These feel like dark times indeed …

And my fear is what is the resolution?

“Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.”

Today is election day, yet in many ways, the atmosphere here in Georgia (overcast, rainy, cold) seems to reflect the inner turmoil. 

And honestly, I don’t know how to face it. 

In the before times, every year, Eddie and I would go with his family to the North Georgia mountains every November. Get away from the city. Spend some time together. It always felt very Modern Family, as by family I mean his ex-wife, her husband, Eddie's kids, and the grandkids. And, look, traveling as both a black and queer person, with a father who was in the military for all his life and took threat assessment on vacations very seriously, I too take threat assessment seriously. Letting others know where I am. Other steps I won’t get into. Etc. And there’s always just a bit of anxiety when traveling while black. Or, traveling while black and queer. 

But, in 2016, we were set to go up to the mountains, like usual. Except, it wasn’t business as usual. We’d just elected into office the 45th president. We’d just seen what half of the country really believed when it came to who they defined as Americans. 

 Ft. Irwin c. 1994 (from the Davis-Morgan Family Archives) 

Growing up in the military, on an army base for my most formative years, I really did view being an American like being an extended family. That’s just how it felt on base as a kid. We’d have neighborhood potlucks where all the families would get together on a Friday night, or we’d do outings.I never had a hometown, but at Ft. Irwin, i had what felt like a hometown small-town experience. We rode all over the base without fear, as there were friends and allies everywhere. On our block, it felt like we all had several mothers and parents. Especially when some of our moms and dads had to go out into the field. I will never forget how my friend’s life changed when his dad became paralyzed after an incident. And how the community turned out to support them. This was the same friend whose house I was spending the night at friend’s house because it was a Friday night. And I remember his mom coming into our room to announce my mom had given birth to my little brother. I remember, before leaving, giving my mom a hug and she winced. I thought I had hurt her, but now we all know how the body works and she was going into labor. White, Black, Latino, Asian, Native American, and every other person you can think of. We were a family. This was the America I’d known. 

And then, we left Ft. Irwin. Moved to the American South. Georgia. 

To say I was culturally shocked was an understatement. I mean, I’d spent summers at both my grandmothers in Macon and Blakely, playing with cousins and exploring in the wet, suffocating Georgia heat. But I’d never gone to school here or really been immersed in Georgia. 

I know that the inner child in me longs, and desires, to return to the world I grew up in, but that space was liminal. “God Bless The USA,” used to conjure that childhood for me. That all changed in 2016. 

Ft. Irwin c. 1991 (from the Davis-Morgan Family Archives) 

It’s a terrible thing to feel like you’re unwanted by your family. Growing up, first hiding in the closet as gay, and then, after a spell, as trans, but always a queer youth, I kept a go bag. In case my family didn’t want me. And I was lucky enough, in both coming out first as gay in high school, and then word through the street to my parents in my 30s, that I was trans - both times my parents reiterated their love for me. My fear was met with love. And while there are some things they didn’t understand, what was and is always made abundantly clear is that they love me and they want me to be happy. When it comes to my darkest moments, I can always cling to that, and that is incredibly powerful. 

Ft. Irwin, c. 1992  (from the Davis-Morgan Family Archives) 

But the extended family that is America, that I grew up and experienced on that base in the middle of the Mojave Desert, where we chased and trapped lizards and kept them in giant plastic water tubs for the allotted two or three days before we had to release them - I feel like in 2016 I found out how that extended family felt about people like me. People who were different.

I read a profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene in the Atlantic. A wonderful profile, as profiles go. It's always intriguing to find out who someone was before they became the public persona. Giving context to how she grew up. Never making apologies, but seeking to understand - what leads a person to become the way that they are. 

Another fascinating subject of mine, and we can get into why in another post but it relates to being a minority in today’s time, but aristocratic women from the 1500s until now. I mean, throughout history really. When one has little power, how does that affect them? 

And so, 2016. There we are, Eddie and I, set to go into the mountains with his extended family. Mind you, (I’m not getting ot the story just yet but still setting the stage) I’d been here before. Not going to the mountains with Eddie’s family in 2016, but instead finding out how a country really feels about you. I mean, it’s an ongoing discourse when a little black child learns about Martin Luther King Jr, and living in fear that people will kill you just for being black. But in 2002, a different drumbeating began - attacking the gays by the religious right. Which wasn’t anything new. But I was coming of age. We lived in the northern Atlanta suburbs by then. On the edge of where Gwinnett County is thinly separated from Fulton county by what feels like just a creek of the Chattahoochee River. Literally less than a mile from my home then. On one side of the suburbs, we had the likes of Usher and Chili, Bow Wow, and other nouveau riche in the infamous Sugarloaf neighborhood. Across the river, in Fulton, was Whitney Houston and a slew of baseball players. Every holiday, at the Target nearby, you could tell who was the celebrity or whatever by the trolley carts they had loaded down. 

My parents and I attended a Presbyterian megachurch. We really started going because a friend of mine in the neighborhood went with their family, and it became our social circle of sorts. Friends is always a loose word with them because … would friends cast others aside?

I knew I was queer at that point. Been knowing since the age of three I liked boys, and I wanted to be a girl. Ariel and I both knew that we wanted to be where the people are, and we wanted to see them dancing.

2001 we saw 9/11 happen, and in the aftermath of that, I decided I didn’t care who knew I was queer, because life is short and I was sick of pretending to be anything other than what I was or am. And I saw myself slowly gravitating away from this conservative megachurch in what I would later find out was a Republican stronghold (I never really stood a chance, did I). By the time 2002, and I’m attending somewhat sporadically, the tone of the messaging changed. Protect traditional marriage. And I heard the parents of my friends talking about protecting traditional marriage from people … well people like me. They didn’t know but it was from people like me. You factor in “Don't ask, don’t tell” still being a very prominent thing, especially as the child of someone in the military, and it does things to you. 

So, in 2016, this feeling of being unwanted by a country certainly wasn’t new. I’d lived with it my whole life. But the tone, fervor, and something else quite intangible shifted. 

In hindsight, I’m glad that Eddie and I took our cross-country road trip when we did. I mean, I was already fearful, but I don’t think it would have been possible after 2016. 

Because, between election day and when Eddie and I went up to the mountains, I was consumed with anxiety. Will I be safe? I’m going into territory where I’m not wanted.  Look I made sure my family knew where I was every second along with my closest black friends. 

And still. See, usually, Eddie and I do the grocery run whenever we go on trips with his family. He and I are usually itching to do something, I always like to get a lay of the land and surveil, and plus make sure I can get snacks I like because I won't know unless I see them. 

But the second we pulled up to the grocery store, the panic went into overdrive. We’d passed plenty of signs for the 45th president. The other flag was out in full force too. At that point, the dog whistles weren’t supersonic anymore. They were just flat-out whistles everyone can hear.

We get the cart, and I’m having a full blown panic attack in the grocery store. I honestly don't remember anything, except a brief moment by the deli counter where we had that weird tiptoe conversation of “are you a safe person” and the deli counter person finally relayed who they voted for. The only thing I remember from the entire trip because it was the one moment I was somewhat at ease. 

I don’t know what will happen if and when my parents pass. Because growing up with my dad in the military, I just always believed if I was in trouble he could send the US army to save me. Jets. Tankers. What have you. I mean, that's what I thought as a kid and I never really grew out of that. Because, in those moments of fear I calculate how far I am away from my mom and dad; my mom, who wrote our Georgia senators when the great housing debacle of 2003 found freshman students without on-campus housing and my mom was livid. I know that they’ll move heaven and earth for me, and I for them. At the start of the pandemic, my first instinct was to go home and be with my parents. It was safe there. And i told Eddie I needed to go to my parents’ house for a bit just for my mental health. To feel safe. 

In 2016, at that grocery store in the midst of a full-on panic attack with me trying to hide tears coming down my face from Eddie, I just wanted to go to their house. As long as I live I’ll never forget that panic. 

This weekend, I went on a work trip to Fayetteville North Carolina. And I’ve already told you all, dear readers, about the nerves. About looking up the voting demographics there. About - oh Ft. Bragg is right there (and the child in me thinking OK my dad can save me by activating Ft. Bragg somehow if something happens). As a visibly black trans woman, I worry about safety. Constantly. I knew I was heightened anxiety because my anxiety was breaking through my anti-anxiety medicine and making me dizzy again. All weekend I was dizzy. 

But especially after Saturday evening. 

I tend to take government announcements of threats seriously. Of heightened awareness. 

In 2001, what I failed to mention is that I spent that summer with my father in Saudi Arabia. My friends were going to Russia for a mission trip with our church, and somehow the fates handed me my own trip abroad. In July of that year, our base was basically put on lockdown. No one could go or leave. I’ll not get into details, but long story short - there were the chatters. When 9/11 happened, as far as I know, they were expecting it to happen to one of the oversea places. 

My anxiety is heightened because the rhetoric in this country has become incredibly volatile. And it feels like we’re in an interregnum period where - what do we do? We have a former President making claims that he’s supposed to be president. We never had a peaceful transition of power, something I’m just not sure our country has ever faced before. 

And, as social beings, I feel we’re all acutely aware of power. Who has it? Where does it reside? Because, in this case, it does trickle down to rule of law? Faith in a society, the silent social contract we make with each other as a collective, has been broken and it hasn’t been restored. 

And so we sit on the eve of an election in Georgia, between two candidates who should not be facing in a runoff. But, we are here because of those same factions I’ve been facing my entire life. Silently. 

My fear is that, because there was never a full handoff of power, then the resolution to how this plays out doesn’t end well. And, as we’ve seen the heightened violence against marginalized communities, these are all key markers for what feels like a collapse of some sort. And the shitty thing is that marginalized communities always pay the price in these instances. And, time and time again when given the opportunity, nothing is done until it's too late. 

So, elections since 2016 give me way too much anxiety. Way too much. Because for some of us, our existence feels at stake. While many of us are still trying to process the loss of something that starts to feel like we made it up; the loss of the love of an extended family. Except, was love ever really there? 

The events that happened in Moore County, just 30 minutes away from where I just happened to travel to on what feels like a random weekend for work, where they were holding a drag event that led to protestors in a county of only 102,763; Dear reader, it shook me. Especially on the heels of the attack on the nightclub in Colorado. Which DHS cites as one of the reasons for their alert. 

People say one thing and act differently, as I found out in that conservative presbyterian megachurch in high school. 

The targeted attack is terrifying. And I don’t know what the solution is going forward. I don’t know what safety or protection feels like if I leave my area if I leave my Grand Duchy of Grant Park and my queerdom of Atlanta (ITP of course.) 

And that terrifies me. 

If you remind me, my next post is about how I treat living in this country as sometimes feeling like being in a hostage situation.