Hi, friends,

My dad has Alzheimer's and his mom died of it a decade ago, so I've been doing a lot of research on it from the functional perspective, and one of the things that seems to happen during the decline of Alzheimer's is that the patient begins to fixate on something and turns it into a catchall that becomes a huge, looming evil to them. When my grandma was declining but still undiagnosed with Alzheimer's she came to visit me in NYC*. She had never been to New York, and my mom (her DIL) helped me plan a really amazing week of cool stuff that we knew my grandma would be very interested in. But with all the interesting, special stuff we did and saw, the one thing she couldn't stop thinking and talking about was "the garbage!". It was August when she came, and as anyone who's been to NYC in August knows, that's when all the sanitation workers take vacation time along with the rest of the world.

Usually, the workers come throughout the night and pick up the bags of garbage left at the curb by supers of residential buildings and employees of businesses, and garbage gets picked up twice a week for each site. NYC has never been accused of being clean, per se, but the garbage pick-up situation is usually coordinated enough that people don't really notice it. Until August, when service slows down to once a week because people are on vacation, so it piles up and can start to stink in the heat and humidity. It happens, and then after Labor Day everything get on schedule again. In August you can just walk quickly through the smell and go into The Guggenheim or a James Beard Award-winning restaurant or something and not let it take up any of your mental energy.

But my grandmother's brain was starting to rebel and disintegrate, so she became stuck on the garbage issue. It's all she wanted to talk about during the actual trip. We were in the Met looking at the TIffany windows and she was stuck on the garbage. Any time anyone asked her how she liked NYC it's all she could say. And it's all she could say about the trip after the trip, either. I have no idea if she had any fun or enjoyed anything we saw, because the idea of the garbage became so big to her that there was no room for her to say or think about anything else. It was like there was a huge garbage bag in her brain that she couldn't see around.

It's pretty clear that Trump** is in a loop about DEI and it's all that's in his mind and that he can think about or talk around. It's like there's a huge garbage bag labeled DEI in his brain that he can't see past. I am positive that he wouldn't be able to tell anyone what the letters D, E, and I stand for. He seems to think DEI is an actual person or group of people. And what's funny to me is that he's creating a coalition by hammering "DEI!" in his typical deranged way.

A big complaint that a lot of people had about the last decade of the USA reality series is that we were mired in identity politics. The "I'm not politically correct" crowd was insulted that people were actually standing up for themselves and being proud of/identifying with the things that made us protected or underrepresented or underserved. And a lot of us who think that identity politics are just fine and a necessary step to claiming power and community understood that they were losing momentum and it was time to start coalescing before it all became enervating. So here's an external enemy who's just lumping us all together anyway in a bizarre and obsessed way, and it turns out that we're all DEI now, I guess?

The bigger issue, of course, is that they're trying to destroy DEI laws and civil rights protections at multple levels, simply by trying to declare them void or illegal or overturned, and by scaring institutions into ending DEI initiatives. These jackasses think that the only reason anyone in the US has been hiring women, admitting BIPOC to highly rejective colleges, putting in accessibility features in public buildings, and giving anyone who isn't a white male Evangelical human trafficking cult*** member any kind of break, or evening the field in any way, is because there were laws passed. They think that we all are bigots like they are, who want to keep only these abusive white men in charge of everything. And if that's the case, then dsimantling civil rights protections and DEI initiatives will make all progress over the last 60 years collapse.

But the flaw in that plan is that there are too many of us DEIs (DEIers? DEIsts?) in power and in the public sphere now to make us disappear entirely or shove us under the couch or in the back of the closet. And a shitton of us have been working to be anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-misogynist, anti-homophobic for most of our lives in big and small ways. I mean, my 82-year-old mother is happy to write her pronouns under her name on a nametag for church events because she knows it's an easy way to make things safer for other people. I don't think my mom is at all unusual--there are millions of us who are doing big and little things to try to create safety and equality and justice for other groups of people. I'm realizing now that I've been more complacent about this than I should have been, and am renewing my efforts to support others without taking over for them. I am guessing that you are having this same realization and are doubling or tripling down on supporting other people.

Even if we don't dig in harder, though, the default position of the country without civil rights protections and DEI initiatives is still, on a personal level, so much more advanced than these jackasses think it is. The think they're going to remove DEI initiatives and everyone but their cis white Evangelical cult dreamboys are just going to disappear. But come on. Who can stand those guys? And the rest of us aren't going anywhere. We work with and for each other already. We need to strengthen those networks so we're stronger and safer all together. This weekend, maybe we can all do some investigation about an identity group that isn't our usual ones (the ones we belong to and our kids and friends belong to) and find out what that group is going to face during this administration, and think about ways to help support that group of fellow human beings. If we can just connect the fuck out of the 252 million of us that didn't vote for Trump, we'll end up better off than we were ten years ago.

Does it matter whether they're playing checkers or chess? (Or Connect Four, as a meme I saw the other day said.) I want to play spades or PacMan instead and just be cool with everyone over here in the extremely large DEI section.

No way out but through.

Love,

Magda

*I lived in NYC from 1996 to 2011.

**My friend Steve refers to him as 0.957 because he's 45/47. Math nerds unite.

***I mean, let's just call Evangelical "churches" what they are, which is human trafficking cults that exist to control the bodies of women and children.

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