump might use this awful event as a political tool to cast himself as the martyr and win sympathy from people who otherwise would be unlikely to empathize much with a man who is famous for lacking empathy for anyone. The Democrats I knew were very worried that this horrible act of violence might actually help Trump’s chance of succeeding in becoming the United States’s first dictator. There were also conspiracies about conspiracies, BlueAnon, and liberals suggesting the assassination attempt was all a staged photo op to cast Trump as the martyr, in spite of no evidence to back up such claims.
Next thing I hear, Biden is doubling down on running for reelection, while yet another white cop kills yet another unarmed BIPOC female. (Say her name…Sonya Massey, which I wrote about here.)
Then before I landed back home, Biden has dropped out and endorsed Kamala Harris. And now I’m back in California, in a bit of a state of pleasant but unbelieving shock. Do we really have a BIPOC female running for President against the worst politician and most immoral, unethical, uncompromising human being we’ve ever had in a position of power in the US?
I have a part that’s scared to hope. I haven’t felt this hopeful since Obama was running for President. A BIPOC female in the top power position in the world could be a game changer for the entire planet.
But my BIPOC sister is warning me to be careful about indulging too much hope. She said, “You can hope. But Biden just pretty much sealed the deal for Trump. In states like our lovely state of Ohio there are laws about how to get on the ballet and at this point ,getting a new Democrat on the ballet is almost impossible. I think we are all failing to realize Trump is and has been orchestrating his takeover for years. For this man to get away with what he has only proves that our collective voice creates little movement in White Power Politics. While I’m all for hope, I have learned that accepting reality allows you to prepare for the future instead of being thrown into the unknown unprepared.”
I felt deflated, hearing her feedback. But it also makes sense. It’s dangerous to hope, especially for a BIPOC female and others in marginalized groups who lack many privileges. Hope means you have further to fall if it turns out that more than 50% of our country is doubling down on white supremacy, misogyny, patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, oppression and indoctrination in the name of Christianity, capitalist greed, and love bombing of a convicted felon who stands for hate in our country.
It’s scary to dare to hope that there’s more decent good people in this country who care about democracy, climate crisis, equality, anti-racism, women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, health equity, infrastructure, supporting the working class poor, and the future we leave our children than there are accomplices to a criminal.
But I’m going to dare to hope anyway- and take my chances on utter devastation and emotional collapse in November. I feel joy watching the young people embrace Kamala Harris with their music, their TikTok videos, and their creativity. I feel excitement that the Presidential race just got MUCH more interesting- with a rush of exuberant energy we haven’t seen the likes of since Obama.
After the crushing blow to progress in 2016, I feel hopeful that the tide is shifting- that the #MeToo movement changes the power dynamics in our country around sexual violence, that George Floyd’s murder changed the hearts of some people who might not have understood how we white people are complicit with white supremacy, even when we consider ourselves progressive liberal Democrats and spiritual seekers, and that the pandemic made us realize that we have to work as a team, to make big changes quickly- in community- in order to defeat a threat like Covid.
As a physician, I consider this next election a public health issue. This election is as much a threat to our safety as Covid was. Our nervous systems cannot handle another Abuser-In-Chief. We must rally together to vote from our hearts for what we know to be right- democracy, a peaceful shift of power during elections, decency in the Presidential office, and the real law and order a former prosecutor can bring to this election, as she fights yet another felon.
I just wanted to be public about my endorsement of Kamala Harris for President. I’ve been posting about BIPOC rights, women’s rights, queer rights, immigrant rights, health equity rights, the rights of the working class…all the rights. Kamala Harris is the only candidate that cares about such things and has a chance of winning.
The morning of the Trump assassination attempt, I was meeting with other teachers at Omega Institute, including Bayo Akomolafe, who has been traveling the world with Three Black Men, speaking with My Grandmother’s Hands author Resmaa Menakem and Orland Bishop, whose work I admire. We were talking about the state of our country and our planet, and Bayo began talking about ant death spirals, something I had not heard about. This is what Bayo wrote:
“In a ‘death spiral’ (otherwise called ‘ant milling’), ants seemingly become fixated in a lethal cycle of sorts. Entomologists believe that some kind of pheromonic accident occurs when the cartographical chemical loops on itself, compelling the ants to keep going round and round, probably intensifying their pacing in the hopes of arriving home.
But they rarely do. If you were an ant, it would be very difficult to shake yourself free from the trance of a death spiral. On the other hand, it would be dangerously easy – it seems – to believe that the next unrelenting step would bring you closer home. In most death spirals observed, the ants march in their crazed continuity, sometimes for days, come rain or sunshine, and then die out of exhaustion, the hopes for a safe arrival lingering over their little bodies like pheromonic ghosts unsure of where to go.
The ant’s death spiral is a multi-species phenomenon, involving human onlookers and their speculations about ant society. Who knows how it comes to be that ants seemingly march in a circle – sometimes as large as a football stadium or as small as could fit on an office table – and then die afterwards? It’s impossible to say for sure what is happening. And yet, we would be remiss if we didn’t heed the ancient warning to learn from ants.
What do death spirals tell us about the constancy of the modern quest for solutions to critical civilization-baring problems and the subsequent realizations that these applications often retain the logic of the problem, perhaps even fortifying the conditions that led to the issue in the first place? Perhaps we can begin to speak about ‘anthro-milling’, not just ant milling: the enlistment of expertise and human agency in territorial patterns of repetition. A trance that whispers we’ll be home – if only we persist in what we already know…
Because one theoretical way an ant can break out of its trance is if it became infected by a fungus, like ophiocordyceps unilateralis – the zombie-ant fungus. Once infected, an ant breaks away from holding patterns and strays, getting lost in the forest, far away from incarcerating concepts of arrival and the anxieties about identity. Somewhere mandible-deep in the underside of a leaf, the zombie-ant becomes an art-form for fungal sporulation – no longer ant nor fungus, but now a curious living-dying betweenness that produces new kinds of worlds.
I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for us – citizens gestating in modern demise – to think along with the monstrous, to think along with the edges, to map out new realities.”
Two hours after musing about finding a way out of the ant death spiral when things seem hopeless, there was a shooting at a Trump rally, and days later, Biden resigned and put a biracial woman on the Democratic Presidential ticket. Which feels pretty damn zombie ant. My country just changed on a dime.
So now I’m curious. Is this unprecedented last minute change in election options a potential way out of the ant death spiral we humans seem to be hell bent on carrying out to suicidal ends? Have we entered the unthinkable? Or is this just more of the same, and we’re going to be carrying those “Are We Really Still Picketing This Shit?” signs at the next Women’s March in November?
I’m very curious how you all are feeling out there in the zeitgeist. Are you risking to hope? Are you more worried than ever because you think we’d have been more likely to win an election with a white male running against Trump? Are we f*cked, or did something completely unexpected just shift the whole dynamic and introduce something so fresh that we have a chance again? Will you fight, join the resistance, and get over any conflict avoidance you might have to be part of this historical moment of protesting impending oppression from a felon dictator?
My DJ Zaza part has put together a Kamala Harris For President playlist on Spotify. May it bring you some hope, joy, and courage to keep resisting. As Valarie Kaur says, just like in labor, we must breathe and then PUSH. I am trained as an OB/GYN. Consider this pushing music.