Sometimes you need to break out the tea you’ve been saving for a special occasion. In this case, it’s a tiny amount of liu bao, a post-fermented tea, that is from the 1950s and cost a small fortune. I have no memory of when I bought it, but I’ve been holding onto it for the right time, and this week counted, because I needed to count, to breathe, to meditate on hot water and flavor and the steeping of tea.

 

This tea was smooth: deep, dark, wonderful, with not a hint of chewy bitterness. It was exactly what I needed to help my brain unclench after (gestures wildly at the world) all of that.

 

I had enough for one pot of tea, and that was enough for me to get a little bit of a break from what feels like a never ending onslaught of fear. 

 

We are going to need as many of those breaks as we can possibly get.

I sincerely hope that three months from now, I will be able to truthfully send out another newsletter saying that I overreacted, that none of what I discuss hereafter comes true. Before you read what comes next, you might want to make sure that you take a moment to get in the mindset to read something very scary, because I think we are living in scary times, and I don’t think I can honestly present the current reality as anything other than what it is.

 

I learned a word this week: hypernormalization.

 

It’s the word people used to describe what was happening in the Soviet bloc countries in the 1970s and 1980s, as people went about their daily lives deeply aware that the center would not hold, that everything was falling apart, but with nothing left to do but pretend that life would go on as they understood it.

 

It’s a word that encompasses the moment when a large number of us know what is happening to our country—know what we are seeing—but engage in a mass, country-wide kayfabe to keep on doing the things we need to do to survive as individuals, even knowing that some individuals won’t make it and that the world we know is rapidly deteriorating around us.

 

And so I want to break the hypernormalization period and write the most alarmist thing I have ever written. I am sorry for having to do that—I try, in general, to not spread panic, and I will try to not do so now. But I have to talk about what is happening in very frank terms.

 

The last two weeks of the Trump presidency have gone from awful to horrific. Executive orders attacking transgender youth, demanding the reinstatement of segregation and the firing of anyone of color and women and disabled people under the guise of ending “DEI,” and ending birthright citizenship using arguments that are disingenuous at best and generally outright falsehoods. 

 

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s code flunkies are rewriting the computer programs in the Treasury department so that he can divert, create, or stop Treasury payments without a paper trail or accountability, and he’s moving into other departments. 

 

None of this is lawful, but enforcement of the law will take months if not years. There are lawsuits; I do not know what lawsuits will do if Musk can simply divert payments. And if the executive branch refuses to enforce the law of the land, which seems increasingly likely, lawsuits will have no effect.

 

I do not mean to sound alarmist, because I do not think that panic and terror are helpful. But I very much think that the alarm is sounding at this moment, and I do not want to contribute to the hypernormalization that is going on right now. 

 

I firmly believe that if nothing is done, historians will place the end of the United States as a democratic, constitutional republic somewhere between a few days ago and a few months from now.

 

So at this point, what do we do?

 

I want to direct you to a piece by Erika Malinoski that I have been thinking about this week about the difference between survival brain and social brain. When we are in our survival brain, our fight or flight impulses are hyped up, and that is when we are most likely to make mistakes and do horrific things. It is the goal of fascists to put us in our survival brain, to make it so that we sort people into “enemy to be destroyed” or “ally in the fight to destroy enemies.” When we are using our survival brain, we are capable of enormous harm.

 

Our social brain is what makes us work together. It’s what makes us save lives, what makes us find solidarity with each other and work for a common cause. It’s what makes us better ourselves as a species.

 

I think that it is deeply important for us to retain as much of our social brain as possible: to connect with other human beings and help them, rather than spend all our time fighting. It helps other human beings, but it also helps us be better, kinder human beings.

 

This is why I don’t want to be alarmist—because I do not want people to be in their survival brain. 

 

You may look at thus and say, “but Courtney, that’s not an answer to fascism.”

 

It is; and it is not. Fascism depends on having enemies. There must be enemies to justify restrictions and giving up rights. There must be enemies to keep you from really thinking about what is happening—to keep you from asking yourself whether what they’re trying to do is worth the horrific cost they are imposing. There must be enemies to justify putting down protests.

 

Keeping your brain from buying into their claim of enemies everywhere is how you oppose fascism from taking root in yourself.

 

One of the things we need to do is consolidate power based on kindness and acting together, with hope and love for our fellow human beings, wherever we can reach. If the federal government declares that trans people are on the enemies, or librarians, or immigrants, or women of color—we must do our best to provide the victims of fascism with love and support in any way possible.

 

This might mean action on the state level. For some of you who live in states that are hostile, this could be solely on the community level. Perhaps you will only be able to act in your neighborhood. Wherever love and kindness persist, we oppose fascism. We do it on the small level; we can build to the national level.

 

And we are going to need that wherever we land.

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