Horror films

Have you seen the latest?

The news cycles over the past month have felt like nothing less than watching a fresh horror movie or tense drama every 24-72 hours. To be clear, I’m watching through a device made for such horrors, a device that I could put down at any time and walk outside, breathe fresh air and listen to birds in the valley to regroup in my immediate more peaceful reality… but the movies are so compelling! I need to know what happens next. I need to see the twist, and envision our impending victory or demise.

And sometimes, I can cling to perspective: are these all horrors, or is some of it just old systems breaking necessarily and inelegantly, to reveal new opportunities for radical, messy but ultimately beautiful change? What will emerge in place of the fractured husks of old agencies? It’s hard to be optimistic in light of how much power is consolidated at the hands of billionaires, ones who are seemingly set to destroy us. But, we will see.

In this binge-watch cycle, it also feels hard to hang on to any sense of priority as the focus keeps shifting, new plots emerging. The thing that felt like it mattered so much yesterday feels distant and admittedly less dramatic today. At one point a few weeks ago I started to write about the Comstock Act, because that week it had hit the “repro movement” Signal chats as a very real impending threat, and I had probably clocked 10-12 hours scenario-planning around what it would mean for abortion access. I was holding layers of complicated thoughts and feelings about the potential mis-application of this law, one that originally came to be in 1873 via a white man and his masturbation addiction.

Practical layers: it would likely cause chaos for the mailing of pills in the US. It would create heightened legal risk for individuals receiving mailed pills, which right now is largely not a criminal act (but still comes with some risk). Emotional/spiritual layers: I can’t believe this is where we are at. Resurrecting a 150-year old dead law that weaponizes the USPS to scare and control people who are just trying to get what they need to be ok, family-plan, and survive in this crazy world. Analytical layer: this is our inherent confusion at its finest. We are still tied up in knots about sexuality and the body, old puritanical programming flows through us, we’re not talking about it and we’re letting other people decide for us what is good and right. The fact that we even still consider this a real law shows how far we are from normalizing sex and sexuality in culture and in life.

But Anthony was a classic struggling human, in his time, trying to get a grip. And sometimes when a person can’t control what’s happening inside, they attempt to control what’s happening outside — which is why he pursued a federal law banning the mailing of porn, birth control and abortifacents instead of dealing with his sh*t. And today, politicians are still able to weaponize his choices, relying on the fact that swaths of this country still believe in sexual shame and suppression, and using this belief to wield control and build their base. We had 150 years to figure this out, but instead of collectively finding a healing path, fostering more human experiences free of shame, where systems are put to work for the good of people who pay for them, instead we are here. Life coaches, where are you? Brene Brown? Glennon? Tony? When are we going to help the masses unpack this shame and confusion?

Anyway. Then I when woke up a day later, and I was tired of thinking about it and didn’t feel like writing about it anymore. Besides, other work news had taken its place, with state officials in Louisiana and Texas suing Dr. Maggie Carpenter for providing virtual abortion care over their restrictive borders. The state of New York was refusing to play ball, and in fact they upped protections soon afterward by eliminating the requirement for shield law providers to include their name on the prescription bottle.

This, while likely stressful for Maggie and many in the movement, is also history in the making. Shield laws are an innovation, a three-year old legal strategy to leverage the tech of telehealth and mailed meds in service of people harmed by bans, and it’s fair to say they were designed, passed and utilized knowing that some point they would be tested. Seeing how indescribably contentious the issue of abortion access has become, there is no timeline in which conservative US politicians would not seek to challenge a shield law, their egos bruised by activists finding ways around their cruel and dangerous restrictions on care. How dare they innovate, just like Uber used to start driving in cities where rideshare was illegal and take it from there. The Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in 2012, "If you put yourself in the position to ask for something that is already legal, you'll find you'll never be able to roll out." How about for abortion, do we feel the same about innovation? I think I know. For now, we will see whose rules win.

Then RFK Jr. was confirmed, along with a fresh wave of horrors: fears that he will enable an era of surfing dangerous anti-and pseudoscience on waves of disease and harm. It’s tempting to get swept up, but again, in some of these emergent new realities the only way to know what it means is to wait and see what actually happens, then take action. Days after public health websites were dismantled and the CDC was instructed not to disseminate their regular updates, experts and activists reconstructed these resource sites from historical snapshots (like archive.org) and redirected people to other independent public health news services - internet FTW. But more recently, RFK recommended the measles vaccine for the Texas outbreak, which surprised a lot of people (and is backed by science). Over time we’ll find out whose rules win, or we’ll find something else altogether.

So, who’s in charge here? We thought we knew, but instead the ball keeps being tossed back in the air for someone else to swat and grab. History is repetitive but not static, and the answer to this question is ever-changing: right now we are being invited to witness firsthand how power builds in the modern age, how long fabricated realities (like those that weaponize certain religious beliefs) can last, and how incredibly challenging it can be to hold on to what’s real when everyone really does think they’re right.

For now, I think the moment calls for us to practice holding contradiction, which requires both effort and patience. Yes, act — but also, wait. Yes, vaccines — but also deeper research on vaccine harms. I heard on a pod how calls to Congress and protests at public meetings are having a real effect: politicians are listening, town halls are being rescheduled, etc. There’s something remarkable about the instant visibility and accountability offered by the internet, and as much as it feels like an endless and dizzying onslaught, filtered by our own choice of media outlets, it also leaves us more in a position of knowing what is happening in the halls of power, in the moment it happens.

With all this witnessing and processing and taking action, I can’t help but remember the infamous Mark Twain quote:

“I had a good many worries… and most of them never happened.”

Meaning alongside all the real harms, there is much we don’t know. We can use logic, reason and this Project 2025 tracker to predict, but so much of it will be revealed and will evolve. And we will respond accordingly, as both audiences and participants. And whether we chose it or not, this is the film festival our generation is slated to attend.