Author: dbachman

I wake up every day, check Twitter, and panic. This is my morning routine, and has been for the last few months: waking up, forgetting about what’s been going on, and getting a rude awakening from my own personal black mirror. From a self-care standpoint, this is a terrible routine, but in a sick, twisted way, I feel it’s my responsibility to be attuned to daily horrors, the newest short-sighted, terrifying tirade by our president, the newest executive order, the latest unqualified person to become the most powerful in their governmental field, the newest act of violence, or silencing. To stay informed is to stay nauseous.

But, on another level, I feel entitled when I do this. After all, these horrors aren’t directly affecting me, as a body of privilege. Does my panic and fear drown out those who are far more at risk of being affected? I’ve been doing a lot of searching and, honestly, yes. It does. I am of the belief that resistance is necessary, but I cannot be the face or the body of the resistance, to fight quietly and in support. It’s a difficult line to toe, but, with my privilege and entitlement, I personally need to figure it out. Maybe it’s obnoxious to share this, it’s a struggle far less significant than so many others during this time, but if I turn it outwards, maybe other potential allies (and allyship is a process, never quite earned, and so easy to perform the gesture of it without putting in the significant work) will ask themselves these kinds of questions.

On November 9, 2016, I was thinking about the phrase “do the work,” and how I exactly could do the work, with these necessary restrictions. I wanted to help those around me, and to try and do so with the least amount of arrogance and self-aggrandizement. There isn’t an easy answer, but what I’ve found is relatively simple, though not as simple as raising ones voice for what one thinks is right.

One must listen more than they speak.

We, the privileged, have and continue to be the dominating voice in most forms of discourse. The loudest, the most frequently articulated. Look at any comment section anywhere, and you can find long passages of people with privilege explaining, and rationalizing, in terms that are, at least superficially, logically sound, for the priority of some voices above others, of some bodies freedom above other peoples, chocking that up to “differing opinions.” In fact, that term, “differing opinions,” has been the blanket that has obscured systemic and white supremacist forces for the entirety of its existence. When things are as simple as a manner of perspective, irrational things can be put into rational terms. This is the prime weapon of the forces of marginalization, of white supremacy, of keeping systems of privilege in place. In taking something irrational, and put it into rational terms, these irrational rationalizers have become a ubiquitous presence.

Seeing evil put in rational terms, well-meaning allies combat that rationalization in kind, with their, our, own rational terms, statistics, precedent, and evidence. While this is well-meaning, it is doomed to fail on impact, because everything rationalized can be proven, and disproven, and proven again; and when something obvious is disputed and supported within infinite echoes, it is the voice of dispute, the irrational-rational, that will win. Because we are privileged, and we have learned that our voices are valuable, we are inclined to speak far more than we are to listen, and it is second nature to raise our voices, to scour the internet, to find “facts,” to meet people on their terms. When you combat, say, someone’s claim that Islam is a violent religion with statistics that say otherwise, you are opening that argument, a silly, scary, irrational argument, to rational debate, giving equal weight to a side that is patently wrong. This is the sinkhole allyship often finds itself falling down.

But how do we combat this tendency? It’s in the systems that we live in, ingrained in our voices, in our lives. These tendencies to drown out the marginalized, even when attempting to do good for the world, is a tough one to shake off. But it is something that must be shaken off. So we must listen. Listen to the people around you. Listen to those who do not share our privilege, the priority of our voices, are bodies, our movement. Internalize the words, the language that will have a positive impact, uncover what we may be doing that is misguided, and actively fight against that urge. Speak up only with the consent of those who we have drowned out. Never stop fighting. Never stop doing the work. But listen.

I may not stop myself from my morning routine, waking up, looking at my phone, and discovering all the hells that await, but every morning, I try and remember what allyship takes, how easily it goes astray. Rather than shouting, I try to look for the voices being the most drowned out. Then I try and listen.

In psychiatry there’s a little something known as “the Goldwater Rule.” The Goldwater Rule is an informal title for the section of the American Psychiatric Association’s Code of Ethics that states it is unethical for a psychologist or psychiatrist to provide a diagnostic assessment of a public figure with whom that have not personally spoken, or to release such a diagnosis or assessment as a public statement. The nomenclature comes from a 1964 piece in Fact Magazine that polled a number of prominent mental health professionals as to whether they believed that conservative Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was fit for Executive Office. Goldwater sued for libel and won $75,000 in damages.

Other than the chance that an elected official might sue you and win big, there are other reasons not to associate the erratic behavior of a public figure with a mental illness that you are in no position to diagnose. A big one is throwing around terms like narcissistic personality disorder because you read the Wikipedia page and maybe breezed through a PDF of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), but it makes you sound like an asshole, whether or not you know it. Another big one is that, since the public figures we most often try to apply our amateur profiling too are rarely savory people, your informal diagnosis will most often prove to be deeply ableist and shaming. Which I guess will also make you sound like an asshole.

Why bring this up? Well, it seems that ever since he first announced his candidacy, Donald Trump has been the favorite subject of ten thousand armchair psychologists, fighting on social media about which personality disorder he most likely has, what sort of derangement is driving his policies. Of course, given the qualifications of these analysts, their hot takes carry about as much weight as if I were to claim that Donald Trump was, in fact, piloted by that tiny little alien from the first “Men in Black” movie. Unfortunately, whereas people would pretty quickly dismiss my little conspiracy theory as bullshit, the idea of a mentally ill Donald Trump sworn into the highest office in the land seems to persist against all odds.

I don’t know if Donald Trump is mentally ill, and I’m an English major, so I’m not in a position to say. But whether Donald Trump is mentally ill is not the point. This fascination with applying mental illness as a catch-all for the people whose behavior most upsets or baffles us is problematic, but it has nothing to do with what the ultimate answer to this very irrelevant question is. 

Donald Trump is racist. Donald Trump is misogynistic. Donald Trump is an Ark-of-the-Covenant-like vessel for toxic masculinity (fingers crossed all these Nazis decide to take a peek inside). Donald Trump is a xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic sexual predator who has spent a lifetime serving an ego that has been hardened and emboldened by the forces of white supremacy. He’s a potential autocrat-wannabe. He has terrible taste in ties.

None of these qualities have anything to do with mental illness. If you think you might be unclear on that, please read that sentence again.

That we cannot look at Donald Trump’s admittedly erratic and undeniably disgusting behavior without immediately thinking the man is probably crazy, says (at least) two things about us. Firstly, we are failing to come to terms with the fact that many of the evils Trump represents, many of the bigotries he embodies, are not at all unique. They are embedded in our social and cultural fabric, and, while Donald Trump may embody them more flamboyantly than we are used to, they are boils that have long festered on the American flesh. They are an American normal. Secondly, we are all too comfortable using the mentally ill as a sort of bulletin board for all the qualities we don’t know how to make sense of, or how to sort. Rather than look at evil in the face and acknowledge that there are ugly forces in this world that are perfectly confident in their ugliness, bred out of perfectly (terrifyingly) normal circumstances, we put them under the umbrella of mental illness. Which, in a way, spares us. Because, we’re sane, right? We know we’re sane. And if racism is insanity than the sane among us cannot possibly be racist, or at least not in the way Donald Trump, or Steve Bannon, or Dylann Roof is.

Complicating this further is the fact that the mental illnesses most often slapped on as explanations for a bad man being a bad man are personality disorders, which have long been stigmatized in popular culture. Ever heard of borderline personality disorder? Don’t worry, it’s just the mental illness that “crazy” women fucking Michael Douglas in 80s movies have. Narcissistic personality disorder? If you have that you’re either Donald Trump or Patrick Bateman. Antisocial personality disorder? Well, you just might be a grimy serial killer who stores dead boys in his crawl space. Unless you need me to continue, the underlying point is that painting personality disorders as shorthand for morally reprehensible behavior is dangerous and destructive to the lives of the people who suffer from them. It makes care more difficult because it inundates potential healthcare professionals with vile and anti-factual preconceptions, and it inundates sufferers with the message that they’re monsters poised to wake up one morning in a twenty-seven foot tie with a hankering for some white nationalism. It tells those who suffer from these illnesses that their destiny is to be a plague, worse than a burden. It tells them their mental illness is also a social illness and a social scourge.

Our impulse to label Donald Trump as mentally ill is no different or more benign than the impulse many have to blame mass shootings on the perceived mental illness of the shooter. Both come from the desire to separate ourselves from what we see as so outrageously hideous we cannot bear to conceive of it taking hold in us. Both come from the casual media-driven association of mental illness and violence, mental illness and instability. Deep down, these attempts to map the unthinkable in the laziest way possible are means of absolving those who set out to do the mapping. Ultimately, they end up absolving the unthinkable as well. Robbing hatred of intentionality and sanity does nothing to diminish its potency. It just strips the person making conscious hateful choices of agency, and gives them a way out of accountability.

If there’s anything “insane” about President Donald Trump, it’s that we, as a collective, have been so willing—over years, if not decades, if not centuries—to let his various perversities bloom in our society, often in the open. The only insanity in Donald Trump is that after excusing him into power, so many of us still want to act as if we have no hand in the systems he feeds on, the systems that built him up. The only insanity about Donald Trump and the malice he espouses is that we can look at history—at ours and our fellows—and continue to find excuses to say that this isn’t normal in America. It is a deep and poisonous moral and political failure to confuse the superlative with the wholly alien. It’s a failure still deeper and more poisonous to act as though this derangement we’re now so determined to performatively recoil from is somehow quarantined in the West Wing.

I don’t know if Donald Trump is mentally ill, and I don’t really care. But I am terrified of the fact that the United States of America is fucking crazy.

Of all the big-budget superhero franchises carving their names into film and TV, it makes sense that the X-Men franchise is the one with an identity crisis. That an X-Men story should always be focused on a gang of misfits with mutant superpowers seems to be the only thing that all the comic book writers, artists, directors, and screenwriters over the years can agree on. And even then, that’s debatable (see anything Wolverine-related). The film series has had its hits (“Days of Future Past,” “Deadpool”) and its very rough misses (“Wolverine,” “Apocalypse”), and every addition has fused its superhero genre with everything from fun action-comedy to sci-fi to 1960s-era thriller.

It’s unclear what exactly FX was expecting when they hired Noah Hawley, the showrunner of “Fargo,” to create a new X-Men television series following David Haller, a young man institutionalized with paranoid schizophrenia who discovers that he possesses telekinesis. In the first few minutes of the pilot, “Legion” stands out as unlike any X-Men work before it, and certainly unlike any other superhero TV show on air or online.

Set to The Who song “Happy Jack,” the opening credits of the show consist of a series of dissolving shots as an infant David grows up to be a troubled youth, and eventually an unstable adult, all while his environs slowly grow more chaotic in a reflection of his mental state. And from there, it only gets much, much weirder. Cerebral and trippy, fractured and mysterious, “Legion” makes no promises as to what parts of its story are actually happening and what’s in David’s head.

Right away, there’s fear that a show like this could quickly turn exploitative. The entire premise of “Legion” revolves around the connection between David’s serious mental illness–one that is already heavily stigmatized in fiction and in real life–and his highly destructive mutant powers. But Hawley, his team of writers, and the actor who portrays David, Dan Stevens (“Downtown Abbey”), are careful not to simply display the character as an unhinged maniac. Stevens plays the role a bit like Mark Ruffalo plays the Incredible Hulk: David has lived with schizophrenia for long enough that he has some understanding of his limits and triggers, and he finds ways to cope with them even when he can’t always control himself. Consequently, David is a very human character, portraying both a curiosity about the world and a fair bit of skepticism, mixed with snark, towards the higher-ups who run the institution he’s trapped in. Even at his breaking points, Stevens plays the character with such determination to stay grounded that he’s easy to empathize with.

Much of the pilot takes place inside the eerily sanitized, government-owned mental hospital where David has lived for the past six years. Pretty soon, it becomes apparent that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. This isn’t just a medical facility we’re looking at; it’s something of a mutant holding cell. There are enough wide-angle shots, weird decorative foliage, mosaic-tiled pools, and long hallways lit with neon to make Stanley Kubrick blush, especially given that this particular breed of sci-fi creepiness harkens back to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and other 1960s entries of the genre.

But though the show takes place in this era (or at least appears to), none of the characters follow through with the decade’s usual tropes. A friend of David’s, another in-patient played by Aubrey Plaza, transcends any sort of ‘60s archetype with her wise-cracking humor. And David’s female counterpart and love interest, a new patient named Sydney Barrett (named after the mentally ill former frontman of Pink Floyd), has more awareness of her situation than meets the eye, as well as a more contemporary style of speech. At one point, in a group therapy session, she responds to the psychotherapist’s request for her to speak with a “nah, I’m good,” which would be off-putting if the show didn’t already muddle the boundaries of space, time, and reality.

Like other FX series, “Legion” benefits from a substantial budget and artistic freedom for its showrunner. I say “benefit” because, while the show’s more art house-y qualities and cinematic techniques don’t always pay off, it’s a treat to get to see them used for what has become the most tired, overused plot in pop culture today: the superhero origin story. Unlike “Deadpool,” which stuck a little too closely to familiar beats to be considered a true satire of the origin tale, “Legion” (sometimes literally) turns the plot on its head. Disorienting intercuts between out-of-order scenes, abstract imagery that is never fully explained, and a flashback structure that only exists for half the pilot all contribute to its uniqueness. Throw it all together at a whiplash-paced 90 minutes, and you’ve got a show that is inevitably difficult to follow at some points, in stark contrast to the very overt storytelling technique of the Marvel films. But this is hardly a problem, because the peculiar style of “Legion” is what makes it so engaging.

Even when it all gets to be too much, elements like David and Syd’s relationship keep the show emotionally grounded. Syd, we learn, is afraid of all physical touch; it’s never entirely clear if this is due to past trauma, or a mutant power, or even because she might be a figment of David’s imagination. Whatever the case, that complication prevents Syd from becoming a stale romantic lead, and her relationship with David embodies the best qualities of any X-Men story: marginalized people commiserating, rising up in the face of injustice, and bringing out the humanity in each other.

Like its characters fully grasping the potential of their abilities, “Legion” pushes the envelope in what we’ve come to expect from superhero television. While recent series like “Jessica Jones” may have broadened their thematic scope, “Legion”’s exhilarating narrative and visuals make it a must-see, raising the bar for more Marvel series to come.

I first saw Joshua Tillman in 2011, when he was a member of Fleet Foxes. His shoulder-length hair and impressive stature made him easily noticeable, even amongst the merry band of late twenty-something bearded folkies. Hearing him play and harmonize with presence and skill, I was struck. This was a standout performer, a guy you wanted to root for, to see more of.

In the coming years, I did. The next year, he released Fear Fun, his first album as the eccentric, frustrating, pretentious, and endearing character Father John Misty. It’s an album full of great song craft, from the pulsing folk anthem of “Only Son of the Ladiesman” to the sad and hilarious “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” (recently treated to a confounding cover on “The Voice”).

Then he got married and, fueled by the new relationship, he released I Love You, Honeybear, an album I’ve revisited time and time again. I’ve been spellbound by the way that Tillman casts himself in these songs. He is the protagonist in the title track, the villain in “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment,” a maudlin clown in “Bored in the USA,” and a jealous secondary pair of eyes in “Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow.” In as many ways as possible, Honeybear asks: what happens when an unconscionable, arrogant jerk is overwhelmed by the kind of love that makes him want to be better? I wrote a review a little more than two years ago and have been thinking about it ever since.

My love for Father John Misty had me excited for just about anything that he could put out. I loved that voice, that natural and frustrating wit, that gorgeous folk sensibility. But last month, he released the first single from his new album, both of which share a name: “Pure Comedy.” I excitedly readied myself to listen to it, and it…is not great. In fact, it is very bad, indeed.

“Pure Comedy” presents itself, like many songs recently released, as a protest song against the Trump presidency. He’s tackled “message” songs before, and potently; “Bored in the USA” and “Holy Shit!!” are immensely powerful. But those songs are cleverly draped in irony, self-awareness, and self-deprecation. This tone is absent from “Pure Comedy,” a song that feels unyieldingly smug. While the notion that the current political climate will create “better art” is exceedingly problematic (it is extremely privileged to see the chaos, anger, and lives lost in the last few months and think, “this would make a great song”), good art is crucial in any form of resistance.

And this, Misty’s attempt to make good, resistant art, is not only driven by the notion that Trump will cause the creation of “better art,” it actually doesn’t even qualify as “better.” It’s a six-minute act of arrogance, driven by a solipsistic and unimpressive video, bridging angry animated figures of humans with footage of Trump, religious figures, and destruction. It’s a simple argument—“this new world is scary”—and it’s told in shallow, pretentious imagery. It feels obscuring rather than insightful.

But the true frustration I have with the song is that it’s beautiful. Tillman’s gorgeous voice soars over a mix of heavy drums and beautifully rendered piano, in a slow-burning, folky unraveling. If I didn’t understand a word he was saying, this would be my favorite song of the year, but, alas, the lyrics, often the strongest part of a Father John Misty song, are where this song stumbles and falls.

It starts out just fine, with Tillman explaining the notion that “our brains are way too big for our mother’s hips,” and so “we emerge half-formed and hope that whoever greets us on the other end is kind enough to fill us in.” It’s a nicely articulated thought, and appears to begin an interesting exploration of human development. But as the song continues, these thoughts are traded in for a neutered, mean-spirited, and distant look at the current world climate.

There are many great songs criticizing or satirizing religion, but to do so effectively, the artist must apply a narrow lens. Tillman’s first target in this song is organized religion, and not only is it an awkward pivot from the song’s introduction, it’s also incredibly poorly articulated. He waxes on about “risen zombies, celestial virgins, magic tricks, these unbelievable outfits” and their “sacred texts written by woman-hating epileptics.”

There are criticisms to be found in Christianity, but this is not the way to do it. Everything said here has been said before and it’s been said without that removal, that “them,” which is what makes this criticism seem particularly spineless. There are works that I love that deal with the strangeness of organized religion, the hypocrisies and salvations, the empowerment and powerlessness it can bring, but those words aren’t found here. I don’t know why I find this so frustrating—perhaps it’s because Tillman, a white, heterosexual man, discusses something this shallowly, when it is, in my opinion, a mandate to understand more deeply what doesn’t directly affect you, but at any rate, it’s tough to find any real insight here.

Similarly neutered by distance and shallowness are Tillman’s takes on political hypocrisy. Take the line “they build fortunes poisoning their offspring, and hand out prizes when someone patents the cure.” Like the rest of the song, this line is a superficially damning, yet fundamentally meaningless, later echoed in notions like “their idea of being free is a prison of beliefs that they never ever have to leave.” Conceptually, Tillman is spouting out ideas that, further explored, might make compelling protest music, but he passes them by in a survey course of white knight activism, patting himself on the back for his understanding without demonstrating any expertise or providing insight into this understanding.

And where does this song end? With a complete cop out. After six minutes of preaching about “evil” religion, corporation, and politic, and parroting much better songs on those subjects, Tillman’s ultimate conclusion is this: “I hate to say it, but each other’s all we got.”

Really? That’s it? That’s all he can glean from the nebulous subject matter of his own song? It feels like a secondary conclusion, the prelude to something clever, ironic and insightful, but it seems that Tillman believed it was enough of those things to merit it being the final line. At least for me, it isn’t. It feels just as removed and low-stakes as the rest of this song, a perspective too above everything, too removed, too arrogant.

If I’m being too harsh to this song, it is because I’ve seen what Joshua Tillman, as Father John Misty, is capable of. He is an artist that, at the peak of his powers, can make me laugh, cry, think, and groan within a few syllables. But I am of the belief that, when an artist is this rare and remarkable, it is necessary to call them out when they fail. In a world where potent, specific, beautiful, and resistant art is becoming absolutely necessary, “Pure Comedy” just doesn’t cut it. It is too removed, too willing to point fingers without turning the lens on itself, too spiteful and self-important, and too much of a parroting of other work to be the affecting work Tillman is capable of. In his last few albums, Father John Misty has given us songs full of beauty, depth, and complexity. This is not one of those songs. Instead, “Pure Comedy” is a puddle that dreams itself an ocean.

I see through you, Betsy DeVos.

I see through your blatant awfulness and cluelessness. I see your inability to answer the simplest question about the department you have been nominated to head, and the millions and millions of young people that you will be responsible for. I see you spitting on public schools—something that 90% of students depend on. I see through your belief that it is not our mandate to teach those with disabilities, and how that belief ties into the casual eugenics of the man who nominated you. But above all else, I saw that glimmer in your eye during your hearings, the way it said, “None of this matters.” You’re wealthy, powerful, and you won’t be held accountable for anything, right?

Not right.

I see through you, Betsy DeVos.

I see through you because I am a public school student. I see through you because I am intellectually disabled, and if I didn’t have my education, I wouldn’t have anything.

I have shared this story with so many family members, friends, co-workers, and I will continue to repeat it. I used to understand words, letters, sentences, but I could not write. It took hours, days, years to get a single sentence out of me. I could not organize my thoughts. It was torture, painful and constant, and in the beginning, there were teachers that looked and sounded just like you; that glimmer that was in their eyes, the lack of accountability, that disappointment, that notion that somehow, I deserved it.

In middle school, I started getting help from the special education department. I met educators that worked closely with me, one on one, first helping me construct thoughts and sentences, then building on that, until I began to enjoy it. Love it, even. Over the course of four years in that program, everything changed. It has continued to change, too. I write articles for The Argus, I study creative writing, and I talk and think and write every day. I am acutely aware that this narrative would not exist without unbelievable privilege, and that my disability can still be a hindrance (particularly this year, as my medication stopped helping me and started hurting me), but I am proud, I am grateful, and I owe so much to public schools and special education. And you want to weaken this, to take it away from some?

I know the American education system fails as much as it succeeds. But it does succeed, and it can get better. And the solution to this is not turning away from public schools, from making it a choice, not a mandate for those with disabilities to get education. We are not lesser.

There is more than a good chance that you will become my Secretary of Education. During that time, I will be starting my job as a special education teacher. It will be the hardest thing I do, and if confirmed, I am all but certain you will make it harder. Part of me is doing it because of you and the ignorance you displayed, but I’m doing it because this matters. It matters to me, and it matters to those with disabilities like mine, or more severe, or even less. My story is not a universal one, but it is a mandate to educate disabled students, and it is also a mandate to try and get better at it.

People will read this and think that I am overreacting, or demonizing wealth, or prejudging someone’s skill at a job, and that is fine. But this is not about private schools versus public schools. It’s about the fact that education is not something to be trifled with. I see how you got here, Betsy DeVos, the money that you donated, and how that supersedes merit. The President trusts you with the future of America’s students. I do not. It will take a lot, after what I have seen of you, for me to have any trust. So I’m going to keep saying what I am saying. This is not a job you want or a job you are ready for. If you do what you say you will, you are going to have to deal with people like me. This will not end well for you. You think you can casually undermine us?

I see through you.

I was outside on a beautiful, sunny day in Louisiana when my neighbor told me one of the worst hurricanes in modern history was coming. Considering the beautiful weather outside, my eight-year-old brain knew he must have been wrong. But he was right. Hurricane Katrina came for us. Residents of New Orleans thought it was safe until three days before landfall when Katrina changed course and charged towards my family and my friends.

This Presidential election too changed course and gave the United States a president no one expected. Hurricane Trump has made landfall and threatens us all. American prosperity sits tenuously in the small hands of a man marked by impulsivity, vagueness, and demagogic tendencies. Who knows if President Trump means what he says? Who knows what Hurricane Trump will do?

A lot of people, including my family members, stayed home for Katrina; the South had lived through plenty of storms before. Louisiana had not anticipated Katrina would be especially different, and no one knew the levees would break. Days before the landfall, meteorologists thought Katrina would be horrific, but no one truthfully knew the scope of the terror until after it hit. My dad saw the rooms literally shake as the storm raged, and he heard the pine trees snap. We underestimated Katrina, and my family was lucky to evacuate after the eye of the hurricane passed right over our home.

Americans should not underestimate a Hurricane Trump. We must shutter the windows and be ready for the worst tempest the United States has ever witnessed. Through every dark period in history, America persevered, but that should placate no one. This logic normalizes Trump by treating him like any other storm, but he is a lot worse. There will not be wind and rain but instead a gale and a torrential downpour. Additionally, we must not expect to survive. Survival requires strenuous labor and persistent will. American people sustained themselves against oppression though struggle and protest. We have weathered storms before, but only because we have fought to make it so.

Thousands of miles away from home, my mom tried to tutor me, and my brother enrolled in a new high school in the middle of a semester. Deep Southerners did everything they could to keep life moving. Even after my family returned, we had no electricity and went to the bathroom in buckets like a lot of Louisiana. Others in New Orleans had to fight against everything to stay alive. Sand bags helped, but when the flood waters came in, they climbed to the attic. And if that failed, they axed through the roof and looked for helicopters for help. New Orleanians embody survival, and soon all Americans must do the same.

When my family finally came home, we got lucky. The fallen pine trees lay around my house and not on top of it, and flood waters never entered it. Eventually my community returned to normal and no one thought about Katrina anymore. New Orleans experienced a resurgence and rebuilt, but the continuing aftermath of the storm remains untold. Rich, white communities rebuilt quickly, but many poor and black communities never could. Twelve years later, homes remain marked with FEMA spray paint, indicating who died in each house during Katrina. People displaced from the city never returned.

When we fight through this presidential term, the aftermath will persist long after America wants to move on. Trump will impoverish, permanently displace, and even destroy communities. The damage always continues even after the hurricane dies. When Hurricane Trump passes, I will pick up a hammer and start fixing our communities, but no amount of glue can reconnect the families ripped apart. Never ignore the lingering pain this storm will inflict, and never let anyone forget this dreadful period.

After Hurricane Katrina, individuals drove boats through the flood waters saving trapped people. They were not FEMA employees, they were simply local people determined to do good. We need to help each other to collectively survive Trump. If we fight against this president, fight against normalization, and fight to survive, America will withstand this four-year-long tempest, however scarred in the aftermath it might be. In storms before, I have slept in my living room to avoid falling trees, I have watched flood waters rise several feet, and I have witnessed a massive oak tree narrowly miss the front of my house as it crashed to the earth. Louisiana lived through massive storms in the past, and with enough effort, America will survive this hurricane.

“Steven Universe,” Rebecca Sugar’s sci-fi musical comedy, very well may be the best show on television right now. I love it with every fiber of my being. I love the bright, clear, rounded animation style. I love how the worldbuilding is entirely filtered through the eyes of its titular protagonist. I love that the vast majority of named and primary characters are women of color. I love its narrative deftness. I love the music, both the video game-inspired score, and the cute, complex original music (check out the recent and remarkable “Here Comes a Thought” from the episode “Mindful Education”). I love that Estelle is a part of something that, somehow, is of comparable quality to the undeniable “American Boy.” But most of all, above all else, I love Pearl.

Let’s back up a bit. “Steven Universe” is a difficult show to summarize, but I will try, though there might be spoilers ahead. After a massive government of sentient gems attempts to conquer and colonize Earth, a process that includes destroying all organic life on the planet, is successfully fought against by a rebellion. The leader of that rebellion, Rose Quartz, falls in love with a goofy, portly musician named Greg Universe. They have a baby, and in the process of making that baby, the alien leader gives up her life to become a part of the new life, leaving Greg, the baby, and the three remaining soldiers in her rebellion to care for the child. Steven grows up as an incredibly positive, gleeful figure in a house with these three gems, learning about the powers he possesses.

Steven is a great character, a wonderful audience surrogate, and his voice actor, Zach Callison, gets better with every episode, but the star of the show for me always will be the gems, three wildly different beings, Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl, who are trying to live in a world without the guiding force of Rose Quartz. The three are all remarkable characters. Garnet’s very existence is in defiance to the culture that she comes from, and her stoicism does nothing to mask the character’s capability for great humor and great pathos. Amethyst is young, insecure, unstable, resentful, and yet often a source of indescribable joy and glee for other characters and for the audience. But, for me, it’s Pearl that I keep coming back to.

When we first meet Pearl, she is high-strung, sensitive, standoffish. She gleefully recites the lore of her alien race and detests disorganization and disorder (two things that often have her at odds with Amethyst). At the beginning, she seems like a relatively conventional trope, particularly within the world of sitcoms and animation. The “Steven Universe” fanbase’s affectionate nickname for her is “bird mom.” She is a motherly figure, affectionate but intense, orderly and highly socially awkward. It’s a treat to watch, but it’s only the surface.

“Steven Universe” is a “kid’s show.” Its characters are colorfully and simply cartooned, and there are episodes where our heroes fight a giant stack of pancakes, or hang out at an arcade, or resolve conflicts between two warring restaurants, but it’s also always been more than that. On the flip side of those episodes, there are some incredibly well crafted sci-fi dystopias, a fan-favorite non-binary character, and nuanced commentary on consent, mental health, and even relationship abuse. But just as remarkable is the triumph and tragedy of Pearl’s arc.

As it is revealed, Pearl, more than any of the other gems introduced, is designed to be, effectively, an aesthetically pleasing, functionally useless maid. She meets Rose Quartz, the renegade, rebel gem, and somehow defies her programming, becoming a part of the rebellion. Once again, all very typical, not outside of dystopian fiction.

But then she falls absolutely, head-over-heels in love with Rose.

Everything Pearl does in “Steven Universe” is for Rose; her face lights up whenever they see a relic of Rose’s memory in the world. Whenever she talks about her, Pearl’s eyes are literally full of stars. But Rose is gone. She’s dead, and she died because she fell in love with someone else and gave up her consciousness and physical form to create a new life, Steven. And for this to happen, Rose had to not love her back, or, at least, to love Steven’s father more than Pearl. So Pearl is now one of three guardians of a walking, talking reminder that her great love didn’t love her back.

Pearl’s arc, then, is trying to figure out who she is. She was told who she was for her entire life: a maid, a servant, a non-thinking entity, and even though Rose freed her a bit, she was still, out of love, a servant. In her own words, she was “devoted to a person and a cause.” The Pearl we meet doesn’t really have a person to be subservient to anymore, and so her neuroses and anxiety stem from a very real arc of soul-searching, one brilliantly told in pieces and fragments.

The layers and complexities of these fragments are too much to cover in one piece, so I want to look at one of my favorite Pearl-centric episodes, “Sworn to the Sword.” Within the 11 minutes of this episode, Pearl teaches Stephen’s best friend, Connie, how to sword-fight, and in the process begins to spread her unhealthy devotion to and obsession with his mother into a new generation. Making Connie repeat phrases like “I’m nothing” and “I don’t matter,” Pearl is in the beginnings of instilling the kind of subservience that she herself used to feel comfortable in. When Steven, who is observing this, becomes uncomfortable with the kind of devotion she’s inspiring, he breaks up the training. In a heated argument with Stephen, Pearl loses it and shouts “WHY WON’T YOU LET ME DO THIS FOR YOU, ROSE!” It’s a devastating moment of heightened emotion with a single sentence communicating so much loss, so much resentment and tragedy in 10 simple words. But what is more devastating is what comes after in a quiet, contemplative conversation. Connie asks Pearl, “Did Rose make you feel like you were nothing?” Pearl responds, through tears, “Rose made me feel like I was everything.” What she doesn’t realize, and maybe what we fail to recognize as well, is that these two feelings aren’t as far away from each other as they seem to be.

Pearl may be broken, but she’s wonderful. She’s a loving, positive figure, constantly trying to better herself, supporting the ones she loves, growing, changing, and building giant, ballet-dancing robots, and most recently winning the affections of the first woman she’s paid attention to since Rose died (admittedly, the new woman resembles Rose quite a bit). She’s become a more stable and grounded figure in Steven’s life. But still, one can assume that every time she looks at the young man she swore to protect, she sees the great love of her life and deals with the complexities of doing that. And because of that I have to thank “Steven Universe” for giving us a character who has been scarred and hurt in understandable ways and refusing to sweep that hurt under the rug.

Last summer, I attended a touring production of the musical “If/Then” and vaguely recognized a name in the playbill. After a few hours, I recognized a voice, a woman with a small role in the production. I didn’t know why her voice affected me so, and then, in a later scene in the production, she said a word and everything clicked into place. It was Deedee Magno Hall, the voice of Pearl. The word was “Steven.” My tears were real.

In the four years before I became a student at Wesleyan University, I, like many others, was a student in high school. During those years, I did many things, but I mostly played the saxophone. By my senior year, I was a member of my high school’s Wind Ensemble, Jazz Band, Jazz Combo, a Saxophone Quartet, and an extracurricular honors concert band that met at the University of Hartford. Band was my home, the sax was my tool for communication and connection during the tumultuous high school years. But this is not about me. Well, it is, quite a bit, but it’s not just about me.

I write all of this because, as a senior, in some of those bands, I became acquainted with a talented freshman musician. He sat next to me, and we would often quietly joke and share parts. I would tell him the elements of music that I had discovered. By the end of the year, seeing his enthusiasm toward jazz improvisation, I spent a few sessions with him in the practice rooms, passing on what little information I knew about the forms and techniques of that storied presence. It was good. I didn’t know him all that well outside of our times playing music, but I enjoyed and appreciated his company, and had high hopes for what he would do musically when he left. Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t seen or thought about him in any form.

It’s abundantly clear from my other pieces for this section that I am confident and vocal in my convictions against President-elect Trump. He is a monstrous con man who cannot handle the job he procured for himself, one he achieved with the assistance of a dangerous cocktail of praying on fear, bullying, pathologically lying, and ultimately, legitimizing hate groups. My opposition to him and everything that he stands for is fairly extreme, and I’ve always thought it important to acknowledge that not only did millions of people vote him into office, but also that I know some of them. But that doesn’t change the fact that, when I next saw my old band mate, the shock I felt was total and complete.

In the days after the election, two Babson College students drove through Wellesley College in a pickup truck adorned with a Trump flag. During their time at Wellesley, they spit at and shouted obscenities at students of color, committing a textbook piece of harassment at Hillary Clinton’s alma mater. One of those two students was the same curious freshman who sat next to me in band.

People have written much about why people voted for Trump. But I will never, never, never comprehend this kind of harassment. Particularly when it comes so close to my home.

Of course, it hurts and shocks me that anyone I know was capable of the lack of empathy, surplus of anger, and privilege to ever think an action like this is acceptable in any form. To millions of marginalized people, America, which was already unsafe, has become far less so. That feeling of fear is real, and legitimate; there have been hundreds and hundreds of hate crimes since Trump’s election. Celebrating the victory of your candidate is acceptable, but using that celebration to actively hurt someone who is already hurt is harassment. That this came from someone raised in my state, in my town, in my band class, still has me reeling.

But I don’t want to spend the entirety of this piece condemning this person, nor do I want to tell the millions of marginalized people more hurt than I could ever be, to forgive him, as hurt as I am by this act. If I was going to do either of those things, I would mention him, or my high school, or the instrument he played, by name. This anger and shock and sadness exists in tandem with memories of teaching him what rhythm changes are, or saying hi to him every day, or standing with him in miserable solidarity during the brief periods of time that our ensemble became a marching band. These are good memories, and while they feel like they are from another life, they still exist. Memory is complex, and so are people, and in my horror, I often have to remind myself that small moments of good, and curiosity, and kindness, can exist in the same bodies that harass, and lack empathy.

In the weeks since this act happened, a lengthy apology has been written, and while I believe some parts of it, I genuinely don’t know what I will do or say if I see him again. I’d like to believe I’d say something like this: I hope you understand. I hope you understand that, regardless of your convictions, what you did was wrong and horrifying. I hope you understand why I hope you think about who you are and your role in this. I hope you understand and continue to try and better yourself. I hope you understand and you listen to the voices of the people you hurt, you really hear them, and you have enough remorse to stand in their shoes. I hope that this is the first step to you changing, to you understanding that there are consequences and harm brought on by your actions. I can’t make you listen to me, but I hope you understand.

Bachman is a member of the class of 2017.

Last Friday, there was a protest on the steps of Olin Library. During the protest, an American Flag was defaced. Since then, articles in The Argus and Wesleying have attempted to address the fact that the defacement happened concurrently with Veterans Day. This article is an attempt to address the flag defacing from a veteran perspective, though it does not reflect the opinions of all veterans, nor the views of Wesleyan Posse Veterans as a group.  This article is simply the opinion of two students, with complex and multifaceted identities, who also happen to be veterans.

To be clear, we do feel that the decision to deface the flag was disrespectful, though not for the reasons you might imagine. One reason we feel this way is because organizers made it a point to invite Posse Veterans to the protest. What follows is the text of that invitation:

“I would also like to invite you and other veterans who are angered and frustrated by Trump’s rhetoric to join us at our rally today at noon outside Usdan. Trump’s messages of hate and intolerance affect all marginalized communities, including veterans, and this rally will be a place to find love and support.”

The organizers’ language is questionable. Considering that some of the veterans on campus supported the protest, the flag defacement was a strange way to foster a feeling of “love and support” among us, especially on Veterans Day. Flag burning is a complicated act, and while it can make a powerful statement about feelings of oppression, it can also be interpreted as a form of visual violence.

Even though the flag was defaced, some veterans chose to stay and march with the protesters.  Some veterans even encouraged students to march to Main Street, despite concerns that doing so might not be appropriate. This encouragement was issued with the expectation that Wesleyan students would remain respectful of the many veterans who were downtown, observing the holiday with their families.  Unfortunately, we do not feel that students lived up to this expectation.

Flag defacement wasn’t the only element of the protest that was distressing in light of Veterans Day. One of the veterans who marched with the protest did so behind a student who, when asked by a bystander if the protesters supported veterans, responded with comments that characterized the military as an imperialist, racist, and colonial force. We believe that this is a necessary conversation to have; however, this response came in direct response to a question regarding veterans, not the military. We feel it is important to make a distinction between the two.

We would like to address the assumption that some of the students at Wesleyan seem to have regarding Veterans Day. The understanding that Veterans Day is a holiday that glorifies war and imperialism is false. Veterans Day is not intended as a celebration of the military-industrial complex. Before being renamed in 1954, Veterans Day was originally called Armistice Day. The date on which it is held, Nov. 11, coincides with Remembrance Day in Europe, which marks the end of military hostilities in World War I in 1918.  The day is intended to memorialize the devastation that war causes, and allow those participants who are traumatized by the horror of it to reflect quietly on the deeply complicated nature of military service, which often involves conflicting feelings of shame and pride. It was also intended as a time dedicated to honor the service of people whom, in many cases, had no say in providing that service—service that, for many, involved great loss of friends, of physical body, and of sanity.

In addition to having misperceptions about the connotations of Veterans Day, many Wesleyan students seem to have relatively polarizing assumptions about veterans themselves. If you are someone who harbors the belief that veterans can be characterized in any singular way, allow us, at this moment, to disavow you of this view. Veterans are an enormously diverse group of individuals, who represent a vastly divergent number of backgrounds and opinions. Our life experiences have all been different, and our belief systems cannot be reduced to a single perspective. This can only be understood if people make a genuine effort to engage us in conversation and get to know us as individuals. There are times, Friday’s protest being one of them, when it feels like this is not happening at the University. Please, do not reduce us to a “thank you for your service,” or a blanket statement about war criminals.

We would like to commend a number of things about last week’s protest. We found the speakers to be passionate and eloquent. The stories that students shared about their experiences with injustice were moving, and we think their resilience in the face of that injustice is inspiring.

The speakers made two points that we’d like to further: the first, that it is impossible for many of the students at Wesleyan to understand certain fears or certain types of pain; the second, that while experiencing deep pain and anger, it is upsetting to be told that you should not feel that way.

We would like to offer our own interpretation: in the same way that we will never understand what it is like to be undocumented immigrants or to be people of color, most Wesleyan students will never understand what it is like to watch a friend’s coffin—draped in an American flag— being loaded onto a plane. Neither will students understand what it is like to receive a phone call from half a world away, informing you that a loved one has just been blown up inside their Humvee. In the same way that many students need time to express their pain and anger regarding the election, veterans need time to express their complicated emotions about military service. To have Veterans Day dismissed by the leaders of the protest as “a whole ’nother thing” and then to be told not to be angry is unfair to us. We are people, and the pain and grief we experience are real. For many of us, Veterans Day is a time to process these feelings.

If the organizers of the protest had intended to respect any of this, the easiest thing to do would have been to get in touch with us and let us know beforehand that defacing the flag was part of the plan. What the organizers would have been surprised to find is that many of us, even some of the most conservative among us, wouldn’t have objected. One thing that almost all of the veterans here can agree on is that we are firm believers in free expression. However, if we had been given a heads up, many of us would probably have chosen not to attend the protest, not because we disagree with the cause, but because it’s hard to see a flag defaced on Veterans Day, a day where we ourselves are trying to process our relationship to that very object. More importantly, if veterans had known the flag was going to be defaced before hand, individuals who are struggling with service-related mental health issues could have made an informed choice about exposing themselves to something that could be traumatic.

While we believe that there should never be limits to free expression, there are certainly limits to good taste.

White is a member of the class of 2019, and Foley is a member of the class of 2018.