Today's Thread

Claire Willett, via Twitter:

In sitting with my feelings about the Mueller report (or more accurately the Barr report) and vividly reliving my feelings on Election Day 2016, it makes me think that one facet of my own privilege I still need to work on is this abiding belief in the myth of Grown-Ups.

A grown-up is not an adult. Adults are real and it's just an age classification. A grown-up is the person who takes care of things and fixes things and protects you from the scary dangers of the world and is always wise and just and brave and right.

They only exist in the minds of kids, and then you get older and you're like "shit my babysitter was SEVENTEEN!!! My parents were in their TWENTIES!!! No one knew ANYTHING! They were ALL just making it up as they went along!!!" and the myth more or less gets replaced by reality.

The belief in Magical Grown-Ups is a side effect of privilege. It's feeling safer when there are cops nearby, or expecting doctors to fix everything. It's when a kid needs help and your first instinct is to call their parents. In any crisis, somewhere a Grow-Up is in charge.

It was my deep and abiding faith that Grown-Ups would save us that left me stunned speechless by the 2016 election, when many people - who had either shed that myth long before, or didn't grow up with it at all - were able to see the crash coming from miles and miles away.

The same part of my Primal Child Brain which secretly believed that somehow a doctor would magically fix my dying mother also, on some level, despite all evidence to the contrary, still believes that a Grown-Up is coming to save us from *gestures vaguely at everything*

Hillary Clinton is a grown-up and Robert Mueller is a grown-up and the Constitution was written by grown-ups and surely somewhere along the line, someone is going to come rescue us from the Titanic before it sinks. The painful reality, of course, is that I am 37. I AM A GROWN-UP

And I wonder if maybe that's one of the unspoken ties that bind those of us from privilege who keep getting taken by surprise when the system fails us - because we were raised to believe the systems all worked, since we were the people they were designed and created to work for.

It makes sense, on some level, when you're a kid. You get sick, and your mom and the doctor take care of you. But the danger in retaining it as an adult is that on some level it's really just buck-passing. "Someone else will take care of this - so I don't have to do it myself."

But there were no grown-ups to magically save us from Trump getting elected and there were no grown-ups to stop his policies from hurting people (no matter how some of his more seasoned advisors may flatter themselves) and there were no grown-ups to prevent Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

There are no grown-ups to stop Mitch McConnell from his rampant abuses of power and there are no grown-ups to make sure every criminal in this government goes to jail and there are no grown-ups locking down security to protect the NEXT election from Russia. There's only us.

The one place of leverage we have is the House of Representatives, and that's because of the hard work of millions of voters and dedicated public servants. We flipped the House because WE were the grown-ups. None of it was magic.

It's uncomfortable and embarrassing to confront your own naivete like this, but I think it's also really important. The one piece of the machinery that's even KIND OF working is the one we fixed ourselves, because we were the only ones who could. No magic. No loophole. Just us.

We may be feeling more than a little lost, but Willett said clearly what we need to remember - grownups wrote our constitution. They gave us a road map so we could lead ourselves outa this shit.

We have to stop being comfortable with Self-Infantalization, and start taking seriously our responsibility to be the grownup in the relationship we have to have with ourselves first.

No gods. No avenging angels. No Daddy State. Just each other. As adults.