1
after UA 2333 is delayed a second time, we order another bottle of wine. it’s a quiet night at Newark. the volume rises as we drink. we’re headed to the Carolinas for a long weekend, the first time i’ve ever taken off work for a non-funeral reason. it’s the dawn of a new decade and we’re excited enough about politics to door knock for a candidate in states where most of us don’t even live.
we board sometime after the third bottle of wine and land after midnight. Myrtle Beach is begging for the end of winter. we chat with our cab driver about the frustratingly squirrel-y nature of seasonal work, how you always hope you can cobble enough together to withstand the winter. spring break is coming up and he’s looking forward to the rush of visitors it’ll bring. he regales us with stories of wrangling drunk college kids; we laugh as if that wasn’t us two years ago.
the actual door knocking isn’t always as friendly. we’re in a very southern, working-class town, and you encounter some stuff you’d expect: “i don’t like bernie sanders and i want nothing to do with anyone who does,” growls a camo-clad white guy framed by a wall full of guns. fair enough!
“you know, i really like bernie,” muses his neighbor, a nearly identical guy in front of a nearly identical wall. “maybe not as much as you — i’m not sure i’d come all the way down from new york. but right now, he’s got my vote.”
others have, too, and not just older white guys: a Latina mother of young kids likes his childcare policy. a pair of college twins are voting to “cancel out their parents”. a 90-year-old Black woman has never voted in her life, but will break tradition this year to vote with her grandson. the number one thing you learn knocking doors is that there is no “typical” American voter: in moving and horrifying ways, other people’s politics make no goddamn sense. imagining you are an exception does not break this rule.
the weekend blurs by: our hotel room gets burgled. on top of a well-deserved hangover, i get vicious food poisoning. we wonder if it’s that virus we keep hearing about, but i recover quickly. two days later, bernie loses south carolina, which we expected. we watch from a barcade as nearly every other nominee drops out to coalesce around joe biden, which we did not expect. but you’d be surprised how easily you can weather heartbreak when it occurs within 5 feet of DDR.
on super tuesday, joe biden unsurprisingly carries south carolina. with few exceptions, the map is purple, but if you zoom in deep into Horry County, you’ll find a little blue pocket, exactly where we knocked.
2
there used to be a doorman in this building. entering feels like trespassing, but there are fewer rules in the city these days. people have fled: for their parents’ house, for the hamptons, for their parents’ third house in the hamptons. i could easily cross the river to jersey, but i’m wracked with terror at the thought of getting my family sick. and i’m paying rent here anyway. also, i’ll never be able to shake the feeling that leaving would be, on some level, a betrayal. i’m still employed, able-bodied, have no dependents. here i can be useful. not always — the guys at the liquor store recognize my voice when i call — but still, sometimes, i am useful.
the door-knocking campaign has shifted, with incredible speed, into a mutual aid group. delivering groceries and supplies feels like the only productive thing i can do. this neighborhood is now populated almost exclusively by those who have been left behind: the very poor, the very old, the very sick. Maria, the woman i’m meeting today, is all three, sticking it out in one of the few rent-controlled units of a high-rise. i text her that i’m coming up. by the time the elevator creaks its way to her floor, she’s already outside her door, masked up and impatient.
Maria has a favor to ask: could i please knock on 14F and check in on Gail? “she hasn’t been answering my calls,” she huffs, more irritated than worried. i agree, hoping i’m about to play mediator and not medical examiner. but it’s not like i have anything else going on.
the fourteenth floor is similarly deserted. i knock on Gail’s apartment once, twice, heart sinking. i’m thinking of how to deliver Maria the news, who we’re supposed to call, when i hear a crotchety “enough with the knocking!”
Gail is fine. she spoke to Maria yesterday — a claim Maria disputes when i deliver this missive — and will call her back tonight. in future visits, i don’t hear anything else about Gail. but there aren’t many more. a few weeks later, i ask Maria how she’s doing, and she never responds.
3
the 43rd day of the strike starts well before sunrise. studios have been trying to work around writers’ picket lines — which many crew members refuse to cross in solidarity — by telling people to show up hours earlier than their call sheet specifies. but the real times keep getting leaked to us. we’re all in different unions, but we negotiate our contracts against the same bosses, and nobody understands exploitation like an IATSE crew member or a Teamster. our struggles are naturally linked.
the decision to honor a picket line is particularly high-stakes for IATSE crew members because if they don’t cross, they don’t get paid. they’re willingly sacrificing food on the table to support a strike that isn’t even theirs. but tensions are understandably rising: how long can this go on? every day we’re told the basic dignities we’re asking for are unreasonable — an outrageous, insulting lie, but standard fare for the billionaires we’re up against. one of them was quoted saying they’re not coming back to the bargaining table until some of us are homeless. they put that in the news!
only a few of us are needed for this morning’s early shift, so it’s just me and one other writer holding signs by a studio side door. the Teamsters begin to arrive. an older white guy in a Celtics cap disembarks from his truck, hands fisted deep in the pockets of his truly baller bomber jacket. he fishes out a cigarette and lights up, watching us warily.
after a few minutes of excruciating silence, i strike up a conversation and smile when i hear his accent. his name is John. i ask whereabouts in Ireland he’s from, and he says Sligo — should have known. he sounds just like my grandfather. i ask if he’s spent any time in Dromore West; he says he’s from just down the road. turns out there’s great surfing in Dromore West. news to me, and probably also to my grandfather.
our conversation is brief but light. John mostly seems relieved i didn’t ask to bum a cigarette, and gives me a nod before clambering back up into his truck.
a few hours later, the line of crew members refusing to cross the picket line is twice as long as the actual picket line. after we’ve bought out the entirety of the nearest dunkin to thank them, we get word the studios are violating a neutral gate to load equipment. our morning crew was too small to send anyone to monitor it. i sprint down a punishingly long LIC block. if even a single truck gets in, production can resume, rendering today’s picket line — and the crew’s sacrifice — almost meaningless.
there are no trucks pulling in when i arrive at the gate. instead i see John from Sligo, parked across the street, engine stubbornly switched off. eventually, he looks up from his New York Post. in lieu of a smile, he flicks the brim of his Celtics cap.
“it doesn’t even fucking matter,” a young woman sobs into her phone on the street. she is young; possibly ‘first election’ young. i know her; i was her. my heart breaks for her. you can’t even play DDR anywhere around here.
and why shouldn’t she feel that? when much of our future seems written in poison? so much of this moment is fueled by delusion: too many, too exhaustingly obvious to list (racism, sexism, transphobia, genocide denial; i could go on). but perhaps the most insidious myth is that everyone, yes you, even you, can and will and even deserve to become, at any cost, a rich, powerful, untouchable billionaire. this myth has persisted for so long we’ve had to change the first letter. it’s a powerful elixir, dripped as distraction into the ears of increasingly isolated Americans. and there is steadfast refusal among “the opposition” to present an equally compelling counternarrative.
not all the “founders” of this country despised the monarchy. some only resented that they could not be part of it. and because monarchy is built on stolen things, they found a place to pillage, people to enslave, and let their little experiment play out. i think it’s safe to say it failed, long before today, though we won’t admit that for some time. there’s too much shareholder value at stake.
a society with capital at its center is barely a society at all, but a merciless, insatiable, mechanical beast. it’s a meat grinder dressed as a slot machine. play another round!, it coaxes, next one could be the jackpot!, as you are ripped apart and made more easily packageable. we are rapidly approaching its natural endpoint. pretending otherwise — pretending this system is remotely worth the destruction it inflicts — is utter, indefensible delusion. but it means everything is permissible, nothing is forbidden, if it can be sold as an offering to the god of money. capitalism is man-made, not god-given. there are people paid handsomely to make you forget this — or worse, to convince you that you won’t live to see the worst of it, so nothing you do here matters.
here is a possible delusion of my own: what we do with dwindling hope is actually the only thing that matters. when up against massively entrenched, powerfully funded delusion, the idea that we can win might feel equally delusional. let it! who gives a shit! embrace toxic positivity! tell yourself, over and over again, that the world we deserve is possible, because it is. so many gifts will be destroyed. our capacity for imagination must never be one of them.
i think it matters that a few folks in South Carolina lent their voice to something radically unexpected. that while Maria was trapped in a tiny apartment in a sick, ghostly city, one of the last things she ever did was check in on her neighbor, even though she was fine. that John from Sligo didn’t cross the picket line when he easily could have.
they will try to ban reproductive freedom nationwide. stock up on pills and organize to get abortion protected in your state anyway. they will try to outlaw the only line of defense for unions. unionize your workplace anyway. they will threaten you with RICO charges for any protests that threaten the capitalist war machine, particularly Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. protest it anyway. they plan to enact mass deportations, to criminalize trans people out of public existence, to abolish gay marriage, to end vaccinations, and, of course, to sever every ripcord that might slow our planet’s skydive into hell. will any of that be enough to drive you into the streets? to risk injury or arrest? it’s rare that the enemy so clearly illustrates how they intend to destroy you. we can anticipate most of what’s coming. are we going to accept it? the answer to this question is the only thing that matters.
why does it matter? i don’t know. some people would probably cite gods or philosophers. my delusional non-answer: it just does. even if we squander every gift, even if there’s never any record of anything we built together — it matters what we did here. every act of altruism, solidarity, and love-borne sacrifice is a miracle. none of it is ever done in vain. the miracle matters until no one’s left to remember it, and we’re all still here.