Reflecting on beloved community
an election reflection that's mostly for myself
Welcome back to Al’s World. I had emergency surgery on Monday night and was discharged from the hospital on Election Day. I’m fine and recovering at home now, doing much better the past three days. I feel an incredibly deep gratitude and undying love for my boyfriend who never left my side and helped me through every tiny stupid hospital process, my best friend who has provided me everything I need for my recovery including her glorious company, and my parents who drove to the city right away when they knew something was wrong, and helped me settle in and out of the hospital. I am deeply LUCKY and immensely privileged to have them, all of my friends who have given me so much loving support and attention, and access to very, very good health insurance, provided by the billionaire family foundation that I convinced to hire me a year and a half ago to sort their papers.
In New York City, it hasn’t rained in six weeks. The day after Election Day it was 80 degrees, and it hasn’t cooled off much. “Normal” temperatures for this time of year are 40 degrees colder, but we are likely past the point of needing to compare what’s currently happening to what’s happened in the past. A forest fire burned in the ravine in Prospect Park all night. They continue to burn all over the Bronx, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
Post-election, everyone I’ve talked to or read who I happen to trust has sent some lightly-varying message of “the only way forward through is to love and care for those around you.” A message of “community” solidarity and love. I put “community” in scare quotes because this word has been bandied about so much online that I feel like I don’t really know what it means; I think since Covid it’s taken on some extrinsic weightiness that it doesn’t really deserve.
This sentiment, of community love, trust, and solidarity, is truly powerful and is reflective of the actual experiences of many people who have lived and survived under regimes that were actively trying to destroy them. I have been moved by this sentiment many times and reposted a beautiful articulation of it a few weeks ago (from Cindy Crabb) in this newsletter. It’s also the only thing that we can really do now, now that we will soon have a government that will actively try to destroy us.
And this week was a confusing one to be on the receiving end of this kind of “community” and familial care. I feel rejuvenated in how many people in my life seem to care deeply that I recover well, at the exact moment when the whole country plunges into a very dark unknown. I know that being able to care for me has been helpful to them in its own way.
But with these particular election results I’m also thinking about the ways in which the “community care” sentiment is, at its root, something like a conservative value too — that our care should and in fact can only extend to those we can see and touch and, importantly, those who are lovable to us.
Realistically, “my community” consists of people I went to college with or met through work in some rarified places, a handful of friends and close family, a few neighbors. But even more realistically, I rely on broad networks of workers organized to varying degrees to bring me the services I rely on to survive: from those that toil in near-slavery conditions to harvest, package, and ship my groceries from locales near and far, to well-compensated MTA employees that I would probably disagree with about every single facet of current political discourse but who repair the rails and trains that I use to navigate the city. I am actually in a type of intimate relationship with all of these people and many, many more, but it’s ridiculous to call them “my community.”
These people are strangers to me, but in this current alignment, I need them. There is a sense in which they need me too, but to a much lesser degree. They do need others, though, in other ways. It would be too much to say “I love them,” because I don’t think that this relationship, undergirded by exploitative capitalism, represents “love,” but this is all to say — I miss Bernie. I understand why he didn’t run again, but I still think someone running on his platform could have won this time around.
I miss his particular courage and conviction in articulating of a larger purpose of government — “Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know?” I was and I am because at this point in world history, it’s ridiculous to think that we could revert back to some kind of hyper-local, pre-20th century style economy, where people grow most of their own food, make their own clothing, etc. But I pick up on nostalgia for this type of thing everywhere I go, right-leaning or left-leaning. The truth is that we desperately rely on the well-being of all manner and all types of people that we don’t know and don’t love.
I’m not ready to give up the idea of a large, far-reaching government that actually does provide services and make life easier for its citizens and inhabitants, that acknowledges our broad interdependence. And I believe this idea is actually still very popular, and I agree with most trustworthy political analysts in the country when they say that the Democrats lost so badly because they abandoned it. I don’t want it to get subsumed into this weird nostalgia for an imagined past or a future in which the only thing we can do is love each other.
We can lend each other books, but we can’t build a circulating collection like the New York Public Library. We can babysit sometimes, but we can’t drive down the overall cost of childcare or provide child tax credits. My beloved community can’t upgrade the signal system on the subways. We can’t build and install wind turbines in Long Island Sound. Pre-Roe, beloved communities tried to give each other abortions and it was incredibly dangerous and exploitative, and many people died. We can do things like open record stores and put on movie programming, or even buy some iridescent paint and lay down bike lanes or crosswalks where we want them to be — and that’s very good, but look — we’re past the point of pretending we don’t need a government that works for us, that the only ones you need are already loving you or whatever. We no longer have it.
In a “normal” world, the political use of this kind of beloved community would be to band together to demand necessary radical changes, which was the upshot of voting for a Harris ticket, but we no longer have this option. Thus we’re left with… just us. Including a lot of people we hate, and who hate us. I don’t want us to forget that we rely on them too. There’s no way to pretend we don’t.
BASKETBALL
The NCAA season just started, but I haven’t watched yet. I feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of teams and games. I feel light interest in the very top teams, because we’re likely to see some best draft picks and interesting narratives arise there — I guess namely UConn and South Carolina and USC.
I don’t look forward to much. Ever worsening climate disasters, a stage of life where friends become nucleated and far away from each other, my parents and family aging and dying, my friends aging and dying, all of the financial burdens that come therewith. Somehow staying employable for the next three decades minimum. Of course, this next stage of American Christo-fascism that will touch all of us in ways we can’t, let’s face it, anticipate. I do not look forward to much.
But oh my god, I cannot wait to see Caitlin Clark play basketball again. I can’t wait to see what she does next. Obviously not just her: I can’t wait for the league to restart in May, next May, the May after that. I can’t wait to see what it looks like with the expansion draft and the currently rotating coaching carousel. Will my beloved Liberty hold on to greatness? Will the Aces be brought low? What will Steph White do for the Fever? What will become of the dear Connecticut Sun without her? These are just questions for 2025, but I know that I will still be watching in 20 years, in sickness and in health, and it’s one of the only things that makes 2045 sound even slightly worth being around for. I rely on women playing professional basketball to bring me joy.
(And just in case you think I actually agree with myself — In some ways I think we are where we are because we have outsourced such joy to such professionals, who we pay a lot of money to watch live out our dreams, to paraphrase Kim Gordon. As articulated above, I don’t think that the end of Trump comes through women’s pickup games, or deciding to playing music together or something, although we could all be due to spend much more time together in these “unproductive” ways, if we can afford it).
MUSIC
The Byrds (minus David Crosby and Gene Clark) — The Notorious Byrd Brothers
My precious NBB. One of the most beautiful rock records made by some of the most despicable rock stars to ever grace Southern California. Look, I don’t know why I’ve been fixated on this album this week. I think I listened to it a lot after Trump won in 2016. There’s a loudly fay, freewheeling nature to the very consistent jingle-jangle sound on this record. It’s sort of like folding a very soft but loudly colorful crochet blanket over yourself on a deep couch. I don’t think there’s been a more successful “psych-rock-country” operation ever, for what it’s worth.