what's more american than all of this guilt?

patriotic malaise, the longest summer of our lives, complicity and yacht parties, and writing as meaningful resistance (or a lack thereof).

i took all the copies of the new yorker from a little free library in a neighborhood that isn’t mine and god made me pay for it. i went home to the worst streak of bad luck and i blame it on my greed. i knew it was wrong and i did it anyway. i left a book in the little free library next to my house to make up for my bad behavior but i’m not sure if god has recognized it yet. it was summer and like every summer before i was the very worst of myself (and it was the very best high i could imagine). 

i cried on a friday night because i was spending too much money. i smoked a joint until i hated the foul taste of earth on my tongue. my red line train moved two stops in an hour and i ubered home from a neighborhood that wasn’t mine and i melted the handle off my moka pot. i bought fabric softener instead of laundry detergent and washed my clothes clean with dish soap, and i broke the boycott to buy fabric softener from target and how am i supposed to live in a city without breaking a boycott? i was determined to be exactly like the spitting image of my mother and i refused to buy an air conditioning unit, so my gas oven warmed my house to unbearable temperatures on the hottest day of the year, a record-breaker, world-ender, “god we really need to do something about climate change” summer day. i am tired of the unbearable weight of existence and all of its bitter glory. 

i went to a lakehouse when i wanted to be at a protest - and i didn’t need to. we all want to be revolutionaries until there’s a better invite. we all think we’re going to save this world until we realize the terrible personal inconvenience that stepping outside of our bubbles really is. my friends and i are overeducated and can’t escape our god-given predisposition towards drinking while the world burns. america has a problem and so do i. we set off fireworks and lose at beer pong when this is the smallest thing we could really stand to lose, and there is nothing that i can write to make me less complicit. please let me know if my guilt can be cancelled out by another “personal is political” essay saying the same thing as last week’s “political is personal” tirade. 

i tell my boyfriend that we’re going to go to the bay area after this. and last week i told him we were going to leave the country, to move to a volcanic island green and lush, like the places i was raised and still long for. it’s not for a sense of righteousness - i know i gave that up long ago. i bought an american flag sweater on election day and haven’t worn it in public since. i know i’m not the one to lead anything because i was stupid enough to believe in something without distrust. i don’t feel very american until i’m on a country road in the appalachian foothills or telling the amtrak conductor my destination. i feel the adrenaline rush of a fiddle and the heavy ground beneath me - this must be what it feels like. it’s not a matter of loyalty but a matter of guilt keeping me here. not a matter of saviorism but a matter of nausea. not a matter of heroism but a game of cowardice. 

i’ve been writing the same novel for four years and have just thirty-two pages, single-spaced. shorter than my thesis and far more precious. maybe what’s keeping it brief is the preconception that it should matter - not as a meager piece of writing but as a manifesto. that it will save the world or save the country - why else should i write anything, if not for an armchair revolution? written and deleted, forgotten and abandoned, found again. a dedication and a love that i wish i could share for something else, too. everything i write is inescapably american, in the way that woody guthrie was american and in the way that heartbreak on the side of a desert road is american. 

i love my country and she breaks my heart. i don’t read the news as much as i should and i cry about it more than i’d like to. all of this guilt and none of us know what to do with it. i go to the hardware store down the block from my apartment to buy a box fan. did ace hardware donate to trump? i begin to google, then i let it go. the planet is melting and we’re past the point of performance. the fan costs more than it would at my neighborhood target, where they lock up the press-on nails and the laundry detergent, but i can’t bring myself to care. there’s a boycott going on, haven’t you heard? i can sleep dreamlessly tonight. 

if leftist movements could figure out how to translate guilt into real, momentous action, we would have had a revolution yesterday. instead we have substack thinkpieces from other girls like me who have so much guilt that they don’t know what to do with it. america is a genocidal imperialist project and never worth saving (and so are most of the places you’re trying to leave it for). if white women online could spend half the time thinking about how to get other white women to see the light as they do overcompensating for their sins, we would have had a revolution yesterday (or at least a few more in the streets). if i could choose something real over my petty inconvenience, maybe all this guilt would go away. 

my father almost took a job in new zealand, before i was born. i think about the girl i would’ve grown into - still complicit in a project of imperialism, still from a paradise by another name, still bitter and cold. and what would i be if i was not american? if i was born into a world without guilt? without complicity? or is guilt and the blistering awareness of complicity a side effect of overeducation, and would i feel it everywhere? i walk along the riverfront and ponder through the eternal question of the metropolis theory bro: am i too educated or am i too american? to what do i owe all of this inaction? i eat lunch on my campus and i consider that i have no one to blame but myself. 

i used to want so desperately to think like a god (or a man). i wanted to feel greed, relentless ambition, entitlement, power, and unimaginable possibility. i wanted to be guiltless and i wanted my hands clean, sanitized, free of grime and fear. i didn’t want to philosophize about it, or daydream about it. i wanted it to be tangible and material, trapped between my hands - so much possibility that i didn’t know what to do with it. i thought i would be unstoppable. all this education, all this righteousness, all this privilege, all this belief in something. this is what second-wave feminists dreamed of, after all. instead all i got was so much guilt that i didn’t know what to do with it. if i wasn’t so american, maybe i would be almost, just barely, free. 

in reality, i didn’t feel any of it, or i didn’t enjoy the practice of performing that i did. i felt all the things that i was supposed to feel as a twenty-year-old girl, then as a twenty-four-year old woman. i felt whimsy, dissonance, unbridled hope, then unbridled fear, love and hate, the urge to run away somewhere and never do much of anything, the ambition to be everything and the exhaustion to do absolutely nothing with it. this will be the longest summer of my life and i will feel all of it (the sunburn, the ruthless anger, the mosquito bites, the box fan tangling my hair, the sweat pooling under my knees, the prickle of unshaved legs, the city so loud on all sides of me, my body small and helpless and guiltless). 

guilt is the easy way out. it demands nothing of us but repentance. it is meant to be felt only on the hottest days of summer, but it has become a year-round practice and an everyday routine. why wouldn’t we choose what renders us blameless and actionless? why wouldn’t we choose the easy way out? numb yourself to everything, watch reality tv until your head aches, stay in the sun until you transform into a tomato girl, walk so far that the curved parts of your feet sting and blister, smoke until you can pinch yourself and feel nothing at all but the scratch in your throat. 

i took all the copies of the new yorker from a little free library in a neighborhood that isn’t mine and god made me pay for it. i blamed all my bad luck on it for the next seven days - a genesis routine, a kind punishment for a victimless sin. i wanted to save the world until i started scrolling. i wanted to leave the country until i believed in something. and then i wanted to stay to prove a point that no one really cared about.