Break Glass in Case of Fire

Well, there were about 9,000 unpaid protesters in front of Milwaukee’s federal building this afternoon.

They had cardboard signs made last night in the kitchen stapled to pieces of wood they found in the garage. The signs had cutouts and cartoons, markers and paints. It felt like seventh grade was alive and well and living inside all of us. The markers, the glue, the whole conceptualization process, the miscalculations, the letters falling off the edge, the profanity.

Somebody had squished their hand down on red paint to make handprints on their sign. The theme was “Hands Off,” after all.

My sign was better than the last one. But still too wordy. It did have cutouts of flames which I thought was pretty clever. And an American flag. I’m thinking of getting some letter stencils to up my game. That and some serious word shrinkage. Oh well. Everything’s a journey.

The point of the sign was one of my middle-of-the-night realizations. The house is on fire. No one is coming to rescue us. We are the rescuers. Cory Booker’s incredible filibuster and Susan Crawford’s more incredible Supreme Court win notwithstanding, the path to safety, the righting of everything that’s been upended and wrecked, seems nonexistent. Power to the people, yes. But how does that work in this moment? Not work in the abstract but actually work as a tactic.

That we must be our own rescuers is a terrifying thought. A fire engulfing our house and no fire engine showing up. Would we jump from the second story window, tie sheets together to make our descent? Not now but several years ago when we had kids living on our third floor, we were told to tie a heavy rope around the cast iron radiator, you know, just in case, one of them had to break a window and lower themselves to the ground. The rope lay coiled next to the radiator for twenty years and then we untied it and put it in the back of our truck in case we had to pull somebody out of a ditch. Which you wouldn’t do with a rope anyway, but, just in case.

I don’t know how we rescue ourselves from the madness that has become our government almost overnight. How do we tie a rope around the radiator?

What is the means by which we save ourselves? I don’t know. I just show up and wait for the next steps to become clear.