What Rough Beast
Earlier this month, I was scheduled to give a talk at an area high school as part of their Writers’ Week. I was excited by the opportunity to speak to a captive (and, hopefully, receptive and interested) audience about my work—usually the trouble is getting me to shut up about it. Hopefully I could impart some useful advice that’d help these young writers avoid the kinds of mistakes I made, starting out. Maybe I could even be entertaining while I did it.
But I never got to give that talk. Not an hour before I was set to leave the house, I was informed the day’s activities would be cancelled. The school was going into lockdown, and everyone was being sent home. I read later the reason was someone discovered a message had been scrawled in two school bathrooms promising to “shoot the school” on that day.
Before I share my thoughts on that, I want to share the concluding statements of the talk I never got to give, because the content is relevant to that discourse:
We’ve been telling stories since we were developed enough to scrawl on cave walls with blood and ashes and other pigments. It’s in our genes. We’ve had the drive for time immemorial. For lots of reasons…to impart information. To express ourselves. To create a record that we were ever here at all.
I like the notion that books are the closest we’ve come to time-travel: someone who died thousands of years ago can speak to us right here, right now, through the writing they left behind. A voice speaking to us across the centuries, in our minds, as we read the words they wrote.
And it’s kind of comforting, in a way, to read all the fart jokes and lewd humor and “Aufidius was here” that some ancient Romans graffitied on the walls of Pompeii and realize after all this time, humanity is the same as it’s always been.
I’m not going to tell you it’s easy to have a career as a writer, because it’s not. It’s hard to put yourself out there, and be seen, or not seen, or properly paid for the blood, sweat, and tears you put into your work. But money does not determine the worth or the value of something, despite the general prevailing attitude in that regard.
And we should all strive to at least be the best communicators possible, because knowing how to talk to people and listen to and understand people just makes living easier. For everybody.
A big part of what we do is create things that make life worth living—with our stories, and our poems, and our prose…with our words, we can make both ourselves and our readers feel connected. Seen. Heard. Understood. Or we can give them an escape. An outlet. A touchstone that may affect the way they think and feel for the rest of their lives. I’m sure you’ve read books you still think about. Might *always* think about. Books you love, I hope. We truly can change the world with our words—and this is a world that so desperately needs changing into a place where we can all not just survive, but *thrive*. Words are *powerful*. We *can* change hearts and minds and the very course of history with our writing. And you know how you know that’s true? Because those who are afraid of what our words can do are literally *right now* threatening to charge teachers with a felony in Florida for having the “wrong” books in their classrooms. Our writing has power. They know it. We mustn’t forget it.
Read. Write. Keep writing.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Truthfully, the threat of a school shooting was a concern on my mind when I agreed to participate, months earlier. I reminded myself that the high school experience of kids today is not the same one I had sixteen years ago. That I didn’t go to school every day with the constant concern that I might not come home at the end of it. School shootings happen nigh-daily at this point. Hell, it could happen while I’m there.
I was too young to substantively experience and process Columbine, but the Virginia Tech shooting happened while I was in college…so that’s the first time I can recall imagining scenarios of what I would do if a shooter came into the lecture hall full of kids just trying to learn the difference between Ionic and Doric columns. A crazy juxtaposition. An insane way to have to consider existence.
I see teachers talk about how disengaged students have become. How hard it is to keep their focus, make them care about their work. Is that really surprising to anyone? They’re growing up fully understanding that their lives have no meaning or value to those in power, beyond their ability to be molded into exploitable labor. They won’t be protected from being gunned down alongside their friends—not at the expense of NRA support and gun lobby money. They won’t be protected from a pandemic causing whole-body vascular damage—the wheels on the bus have to keep turning, no exceptions. Your classmates have COVID, but your parents can’t stay home with you—they have to go grind at the office where they can be seen…breathe each others’ viruses, make middle management feel important, give their employers’ office real estate its money’s worth. They won’t be protected from persecution for who they are—not with test balloon laws being passed in red states to try to ban the very existence of trans people, or ban discussing gender, or sexual orientation, or racial history.
No protection, no safety net—just deliberate State abandonment of the American people.
Failed banks and companies will get bailed out, but you get to be saddled with inescapable student loan or medical debt for the rest of your existence. Heaven help you if a train crashes in your back yard and poisons your water supply forever because the President says rail workers don’t deserve sick leave. Keep calm or be white at a traffic stop, or an unaccountable officer with military gear and an itchy trigger finger might put fourteen new holes in you and be suspended with pay until the public forgets amid the emergence of the next horror.
On, and on, and on—the collapse all available for viewing and discussion on TikTok, which the government is now trying to ban under the dubious guise of “privacy” at Meta’s behest, because Facebook and Instagram can’t compete. Hilarious that anyone living post-9/11 would believe this government (or Mark Fuckerberg) gives a solitary shit about privacy. Profit and Control, the refrain, sing it with me: the only thing these people care about is their profits, and their control.
The elites and right-wing despots in this country can’t abide the people of this country having discourse in spaces where they can’t control the discourse (or profit from it)—because they know their rhetoric and “ideas” and vision have no relevance or credibility to the VAST majority of Americans, or when faced with scrutiny. We don’t want their greed, their hate, their lies, or their control. These are the last, frantic gasps of a dying ideology that can’t succeed any other way than eliminating any challenge to it—destroying rights, destroying books, destroying the education system, destroying PEOPLE—because their ideology can’t succeed on the strength of its merits. It has none.
They’re afraid. Don’t give in. Keep giving them something to be afraid of—even if all that is, is unabashedly living an existence as someone whose heart and body and mind they’ll never have. There are so many more of us than there are of them. Let them see our strength in numbers. Let them tremble. Let them remember why we made them afraid to wear their white robes and bent crosses in public the last time. We, humanity, once declared “Never again.” Now is the time we show them we meant it.