This is not a drill

Do you remember in January 2018, during Trump’s first term as president, a false warning was accidentally sent through the country’s Emergency Alert  System instructing people living in Hawaii to seek shelter due to an incoming ballistic missile. “Seek shelter immediately,” the warning read in all caps. “This is not a drill.”

It took more than 38 minutes for officials to admit that the warning had been sent in error. But by then, the fear and panic had spread. “I thought I was going to die,” one person shared in an essay at Business Insider. 

On social media, I heard through mutual friends about a Hawaiian couple who ran out after receiving the alert and adopted a dog from a local animal shelter. The compulsion they felt in that moment, aside from fear and anxiety, was to open their home to an animal in an attempt to give it a brief reprieve of love and security. I always wanted to write a story about that couple, but we were never able to make it work. The last time I reached out, though, they told me they still had the dog.

Trump, who was by then starting his second year in office, had already been threatening to “communicate with the public” via the phones we all carry in our pockets and purses. In October 2018 he did just that, sending out a mass message testing that system.

I was in the middle of a telephone interview with the author Lacy Johnson during that October test when both of our phones buzzed. Not only was this man on every news channel, all over Twitter and every other website, now he was insinuating himself into even private moments. It felt like Trump was inescapable, even if you tried to ignore the news.

In November 2016, I was living in Amsterdam. I stayed up very late, watching the returns come in. At 6 a.m., even though some swing states had still not reported, i decided to open the bottle of champagne I had for the occasion, which was looking more and more bleak.

Unlike 2016, during this year’s election, Trump felt inevitable. Inescapable. Again. 

After this year’s election, I took solace in my dogs. The day after, I took them for a long walk. I took them to the beach in Galveston a few weekends later. We went to the dog park. The great thing about dogs is that they don’t even know what a president is. They had no idea America had just had an election.

None of us knows what fresh hell a second Trump administration will bring, but by all accounts, the intention is to inflict a large amount of suffering on Americans, particularly marginalized folks. Adopting a dog ins’t going to save Black folks, or queer folks, or immigrants. As Choire Sicha wrote the day after the election, your first idea is not necessarily your best idea.

But when I get overwhelmed thinking about what the future might hold, I try to think of small ways to reclaim my humanity, protect my community, and perpetuate kindness. (Kindness, not niceness.) Americans will likely be asked to make some difficult decisions in the next couple of years. If you think you can’t resist in a big way, maybe a small action is more sustainable.

Some things I've found helpful

• I've been revisiting this essay from Sarah Kendzior a lot in the past few months: how to be your own light in the Age of Trump
• On journaling: The secret diary of a mass murder, about a Polish journalist who took notes on what he saw and heard happening in the forrest of Ponar in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.

Sakowicz’s response to what was happening around him was to write it down, to make a secret record of the events. He took detailed notes in Polish on scraps of paper, sometimes writing in the white spaces around the numbers on pages from a calendar—describing everything he saw and learned, creating a fragmentary diary in which revelatory observations were interspersed with his own wry commentary.

• And that reminds me of the story I wrote in 2017 about a group of Czech teens in a Nazi-occupied ghetto who created a secret zine, Vedem, to document life in the encampment, eventually publishing 83 issues in two years.
• Fifteen things for when the world is shitty and terrifying
• "Insisting upon our humanity means taking care of other people around you, slowly and deliberately and intentionally, not out of obligation, but because the precise intended feeling of moments like this is to make us feel isolated, disconnected, fundamentally misunderstood and unheard. Insisting upon our humanity means doing the things that are not recognizably efficient, that aren’t focused on walling ourselves off."
• 101 small ways you can improve your city
• From Bluesky: advice from Brazilians who have lived under Bolsonaro. Plus, "not obeying in advance" means not letting him suck all the joy out of your life before he even gets in office.
• I want a dyke for president

That’s all for today. I love you, thanks for reading.