A Nurse Log is a Beautiful Thing
I’m in Kürten, Germany and it’s charming the pants off of me, with its farmhouses, walking paths, and epic thunderstorms. I’ve spent the last week here, alongside the roar coming out of the RNC, the chants of “USA!” following the attempted assassination of Trump, the naming of JD Vance as his running mate, and now the extraordinary day that yesterday was, with President Biden ending his bid for re-election and endorsing Kamala Harris to become the nation’s first Black, South Asian, female President. Wow. What a time to be alive.
As I’ve written about previously, my partner and I are in the midst of a year of planned travel and remote work from Europe. And, as we travel, I find myself reading and learning so much history about the layers upon layers of pain that the people of these lands endured for centuries as first the Romans, and then many others, dominated them to bring them into “civilization.” For hundreds of years, what is now called “Germany” was ruled by others who thought of them as “barbarians.”
Next door, there’s a tattered German flag flying, and I wonder, “Is that a show of fandom for the Euro 2024, or is it a symbol of a longer, deeper nationalism that mirrors our own pitiful and painful story in the US?”
I’m still learning, and am certainly no expert, but it scares me hearing about the ways that Germans were forced to submit, over and over again, until they simply wouldn’t anymore. Because we all know how badly that went. So when I heard the crowd chanting “USA!” following Trump’s fist pump, my stomach absolutely turned at the ways that so many people - many of them my own relatives! - identify primarily as victims who are righteously not gonna take it anymore. That is what we saw in full neon, sequined display in Milwaukee.
Blessedly, barely a week later, we suddenly have a real shot at electing a woman of the global majority as President of the United States, and sounding a resounding “NO!” to the MAGA worldview that existentially threatens our democracy. Hell yes.
Grateful as I am for this shift in the headwinds though, in truth, I still don’t even think it’s anyone at the top of the ticket who needs to be our focus. I think this election has got to be about us and what WE are gonna do. The ways that WE will find shared interest in defeating this far-right ideology, because, as Bernie recently pointed out, if France can band together to stop their worst impulses from running their government, then we can, too. It’s time to refuse to be distracted from the task at hand, which is stopping another Hitler. Because Vance was actually right about this one thing.
In between my reading about the rise of Nazi Germany, I take walks around the countryside. I’ve been relishing the way that “nurse logs” are some of the greenest things in the whole forest because they utterly are awash with new life: the lightest, brightest green which signals that something exceedingly fresh and new is happening. Moss and small ferns grow beside mushrooms, which are, in turn, breaking the whole thing down. It’s quite beautiful, this old with new.
And I know it, y’all. We are sick to death of this two party system and all the ways that money and militarism are baked into the game to make it impossible for us to have candidates that we can whole-heartedly believe in. I can already feel some of my leftie friends side-eyeing Harris. But as the poet Aurora Levins Morales put it in her brilliant letter, “Midnight in the Latrines Again,” that’s not even what it’s about, anyway. She says:
“For the US left, presidential elections are about choosing an opponent, not a leader. We do not have any candidate available to us who will not be complicit with genocide anywhere in the world that imperialist domination demands it for the benefit of rampant capitalism. We do not have any candidate who will take the kind of action we need to avert climate catastrophe. We’re not choosing between leaders. We are the leaders. We’re choosing who to fight.”
So perhaps we can take a lesson from the forest and let our movements be fed by what is dying all around us as we wage our fight. Maybe we can use the wreckage as a bridge to a new future that’s bursting to be born and hungry to transform everything it touches. That policy not working? Let’s use this kind of mushroom to break it down and turn it into something useful, beautiful, and GREEN!
These are the questions I’m left asking: Can we get out of our own way, these final few months of this tumultuous, traumatic, painful election year, and do the many-handed work of making sure that we can ride the nurse log of our current political moment into the future, without being beholden to its current shape? Can we face the requirement on us now to put an end to the clear cutting ethos of MAGA, once and for all? Because Trump is old, but Vance is not. And both of them have Project 2025 lined up, and ready.
So what do you think, friends? Are we ready to move like our ravenous, merciful, absolutely-accepting-of-WHAT-IS forest ecosystems, working in powerful concert to break down what is no longer of service, and make it into something fresh? I, for one, am ready to see what we can grow out of this rot.
