While I Was Gone
I tried not to have too many thoughts while I was out, but I couldn't totally help it. Here are a few of them.
Quick note: I am traveling every weekend from now until the middle of August, so I’m going to do my best to post frequently, but I can’t guarantee any regularity. Thank you very much for your grace!
The President of the University of Virginia resigned in what the New York Times called “perhaps the most significant victory in [the Trump regime’s] pressure campaign on higher education.”
I went to UVA for undergrad, and even now, more than a decade out of college, my feelings about it are, at best, mixed. On the one hand, the academics were outstanding, and I met some of my favorite people in the world there. On the other hand, even though I have never been much of a crier, I spent my first 48 hours of college sobbing. Move-in day started with a panic attack and while I eventually found more stable footing, I never felt that much more comfortable than I did in those early days. Some of this was me, of course. I wanted to go much further afield for college, but I ended up going to UVA with about 20 of my high school classmates, and I wonder now how much of my early panic was tied to feeling trapped in a version of myself I’d hoped to leave behind.
But it wasn’t just about me, and what I was bringing with me. It was also about UVA - its homogeneity, the predominance of greek life, the tradition of girls wearing sundresses and pearls to football games. It was about lines and lines of underage girls outside of frat houses, waiting for them to decide we were pretty enough to be let in. It was the mother I overheard talking to her daughter about how everyone gets engaged in their third year and married after fourth. UVA was a lot whiter than where I went to high school, and even though it was quite a bit bigger, it felt smaller to me.
I say this to explain why, reading about the controversy around UVA and President James Ryan’s resignation, felt akin to reading about what was going on at Harvard or Columbia - something that was important and distressing politically, but impersonal. But it matters, that a president who was deeply focused on diversity and first generation college students was ousted from a University that stands, in many ways, as a bastion of the old south. Surrounded by the plantations of the founding fathers, and built on a reverence for Thomas Jefferson that often turns deliberately away from his role in perpetuating the violence of slavery, in many ways UVA is a microcosm of the contradictions and violence in our nation’s founding. And it mattered that there was someone in charge who saw that, and who believed in our responsibility to address the injustices of the past. And it matters now, that that person is gone, in deference to a President who praised the Nazis who marched through Charlottesville in 2017, who has turned the whole apparatus of the government towards punishing his enemies and preserving the rigid homogeneity and violent racial and economic hierarchy that both UVA and this nation were built on.
Zohran Mamdani won the NYC Democratic Party for Mayor and it is exceptionally good news. What Zohran has brought to New York City politics is not just an economic vision for a more affordable city. Nor is it just a refreshing style of politics that meets people where they are - on the street, scrolling videos on their phone, on the subway, in the bodega. But even more important, to me, than either of those (pretty important) things is the possibility, and the joy that this campaign brought back to politics in an exceedingly joyless moment.
Zohran Mamdani believes that we can actually make this city more affordable, that we do not have to settle for the scrimping and striving that has become so endemic to New York. There’s a version of this city where I’m no longer applying for an apartment before I’ve even seen it because affordable two-bedrooms have become the sloped and peeling holy grail. There’s a version where the trains and the buses are accessible, and on time. We can have affordable grocery stores instead of food deserts. We can have the space to breathe. And then, maybe, the space to dream.
And Zohran did it while laughing! While telling good jokes, and talking to people as though they were people and not representations of a demographic outlined in polling data in a metaphysical binder locked on a political aide’s phone. He did it making friends with Brad Lander, when they could have seen each other as the opposition, instead of collaborators and friendly competition. Zohran won while making us all feel a part of something joyful, teeming with possibility and community.
I missed most of the initial backlash, though I can based on texts from friends and the many newsletters I read about it afterwards, a) that it was horrifying in its violent implications for Zohran and his friends, family, and staff, and more generally for all of us who believe in democracy, equality, and freedom from fear and b) that it also came from a Democratic party “establishment” that is stuck in the past, stuck in their polling binders and their MSNBC green rooms, and stuck with a losing sex pest corrupt candidate in Andrew Cuomo.
I have no idea what’s going to happen with Zohran’s future mayoralty - I have no idea if we’ll be able to accomplish all that he set out in his platform, or whether his plans will work the way he intends them to. But I do know that he is going to try his damndest to make this city a place for all of us, as it has so long promised to be. This primary brought so much hope and joy and energy back into politics - we had a wealth of progressive candidates who want to make this city a better place, who want to try things, and who believe in and will keep fighting for a brighter future. And in a country where fear and scarcity and precarity and corruption have become the primary currency of politics, it’s deeply nice to see.
(Further reading: for those who are concerned about anti-semitism ascribed to Zohran Mamdani, this from Bess Kalb, and this from Michelle Goldberg are worth reading. And on the Democratic Party and whatever the fuck was up with everyone lining up behind Andrew Cuomo, I’d read both Dan Pfeiffer and Amanda Litman)
I was abroad while I was gone, traveling in Ireland and the UK and I was startled by the amount of people who first asked if we were Canadian when they heard us talk, instead of asking if we were American. That’s never happened to me abroad before, and I assume it’s because while I was flattered to be assumed Canadian, and regretfully had to apologize for being American instead, most Canadians lately have been horrified and angry to be mistaken for their southern aggressor and broader global menace.
And while I tried to turn my brain off, and avoid politics as much as I could, it turns out that isn’t wholly possible. It’s still happening, wherever you go, to people you love, and to your community, and to a nation full of people facing down tragedy and violence with a corrupt asshole at the helm. Still, I was able to get some perspective. At times I felt very Elizabeth Bennet, asking her aunt and uncle and the universe at large “what are men to rocks and mountains?” (Someday ask me to rant about the 2005 Pride & Prejudice giving this line to Mary instead, you’ll have fun). As the cliffs stretch into the wide and roiling sea, as the sky spills dark and leaden or bright and blue over green fields and the wind whips you in all directions, it's hard to forget that the world is so much bigger, has been around so much longer than this moment. It’s not that our problems are small, or unimportant. We are each a universe, and our tragedies and hurts are equally vast. But we are part of a bigger world - we are not alone, and we can look to nature and to each other for perseverance and hope.
Because it wasn’t just the natural wonders, but the political tour of Belfast, and the diversity on the streets of London, and the voluptuous and gloriously colorful celebration of Pride in Dublin. e It was clear, everywhere we went: we can make peace. We’ve done it before.