Press bans and fear: How authoritarianism changes us

The community room in a rural library slowly fills with residents on a warm September night. This is a county that has voted deep red for decades in a district continuously held by Republican congressmen since 1981. A packed meeting of over sixty attendees for the town hall of a Democratic challenger is a curiosity in this town of just over twelve thousand.

There are more gray heads than any other color and precious few under the age of forty. But the energy of the crowd is fervent, leaning forward in their seats, ready and passionate. Not all are particularly convinced by the Democrat, though no one here speaks up in favor of the Republican incumbent. At first, there seems to be no media present, until a local blogger stands up and starts snapping photos with an iPhone.

Might this upstart candidate have a chance to beat the juggernaut of a Republican who has won the district with 60 to 68 percent of the vote in three consecutive elections? Does he stand a chance with a budget of reportedly $30,000 up against roughly $1.3 million on the Republican side? The crowd seems to hope so. Their questions aren’t so much about the candidate’s policies as about strategy. How does he propose to win?

The strenuous but positive atmosphere is shattered when a harsh voice interrupts loudly from the back of the room. “Are you recording?”

I’m that lone blogger/journalist, and I’m momentarily stunned. But I manage to blurt, “No!”

The voice continues, scolding, demanding that I stop taking pictures. Given my history as a person with a visible disability, I have huge social anxiety, and it is all I can do to ask whether there is a media ban. I turn to the precarious candidate, who is frozen in mid-sentence. “Are you not allowing pictures?”

Chris beck, democratic challenger in a deep red district, talks with a crowd at a rural town hall where a member of the audience objected to photos, citing security concerns - the image shows a man talking to a room full of people with their faces censored by black rectangles - image by arie farnam

“No, n…n…no. Photos are fine.” He seems as shocked as me.

But my companion that evening taps at my leg. I can’t see the faces around me. I take photos, but that’s mainly because I’m good at composition. I’m still legally blind and the faces are all blotchy ovals without expression or distinction. I don’t know who has yelled at me or who might now be glaring. So, I sit down.

I don’t feel welcome. The general mood has soured considerably, and both questions and answers feel forced. "That was uncalled for," one woman whispers. Another comments, “She wouldn’t treat someone she respected that way." A half an hour later, I muster the courage to duck out the back door, giving a little wave in case anyone is watching for my reaction. The last thing I want to do is put more of a damper on this particular campaign.

I hoped that would be the end of it. But as it turned out, the person who scolded me was sort-of the organizer—at least the person who had helped Chris Beck set up this town hall, though he’d insisted on leading it himself, and apparently with good reason. Had there been a media ban of some kind announced? No, no one I spoke to had seen or heard anything of the sort.

Later that evening, I received a text from the organizer, demanding that I not publish any photos including her or her husband. The camera had been turned to capture the candidate plus some portions of the crowd, after all. And it hit me that this wasn’t just a controlling event coordinator with a poor understanding of free press coverage, but a person afraid for themselves and their family in a time of political repression and vindictiveness.

Was that reasonable?

Fear is rarely “reasonable.” It catches, reacts and grows like wildfire, unpredictably and usually in ways that are unhelpful. Certainly, we face significant political retribution in the U.S. today. That very weekend, reporters from CNN, Politico, and MS NOW were banned from the press areas of the White House for reporting that was mostly tepid and only sometimes rigorously fact-checked Trump’s statements. Naturally, those of us with opposition views get nervous and try to protect our identities when we can.

But this was a campaign event and a town hall where people from both sides were likely to meet, some expressly to argue with the candidate. The question about recording made a bit more sense if someone wanted to ask a sensitive question. But photos? How could being photographed in the audience of such an event be considered controversial?

Well, what if we were in Russia? In the period when a campaign event by an opposition candidate was even theoretically possible in Russia, being seen in the audience might well have been problematic, given that no one who wasn’t actively working for the regime as a spy would be there unless they were a vehement supporter of the candidate. Because that’s how Putin rolls. Surveillance would be guaranteed. Retribution might not be immediate, but the files would be kept for a time when “evidence” against you might be desirable.

I spent the next several days thinking about it, while an uncomfortable debate cropped up in our local activist discussion channel about me and my photos. Most people seemed to take the side of the organizer who had scolded me. One woman thought the camera was pointed too much toward the audience. Another speculated on how a media ban could be logistically carried out. The organizer claimed the library’s policy against photographing staff and patrons covered public events as well. A lawyer chimed in to state that it is legal to take photos at campaign events.

But that doesn’t really solve any of our problems or answer the thorny questions. Is it ethical to take such photos? Is it ethical to ban journalists or all photos at a public campaign event? Is it legitimate to be afraid of being identified in the audience, since people with opposing views do often attend town hall meetings in the U.S.? And if you think things are as bad as they are in Russia, shouldn’t we expect more discreet surveillance anyway? With Trump banning journalists, is this really something we should be emulating?

In Russia or the totalitarian states of the old Soviet Bloc, a media ban by opposition groups wouldn’t be on the table, not because their situation is (or was less dire. The opposition in Russia still faces worse repression than we do, regardless of how shocked we are at Trump’s recent actions. But in Russia, surveillance of any publicly announced event, whether an opposition campaign or a protest, would be guaranteed, whether it was visible or not. And any independent media coverage would thus be welcom, not as a means by which the authorities would grab the identities of those present but rather as documentation that is desperately needed, whether it can be used in media coverage or not.

In Trump’s America, with security cameras and smart phone location services constantly tracking us, it’s hard to imagine any advantage in banning photos that might include part of the audience at such a public event. Even local antagonism can’t be avoided. Every one of our outdoor public events is photographed by people driving or walking by. We’ve noted several photographers intentionally capturing every face in protest crowds. Some of us wear masks to try to avoid being recognized locally, because there are examples of threats and intimidation against people who oppose the MAGA movement, especially in rural areas like this.

I was trailed by a white pickup at a walking pace while I was out with my guide dog a couple of months ago. I do understand the fear.

But fear itself is also one of the greatest threats we face. All too often fear is wielded as a conscious weapon by authoritarian governments. It is meant to cause just such scenes—to turn likeminded neighbors against one another, to sow dissention and suspicion among opponents of the regime, and to ensure that efforts to oppose the regime stay quiet, unpublicized, and repressed. And it isn’t just fear that bleeds out of authoritarian regimes and into the thoughts and actions of the population.

When Trump banned major media organizations from access to the press areas of the White House, he did so in an intentionally shaming way, canceling the badges of reporters who were then dramatically refused access in front of their colleagues. Many of us share messages online about how "we are not the same." We say our opposition to this administration is not merely about political differences of opinion. It’s about things that go much deeper.

Bullying. Censorship. Banning journalists from legitimate public places. Intentional cruelty. Undermining democracy. These are not "political issues." These are moral issues. 

And it is not only right-wing politicians and groups that have engaged in them throughout history. Left-wing idealists with the best of intentions worked hard to build labor movements that, in some cases, developed into totalitarian regimes. I spent a lot of my journalistic career witnessing the aftermath of that in Eastern Europe.

That is why I, first and foremost, pay attention to the difference between political and ethical issues. We must guard against the creep of authoritarian thinking into our own groups. Authoritarian power. Shaming. Banning journalists from a campaign event. Those are not left or right, Democrat or Republican. That power dynamic is often spread by a regime that is so pervasive in its misbehavior that it causes citizens to mimic its tactics and turn on one another out of fear.

That is something that working as a journalist in countries with present and recent totalitarian regimes taught me. The problem isn't just the regime. Much worse is how such oppressive systems turn the people against one another, poisoning opposition groups with fear, infighting, and cynicism. This is a fascist regime that we're up against and the mutual suspicion and depression spreading in progressive groups across the country is one of the proofs of it.

We must also protect one another. Some people are more at risk than others in these times. I’ve obscured the faces in my photo to be as safe as possible, but the fact that we all had tracking devices in our pockets should banish any false sense of security. I urge everyone to learn about realistic security and privacy measures, including leaving phones at home and wearing masks. No one should be hassled if they choose to protect their own privacy.

But no one should be shamed for doing the work that needs to be done either. I was shaken by being publicly reprimanded, but I’d go through ten times that much if I thought it would help. The problem is that the change in the atmosphere of that room was palpable. No one wanted to say a peep. Some likely won't come again.

If only all the negativity just came from the regime!

It is hard to get along, to let slights go, to take personal safety measures, choose one’s own level of risk, and then be brave. But we know the alternative. As Chris Beck, the one person in the room with no hope of anonymity, said, "This is not about me. It’s bigger than any of us."

Ordinary moments in the midst of terror

As a young teenager in the early 1990s, I was deeply shaken and transformed by the movie Au revoir les enfants ("Goodbye, Children"), a 1987 French film, about the friendship between two boys, Julien and Jean, at a Catholic boarding school during World War II. In the film, Jean is Jewish, and he is abducted along with other children and the school headmaster by Nazi authorities at the end of the movie. It was based on the real experiences of the director, Louis Malle, who attended just such a school where Jewish children were hidden and then taken away during the war.

The film was one of the least graphic or horrific Holocaust stories I was exposed to as a teenager. So, why did it affect me so deeply?

There are images from that film that have circulated in my thoughts regularly for decades now—the boys playing practical jokes, playing outside, sitting in class, complaining about school lunches, and getting into minor trouble. The vast majority of the film is regular life, and that was completely intentional, not poor pacing on Malle’s part. His whole point was how normal life was.

Yes, he was aware of tensions and wild stuff going on during that time, but mostly it felt distant. There’s one scene in a restaurant where a Jewish man is recognized and harassed. That’s one of the few times anything comes up, but even that isn’t the point. The point of the scene and what gets most of the camera’s attention is how quickly everyone in the restaurant goes back to eating and talking normally.

A peaceful creek and a small stack of stones for meditation - image by Arie Farnam

About a year after I first saw that movie I went to Germany as an exchange student and I couldn’t get it out of my head. My German host family was often pretty harsh. They weren’t told ahead of time that I’m legally blind, and they were upset. We were sitting at dinner and my host father snapped, “That’s unacceptable!” My host mother explained in a somewhat more moderate tone, “But we hoped you would be friends with our daughter,” as if that was now impossible, which proved to be true.

One of the biggest problems was that I couldn’t go to school with their daughter who was a year younger than me, because German schools did not allow students with disabilities to attend mainstream public schools at the time (in 1992). My host mother, who I believe did try to be kind despite my prickly teenage exterior, arranged for me to attend an all-girls private Catholic school.

And the only reason I could attend was because I had buckled to my mother’s protective pressure and marked my religion as “Protestant” on my official exchange agency forms. I was about as Protestant as the Dalai Lama. The problem was that the form only had Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Buddhist options. There wasn’t even an option for Muslims, let alone Pagans. There was no “other” category, which I would have happily chosen. I wanted to check Buddhist, just to mess with them, even though my family wasn’t remotely Buddhist either. Mama said I should choose Protestant because at least she was raised Protestant, though she wasn’t really anymore, and I had been raised on Greek, Norse and Native American myths.

Well, I didn’t know until I’d been at the school a week or so, but you could only attend that school if you were a card carrying Catholic or Protestant. Fortunately, some friendly classmates realized the problem before any of the adults caught on. They also knew that the alternative would be that I would be sent away to an institutional school for the blind.

So, they protected me and taught me to fake being a Protestant, how to cross myself in the correct direction (the opposite of the Catholic students) and how to pretend some knowledge in our special Protestant religion classes held in the school basement. I was almost caught when the Protestant religion teacher asked me what people in America say about Martin Luther, and I thought he meant MLK because I had never heard of the original. Sensing that I was about to screw things up royally, one of my friends stomped hard on my foot under the desk, and I got the message and shut my mouth and refused to say another word.

I couldn’t help feeling a romantic thrill at the age of 16, that I—like Jean in the movie that had awakened me to the seriousness of political realities beyond teenage lives—was hiding in a Catholic school because I was from the wrong religion. At the same time, I knew that comparing my situation to a real-life story from the Holocaust was both stupid and offensive. So, I never mentioned it to anybody. But I never forgot.

And when the grandfather of my host family took me under his wing and provided the only truly loving and warm welcome I got in that family, I listened to him with deep attention. Opa, as we called him, had been drafted into the Nazi army as a young man.

Being a romantic girl, I wanted desperately to see him as good, so I never grilled him on exactly how it had happened, whether he had known how bad the Nazis were when he was drafted or whether he had tried to evade or escape. But he was very clear on the morality as an old man. He impressed upon me vehemently and repeatedly that ordinary Germans were responsible for what happened, and that he should have done more to stop the war and the Holocaust. He was sent to the Eastern Front, where he was among 90,000 German soldiers captured at Stalingrad. And he was among the mere 5,000 of those who survived the gulags.

He was one of the first people I had ever met who had a truly earth-shaking life story. He may well have been responsible for a large part of my switch from wanting to be a lawyer, who could take on injustice in the courts, to wanting to be a journalist. The idea that I could interview people, the way I talked to Opa, and hear first hand the really important stories in the world and tell the world about them, became all consuming to me within a year after hearing his tales of the war and his survival.

But the thing that stayed the clearest in my mind was one gray Saturday, sitting at the kitchen table with him, mugs of tea in front of us, when he was telling me and a friend about the rise of the Nazis and how ordinary people had been roped into the whole system, he turned to me specifically and said, “You have to understand this. It can happen anywhere. It could happen in your country.”

I had protested the first Gulf War in early 1991 at the age of fourteen, which was another part of my political awakening. I had started hearing about US-backed dictatorships and death squads that had ravaged Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, things that had happened in my much shorter lifetime. I believed him.

And I have basically been doing what that German grandpa urged me to do ever since—paying attention, documenting whatever I can, standing up and loudly saying “no” when I have to, being ready to run or hide or fight back if necessary. Today, I am amazed that old man saw the U.S. in that context all those years ago. I was a rebellious teenager after all. Of course, I thought the government and mainstream society was likely to be evil.

But Opa saw warning signs—a belligerence and propensity to go to war first and use diplomacy later, a willingness to support dictators, torture and violence in our allies, widespread, vocal racism and lack of real redress of past injustices, the concept of “America first,” runaway corporate capitalism, income inequality spiraling out of control compared to the rest of the world, and worst of all, the flimsy and outmoded American electoral system that had turned the U.S. into a de facto two-party state, where most people felt that they had no real representation. Even in 1992, that was clear to an old man in Germany who had seen where such things can lead.

Today, my heart breaks. Opa, I failed. I tried. I really did try—as a journalist and as a citizen. I cried out against each increasing wave of war, tolerance for torture, surveillance, violence against peaceful protesters, repression of free media, electoral manipulation, legalized bribery, propaganda, racialized policies and rhetoric, etc. In the early 2000s, people used to mock me for it, not just Americans but also Europeans. My European friends have most definitely stopped laughing about my propensity for political protest.

I’m glad Opa didn’t live to see 2026. It would break his heart.

I’m working as hard as I can still, but I’m exhausted. We all are. I spend an inordinate amount of time juggling healthcare bureaucracy for my son and me. My son’s cheekbone and eye socket were shattered in a baseball accident a few weeks ago, and it’s been a nightmare ensuring that he has adequate medical care. And maintaining what remains of our health insurance is a constant running battle.

But on a Sunday, Mama and I finally manage to bundle my 96-year-old grandma into the car and drive to a nearby wading pool at a local creek for a few moments of relief. In the back seat, on the way there, I scroll through my phone and come across a video sent by friends from the other side of the state. A woman holds the phone and you can hear in her voice that she’s crying. She points the camera toward an imposing razor wire fence, several fences, in fact, in layers around an industrial-scale compound.

At first, I don’t understand. And then it hits me with force just as I hear the voices, distant cries, many many voices, dozens at least. They sound like women. There are shadows against the distant wire fences, many hands raised, splayed fingers, grasping.

“We are trying! We are trying to get you out!” the woman with the phone yells, her voice breaking into sobs.

I read the note that came with it. An ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington. My limbs feel impossibly heavy. I clench my throat to keep back any sound. My mother and grandma in the front seat don’t need to know this. My grandma with dementia wouldn’t understand. And Mama knows full well. She often crumples under the weight of it. I’ll tell her about it later, when she’s not driving.

My friend writes that the people in the concentration camp—and yes, these fit the international definition of concentration camps, with massive numbers of detainees rounded up based primarily on ethnicity and held indefinitely until their legal status can be ascertained, including many U.S. citizens—are women, at least on this side of the complex. The landscape around it is bleak and isolated.

We arrive at the creek and my cell phone has no signal. We sit on folding chairs with our feet in the water, eating a picnic lunch and watching children splash and families lounge on the grass. My mind returns again to Au revoir les enfants after all these years. There were scenes like this in the movie. People relaxing, playing, swimming, eating picnic lunches. These things are not incompatible with concentration camps in the same country.

I hear the little boys yelling, “Soldier! Soldier, come on! This way!" as they slide down the brisk stream. At first, I think they’re playing at soldiers, but as I listen it becomes clear. It’s one boy they call Soldier, with the intonation of a name. The mothers call out to him by that name. In this country, some people name their child “Soldier.” In this red county, I know most of the people here wouldn’t know about the concentration camps and if they were told they would argue that “Those are only for criminals,” or “Well, they shouldn’t have broken the law coming here,” and so on. The discomfort of having read a fair amount of history is that I know that’s how the Nazi concentration camps started too. They claimed the people rounded up in camps and deported were criminals.

When we head back to the car, Mama takes my grandma to the bathroom and I go to the car with my dog Conway and load our chairs and coolers. I hear a family talking as they get out of their vehicle next to us. Pleasant chatter. Then, my mind snaps to the fact that it’s in Spanish. With the way things are, I straighten up and scan the gravel parking lot, checking that there is no one suspicious around. It’s reflex. After that video, I can’t help but worry.

Local friends often say, “We would like to help people, but there aren’t any immigrants here.”

But there are. I listen in the grocery store and at out of the way places like this. There are plenty of Spanish speakers in our local area, if you’re paying attention, but they don’t go anywhere much, not if they can help it. Just food, work, and recreation in the most out of the way spots—like this.

I hear a woman sharp whisper and a second later pattering little feet. I turn and there’s a tiny girl with black pigtails toddling up to my dog, an older woman a few steps behind, trying to catch her.

"¡Sí, sí, puedes!" I squat down next to Conway, who is delighted, wagging his tail furiously and exercising admirable self control by not lunging forward. He loves attention from little kids.

The little girl reaches out a hand tentatively toward his soft ears. The woman has stopped just short of grabbing her up.

"Es muy amable,” I try, scrambling for something from my Duolingo lessons. That probably isn’t the right word for a nice dog, but it’s the best I can do on short notice.

"¿Español?" The woman sounds surprised. The little girl smiles, pats Conway and then darts away toward the car next to ours.

I glance up at the woman and smile. I want to ask, “Are you okay? Do you need any help? Be careful out there. Do you know who to call if you run into trouble?” I don’t have any “red cards” with me, but I have my doubt about how useful those really are anyway. I also don’t want to add fear or suspicion to a pleasant interaction, so we just smile awkwardly and then the woman chases after the toddler, to keep her from veering out into the parking lot.

A few minutes later, I’m getting into the back seat. Grandma is in the front and Mama is on her way back from the bathroom. The car is running and the AC is on, so I reach over and buzz the window up. Two teenage girls—dark-skin and black hair—are just outside, heading for the car next to ours, and they react to the sound of the window, leaping back and pressing themselves against their car. Their faces are momentarily stretched, mouths and eyes wide.

I smile and wave. They shrug and hurry to the other side of the car. I consider rolling the window back down and saying something helpful or reassuring. But what? And would that really be reassuring? Being noticed, having someone clearly track your reactions? Insecure and lacking confidence, I remain silent but ready.

What must it be like to know that people who just look or speak like you are being tracked and stopped, arrested, and imprisoned, forced to spend weeks proving their citizenship or legal status while being moved around between concentration camps with inadequate food and brutal conditions? It isn’t just happening to recent immigrants or to people without legal status. There are plenty of U.S. citizens who have been swept up in it. And what exactly is the moral justification for treating people that way, regardless of their citizenship?

And how helpful is it that some of us are allies? How do we show who we are without raising fears and suspicions? What exactly can we do, except be ready, be aware, pay attention, and take videos if the worst does happen?

I wish I could do better. I am seeing more and more scenes from Au revoir les enfants behind my eyes these days.

Flowering and throwing out seeds

It has been an overwhelming month.

I completed my MFA thesis—the first half of a speculative novel entitled Scent of the Open Sky about a woman with ocular albinism living in a climate-adapted, sealed city in 2083 where everything in your life is determined by your status in an instant social rating system

My 15-year-old got hit in the face with a baseball going 86 miles per hour. He has a shattered cheek bone and yet another concussion. He’ll need reconstructive surgery and titanium plates and screws in his face.

I graduated from the MFA, was told by a healthcare provider that I likely have autism, got rejected from a major literary fellowship I was really hopeful for, applied for six more, had a huge argument with a family member I usually really mesh with, and got my first short fiction published in a literary magazine.

Like I said, it’s been a lot.

So, I’m pretty much just here to say “Happy Full Moon!” And here’s the link to that story I got published—my first fiction published by someone other than me. Warning: It’s about climate refugees. It’s pretty intense. The little bit of resilience and hope is pretty gritty. But it’s a hot summer. You should totally read it. Here’s the first few lines as a teaser:

Image of a wildflower meadow on pumpkin ridge in tones of yellow and purple with a line of dark green pines at the edge - image by arie farnam

The Canteen

He was a child born at the wrong time. 

His mother was pursuing a career and his father didn’t stay. The flooding came in his sixth summer as the seawall failed, and they fled inland, driving his uncle’s electric Nissan through ankle deep water to get out of Los Angeles—his aunt and uncle and their kids, plus the boy and his mom piled in the back. His mom’s newer mini-electric stood in deeper water and wouldn’t start.

There was no work to be had inland. No jobs for legal assistants or marketing specialists or even for wireless technicians, like Uncle Derek. They had to show up at dawn in Walmart parking lots to compete for day labor. 

Then, the California grape orchards succumbed to the relentless drought and the blistering heat. Burned-out cars as well as cars that had just stopped running under the hammer of the sun lined the freeways.

Michael was the eldest of the children. His cousins were three and a newborn when they fled the drowning--yet simultaneously water-desperate--city. Eventually, they resigned themselves to a government camp in the desert. Relocation was promised month after month and then year after year. But instead more people came, and the heat got worse until people died of it, faces red and swollen, then gray and sunken with dehydration, even when there was water to drink.

They moved from one camp to another over the next four years, until they reached Boise, Idaho when he was ten. They camped near a garbage dump for several nights. It was an illegal camp, people shifting around, not officially supposed to be there. But that was where he found the canteen. 

It was dingy green and had a broken strap that hung off the back. The front had the faded script “U.S. Army.” The heat-softened plastic was no longer flat on the bottom so that it couldn’t stand up and the cap was missing. 

But Michael loved to look at the letters. When they first went into the camps, there had been military vehicles and soldiers who looked at him kindly and even gave him candy called “Skittles.”

Continue reading here.

Open letters: Dear Heather

April 14, 2026

Dear Heather,

I’ve been writing to you in my mind for months now. My ritual is to set the alarm for six every morning. I struggle for consciousness in bed for fifteen minutes and check the weather while the wind chime calls in the gray light outside my window. Then, I listen to your letter on my phone while I make green tea with my little electric kettle.

I ration your letters, since you don’t write every single day. I only listen for that ten-minute interval while I make the tea. Then, I put it away. I don’t listen again until the next morning, unless you’ve written so much that there’s two full letters stacked up. Then, I might finish one later in the morning in between grad school assignments, bureaucratic meetings, and editing gigs—savoring it like sweets sneaked from my mother’s pantry when I was a child.

What would I do if you ever stopped writing these letters? I’d survive, I guess. But it would be devastating. I have never written back. I’ve thought of it. I’ve thought through whole letters to you in my mind. This is the first time I’ve ever written it down, and I won’t send this letter either.

But I’m writing today because you touch on a place near where I used to live in Central Europe. My friends there write either with bitter cynicism or cautious optimism. But you say it's the demise of a government built on “the idea that society works best if a few wealthy men run everything.” And that’s hope, isn’t it? After sixteen years of oppression. Still, you don’t push the hope too far, just a sign of positive change. We could do that, couldn’t we?

I’m glad you see that too. Not many people here are watching the news from Europe. My kettle marks me out as European here. So, when you wrote about that, I finally gave in and wrote down my letter to you. I’ll write but I won’t send it. You bring a bit of hope into my kitchen each day, even when your letters are deeply sad.

Arie

IMAGE of purple Rocky Mountain Irises in long grass - photo by Arie Farnam

April 16, 2026

Dear Heather,

My mother reads your letters too, you know. She doesn’t ration them like I do, so she’ll text me to urge me to read your latest. She has a harder time with hope than I do. I’m relatively tough. I’ve been through a few things, after all. But so has she. How does one stay that tender after living through everything she has. She tells me your letters keep her going.

I want to give her hope the way you do. I should be able to, right? Should I just focus on the positive more? Why is that so hard? My kids may be having a lot of trouble, but they’re still alive. We have food and a roof over our heads, even if it’s a bit rickety. She says our family is deeply dysfunctional and it’s her fault. She says she failed at the most important mission in her life. Not true. I came back, didn’t I? I tell her all the good things I got growing up the way we did—justice-centered values, empathy, understanding for struggling people, deep connection with the earth. Would I be the writer I am now if I hadn’t had that? She didn’t fail and if she did, aren’t I many times worse as a mother? She backs off then. She won’t let me say that, but she knows it’s true by the standards she set for herself—keeping the family together and all that.

This is why I am never going to send these letters to you. You don’t need to hear about our drama. In your letter today, you wrote about the grief after a dream is killed. You reminded me that the struggles I’m living have a long history and that how I respond matters. Your letters keep me hanging on.

Arie

Image of a red-haired woman with a yellow lab in a meadow of wildflowers - Image by Julie Farnam

April 25, 2026

Dear Heather,

Obviously, the strain gets to you too. You sound exhausted. You keep saying in letter after letter that it’s almost over, that things are crumbling. He’ll be gone soon. But it doesn’t end. Somehow, the situation keeps getting worse. Just when it seems like everything is on the brink of collapse, more things fall apart. Then, you tell me about ever more depraved abuse and criminality.

But today you went on a tangent about international law, the founding of the UN, and all the structures that made the first four decades of my life feel stable and relatively privileged, even when we were living in a shack without plumbing. I remember learning about all that as a young adult. I was so hopeful that the grown-ups were going to nail down an international court. War was going to be a thing of the past. We already had what felt like a much more stable world. I tried to tell everyone about “international rule of law” when I was twenty. I was such a nerd. It was my first big thing. I was obsessed. That’s part of why it feels like you’re talking directly to me across the kitchen table. But I feel how tired you are too.

I wish I could offer you a cup of my tea, gentle greenish yellow, earthy flavor in a sand-colored ceramic cup. I hope you stay strong, because I don’t know what we’d do without you.

Arie

—

April 29, 2026

Dear Heather,

I love the historical rabbit holes you go down, and I love reading about history, even the dark parts of it. But today, your letter leaves me with a deep sense of shame. It’s not your fault. Really, it’s not. It’s his fault. Only his.

You know how they’re always saying that “white children shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed of being white” in school by being taught about the history of our country. I’m old enough that I wasn’t taught any of the things that make those old men so uncomfortable. Not in school at least. I was taught about Columbus in early September every year, then the Pilgrims by Thanksgiving, and the Civil War by May. That was it for history class, and it was mind-numbingly boring.

I learned real history only by reading on my own and by talking to people who lived it. It was amazing, thrilling, shocking, terrible, and tragic. But it never made me feel ashamed. Maybe, some moments made me feel a sense of responsibility, but responsibility to do something different in the future, not responsibility for things that happened before I was born. Even though I knew the version of history I was taught in school was, in and of itself, a crime of erasure, it didn’t make me ashamed. I was a child. I had been assaulted with propaganda. I felt kinship with the Eastern European dissidents who told me about the propaganda they’d had forced on them as children. I wasn’t ashamed when I learned real history. I was angry.

But today I’m ashamed. You quoted him talking about the importance of "Anglo-Saxon bloodlines," about how the English settled “a wild and untamed continent” here, as if no Americans lived here before then and no others live here now. And it isn’t just the echoes of psychopaths of the past. It’s the violence of these lies. I feel a deep sense of shame for being primarily Anglo-Saxon when he drags my heritage through the sludge of his hate. I can’t look my friends in the eye without apologizing every other sentence. It’s humiliating.

You remind me that each of us has value and dignity. You soothe away the shame. And I’m glad for that. I will try to hold my head up and do what I must. I’ll be here with my teapot again tomorrow.

Arie

Image of a ridge-top of wildflower meadow above the mountain-ringed grand ronde valley - Image by Arie Farnam

May 10, 2026

Dear Heather,

I’m not fond of Mother’s Day anymore. I’m an adoptive mother, and when my kids were very little there was the occasional teacher who would tell them to draw a Mother’s Day picture or something similar. These usually didn’t make it home to me, and when they did, they were clearly created under duress—a heart drawn in a single wobbly line of crayon, a slapdash paper flower found at the bottom of a backpack. It wasn’t the kids’ fault. They both have developmental disabilities and ADHD. Focusing on something arbitrarily dictated by the calendar isn’t a strength.

Now, my fifteen-year-old cusses me out because I insist he brushes his teeth at least once a day. My seventeen-year-old demands why I won’t buy her “designer perfume.” Their neurology makes them such easy targets for the vultures of social media and advertising. No one else tells them it’s Mother’s Day and I’m certainly not going to mention it like I’m begging for a pinch of appreciation. I hug my mother. We visit a greenhouse full of spring beauty and walk in wildflower meadows together. But Mother’s Day still leaves me aching deep inside.

Mother’s Day just feels like another pressure point with more demands for performance on me, my mother and other mothers I know. I appreciate your letter, the idea that the original Mother’s Day was about women seizing our own power. That’s refreshing.

A woman mentioned you to me at the farmer’s market yesterday. I couldn’t even recognize her with my very nearsighted eyes. You’re becoming like a secret code. “Happy Mother’s Day! Have you read Heather’s letter?” A way to signal safety and solidarity. Keep on, please, keep on.

Arie

—

May 13, 2026

Dear Heather,

You’ve been grim the last few days, mostly recounting events in a dogged, weather-beaten tone. The Voting Rights Act is in tatters. You clearly feel a need to give us hope. You quote Tennessee state representative Justin Jones, “We’ll keep fighting. We will not stop getting in good trouble. We will not go back.” Those are tired stock phrases, and he’s likely to lose his job with the new map.

When you sound that exhausted, I think I should send you a letter just to say how much we appreciate you. I know you get tons of letters, thousands you can’t possibly read. You try responding to people in your letters sometimes, but you’d need a small army of staff. And I’m not a fan girl type. I have always detested celebrities. The only reason you’re an exception is because you appear to have an undisguised cold sore on your mouth in videos, you aren’t wearing makeup, and you don’t appear to have a staff to read your mail.

Dappled light falls across my page through the maple next door. Steam rises from the squat cup. My tea is brewed. All I really wanted to say is thanks for the letters. We need them.

Arie

Bones on the ridge: A memory of genocide in the land

I have always sensed grief in the land of my birth—love too, but also a vast and tender, barely covered grief.

When we give a land acknowledgement at events, we say “This is the land of the Nimiipu or Nez Perce people, the Umatilla, the Walla Walla and the Cayuse peoples.” Most locals know someone with Nez Perce or Umatilla or Walla Walla ancestry. But there are few Cayuse.

When I was a teenager, my dad had a blunt explanation: “There was a massacre. It was retaliation for something that happened over the mountains. The white settlers massacred a whole village—Cayuse, I think.”

For years, that was all I knew of it, and I envisioned this village out in the middle of the beautiful Grande Ronde Valley. That’s where you’d put a village, isn’t it?

A photo of distant women looking out from the top of pumpkin Ridge toward a vista of rolling meadows and a mountain against the cool blue sky of early spring. Image by arie farnam

Recently, I decided to go looking.

First, I found that the massacre had indeed been named “the Grande Ronde Massacre” by historians, confusing a lot of students of history because there is a town called “Grande Ronde” on the far side of Oregon. But it was here, in the valley. It has the historical distinction of being the greatest loss of life in the state of Oregon, during what white historians call “the Indian Wars.”

Could this be why I have always felt a fragility in this land, like a body on the brink of tears? I grew up living very close to the land, growing much of our own food, spending nearly every day outdoors, covered in dirt and brush scratches. I loved our ridge, Pumpkin Ridge, at the far end of the Grande Ronde Valley.

I wasn’t a particularly astute child and I think I took a lot of things for granted, especially my hard-working mother. But somehow, even as a self-centered child, I didn’t take the ridge for granted. I stroked rocks, hugged trees and thanked flowers. I truly felt gratitude for the land.

My brothers and I also wandered freely across the entirety of Pumpkin Ridge, regardless of barbed-wire fences and the frustrated remonstrations of the ranchers, whose cattle we liked to chase with wooden swords.

To the south, there was the woodlot where edible mushrooms grew, a friend’s ranch and the road to the little store in Summerville where we bought candy. To the west, there was the highest part of the ridge, rugged slopes of gray, igneous boulders and pine trees and then a windswept prairie covered with wildflowers. To the North, there were houses with a few other kids, ponds and embankments where kids could build dugout forts. To the East, where our home faced, there was a large cattle pasture and beyond it a second high ridge.

I liked to hike up to the east ridge, where the wildflowers were particularly spectacular and look back at our little cabin across the hollow. But as a child, I was afraid to go further. Once I ventured into the grassy swale beyond the ridge-line and felt a wave of unprovoked, intense fear. The fences were no tighter than anywhere else, but I felt an intuitive barrier.

Forbidden!

As an adult, I pushed beyond that boundary but the land there still felt eerily silent. There were flowers but not much bird song. Pesticides used by the ranchers, I thought. Then, on the road down to Elgin, I came over the hill on a walk last year, and the whole slope was clearcut. The smell of diesel and dying trees, the jumble of earth and logs and branches, like coming across the scene of a rape or murder, the victim still splayed out on the ground, but the deed done and nothing to be done but cry.

I doubled over, sobbing. The grief I had felt in the land for so long, wracking my body with pain. I squatted down on the dirt road for long minutes, trying to pull myself together. Why? Who still does clearcuts these days? They know better. It destroys the land for so long. With the dry summers, it’s nearly impossible for trees to regrow.

I pulled myself together and went home, swearing I’d never go to that side of the ridge again.

Over several months, a niggling, whispering demand returned to my mind again and again. I must find the location of the Grande Ronde Massacre.

When I found the description in an article in The Oregon Encyclopedia by William L. Lang, I felt—rather than a bolt of shock that it could be so close to the place where I grew up—a deep recognition. Of course, it was there. My body had known it all along.

Just below that eastern slope of the ridge the Grande Ronde River loops through secluded, rocky meadows between the tiny towns of Summerville and Elgin. It was there at the foot of our ridge that the Cayuse and Walla Walla peoples had a summer village in the early 1800s. The gentle meadows between the river and the pine forest were an ideal habitat for camas, the bright blue flowers with nutritious tubers that they harvested and stored for yearlong sustenance.

In 1856, Isaac I. Stevens, then governor of Washington Territory, sent men out to hunt down and kill all “hostile Native forces.” Some were regular army. Others were “volunteers.” It was payback for an attack on white miners hundreds of miles away, over on the far side of the Cascades. Col. Benjamin Shaw, who led one band of those “volunteers,” discovered the location of the village.

Shaw rode out on July 17, 1856, with 175 mounted… (I struggle with the word here. Lang uses the euphemism of “volunteers.” I’m tempted to say “terrorists” but in a more sober frame of mind one might say “paramilitary combatants.”)

Whatever they were, they swept down on a camp full of women and children who were out digging camas and gathering other plants. There were a few young warriors present with horses, but most of the men were away. Those few boys stood little chance to defend their families.

Shaw wrote in his report, “The enemy was on the gallop for 15 miles, and most of those who fell were shot with the revolver.” This detail out of the past stabs into me. They chased these villagers for fifteen miles. A revolver is a close-range weapon. You don’t use one in a battle against armed fighters. You use it from the saddle, on people running on foot, close enough to touch. Most of them were women and children.

Another bit of the record comes from a Capt. Walter DeLacy under Shaw’s command. “Such was the impetuosity of the charge that many of their women even were unable to escape and were overtaken in the pursuit.” The exact number of those killed isn’t known, though scholars estimate that at least sixty, most of them women and children, were murdered, based primarily on the writings of DeLacy and other corroborating evidence.

These kinds of stories, lost in the past and told mainly in numbers, often feel divorced from reality and human emotion. DeLacy’s description of objects is particularly disturbing: “At least 200 packs were scattered over this distance, containing all their winter provisions, furniture, mats and in fact everything they possessed. In returning from the pursuit, we burned all of these as far as camp…we came to the Indian village, where 120 lodges were counted. It was burnt.”

I hope some escaped. The marauders estimated 120 dwellings, and scholars say something over sixty people were killed. But they were stripped of all of their gear. Shaw rounded up several hundred horses, took the best of them for his company, and slaughtered the rest. The soldiers knew that the remaining civilian population would starve in the winter without their horses.

As my country enters a new war in a distant land, I am shamed and saddened. I tell people about what I learned of the Grande Ronde Massacre and no one knows the history. It happened about 2 miles from where I was born in the loft of a scrap-lumber shack. There should be a monument. It should be taught in school, so that we learn from history.

If we, as a nation, remembered better what our country came from, might we think more deeply when choosing leaders, who might jet off to start new wars?

I am a granddaughter of the colonizers in this valley. I share blood and history with them, and I feel no natural right to roots here. But I can’t change my deep connection to the land, or my gratitude for having been born here. My body also sensed the grief and wounding of the earth on the east side of the ridge even before I knew its history.

Does the earth track our genes or bloodlines? Or does the body of the land call to the humming, throbbing body of soft flesh, pulsing blood and hard bone and whisper that we choose who we will be with each step we take from here on forward?

Ice as healer, as delight, as dire need as well as terror

Nearly every day, I walk with my guide dog Conway on Fir Street toward the railroad crossing to the downtown area of La Grande, Oregon to shop at the health-food store, to put up protest posters or to pick up a prescription for my mom, who is recovering from knee surgery. For weeks, the weather has been cold but extremely dry in Eastern Oregon. There isn’t a speck of snow or ice in the valley, and the sun was brilliant.

On one particular block, we have to steer off the sidewalk and into the grass, because someone scattered salt on that sidewalk when snow and ice seemed likely in early January, but it hasn’t come for several weeks, and with the weather so dry, the salt remains to sting and erode the paws of a patient working dog, who wouldn’t flinch but would spend the evening nursing raw feet, if I’m not careful.

Ice--its presence, its ravages, its absence, and the need for it--is the tangled theme of my life these days. For the first time in my life, I’ve been the caregiver for my mother, instead of the other way around, while she recovers from surgery. Three times a day, I lift chill, wet bottles out of the machine that bathes her knee in ice water to keep the swelling to merely twice its normal size and replace them with bottles frozen hard as stone from the outside freezer.

My hands are cold. The sub-freezing air stings my face when I step out early in the morning to let Conway pee and switch out the ice bottles. Conway frolics across the yard and spins around the dormant lilac tree, delighted with the glittering ice crystals left on the grass by morning dew.

Creative commons image by Eric Wüstenhagen - Ice crystals shine in the light against a dark background

Ice is good. It’s a blessing, a healing, a joy. And I actually wish we had more of it right now, for the sake of the summer drought and the glaciers melting at the earth’s poles. Now the weather is breaking but bringing a drizzle of rain and warmer temperatures, instead of ice and snow. No one even talks about climate change anymore. Not in my town. Not on the news.

I say the word “ice” a couple of dozen times a day in reference to the roads, the weather, my mother’s knee, the state of my unreliable freezer or Conway’s delight. But of course, because I’m a journalist and a news junkie, I hear it hundreds of times per day in an entirely different context.

The cries of Native American grandmothers arrested while driving home, of the mother of an abducted US-citizen teenager, of the family of another US citizen--an elderly man--led outside in the extreme cold of Minnesota in his underwear, of a pregnant woman slammed to the pavement with a heavy knee in her back, of peaceful protesters beaten and pepper-sprayed directly in the face, and of those watching as a second citizen was shot down, murdered in cold blood echo from my tablet.

My mother pleads for me to use headphones. She knows, but she is trapped in a recliner with her knee up in the air, soaked in ice. She has no defenses.

ICE. It chills me every time I say the word in this context. I catch a ride downtown to a protest, where our signs rail against ICE. This time I don’t bring Conway. His ears are too delicate for the shouting, and we never know when things might get rough, even here. Even legally blind, I’m more equipped to handle crisis than my anxious, highly trained guide.

Not to mention the fact that I walk everywhere alone in this town most of the time, and I don’t need another way to be easily identifiable to the rabid cultists who blare by in their coal-rolling pickups, spitting hate and curse words out their windows. Cowards that they are, they don’t attack when there are a few hundred of us at a protest, but like wolves, they look for those who have been separated from the crowd.

I feel ice shoot down my spine as a pick-up truck slows and follows me for a couple of blocks on Fir Street. I don’t look around, but there is little reason for the vehicle to move at my walking pace, other than recognition and politics.

So, I wear a mask at protests. Icy wind chills my face after an hour and a half in the cold anyway. I return to the warmth of my home and change out the ice bottles in the machine again. Now the news says the United States is on the brink of invading Greenland, the land of glacier ice, named deceptively by ancient Vikings who didn’t know about oil and rare minerals, but claimed the frigid coast for Denmark anyway. As Europe lodges bewildered diplomatic protests, the US president says NATO allies are a greater threat to America than China or Russia.

I spent time in Russia and Kazakhstan back in the 1990s. The cold was as severe as it has been recently in Minnesota. It was cold so brutal that any bare skin could be frostbitten within minutes. Day-time temperatures topped out around negative twenty degrees Fahrenheit in the even in November.

For a time, I worked with an Afghan newspaper editor named Aref Jahesh, trying to make a video documentary about migration. He brought me to the homes of his friends and family, fellow Afghan refugees, and I’d sit on the floor with the children, eating flat bread with exquisitely spiced chutneys. Afterwards, we’d walk out into the frozen streets of Alma Ata, the ground covered with a sheer layer of black ice and a light dusting of new snow. Multiple times each day, Jahesh would take a step, shout and land hard on his back against the ice. I’d skate over to him on my heavy-treaded boots and give him a hand up.

Finally, one day he complained and asked why I never fell. He did actually have good boots too, for a wonder. I thought about it all that day, and in the end, I told him my theory. As a legally blind person, I always walk on suspicious ground. I’m never sure of the reality I think I see through extremely blurry vision. I always walk as if there could be ice or an unexpected gray-on-gray curb at the next step. I’m always ready to adapt.

Today, just listening to the news, I feel like Jahesh walking on that invisible ice.

Reality is shifting. There’s no ice under my feet here, though there should be in late January. Instead, my inner world feels slick and unreliable. Wasn’t it just a few years ago, I was on the other side of the Atlantic and worried about the expansion of NATO because of its implications of imperialism?

We pray for ice and glaciers, though we are cold. We fear ICE scouring the land, disappearing our neighbors, beating up random passersby, shooting to kill. The NRA is standing up for a liberal protester killed ostensibly for just having a legally carried gun. Progressives and leftists cling to NATO as the last hope of the free world. The US administration is closer to dictators in Russia and China than it is to Europe.

My hands are freezing. My ears are warm inside bulky headphones. I can no longer stand alone on this slippery surface.

Courage somehow to face the mornings

The shadows of a dying day straggle across the wall. Forgotten Solstice lights glow against the fading golden light. The papery, pale tan vines of dried up nasturtiums trail across the front porch outside the window.

The old year is withered. It wasn’t one we generally wanted to hang on to. It feels fine to let go of the old this time. I’ll take down the lights soon. I’ll clean up the desiccated vines.

I am ready to let go of the things that have burdened me and wasted my time. I feel at peace with letting go of some struggles and roles that I felt very strongly about even a few months ago. I am so ready for a new start in my personal life.

And yet, I know the world isn’t really ready.

We’re mired in rising neo-fascism. It feels so much like 1935 or so in Central Europe that I can’t really look ahead to the next year or ten years with much hope beyond a kind of grim determination. If I dwell on them, there are a hundred reasons to say we’re actually worse off than people in 1935, but the main one of those is that we already know what happened in 1945, and we don’t know this time. We don’t know what’s coming, how bad it may get or if sanity will ever return.

Creative Commons image by The Whisperer in the Shadows

I comfort myself, “They didn’t know either.”

That’s the clearest thing one gets from reading history books. People in the 1930s had no reason to believe the rise of fascism wouldn’t be forever. Fascism was strong, even in the US in those years. People forget that. There was no guarantee that the US would end up on the right side of history that time.

We did. Thank goodness. But it could have gone the other way. Key industrialists, such as Henry Ford, and significant pro-Nazi organizations, such as the German American Bund and the KKK, pushed fascist ideology. The US was simultaneously plagued by Jim Crow segregation laws, rampant racism, the ongoing genocide of Native Americans and the Great Depression during those years. Those who stood up to fascism at the time had little reason for hope, though the US was then merely one of the peripheral areas threatened by the insidious spread of full fascism.

Now we’re at the epicenter of it. We are now the place where fascism is rising and it’s other countries that have to wrestle with how to deal with this 500 pound gorilla with nuclear weapons and with their own domestic wannabe-fascist movements at the same time.

I wish them luck and steadfast courage. I hope against hope all this won’t lead to war or extensive violence. It’s already hurting so many innocent people while the guilty grifters and predators gloat and point fingers from their seats of power and unimaginable wealth.

Today, we’re told that “empathy is a weakness” and “AI will make work obsolete.” We aren’t told what will happen to all these working humans, if their work is deemed “unnecessary.”

So far, what we have are empty fields and employers at their wits’ end because many of the most essential jobs that were done by immigrants are going un-done because our immigrant neighbors are living through the nightmare of being hunted, beaten and detained, usually for no discernible reason. Most of those detained by ICE and similar agencies are NOT undocumented or even in any violation of immigration standards. Most are simply suspected of being immigrants, and because there is no due process in the system, it often takes days or weeks to prove that one is a U.S. citizen or a legal immigrant.

Sometimes the individual has already been deported by the time they can gain access to lawyers and documents to prove their status. Sometimes they’ve “merely” been beaten, starved, frozen and detained in concentration-camp-like conditions for a few weeks. They’ve suffered health consequences.

At least one pregnant mother lost her child after being abused by officers and thrown roughly to the ground. And we only know about that particular case because someone caught it on video. How many others are there unknown and unseen?

There truly is not much difference between this and what was happening in Nazi Germany in 1935. Remember, that was before the death camps and the “final solution.” This is how it started—the erosion of democracy, denial of due process, mass arrests, detention camps. People initially returned from those camps, just as they do today, with terrible tales to tell and shaky health. It really is eerily repetitive.

In 1935, the US had it’s own fascists, aspiring to what the Nazis were doing. It also had segregation laws and the Great Depression with most of the country sunk so deep in economic desperation that people couldn’t think straight. But there was one really beautiful thing that happened in 1935, which I was required to write a paper about last term in graduate school—a twenty-four-year-old woman named Josephine Johnson became the youngest person ever to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Her record still stands.

Out of about a hundred people who have won the Pulitzer Prize since it was founded in 1918, only 31 have been women, and only 17 of them have been under the age of forty. Only TWO winners ever were in their twenties when they won.

Josephine Johnson wrote about a family struggling to survive on a Dustbowl farm in Now in November, a hauntingly beautiful and deeply emotional novel which is almost never assigned in literature courses today. The competition that year included such classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and James M. Caine’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Johnson’s work prevailed both in front of the committee and at bookstores. But Johnson and her work were both wiped from literary society in 1939, despite the extensive success of Now in November, which sold out in pre-sales before it was even fully published, and of her second novel.

Scholars don’t know why she disappeared, but there are facts that speak quiet, uncomfortable truths.

In 1936, a year after she received the prize Johnson was arrested for “encouraging dairy workers to strike.” Her later books became more overtly political in terms of calling for more equitable economic policies and redistribution of fraudulently obtained extreme wealth. In 1939, the anti-Communist witch hunt of the House Committee on Un-American Activities first began, though it is best known for its activities in the 1950s.

Coincidence?

I think not. You’ve likely never heard of Now in November or Josephine Johnson because of the vast wave of fascism that stormed the world ninety years ago. She wrote 11 books in all and died in obscurity in 1990. She was almost certainly a victim of political censorship and blacklisting.

And yet, her first book Now In November survives today. It’s hard to find print copies, but a professor assigned it to me and a handful of my classmates anyway. A few recent scholars have marveled at the incredible lyricism and the precision of every single sentence. I did an experiment in class where we turned to random points in the book to see if we could catch Johnson with a sentence that you wouldn’t want to be quoted on or even a boring, filler sentence. Couldn’t find one.

It’s “nearly perfect” and “just unbelievably good” in terms of writing craft and skill, as the initial reviews said. It’s also emotionally heavy and linguistically dense for modern readers, so beware, but certainly go read it if you’re up for an adventure.

The final image of the book, the thing that Johnson leaves the reader with in the final lines is an answer of sorts to the despair of her time, and as good as we’re likely to get in the despair of our own times: “I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times.”

We could wish for a bit more than the “courage somehow to face the mornings,” but damn, we need that bare minimum. “Faith born of despair” and “the consolation of a heart in its necessity,” these are the things Johnson says build that courage. Hope in spite of reason, and the comfort of knowing that we must go on because of the needs of those who depend on us.

That’s it. That’s how I’m going on in this New Year. I’m with Johnson. I’m with her for that bit of encouragement from the other side of a 90-year political silencing.

Last Thanksgiving, it was that which drew me to give thanks for the precious bits of survival that have been passed to us, for Johnson’s work of youthful genius beyond all odds; for the wisdom of Native American grandmothers and grandfathers, those who survived genocide and carried knowledge of the earth and sustainable, equitable living to us; for the teachings of civil rights activists who endured jail. beatings and murdered friends so that their messages might be passed down to us; even for the tattered whisperings of ancient Druids, early casualties of colonialism and imperialism, which are mostly unintelligible now and yet there is something they managed to save.

These bits and pieces. Maybe that’s all that will survive our wave of fascism as well, some small fragment of hope or wisdom or understanding from whoever among us makes it through. We must strive to survive, because of the despair and darkness that would have been left to us, if those who came before us had given in.

There are those in the future who will reach back to our time for hope beyond reason, for inspiration and for clues about how to survive whatever comes for them. We now carry the torch.

Flash writing: "Inventory," "Instructions to an adopted child," and "Earth Mother"

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’m a bit wordy. My Master of Fine Arts program is working on improving that.

I’m headed for surgery next week, amid holidays, so things are hectic. Instead of writing another long post, I’m sending you a couple ultra short (mostly fictional) pieces that came out of school assignments. I couldn’t help but make them relevant to the times, but seriously, dear readers, someone read the first one and worried that I was having financial trouble, instead of worrying that I was under investigation by the FBI. If this piece were nonfiction, I’d think the second connotation would be worse. In any event, hopefully, you’ll enjoy something new and unconventional.

I have three short pieces to share: "Inventory of objects on a subject's desk," written from the perspective of a surveillance officer looking into protest activity; "Instructions to an adopted child," a snippet of dialogue that tells the story of the desperation white parents of adopted brown children feel when they start waking up to reality; and "Earth Mother," a super short prose poem from an uncommon perspective.

photo of protesters on a main road with signs reading “shop local,” “no thanks to corporate greed,” “shop small,” and “corporate greed kills community.” - image by julie farnam

Inventory of objects on subject’s desk

• Three pens (Two dried up)

• An old-fashioned manual nutcracker made of stainless steel

• A check payable to the order of the subject from the State of Washington for $8.16

• A Medicaid insurance card in subject’s name, ID no. BD78934A

• An after-visit summary document for subject’s child from a dentist, outstanding bill $154

• Electric bill in subject’s name for $216.29

• A stack of seven stapled, hand-written papers in widely varied childish hands, with commas and editing marks added in blue pen

• Empty packaging for an iPhone 13 screen protector

• Samsung TV remote control (TV is in the other room)

• Battered Apple MacBook with pieces of plastic flaking off corners, locked with code.

• Sticky notes on computer reading: “Call Jen about getting on Signal.” “Sandy’s medication management appt – Tues. 2:30” “FREEZE WARNING! Cover garden on Mon. night!” “Call water company about brown, stinky water.” “Return call about Cascade editing gig.” “Call insurance fuckers and deal with fuckery” (punctures show extreme force in writing)

• Nearly empty roll of packing tape

• 5 fat black markers, 2 fat red markers, 1 fat blue marker, all nearly used up

• Scissors with pink plastic handles

• Long-neck lamp with stainless steel base

• Small plastic bag with a child’s costume jewelry inside—a plastic ring, a locket with a yellow plastic fixture, and a metal broach

• A bookmark advertising the subject’s book launch ten years ago

• A laminated vaccination record in Spanish for the subject’s child

• Canine heart-worm and tick medication in original packaging

• Safeway receipt for cucumbers, lemon juice, chicken thighs and mozzarella cheese: $44.19 (Noted: SNAP balance remaining $3.22)

• Letter from OHP denying care for mental health care for subject’s child

• Letter from OHP denying care for subject’s postoperative recovery medication

• Stack of more than 100 fliers for protest at City Hall: Saturday at 1:00 pm, decorated with a red-painted fist

• Fidget toy made of interconnected triangles in blue and purple designs

Instructions to an adopted child (2025 edition)

“Honey, please sit down a minute.”

“I want you to listen, just for a bit because this is important. When you’re in town, you know what to do if you’re stopped by police, right? Just like we practiced, you call them ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am.’ You keep your hands out to your sides where they can see them. You ask, ‘Am I free to go?’ And if they say, ‘yes,’ you walk away slowly.”

“You remember all that, right? We practiced.”

“Well, now we need to add something. You also need to say, ‘I’m an American citizen.’ Can you repeat that for me?”

“Yeah, that’s great! If the police stop you, you tell them you’re a citizen. And even if someone who isn’t police stops you, you say that. ‘I’m an American citizen.’ Remember, okay?”

“If they don’t let you leave, you say, ‘I need to call my mom.” You keep saying those two things and say my phone number. Do you remember it? Go ahead. You might not get to use your phone. You have to remember it.”

“Good job! You just keep saying it. Don’t say anything else. Just ‘I’m an American citizen. I need to call my mom.’ Don’t answer questions. Just say that over and over.”

“No, honey! You can’t-- Don’t yell at them. It’s not funny! And you can’t call them names!”

“Listen! For real. Right now, kids with brown skin are being disappeared. This is how we try to keep you safe.”

Earth Mother

I call you up out of the humus of my soil, to rise with eyes and voice lifted toward hope, calling out your need for purpose—you, children of this wayward ape species, called into awareness by fire, by flint, by these damnable words that you call your exceptional birthright—and calling hopelessly, as you do, for mercy when you are in the pain of a body; I call you into being not because I am cruel or devoid of meaning, but because my molten heart could not resist your poignant voices calling.