A love letter

To you, who have closed your eyes, who think this will only last four years, who's family members are begging you to talk to you about the future.

To you, the one we need on our side,

I understand why you’ve stopped reading the news. Why you’ve told yourself this is just another moment in history, another pendulum swing, another four years. I understand why you believe the institutions will hold, why you the warnings sound dramatic, why you keep telling your wife, your sister, your daughter, your son, your husband, your friend: "It won’t be that bad."

But I need you to listen.

Not because I want you to suffer the weight of the news, not because I want you to lose sleep, but because you must know, you MUST pay attention. Because history is screaming in our ears, begging us to recognize the patterns, to understand that disengagement is complicity. Not being aware does not exempt you from responsibility.

People are already dying.

People are being stripped of their rights, their safety, their autonomy, and their entire family. Because you are of the majority, you may think this won’t reach you, that you can ride this out untouched. And here I pause— because I also understand that many of you have never had to consider how your personal safety can be impacted by an outside force—you have no framework with which to look at this moment. It is paralyzing the first time you realize you are the prey. It is easier to close your eyes and hope the jaguar's breath on your neck is just a nightmare. The privilege of chosen ignorance will not last through the next 40 years (it will not be 4).

History does not reward neutrality. Silence is not a shield. When the time comes, and it will come, you (unlike many) will have two choices: To suffer your own demise under the weight of the impending autocratic system or to become part of it—to hand over your neighbor to ICE, to report your wife and daughter’s pregnancy status, to offer your son to the colonizing machine of war, to enforce rules you never thought you'd agree to.

By the time you recognize the danger, it will be too late. The choices will have already been made for you.

I know this sounds alarmist to you. Because you don’t know what’s going on, by choice. Because you are not seeing with clear eyes that a mere 85 years ago, these same things happened to real people, just like you, just like me.

If you think you'll make the right choice in the moments to come, need I remind you that all people think they will choose the noble path. But they have not. Regular people have shot and killed children. To protect themselves, their own family, and to uphold the regimes they benefit from, even if the only benefit is survival; especially if the only benefit is survival. How can you possibly think you'll make the right decision in the moment that is rapidly accelerating towards you— if you close your eyes now?

This has happened before. In Germany. In Rome. In Chile. In Myanmar. In the United States. Countless random citizens took part in mass murder, systemically sanctioned horrors, and the deconstruction of their own lawful protections. This happened not because these countries lacked good people, but because too many good people believed they could wait it out, that it wouldn’t touch them, that someone else would stop it. They turned away until the moment turning away was no longer an option, and then they found themselves without a voice, without a choice, without the power to direct the path of their own life (or anyone else’s) away from these atrocities. A power you currently assume will always be yours.

You don’t get to sit this out. It is already happening without you.

This moment demands your attention, your voice, your action. If you choose to ignore it, you are making a choice—but not the one you think. You are choosing complicity. You are choosing the path that leads you to become the very thing you refuse to look at. Reach out to your family and friends, we are begging to have this conversation with you.

I've filled this post with links to current news, historical examples, and mutual-aid/resistance frameworks to get you started. If you don’t know how to stay engaged without suffering or becoming nihilistic, pick one thing you care about deeply; immigration, climate change, women’s rights, health care, finances, or your children, and start there. Read the recent news on that thing and observe from that worldview. See how you are being affected. Keep caring, keep finding a way to stay engaged. Only then can you choose what you’re going to do next, and you must choose.

You are not alone. The people fighting, fleeing, writing, sharing, and communing, are the people who know the primal fear of oppression personally, and they know how to continue to move against that smothering oppression. We will lead you, come with us.

We love you, we need you.

Love,
Your daughter, your neighbor, your wife, your husband, your son, your auntie, your mother, your father, your friend.