The Witches Are Coming

by Lindy West

  The Northwest is a layered place. May through September: blue water, green trees, white mountains, blue sky. October through April: gray water, gray trees, white mountains, gray sky. I remember coming home from college in Los Angeles and taking the ferry across Puget Sound, watching the land sitting long, low, and dark on the water. I looked at it, and for the first time I didn’t think, “This is my home,” but instead “This is my habitat,” as though if you put me somewhere else I would fade and die. A polar bear trying to be a flamingo.

  I remember the first summer all the snow melted in the mountains. Blue water, green trees, brown mountains, blue sky. It was just a few years ago. Now it’s every summer.

  One early August day in 2017, I looked at the weather forecast and it read “89 degrees, smoke.”

  The sky turned brown and opaque. The neighboring city of Bellevue, which normally glitters above Lake Washington to the east, disappeared. The mountains disappeared. I didn’t see a tree move for an entire week. It was like a giant cloche had been placed over the whole region, as though God were playing molecular gastronomy and we were her smoked langoustine cotton candy duck balloons. You could feel the air on your skin, powdery and wrong, somehow both sweltering and clammy. Residents were warned not to exercise; people with asthma clutched their inhalers, white knuckled.

  To live in Seattle is to exist, perpetually, in the bargaining stage of grief. From October through May, generally speaking, it drizzles. Every day. What gets us through the gray, like a mantra, is the promise of summer. Summers in Seattle are perfect, bright blue and fresh, and all winter long we assure ourselves, over and over, “This is worth it for that.” Please let this one be a good summer, a long summer, a real Seattle summer. We need it. It’s our medicine.

  The smoke stole our summer, as it would the summer after. People were on edge. One day in the car, my husband was telling me about two guys he saw fighting on the street, and I got distracted by two guys fighting on the street.

  I can’t say definitively that our now-annual, unprecedented wildfires are the direct result of human-made climate change. I am not a scientist. But those smoke-choked months have thrown formerly intangible feelings of dread into stark perspective. While the smoke hovered, I remember staring at the low, dirty sky and thinking “What if this never left? What if it got worse?”

  I do know that the planet is getting warmer, that Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, that in October 2018 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—not a panel known for exaggeration or rhetorical liberties—released something called the “doomsday report.” This is what the executive director of the UN Environment Program, Erik Solheim, said about it: “It’s like a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen.”

  There is a smoke alarm in the kitchen, and there was smoke hovering over my place, my habitat. I don’t know if the 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit the earth has warmed since the late 1800s caused those fires directly, or what kind of calamities might come of the 1.5 degrees it’s predicted to warm by 2040. But irrespective of their cause, the fires’ impact—the claustrophobia, the tension, the suffocating, ugly air—felt like a preview (and a mild one) of what’s to come if we don’t take immediate and drastic steps to halt and mitigate climate change. Temperatures will almost certainly rise. Air quality will almost certainly decline. I do not want to live like this, and you don’t, either.

  It’s easy, if you are not in immediate danger of being swallowed by the sea or strangled by drought, to slip into normalcy. Moment to moment, for a lot of people in the United States and other wealthy nations, everything still feels fine, unchanged. Even if you genuinely believe that doom is coming, it is possible to set aside your panic for a while and, say, go get a coffee. Wash your dog. Bicker with your spouse. The stoplights still work and you can still buy avocados at the supermarket and life is still as mundane and tedious as it’s always been. Boredom is somehow even more reassuring than happiness.

  But we’re well past the window of procrastination. This is the time.

  Seattle in the smoke looks like one of those old photos of the United States’ smog-socked skylines from before the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, an echo as oddly hopeful as it is horrifying. The thing about human-made climate change is that it’s human made, which means that humans, to some degree, can unmake it. But it will take more than banning plastic bags and obsessing about straws and good liberals composting their pizza boxes.

  We need to remember what a society is for.

  Bad actors who profit from our despair, complacency, and delusions of rugged individualism have managed to convince us that we have no collective duty to prevent human beings from dying on the street today or in a generation or two due to not being able to breathe or find clean water. We must push ourselves beyond this cognitive divide, where some people see impending doom and shrug and others have the luxury to pretend they don’t see it at all (come on, on some level, you have to see it); where everyone’s house is a nation-state and life is a Hunger Game.

  On tour for my 2016 book, Shrill, I was taking an Uber (I know, I’m sorry, it was a necessity1) across an unfamiliar town when the driver, whom I’ll call Randy, started telling me about this cool dude named Jesus. Randy’s big opener, earlier in the ride, had been to gesture at a homeless man panhandling by the side of the road and say, “Isn’t it terrible?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, though I was unsure whether he was referring to homelessness as a blight or as a form of state violence. “I can’t believe my tax money pays for the president’s golf vacations while people are freezing to death on the street. It’s robbery.”

  “True that,” he said, to my relief. “I hope this crazy country gets itself figured out before things get worse.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “I would really like to keep living.”

  “Yeah?” Randy pounced. “How would you like to live … forever?”

  Unfortunately, his offer had the opposite of its intended effect, as I immediately and permanently died. The undeterred Randy proceeded to explain to my corpse that Christmas isn’t real and the Bible predicted that the earth was round, which was proof that the Bible was scientific fact. This went on for the next twenty minutes, during which Randy got lost twice as he was apparently proselytizing too hard to look at the GPS. It was less a ride share and more a low-grade kidnapping for which I was being charged. To his credit, though, it did feel like eternity.

  But if there’s anything twenty-first-century American life has prepared me for, it’s an old man taking possession of my body and incompetently steering it in directions I don’t want to go, while ignoring my boundaries and lecturing me on the one right way to live. At least Randy cared about that homeless guy, though. And that is more than I can say for leadership in America.

  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the notion of “care.” Care can be florid and romantic or bureaucratic and dry; it is maintenance and stewardship and only sometimes love. You can take care of something without personally caring about it, which is precisely what our elected officials are supposed to do: take care of our communities and our planet, whether or not they personally share our priorities and fears and weaknesses and religions and sexual orientations and gender identities and skin colors.

  But in this moment, at precisely the moment when it is already too late for our planet in many ways but in which we could still do something, if anyone cared, the United States is being run by a political party that is thoroughly divested of care. Since Trump took office, Republicans have proposed legislation to destroy unions, the health care system, the education system, and the Environmental Protection Agency; to defund Planned Parenthood and obliterate abortion access; to stifle public protest and decimate arts funding; to increase the risk of violence against trans people and roll back antidiscrimination laws; and to funnel more and more wealth from the poorest to the richest.

  In the wake of the Republican Party�
�s luscious, succulent failure to obliterate the Affordable Care Act in 2017 and replace it with catastrophic nationwide poverty and death, an old video of a Paul Ryan gaffe went viral. “We’re not going to give up,” Ryan assured his audience, “on destroying the health care system for the American people.”

  The clip is from 2013, not 2017, and obviously Ryan did not mean to say into a microphone that he wanted to destroy the health care system. He also, presumably, did not mean to let Donald Trump spell the end of his political career so he could retire to spend more time with his teenage children—just around the time all kids are known to want their dads to spend less time taking health care from poor people and more time just hanging out.

  But here’s the thing: I talk into a microphone in front of people all the time, and not once have I ever accidentally said, “Hitler was pretty cool” when what I meant to say was “Throw all Nazis off a bridge.” Even if we acknowledge that such a slip of the tongue is technically possible (if not likely), we don’t need to wonder about what Ryan secretly believes. Gaffe or no, we already know he wants to destroy the health care system for the American people, because he tried to pass legislation that would destroy the health care system for the American people. Stop doubting what you see right in front of your face. Climate change is real. Criminalizing homelessness does not stop homelessness. Universal health care is an objective public good. Corporations are stealing your money and your future.

  Political parties do tell you what they are and what they think a society is for, maybe not in their words but always, always, always in their actions. But politicians don’t actually get to decide what their duties and responsibilities are and what view of the world they’re tasked to uphold—we do. And I don’t think it’s a particularly wild swing for me to say that the purpose of a society is not to generate the maximum amount of megabucks for oil and gas executives and pharmaceutical executives and auto executives and defense contractors and corrupt old men moldering in the halls of Congress. The purpose of a society is to take care of people. FIRE. EVERY. DIRTY. MOTHERFUCKER. WHO DOESN’T CARE IF YOUR GRANDBABY DIES IN A FLASH FLOOD IN DOWNTOWN TUCSON. MY GOD.

  The other day I accidentally read a Facebook post about climate change during Aham’s and my sacred morning time—a post that said, basically, “It’s over.” We missed the window. Climate collapse is imminent and inevitable, and our brains cannot truly comprehend what “exponential” looks like, because right now everything looks relatively normal in the privileged parts of the world—the other day I saw orca whales, through binoculars, from inside my mother’s living room—but it also looks like death. Soon. Everything will change drastically and abruptly, we will burn and the sea will swallow us, even the rich, and my generation is not going to die before it gets here. Fuck dreams. Fuck sending your kids to college. Fuck fun. Fuck art. Fuck fish. It isn’t the next generation’s job to fix climate change; that was our job, and we didn’t even try. All our kids can do is learn to farm and hope they survive mass extinction.

  I rolled over and clutched Aham as tight as I could and sobbed into his back in absolute true fucking grieving terror. (I ruined the morning.) We were a few days into Donald Trump’s fake national emergency to build his racist propaganda wall; meanwhile, a real emergency, the most catastrophic global emergency in the history of the human race, was entering its last days and the most powerful man on Earth was insisting that the gravest threat to American safety is refugee children. And for what? For fucking what? I don’t get to die of old age holding hands with my husband so that a couple of billionaires can accumulate $111 billion instead of $109 billion to pass on to their probably dead children in an apocalyptic wasteland where twenty-first-century currency is worthless anyway because it’s really more of a scrap-metal-and-goat-lard-based economy? No wonder there’s an opioid epidemic.

  During the 2019 State of the Union address, Trump bragged, “We have unleashed a revolution in American energy—the United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.”

  A week or so later, on Twitter, Trump mocked Amy Klobuchar for “talking proudly of fighting global warming while standing in a virtual blizzard of snow, ice and freezing temperatures. Bad timing. By the end of her speech she looked like a Snowman(woman)!”

  He’s laughing at you. He’s laughing at your land drying up and your children starving to death. But just as we have begun to tell men like this that they do not own and control our bodies, we do not have to let them own and control our future on this planet.

  My fellow human beings. Wherever you live. Whomever you voted for. You know those things that mean everything to you—your exquisite loves—whatever your version is, your evergreen trees, your mornings, your cold waters, your Dad-haunted hills, your Ahamefule? Human-made climate change is going to take those things from you and kill them. We will not get to die in the normal ways, quietly, comfortably, together, at home, old. We will die in pain and panic. Or your grandchildren will. They will be panicked and in pain and will never have seen snow on the mountains in the summertime, as you and I got to.

  Do you understand? Even if the notion of this happening in your lifetime or the lifetime of people you love is only a possibility, a prognostication, don’t you want to fight it with every atom in your body? Build it into your day. Every day you call. Every day you write a letter. Every march you march. Tax yourself. Protect your community. If you’re waiting for a grown-up to come fix it, stop. Be your own grown-up. Be your own president.

  I know that people you trust told you that climate disaster isn’t real, but they were lying, because they know that’s what you want to hear, because they are corrupt and they want power and money. That’s it. Luckily, we are their boss. They are hired to take care of us, and if they are lighting the candles and setting the table for fire and death, we have to get rid of them and give the power to someone who will fight for this world, because—and I think this goes cruelly underacknowledged in the surreal, nihilistic upside down of Trump’s America—this world is beautiful and good and worth saving. Do not despair. Despair is the death of action. Go, act, fight.

  After my sobbing, I spent the rest of the day talking myself down. That post I read was just one man’s analysis of the data; other scientists have other takes; we do not actually know what will happen when, though I believe it is dire and soon. Regardless, we cannot go back in time; all we can do is start right now. We do not actually have to convince and mobilize seven billion people; we just have to convince and mobilize our governments. Donald Trump is the president of only one country; there are 195 countries on Earth. Regulation works; people, for the most part, will live within the parameters presented to them. We don’t know what we don’t know; we don’t know what technologies the will to live might wring out of the best of us.

  I love this world, and I aim to keep it.

  _____________________

  1 PSA: Ride share apps are so cheap because drivers are being exploited. If you have to use one, tip 30 percent minimum and in the meantime fight like hell for unionization and workers’ rights. Bye!

  Long Live the Port Chester Whooping Cranes

  I was parallel parking between two Priuses when my stepdaughter, who is fifteen, asked, “Lindy, why do people hate Priuses so much?”

  “Do they?” I didn’t know that. I thought Priuses were cool. Tom Hanks drives one. I mean, I hate Priuses because their rear seat belts aren’t long enough for fat people, so I have to risk my life in one bonus way every time I get into a Lyft (you too, Tesla, but thank God you reinvented the door handle—it’s about time!), which seems to me like a passive-aggressive side effect of wellness culture: energy-efficient cars are for smart, conscientious, energy-efficient people. If fat people don’t want their brains pulverized on the hot gravel shoulder of I-5, they should eat less and exercise more!

  But the general public hates Priuses? Really? Do they hate noted Prius owner Cameron Diaz, too??

  “Yeah, the kids at my school
make fun of Priuses all the time.”

  Oh, right, I remembered, a whiff of familiarity drifting up from my youth. Because caring about the environment is—as they said in the nineties—gay.

  My younger stepdaughter goes to an exurban high school about an hour outside of Seattle, near her mom’s house. It’s a mostly white school (over 75 percent) and significantly more conservative than any community within the city limits. The county went for Hillary but had almost twice as many votes for Trump as King County, where I live. More than a few kids wear MAGA hats to school, partially because they, like their parents, sincerely think that Trump is good and his ideas are good and his policies rule and immigrants are bad and liberals are snowflakes. But there’s a subtler, more ironic cast to it, too: wearing a MAGA hat is a form of trolling, to “trigger” the libs and the feminists, because if there’s one legacy Trump is leaving to children (besides an irreparably ravaged ecosystem, a nation stripped of civil rights protections, and maybe another war), it’s the gamification of harm.

  My older stepdaughter, who’s seventeen, went to that school for her freshman year before transferring to an inner-city school near our house. “My science teacher there told us that he doesn’t believe in the Big Bang,” she said when I asked about the science curriculum at her old school, her sister’s school. In her art class, a kid drew a fetus’s hand reaching for a woman’s hand, with a pair of scissors labeled “ABORTION” slicing between them. Her city school doesn’t always have potable water. Her exurb school had a laptop for every student. She doesn’t miss it.

  Of course the kids of Trump supporters think that Priuses—which, by the way, are still mass transit–killing, fossil fuel–burning luxury items manufactured by the automotive industry, so, yes, extremely granola—are effeminate and embarrassing, virtue signaling for cucks, because waste is manly and destruction is manly and real manly men drive trucks guns bang bang toot toot truck deer beer mud truck vroom black smoke logging antlers tits fire and blood.