REBECCA TRAISTER: Alright.
Number 1. Bridge collapses, crumbling infrastructure, the fact that the subways don't work.
Number 2. Mass shootings.
Number 3. That we will never know the arc of how the Star Wars movies were supposed to go because Carrie Fisher died and therefore what I suspect was supposed to be the final installment that would be revelatory about Princess Leia and her relationship to Kylo Ren will never get written.
Number 4. The failure of the news media to connect policy to the issues we hear about on the news everyday.
Number 5. Stagnation, passivity and hopelessness.
Number 6. Never again knowing if elections are free and fair. We hear increasingly about voter suppression. Lack of enfranchisement for big chunks of the United States population was something that this country was built on. They built it on the lack of enfranchisement for African Americans who they also didn't even consider fully human in our founding documents. Um, you know, a few years ago, the Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act. The voting rights act, which was something that was sort of hundreds of years in the making and it’s just a constant, constant unceasing battle. One of the things that plagues me is we don’t have centuries to work with here.
Number 7. The world burning. I just imagine a world that's nothing like the one that we live in now, a world that's become unrecognizable to us. It's hard for me to imagine that there would be no ... God, it’s very hard for me to talk about actually. Like the things I fear personally you know in a kind of intimate way are so often about the people to whom I'm close, and it's hard for me to talk. You know, I'm not inclined to talk publicly about the kinds of fears - I mean I, each and every one of these is a mass fear. But also obviously a personal fear.
Number 8. The Supreme Court.
Number 9. Losing the midterms.
Number 10. Winning the midterms. One of the things I keep wanting to say to people is like, no matter what happens during the midterms, there are all these modes of mass resistance, and to give up on those would be to ensure that xenophobic, racist, transphobic, homophobic, sexist, right wing, white, capitalist, patriarchal power will win deep into the future. But that means the only thing we have to do is participate even harder 'cause it's really, really hard to fight and invest and care and really look straight at what's at stake. The faith that we can fix things with an election is part of what got us into this mess with the belief that because we elected Barack Obama President, everything was okay.
Um. This is great. Thanks so much for inviting me. I think I'm fully depressed.
My name is Rebecca Traister and these are ten things that scare me.