fantasies of competence

I have this recurring daydream where I’m on trial for treason. Today’s version involved me traveling to Greenland, volunteering for the Danish army, and helping to fend off an American invasion, then being arrested and put on trial for treason. At my trial I argued that the charges should be dismissed because the US and Denmark were NATO members, and so I couldn’t have been committing treason. In the end I'm executed by firing squad.

Little reveries like this have been interrupting my morning coffee or afternoon smoke for more than a decade, ever since America started to spiral into a fascist nightmare. The exact content varies with whatever's happening in the news, but the basic outline of the story is always the same. They've never totally without a basis in reality - I speak Norwegian and I can shoot and ski and deal with the cold, so I could probably make myself useful in Greenland - and they always end in personal catastrophe.

It's a coping mechanism for sure. There's nothing I can really do except watch the disaster unfold. Even if someone were organizing an armed resistance, the other side has drones. My vote doesn't matter - I'm in a deep blue area of a deep red state, so my ballots in the last dozen elections may as well have been shredded for all the effect they had. There's no competent local organizations to volunteer with, just the DSA (the local branch of which seems to spend most of its time fielding internal accusations of harassment) and various groups attached to the Democrats, who are not exactly the resistance we need. About four years ago in an attempt to manage these feelings I signed up as an election worker, figuring that if I couldn't control democracies outcomes I could at least help maintain the system. It helps with the helplessness and terror, the way I imagine ibuprofen helps with stage four cancer.

I can't imagine anything improving in my lifetime; the future history of America is a slow spiral into disaster and dissolution, and the process will be stupid and terrifying and frustrating and embarrassing and bloody and stupid and stupid and so, so stupid. So I fantasize about a grand last stand, giving a speech that future generations will read, and then dying nobly.

I've dealt with deep depression; what queer person hasn't? This is something different, almost the reverse or inverse or evil universe version of depression, where my life is fine, good maybe, great even, but society is coming apart around me and there's nothing I can do to help. I'm going to die in a worse world than I was born in, and there's nothing I can do to change that. That's a particular uncomfortable thought for an American, but at this point it's so soaked through me that I can't even daydream about a positive outcome.

So I guess I'll keep daydreaming. Maybe tomorrow it'll be about defending a family from ICE or joining guerrillas in Venezuela or being on the losing side in a civil war. Whatever it is, I know how the story ends.