—CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD, ON WHETHER TO COME FORWARD DURING THE KAVANAUGH HEARINGS
I AM SO TIRED.
The train is very, very urgent. It is moving a man’s career forward. It is very difficult to get the train to stop.
The presumption is that the train will not stop. The presumption is that you will be a scream thrown on the tracks. That it will require a great many of you to be thrown onto the tracks before the train will grind to a halt. It can never be just the one; it must be several at once. Someday we will know the precise conversion. We will tell them: Do not bother unless there are twenty others like you, because the train will continue, and you will be crushed.
It is painful to watch a woman caught and torn in the gears of a man’s progress. To watch the meaning of her name change into a thing that happened to her once. To watch the first sentence of her obituary get rewritten. To watch her name be linked to this man’s name (Anita, accuser of Clarence; Christine, accuser of Brett). All she asks is for the train to stop.
To make the train stop, you must throw yourself in front. Your whole self. Your fear of flying. Your family.
You must throw yourself in front of the train, but still it may not be enough. These trains move very fast. We must not ask why.
Maybe the train will stop for a week. That seems fair. A week, just to make sure. A week, to take this seriously, at a gentleman’s request.
But I am so tired.
I am so tired of this constant parade of pain.
In the Bible, Thomas says he will not believe that Jesus has survived unless he can stick his hand into the wounds. But this is not a reasonable thing to ask of someone who is not God, to stick your hand into their wound. I am tired of watching people become wounds. Half the Internet is a wound. Have you stuck your hand in it enough? Do you believe yet? The #MeToo movement lurches forward over a path of scars. The change is so slow and the sacrifice it demands so great.
Even as she testified Thursday, Christine Blasey Ford kept apologizing. (“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can read fast!” she said. She was here to be “helpful,” she said.)
Someday I want to not be tired.
Someday I want us not to apologize.
Women are used to squinting to see our own stories in the stories of others. To reading ourselves into the words “all men are created equal.” To being the thing tied to the tracks to raise the stakes.
I am so tired of the moment when you discover how little your weight counts against the train’s.
I want us to be the train and not the thing thrown under it.
I want us to be the thing too urgent to be stopped, not the thing that must curl up apologetically to make room for it.
Is it too much to ask to be the train sometimes? Not all the time, just sometimes.
I am so tired of watching us jump.
I am so tired of watching the trains keep going.
September 28, 2018
A Humanizing Profile of Your Local Neo-Nazi
ARE WE DOING THESE? OKAY!
One thing that may surprise you to learn about Neo-Nazis is that they live in houses! You would think that maybe one would live in some kind of enormous bone hut, or a stack of burning newsreels, or a large tent constructed entirely from problematic flags, but actually no. Actually Henrik (whose last name I am withholding, for some reason) lives in a regular house. With a two-car garage, where a tennis ball hangs on the end of a sturdy rope as a caution to those who want to move forward too far. Henrik immediately drew an analogy from this ball that I don’t want to repeat! But amazingly, the tennis ball is there in his house, just like in other people’s houses. It doesn’t just corrode away the moment he touches it. WILD!
Strangely, in pictures, Henrik appears in full color, not sepiatinted or wearing a little pickelhaube. This surprised me very much.
It surprised me less, but still a little bit, to learn that he has a dog and that the dog is just as loyal to him as a dog would be to a regular person. I don’t know if the dog understands all of his beliefs. The dog sits at his feet and he pets it and scritches it behind the ears.
Henrik and I go to a Putt-Putt golf course. He puts on a shirt that expresses his beliefs, just like it’s a normal shirt. But it’s not a normal shirt! The shirt says some pretty impolite things. Wow! And yet: He puts it on one arm at a time! And his head goes through the hole at the top, just like a regular person’s head.
When he hits the ball, no talons come out, and when he retrieves the ball from the hole, he does not shiver away into dust! He likes art and music, not just Wagner. He also loves Hatecore. He said it isn’t a contradiction to love Hatecore. He acts like “Hatecore” is just a genre of music, like other genres! I’m so confused.
His lights turn on and off, with a light switch. Can you believe this guy?
On the surface, Henrik is a striking young man, with a sharp and well-delineated chin and eyes that seem to open the windows to his soul. His eyes (and soul), like the lives he thinks #matter, are blue. When he stands next to the exposed brick wall of this coffee shop in excellent lighting for my photographer to snap pictures, he crosses his arms. I ask why he is crossing his arms. Is he trying to keep people out?
Yes, he says.
