#rescuers

Weekly Meditations in an Emergency essay.

I have lived a long time but I have never lived through such a time of destruction, of nature, of human lives, of truth, fact, science, journalism, the rule of law. I write during a summer of colossal wildfires, of extreme heat, of human rights abuses, of attacks on history itself and the rule of law in the USA, of a pointless, gratuitous war dragging on because Donald Trump can't admit he lost it, of leaders in the UK and Canada as well as in the USA abandoning the climate struggle even as Canada burns and Europe broils and burns. It is often overwhelming, and it feels like more than any one of us can respond to.

But we can. We might need to take breaks or pace ourselves or find our niche and our people to do it. People are doing the work, often in undramatic ways — meetings, court filings, fundraisings, investigations, forms of support and solidarity that are not high-profile. But let me talk for a moment about a high-profile incident that riveted people across the country and the world. A few days ago, I watched a novice lifeguard, age sixteen, pull a younger boy out of the surf that threatened to sweep him away, on a Santa Cruz beach where the waves had suddenly become far larger and more dangerous. They swept over the lifeguard and the boy again and again and somehow each time they reemerged, the young man had not let go. There was a simplicity to his task, a clarity, that we do not get when we try to figure out how pull democracy or justice or human rights out of the storms of destruction; these are not things that one person on one occasion can resolve.

Even so, there are parallels. Many are caught up in the violence of Trump's unregulated militias, the ICE stormtroopers, and many are trying to pull them back out to safety, to the solid ground of the lives they were leading in the places they lived. I was horrified to see (in videos), a few days ago, a Ukrainian refugee grabbed in San Francisco's airport; her screams, the bystanders, the fact that it was all taking place in locations I know well and live near made it particularly vivid for me. The lifeguards are her friends raising money on GoFundMe and organizing what aid they can for her. Such lifeguards exist everywhere, as community members, as organizations dedicated to human rights, and sometimes as opposition politicians attempting to stop the administration or change the rules. They do not always succeed but they go into the surf to try. Perhaps another lesson from that riveting video of rescue is that the waves may crash over you repeatedly before you get to safety. The process may not be simple and the outcome may not be certain while things unfold, which I say because I too often hear the lack of immediate victory interpreted as defeat.

In a way this is a terrible metaphor. The harm is not being done by a vast and ancient natural force or even by a majority; it's being done by an unpopular regime that is plummeting in the polls and seems almost frantic to do as much as it can while it can (because they seem likely to lose the midterms, because they are losing popularity fast, because Trump seems to be in a phase of rapid decay, and because the courts– thanks to the lifeguards of the law--keep overturning their overreach and other transgressions). A touchstone essay for me is Michelle Alexander's 2018 proposition that we are not the dam trying to stop the river; we are the river that they are trying to dam, and whatever they build we will overtop it and flow in in the end. I agree with that profoundly; at the heart of my new book, The Beginning Comes After the End, is the argument that the right is engaged in backlash against all that we have changed over the past three quarters of a century to make a more just and equal world (and that that should be a reminder that we did change the world, we do have power, we have a history of victories that are even more often and more significantly incremental cultural shift as landmark legal successes, and they are furious about all of it).

Another way to rework the lifeguard metaphor is to note that the main effort is to keep people from being swept away in the first place, and to dismantle the forces that try to drown people in cruel displacement and deprivation. But so many are being swept away. This harrowing story was just published: "An Overland [St. Louis, Missouri, area] couple who had recently returned to Guatemala was found bound and shot to death in a sugarcane field. Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz were killed weeks after González de la Cruz self-deported to be with her husband, who was deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year. Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was found crying beside her mother’s body in southern Guatemala." González de la Cruz, who was only 25, had followed her deported husband because she had no good choices, and so she tried to navigate the bad ones.

Refugees are being sent back to the countries that they fled because those countries were dangerous or being sent to countries they have never been to before in a kind of human dumping; in the latter case, they may not even speak the language or have any resources to survive whatsoever, and the Trump Administration seems to be picking violent places on purpose. As Adam Serwer wrote abut the first Trump Administration, "the cruelty is the point." JD Vance and Donald Trump, along with fellow travelers like Elon Musk, are endeavoring to create a world in which some people don't matter, have no rights, and in which their kind of people doesn't have to care about "those kinds of people." Musk's claim that the destruction of USAID by DOGE didn't kill anyone is really an argument that nobody who mattered died because only certain kinds of people matter. They have their following, but I believe it is a minority, and how could it not be when it claims that most of us don't matter?

[the rest, including the angel, at the link, and please do subscribe, free or paid, and these will be delivered to you directly.]

This is a WIP of when Zor’el first fell for Lianhua, making the decision to follow her footsteps and become a healer. Eventually they become Mates, and the official healers of the scarsworn clan. Characters adopted from aloeteroart and dextmd on DA. Backstory by me :)