I’ve noticed some posts around about how you can’t romanticize your life during a fascist regime and while I deeply sympathize with this sentiment, I want you to try to understand that’s what they want you to believe.
Fascism thrives best in the cesspool of hopelessness. They want us so confused and hopeless that we give in. When you give in, you don’t fight back.
If you wait for life to look good to do the things that bring you joy; life will still be bad - you will just have less joy.
As someone who has struggled with my mental health a lot for the last thirty years, I know this struggle firsthand. And changing this belief system - the one where you spend all of your time expecting bad things so you won’t be surprised when they happen - it’s the hardest work that I have ever done. And I’m not perfect; I still have setbacks. I still experience really real fears about the state of the world and the US, in particular, because that’s where I live.
But I made a vow to myself that I will not let the choices of others ruin my life. When I made that vow, I was thinking of my parents - but it applies to the state of the government right now, too.
There are still flowers in my garden, and ripe tomatoes, and it’s almost pick-your-own apples season, and I have plans with my friends to go to as many cemetery ghost walks as we can find this October.
I still deserve to live. I still deserve to laugh. I still deserve to love. I still deserve to be as happy as I can be.
And you do, too.
Dan Savage.
*gestures broadly at the resistance movements in europe during the last reich*
“Where there's hope, there's life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”
— The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
“One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”
— The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
