Goodbye 2016

I didn't write anything here for the last two months of the year because I was really depressed about the election. I was also in the early months of being pregnant, and while the pregnancy is great news, I was sick most of the time so wasn't really doing anything besides struggling through the workday, lying on the couch, trying not to throw up, and throwing up. The election and the pregnancy sort of swirled together into a seemingly endless stream of nausea and existential dread - we had been thrilled about the pregnancy on November 7, but then a switch flipped and both Ben and I really struggled with what it's going to mean to bring a child into a world that is much different, and much worse, than the one we had anticipated.

After a mourning period (no kidding - I wore a torn black ribbon for a week after the election to symbolically sit shiva), I owned up to the fact that as rich, well-educated, straight, cis, white people living in an extremely liberal area, we are going to be among the least harmed by the new administration. That means we need to step up to try and minimize the damage to the more vulnerable among us. So far we've done that by:

• Increasing our recurring donations from 5% of our income to 10%, partly by increasing the amount to organizations like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, whose work is now more important than ever, and partly by adding a few new organizations that address the increasingly urgent issues of Islamophobia (Council on American-Islamic Relations), immigrant rights (National Immigration Law Center), voting rights (Brannan Center for Justice), and trans rights (TGI Justice Project).
• I found out I get a bonus at my new job, which is great but financially unnecessary, so I gave it away. Some went to extra end of year giving for organizations we already support, most went to organizations working to support Syrian refugees given the current severity of that crisis.
• The feminist book club I'm a part of decided to do more than just read together, and collectively we are sponsoring the local resettlement of a refugee family with the International Rescue Committee. Unfortunately the US doesn't let citizens sponsor the settlement of additional refugee families, so we can't increase the number of people receiving safety here, but the IRC works to support the settlement of already approved refugee families who don't have any local friends or family to support them. We should be matched with a family in the next few weeks, at which point we'll raise funds to support them financially, collect furniture and other items to furnish their new home, and mentor them in navigating the city, getting jobs, getting their kids enrolled in school, and all the other tasks that they'll need support in managing over the coming months.
• I've been calling various elected representatives every morning on my walk to work to advocate for and against various bills, proposals, and appointments. I get my daily action list from a combination of We're His Problem Now, #FightTrump, and Wall of Us. At first I was reluctant to do this because I don't like talking to strangers on the phone, but it is actually really easy, and now it's just part of my morning routine. For the first few weeks I was calling while walking, I was still stopping behind what I nicknamed my "puke bush" midway through my walk for my daily morning throw up, and I was still able to make calls before and after - it really is that easy. One time Jason Chaffetz even answered his own phone, which I was totally unprepared for, but the lesson I took away was to keep calling and be prepared to talk to anyone.
• This is a small thing, but we sent handwritten support letters to every mosque that received hatemail after the election. It felt nice to write uniformly positive and loving letters, in contrast to the often critical phone calls, and the unexpected - but completely lovely - result has been some incredibly wonderful letters back from people at the various mosques. So if you're ever visiting and wonder why we have holiday cards from random mosques across the country on our fridge, that's why.
• Ben has been especially concerned about the potential environmental harm on the horizon, so he's been figuring out how to make us greener in various ways. For now he's mostly focused on reducing our water use and our trash output, and we've also agreed to only eat meat twice a week, fly less often, and do as much of our shopping locally as possible.
• We're not going to go to the Women's March on Washington, as part of our new "minimize flying" policy, but we are going to go to the Bay Area solidarity march.
• I re-read "Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice" with a group at work, and we're trying to figure out how we can collectively do something useful like my feminist book club is doing.
• I also read "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities" and found it really helpful for thinking about how to approach the coming years. In particular, I'm realizing the importance of picking only 1-2 issues and really focusing on them, rather than trying to do everything and doing it all poorly. The author also writes about the importance of centering your actions around the goals you are trying to achieve, and not developing an unhealthy obsession with "the enemy" standing in your way. In other words, I need to resist the temptation to waste mental energy despairing over how awful the human dumpster fire of the president elect is, and stay focused on loving and supporting the people I want to protect from him.

All told, I'm feeling okay about what we are doing so far (and I haven't stopped doing any of the things I've written about in previous posts). I'm having to resist the temptation to join more groups and sign up for more recurring actions, because I know I'll have limited capacity once the baby comes, and I don't want to start any work where me suddenly disappearing for several months would cause problems. I am feeling kind of icky about the fact that all of these actions we're taking would have still been important had the election gone the other way, but we probably wouldn't have been catalyzed into doing them. I'm hoping the unpleasantness of that personal realization will compel me to maintain this level of engagement even when there isn't a looming existential threat to our national freedom and security.