News & Notes

So … Nine Lives has been pretty quiet thus far this year.

As usual, a variety of life events have gotten in the way of writing. But that’s not the primary reason for my silence. Mostly, I’ve been quiet because I’m stuck not knowing what to say.

America is in critical condition right now, and for all that I haven’t lived there in nearly twelve years, the state of things up north consumes almost my entire capacity for thought, almost all the time.

By now I would guess I have spent at least a thousand hours reading up in preparation for the crisis point that, in 2015, I became fully convinced America was headed for (and which we are now experiencing). A substantial portion of that research and study has occurred within the past six months, as the precise shape the crisis is taking has become more clear.

Unfortunately, every constructive, effective action my research has turned up requires that one be physically residing in America, an option that is closed to me for the foreseeable future and probably forever.

So what’s left? Well, all that research does leave me in possession of a great deal of relevant information, and maybe even some uncommon level of insight. I desperately want to share what I have learned, in no small part because there’s really nothing else helpful that I can do.

But I’ve come to feel like no one wants to hear what I have to say. The second part of my planned “How to Survive 2025” series was meant to be about some of the ways people can protect themselves technologically when surveillance capitalism meets authoritarian regime. But every time I’ve brought any part of that up with people I know personally, I’ve been shut down. For all the anti-Trump rhetoric amongst my friends and acquaintances, no one seems able to imagine that they might ever be personally affected, much less targeted. And so no one is willing to be even slightly inconvenienced for the sake of proactive safety.^[1]

These kind of responses have discouraged me from continuing to spend the multiple tens of hours required to compile, double-check, and source that sort of comprehensive guide.

Sometimes I even fear that sharing what I know might make things worse. I came very close to publishing a piece on “How to Survive an Anti-Authoritarian Protest” just before the Hands Off demonstrations, detailing all the safety preparations that one could make when state violence was a possible response.

But I held back, partly because I feared I would (again) come off as alarmist and no one would take me seriously; partly because I was afraid that if anyone did take me seriously, talking about worst-case scenarios might make people too scared to turn out, which would be the exact opposite of what the resistance needs.

And nothing did go wrong … that day. But here we are two months later, and it’s a different story. I’ve personally seen videos on Bluesky from No Kings Saturday of state violence against nonviolent citizen protestors in three cities (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Las Vegas). Everything I know points to a future in which — assuming resistance continues, which I believe and hope it will — the violence of state security forces against unarmed, nonviolent citizens will continue to escalate.

And I still don’t know whether finishing that piece is a good idea. Maybe I should leave such things to the people on the ground organizing the movements. Or people for whom this sort of thing is their professional field of expertise.

But because writing about the current emergency is the only thing I personally can do that has a chance of moving the needle even infinitesimally, of helping anyone at all ... not doing that leaves me feeling utterly helpless, sometimes even despairing.

My trauma coping mechanisms all center around gathering information and then taking action; “silent witnessing” is not a strategy I have ever been comfortable with.

And writing about anything except the greatest global political emergency in eighty years feels absolutely trivial. In fact, even going through the motions of fucking being alive right now feels a lot like being a band member on the deck of the Titanic. I have spent days at a time this year enmired in the (unanswerable) question of “what even is the point of me?”

I keep coming back to the conclusion that if I am good for anything at all, it must be writing … and yet I am not often very good at getting people to read what I am saying. Sometimes I wish I were better at comedy than tragedy. Last night, after finishing a draft including the above paragraph, I happened to watch a Netflix stand-up special in which a comedian^[2] used essentially the exact same idea as a joke: “I tend to set the stakes for everything that I do way too high. Like, right now I feel crushed by the responsibility of having a microphone at this moment in history. Anything less than calling for global revolution feels a bit self-indulgent, you know what I mean? Like, what am I going to do, talk about boobs?”

I am poignantly reminded of journalist (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Maria Ressa’s plea on Jon Stewart’s podcast a few weeks ago: “Jon, I want you to take these facts and make them funny because no one is listening to them.”

Stewart replied, “Maria, I’m doing my damn best. I really am. It’s just hard.”

I’ve never been one to write only for myself; it’s always and only for me an act of communication. So if you’ve read this far in my angsty little ramble, I’d like to know your preference, if you have one. Should I write about authoritarian resistance strategy and safety practices, however inconvenient? Should I try to go back to writing about other, more personal things which don’t directly address the current political emergency (but which will still probably convey my general sense of anxiety and anguish, because that’s what I have to work with and I am not a stand-up comedian)? Should I just let Nine Lives lie fallow and focus purely on fiction?^[3]

You can send your answer in an email (replying to the newsletter works great); paying supporters also have an online comment option.