On endings in Pandemic

As the election nears, I am finding it harder and harder to go to bed. My wake up time remains sometime between ten and eleven am, but I’m burning the midnight oil past three and four and, last night, five.

Sleep deprivation pushes me into a fuzzy world, pulsing with desperation, not quite rooted in reality. I’ve signed up to volunteer for the Biden campaign, but there’s the sense that I can, and should, do more.

There’s a sense of deja vu, the energy that echos of early March, and I wonder if this is what drowning in the ocean feels like: solitary panic, unnoticed flailing, people dotting the beach, not a care in the world as you slip away. The only people I listened to in March were among a group of a dozen or so experts in infectious disease, and they were sounding every alarm, and I was freaking out, and everyone around me was entirely unconcerned. This feels the same.

Democracies don’t take generations or even decades to collapse. It happens very quickly, when you’re distracted by something over here, caught up by something over there. Central to their collapse is the people focusing on the immediate things in front of them: the president can’t lift a cup of water, self-described patriots are shooting protestors with paintball guns, Nancy Pelosi fat-shamed Trump, somebody died. And while you’re looking over there, brown children are in cages, brown immigrants’ wombs are being rendered barren by non-doctors, we’ve almost forgotten a time when every moment wasn’t “us vs them,” 200k people have died in barely six months, trust in the media has been shattered without merit, and it’s all been so slippery that when the President of the United States starts talking about “racehorse theory” at a rally—i.e. eugenics, how the Holocaust started—we barely even register.

It takes democracies one to three years to disintegrate past the point of no return, and we have almost reached that point. We no longer trust that the election will be tallied honestly. Voter suppression isn’t widespread. We have a candidate who very likely will refuse to leave the White House if he loses, who will contest the results, who will lie and cheat and roll over bodies to stay in power.

Americans are not fundamentally different than the Germans of the 1930s, equally vulnerable, equally willing to obey. The lines are drawn. No longer do we wonder which side we would have been on in Nazi Germany, we don’t have to.

Our mistake has been in saying, “It can’t happen here.” We ought to have been saying, “It can happen here, but we won’t let it.”

Relevent watching:

Relevant reading: https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Twenty-Lessons-Twentieth-Century/dp/0804190119/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=on+tyranny&qid=1600602127&s=books&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/How-Fascism-Works-Politics-Them/dp/0525511830