Fear Itself

Deciding how afraid to be in a Trump/Musk America; planning a summer garden

The USAID sign being covered with, what is that, Gorilla tape? (Photo courtesy of my anonymous source in the agency)

The Saturday before the Super Bowl, protestors crowded the corners of a busy intersection in Redding, California. The last time I saw people on this corner, it was election day, and they were waving pro-Trump flags. A little judder of fear went through me, then, but I reassured myself: far Northern California is a red state, basically Texas by the Sea. Kamala would win, right?

Oh, how little I knew.

This weekend’s group, however, did not have red MAGA hats. It took me a second to clock it as I waited at the light, but then I saw a sign decrying the ICE raids. Another read, “We support immigrants,” and one called out your average Redding citizen: “YOU ELECTED A FASCIST, ARE YOU HAPPY?”

When I realized it was a pro-immigrant protest, I wanted to stop and stand with them in solidarity. But I glanced at the back seat: nope. The baby had fallen asleep on our way home. So, too afraid to honk and wake her, I gave them a peace sign and a thumbs up as I rolled by.

In this time of infant caring, I’m not the best at staying on top of the news—and there’s so much outrage it can be hard to keep up, anyway. But lately, the “news” keeps landing on my doorstep, arriving in my texts and inbox…because it’s happening to people I know.

I’m a former federal employee; a huge number of my friends are current federal employees. One friend is (still, somehow) employed by USAID, one of the 200 staff remaining huddled like refugees after the rest of the agency’s 10,000 employees were dismissed without notice by Elon Musk’s cronies.

She described this gestapo of young men storming their offices—despite lacking the security clearance to be present—and hacking into their communications and payment systems before sending out mass emails telling employees to go home immediately.

Now, my friend is routing aid and supplies to Gaza as the name of her agency is stripped from the building. Simultaneously, she’s looking for a job and weighing whether to try to stay with the government at all.

Another friend shares some of the memos he’s receiving as a USDA employee. The one demanding that employees redesign their email signatures—with any reference to gender pronouns explicitly forbidden—gives me a little chill. A few days later, the Forest Service abruptly terminates 3,400 probationary employees; this includes several friends, many of them with small children to support.

Over the next few days, it appears that the Forest Service may be picked apart piece by piece; Amanda Monthei has an excellent two-parter (part one; part two) about the dire consequences of this.

The terminations, along with mass hiring freezes, all threaten to derail the agency’s response to wildfires this summer (or, as the fires in LA have shown, any time of year). Layoffs will cripple forest recreation and a host of land management functions.

To say that the gutting of my former employer hurts is an understatement; it makes me so angry, I almost can’t think about it. And it’s phenomenally stupid—people (civilians) will die in catastrophic wildfires, thanks to this choice. Firefighters will die.

Outside of government, things aren’t looking much better. A professor friend in the Deep South says the university where she teaches is considering a ban on any classes covering DEI topics; she teaches, among other things, disability studies.

And Google maps now reads The Gulf of America?

It’s all giving George Orwell; it’s giving Margaret Atwood. Hell, it’s almost giving Benito Mussolini. I send Ed an email: “Hey, we need to get passports for you and Story. Just in case this is actually chapter one of A Handmaid’s Tale. Nobody ever believes it can happen until it’s too late.”

I send that email, but I’m still not sure. How scared should I be? How afraid should we collectively feel right now, and is there some kind of bellwether, some canary, that would tell us when to be really afraid—when to, for example, riot in the streets, or flee?

In firefighting, when you served as the lookout, you’d decide upon a landmark or feature on the landscape. If the fire reached that point, the crew was no longer safe; time to pull them out. We called this decision moment the “trigger point.”

I’m looking for it now, in this country, in this presidency. What’s our trigger point? When do we call it?

It scares me that I don’t know.

---

Complicating what would otherwise be an easy leap to full-blown anxiety and rage-spiraling is the infant sleeping in my arms.

For one thing, I consider my primary job right now to be as a calm and secure base; in the words of internet therapy-speak, I need to stay regulated (as much as possible) to co-regulate her—which in turn will serve as the blueprint for how she is able to manage her emotions as an adult.

My biggest responsibility right now, in other words, is to remain chill. To keep singing songs and reading books and blowing raspberries and delivering cheek kisses. Staying in that zone is possible only if I manage to tell myself there’s no reason to be too afraid, not yet.

Beyond the need to be a steady parental presence, what do I want to teach her? “The world used to be way better, but it sucks now,” or, “You’re going to grow up in the worst and most terrifying time in American history”? Um, not ideal. Those beliefs don’t really set her up for a sense of agency and possibility in life.

Also, some of those statements aren’t categorically true. You could make an argument that our country has seen way worse times (the Civil War, for example) and that its leaders have often or always been violent and bigoted and greedy and utterly lacking in foresight (see also: the removal and genocide of Indigenous people, Japanese internment, the era of monopolies, the destruction of the redwoods and hunting-to-extinction of the Grizzly, the wars in the Middle East…).

Any way you slice it, we haven’t just now fallen off from some golden era of American virtue. Maybe we’ve merely, per Howard Zinn’s theory of U.S. history (two steps forward into progressive values and equality; then a step back), taken a bigger-than-usual backslide. Which might—if you want to be crazy optimistic—signal that we recently took a bigger than normal step forward in equity and tolerance. We really scared the backwards and backwoods among us, and this is their tantrum.

But times are legitimately scary. Their tantrum is leaving real Americans without jobs and real children starving around the world because a crippled USAID couldn’t deliver their nutrition. My friends are on signal; my friends are guarding what they say and to whom. AI is scanning people’s emails and deciding what to censor, and whom to fire. Big Brother isn’t a distant possibility. He’s right here.

Searching my usual sources for guidance on how to titrate my terror, I find conflicting messages. A New Yorker piece suggests that Trump’s point is to inundate us with outrage, so we’re caught in indignance whack-a-mole and can’t effectively stop any single injustice; I see this sentiment echoed elsewhere. This is “flooding the zone,” this is “muzzle velocity.” Most of all, “don’t believe Trump.” Believing his bluster makes his kingly power more likely to become real.

Even my friend who may at any moment be let go from USAID says, “Did you see the Ezra Klein video? That made me feel a little better.”

I too was comforted by Klein’s refrain: Don’t believe him. But other sources point to a truly alarming trend. Trump and Musk are breaking the law and violating the constitution, and they appear to be getting away with it. While some judges and lawsuits have achieved temporary stays, Congress isn’t leveraging the usual checks on a president.

What if he does get away with it, and before we know it, our democracy has slipped through our fingers as we were placidly telling ourselves it couldn’t happen here? What if “don’t believe him” is the dangerous equivalent of looking the other way?

So which is it? Nothing to fear but fear itself, or believe the worst and stock your bunker? I’m writing my way through this; I still don’t know.

Meanwhile, I consider when to buy seeds.

Redding is lowkey flooding right now, after torrential rains and dam releases into the Sacramento River, but summer is coming.

Summer comes early here, and hits hard, and if you don’t have your plants in the ground, they won’t make it past June.

So I’m starting to plan the garden that, in my idealized vision, Story and I will water and tend together. Vegetables, flowers? Fruits? Start everything from seed, or get a few little seedlings at planting time? These are the soothing considerations I weigh in quiet moments; these are the antidote to “trigger point” thinking.

I decide we’ll start from seed; we have the time, and together we can watch for the little sprouts, check in with our babies each day. Story seems to really like looking at plants (or am I projecting? No, no, she appears truly fascinated). Soon I must convince Ed to help me build some raised beds; clear the endeavor with the landlord; find the funds and the soil.

I text my gardeningest friend, Alex. What did well for you last summer? Then I try to recall my lessons from summer 2022, the last time I tried a garden here. Cucumbers and hot peppers did well; tomatoes struggled. Watermelon was ok—herbs foundered but could make it with more shade. Strawberries were doable.

Is it vanity and waste, to make a garden in this climate, in these times? Will I use a lot of water we can’t really spare, only to produce a few pockmarked cucumbers? Would my time be better spent calling my representatives or attending a protest?

Maybe so. But I persist. In times like these, I have to be able to tell my daughter what we live for (plants, among other things). I need to teach her that life, which still has so much beauty, is fundamentally worth living.

There’s so much to love. Heavy rain, a creek swelling. A friend’s smile, a loaf of bread, the way light comes in the window. Music. The dog waiting by the door when he knows it’s time to go out. And her face, my daughter’s face. Nothing has ever been more worth living for.

Nothing has ever made me more scared than having a child—yet nothing has given me so many reasons to banish fear from my heart.

I want her to know later, of her infancy, that I fought would-be fascism in my way, by writing about it—and that, in a time of deep uncertainty, we planted a garden.