January 20, 2025

Showing Up

I showed up like this eight years ago, and I’m not sorry I did, but there was a whole lot I still had yet to understand about the moment I was trying to meet. Which I really did think was just a moment, one grand obstacle to be overcome, I was so utterly convinced of my righteousness, and it felt like a grand performance, utterly infused with ego: LOOK AT ME ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY. And I wasn’t wrong about that, necessarily, but my grasp of the shape of history definitely left something to be desired. I kept thinking, “LOOK, HOW THERE ARE MORE OF US THAN YOU!” but I have come to doubt if this is a particularly good argument, especially when a convoy of people who definitely don’t share my principles tried a similar tactic in 2022, albeit with violence, implicit and otherwise. Which made me think that maybe it’s a slippery slope in which I do not want to participate, and wonder what better ways there might be to rise up in opposition.

Anand Giridharadas writes: “The first Trump presidency was a time of great and often smug certitude. He was so wrong that the contrast made us right. He was so against democracy and justice and freedom that anything we did was self-evidently heavenly. But self-righteousness corrodes the soul and the mind. And the long posture of resistance and fury and perma-vigilance has turned many of us into certitude bots instead of people of curiosity. Democracy is all about curiosity, it depends on curiosity, because it is about you and I figuring each other out and then choosing the future together, instead of the king doing it for us. But the moral clarity triggered by Trump’s vacuous viciousness lulled many of us into a dogmatic slumber. Now I see and hear around me people who are getting into a posture of real rethinking, who are returning to curiosity, who are willing to ask real and hard questions about what many of us missed and didn’t see and may not see still. Their posture is not outward but inward.”

Today, I don’t have any answers. I don’t even have a placard, but what I do have is a conversation with Heather Marshall about her 2022 bestselling novel LOOKING FOR JANE, which keeps on showing up on the bestseller list after all this time, its themes of reproductive justice and bodily autonomy continuing to resonate. The conversation is for paid subscribers on my Substack page, but the preview is available for everybody is and it’s worth checking out. Listen here!