When I was pregnant I wrote to you all the time. I wanted you to understand the zeitgeist of your gestation, the amniotic fluid of the external world that I was floating in. 2011: Year of the killer drought and the Bastrop fires and Frank-Dodd. I wrote about Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous and the recession, which was big back then. It seems hard to believe in some ways and in others it is so much the seeds of now. Back then, it felt like the edge of the world, like things might really change, or if not, end, perhaps abruptly. A revolution brewing.
Things have changed, but not how I thought. The revolution is still happening, but different – right wing and totalitarian. We’ve become a banana republic overnight, although in hindsite the path is slower and easier to trace. Of course we are here. See: Allende. See: and Latin American unrest and US response. Only now, here. See: Snowden, Russia, death of the middle class.
I have changed too, in ways I could not have grasped then. I think about the future differently. Always, I think of you. See: me at 2:30 am. Again at 4:30am. And all seconds in between. I do not think about taking you to Disney or giving you the perfect childhood the way some people do (well, sometimes. Of course I do.) It’s more of a Terminator thing. More Sarah Connor, without the chin ups. (There should be some chin ups.) The future is coming for you, it’s coming for us all. How I feel about that goes against everything I thought I was.
For example, next year you are going to a charter school that takes money away from our neighborhood school, which is minority and struggling. Charters fuck over everyone, but especially the most disadvantaged kids who don’t have the choice to go somewhere else. And you’re going and I’m ok with it. You aren’t a special snowflake, it’s just that the industrial revolution, top-down, child-as-vessel won’t work. Because you are going to create the future. Why would I hold you to some system of the past when I know that? Wouldn’t THAT be wrong?
And now, similarly, my mind is on leaving. Texas, for sure, but maybe the US altogether. Some friends have done it, and have given me the talk. Which goes: Go now. While you can. Can I? Most of our friends are here. We have a house and I have a decent job. And there’s Austin. Love of my life. And you’ll be in a good school, too, for Texas. A good school for you, little snowflake. In a place where there is open carry and school shootings and xenophobic, racist, sexist government. Hurricanes and droughts, fires, who knows what else to come. Climate change maps are not kind to Texas.
In Texas, the grass is crispy and the forecast is a string of 100s from now until September. In Antarctica, Larsen C just broke off the coast, as big as the State of Delaware. What do we do? What would Sarah Connor?
Little Bug 