This diary is 11 days late.
I was supposed to write it on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016, but when I awoke the world was a far different place than I expected it to be. When it came time to make my weekly submission, I told my fellow Sunday Kossacks that I was too angry to write anything useful, or express myself proactively. In true Kos fashion, they encouraged me to let it rip regardless, but I put myself on pause in hopes of finding higher ground. Of course I’d already uploaded much of my heat-of-the-moment rage to Twitter in the wee hours of the morning, but felt my emotions were still too naked and raw to be tamed into prose.
I called my best friend.
As she so often does, she offered up the affirmation and insight that gave my inner rage a name. She said, “I feel so traumatized, it’s like 2000 all over again, it’s Bush/Gore PTSD.” Light bulbs. All at once it became apparent to me that I wasn’t just raging over the trauma of Election 2016, but also being triggered and antagonized by the memory of hanging chads, and the broad daylight theft of democracy that rained on my inaugural voting experience.
Not only is it a nightmare: it’s a recurring one.
Once again, we find ourselves overruled by a system that pays no deference to the will of the popular majority. Once again, we see a corporate media all too eager to acquiesce to the seedlings of fascism, and much too incestuous to see the immense danger in its groupthink. To add further insult to repetitive injury, this latest theft is accompanied by the joyful noise of white supremacists, and the wanton normalization of their very existence in close proximity to the Oval Office. As each day passes, I find myself more angry than I was the day before, rather than gradually settling into numbing calm. Another light bulb. The anger isn’t dissipating because the crisis won’t allow it.
Also, why should it?
I listen to Solange.
I won’t dare to try my hand as a music critic, but A Seat at the Table has been a salve to my election wounds in ways I didn’t expect as I listened to it pre-11/9. It’s not just the unapologetic pride in black womanhood, but as I’ve listened to it this week, I’m soothed by the affirmation that my anger is valid and righteous. Hearing her father recount his experience integrating schools in Jim Crow Alabama reminds me of my parents graduating from “Negro” high school in Jim Crow Texas, and I find myself in paradoxical peace at the reminder that they too were angry. More light bulbs. I also remember the Freedom Riders who rode on the fuel of unyielding anger at unmitigated crises. The abolitionists. The suffragettes. The bra burners. The hippies. Martin, Malcolm, and Rosa. John Lewis. Fannie Lou Hamer. Cesar Chavez. Dolores Huerta. All angry; all activists.
I have the right to be mad, and so do you. So did they.
Ultimately, it is the sheer magnitude and perpetuation of unquelled anger that forces us to reckon with its antecedents. If we aren’t sufficiently angry about the current state of affairs, we can’t muster the motivation to change them. Indeed, it’s precisely this righteous anger that fuels Propane Jane, and the tweetstorms smoldering from her hand. I've been mad since the day I learned my people were once enslaved, and every day since has been an exercise in living a purposeful life either in spite of or because of that anger. It's the same anger over healthcare disparities, socioeconomic injustice, and the race, sex, and gender discrimination felt by generations of souls who came before us. As Solange so aptly says, "I got a lot to be mad about”.
So here stands my angry submission. It isn't hurried or pressured by the expectation that time will heal all wounds. It is offered with absolute certainty that the fight for freedom and justice requires angry determination to thrive and succeed. It is volunteered amidst further confirmation that the apathy and complacency bred in the absence of sufficient anger create the very conditions at which we rage again. It could’ve been written on 11/9 in 2016, 2000, 1964, or 1864. We’ve earned the right to be mad, so we might as well use it.
For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die. — Ted Kennedy