Scream

I wrote this piece in October 2017 the day after the Las Vegas shooting, while news from Puerto Rico about the horrors of Hurricane Maria were still filtering out, and I was still processing my experience of being in Miami the day after the Pulse shooting a year earlier. Read it as fast as possible until the plane evens out with your scream.

Before I left you asked me to write you while I was on the road and once I landed I went straight to the bookstore and while thumbing my fingers along the spines of 2 dollar throwaways I found a book of 90 postcards by a queer femme cuban punk who had grown up in Miami and lived in Brooklyn and published these graphic depictions of life on the road That resonated deeply with me called Distance Makes the Heart Grow Sick

and so I immediately purchased it and found a book of stamps and spent the evening flipping through and sending out little signal lights asking who wants a postcard and as I was writing more thoughts started to flow and I started to wonder why I hadn’t been doing this for years because you were right I could feel the pull could see the connections to all the homes I’ve built over the years

The anarchist compound in Des Moines where I spent 9 weeks try to convince student to register to vote

the house in the burbs in DC where we spent 15 week 10 people to a room chainsmoking and building an assault plan on the Capitol to take back our democracy

all the couches that housed me just for a night how many others’ sweat and stardust lived in those cushions

and I wondered whether you knew anyone in Mexico City whose home was now just a pile of rubble

and I looked at these postcards and I thought about Miami and how the only time I was there I was stuck in meetings about climate gentrification and fair weather flooding during the day while queers were burying their dead just a few hours away because Pulse had a Latin night and that was of course the time to shoot up the club and how I had never felt such an intense visceral grief for people who I didn’t know personally

but somehow it was piercing right down to my soul and the only thing this crew of young queers that I was staying in an Airbnb with a giant Texaco sign as wall decor could do while surrounded by these liberal environmentalists who could only think to do a blood drive which we weren’t even legally allowed to participate in was dip out early and go find a club in downtown Miami and grieve on the dancefloor defiantly move our shoulders in time with the locals who welcomed us with open arms who understood why we were there

and I remember walking outside at the end of the night and no words needed to be said but the three of us all shared the lovesac that night and I didn’t mind while they made out because we were all holding each other up

and I could feel a glimmer of the community I had only read about the queers and dykes who marched together united in anger acting up pushing forward pushing out pushing up unsure of which direction to go because their lovers and families and friends were dropping dead in the streets but at least there were Monday night meetings where sex was in the air and equity shares in Wells Fargo weren’t a distraction and they knew that the whole damn system had to go

and I suddenly found myself pouring out this memory in a stuffy boardroom as the reason why I organize to a group of people who I knew would misgender me and misunderstand me but I didn’t really care because at this point if you let me through the door without knowing my politics then it’s too little too late for you and what good would another meeting about climate advocacy be if there wasn’t some fucking urgency brought in to the room I can’t remember if Puerto Rico was mentioned but at least everyone in the room knew some about how bad things were in Puerto Rico but not a lot about the colonial history of Puerto Rico or the fact that Puerto Rico’s electrical grid was still 100% offline and dams were bursting but apparently Puerto Rico made a good headlines news story about how much worse things could have been

and seriously if you know someone from Puerto Rico or someone with family in Puerto Rico now might be a good time to text them and see how they’re doing now might be a good time to really take stock of who to send a postcard to because the last few weeks have been a real shitshow in lots of places and there’s lots of people hurting

and it’s really important that we take a second to talk about what got us to this point just a second because things are starting to spin faster and faster and yes the shooting last night was a travesty we should absolutely honor and remember those lost

and also it’s not too much to say that many people I saw posting about this tragedy today were pointing out that in reality there are unspoken massacres like Wounded Knee and Black Wall Street with larger losses of life so in part the question remains whose lives have mattered until now and whose lives the cameras will focus on and the answer to that question creates the conditions for death on the streets of Las Vegas and forces us to forget about the hills of Sierra Leone and the floodplains of India and the cracked apartment buildings of Mexico City and the flooded Superfund sites of Houston and the flooded streets of downtown Miami and the flooded towns of Puerto Rico

and I finished my meetings and got on the plane to Detroit and I was sitting next to my friend who had just finished a 400 mile hike in the backcountry in Northern California all by himself and he was telling me about how hiking on trails with just a flimsy guardrail between you and a 500 foot drop while you’re having trouble breathing because of the smoke plumes of the massive wildfires that are darkening the sky of the entire Pacific Northwest really puts a lot of things in perspective like the arrogance of believing that we have any sort of control over a complex system that we’ve been pumping millions of barrels of oil a day into for decades and that maybe chaos theory is right maybe we really do learn how to thrive right on the knife-point edge of disaster and being in these sorts of situations is a good reminder of that and a good way to prepare oneself for the cold hard facts of 40 feet of sea level rise when Greenland and the West Antarctic shelf collapse and how every major coastal city will no longer exist

and even if we win beyond the most radical dreams of every leftist since long before Marx all the emptied coffers of the rich and powerful won’t stop the most devastating tragedies in human history and I try to tell him that that might all be true but fuck that’s not the way human psychology works that’s why we need short-term wins and victories we can’t get people onboard to build a better society if we know that our best win is a hundred times worse than things are and he says well that may be the way humans are wired right now but we’re wired by the systems we exist in so maybe if we really think about it in terms of an evolution of the human species not just singular political victories we can get something done and I realize that we’ve arrived at the same logical conclusion just through different ends and my rising scream evens out at the same time as the plane and I calmly observe the irony of us having this conversation while we are 10000 feet in the air and my friend stops to look out the window and points out the sunset reflecting off the rippling water below with a smile and a twinkle in his eye.