The Plan for after You Get Punched in the Face (Part 5)
Who'll be my role model now that my role model is gone, gone, ducked back down the alley with some roly-poly little bat-faced girl
This series is a meditation on Mike Tyson’s famous line that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
As the new administration punches us in the face again and again, we aim to shake it right off so we can survive to fight another day.
In the words of my friend A., “They feed off our despair. They recoil from our joy.”
Long may they recoil, my friends.
Ways to Avoid Despair (5/10)
5. Find yourself a resilience role model
Quick flashback for y’all today.
Back in 2020, deep in the fourth year of Trump 1.0 and the first year of Covid, a bunch of my best friends and I worked our 🤬s off to get Joe Biden and Kamala Harris elected. For example, I volunteered with the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and helped secure the ~22k margin of victory there. It was one of the finest hours of my life and I’ll share all the details with you anytime you like, I’ll buy the beers.
Sometime during the pleasant but false calm of the Biden administration, my mom sent me this book:
I was like, Cool, Mom! Love anything George Clooney’s wife is reading! Maria Ressa sounds like a bada$$! That Rodrigo Duterte sure was a bad guy! Thanks!
But on the inside, maybe I was thinking, hey, Mom, I don’t need this, we stood up to a dictator already and voted him out of office and foiled his evil plans, I mean, I’ll read this for fun, but I’m sure I already know it all since my best friends and I all already did this already, etc. etc.
Flash forward to November 2024. You bet I was digging that book out of the deep dusty storage at the back of the bookcase and recommending it to everyone in sight. George Clooney’s wife likes this! Maria Ressa is a bada$$! Thank goodness she won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in the Philippines so we have a visible example of someone who (A) stood up to a dictator and (B) won a big visible prize for it! Thank goodness she is still working and teaching and talking about the broligarchy!
Flash forward to this week we all just lived through. As you know, I’m struggling to keep up with all the news and newsletters flooding my inbox and brainspace. But this post from Zeteo broke through the noise:
Just seeing this picture of Maria Ressa looking so alert and rueful in 2018 made me feel a little better. If she could stand up to a dictator maybe we can:
So who is this Maria Ressa anyway?
Well, she was born in the Philippines back in 1963 and grew up in New Jersey. She came up as a trailblazing journalist, running CNN’s Jakarta bureau and serving as CNN’s lead investigative reporter for all of Asia, for example. In 2012, she and three other female founders started Rappler, a news organization covering the Philippines. Now she is both the CEO of Rappler and a professor at Columbia University addressing everything from social media to artificial intelligence to democracy. (Ha ha I just mistyped that “democrazy” and I’m afraid that’s a word we’re gonna need over the next four years.)
Okay, that all sounds cool, Auntie Genevieve, but exactly how and when did Maria Ressa stand up to a dictator?
Well, her company Rappler started covering news in the Philippines in 2012. That means that she was on the case when the notorious Rodrigo Duterte became president in 2016. The Duterte regime was characterized by, for example, extreme violence in the conduct of the “drug war,” wanton corruption, and misuse of trolls & bots on social media to manipulate public opinion. (Ugh, sound familiar?) Rappler reported on these phenomena as news, which led to Ressa facing criminal charges for supposedly making all this stuff up, cheating on her taxes, and more. In Ressa’s words, “In the Philippines… we had like up to 30,000 people killed in three years. And the criminal charges against me go hand in hand with that. So there was a year, 2019, when I got 10 arrest warrants, and I would come home, and I’d be arrested.” She has been unable to travel freely ever since, meaning that she has to get government permission when she wants to go back to New York and confer with her students at Columbia. When she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, she was lauded (along with Dmitry Muratov, a Russian journalist) for safeguarding freedom of expression in her homeland.
Even today, Maria Ressa still faces criminal charges in the Philippines related to her standing up to a dictator. If you want to support her, you can consider buying her book.
So when your resilience role model tells you that your country is “moving into hell,” you listen. You read her book and you seek information about how she stayed strong to help yourself stay strong. I like looking at this picture of her smiling from ear to ear:
She looks a lot like someone who can navigate both despair and joy. I’m getting a pink jacket and linking arms with Amal Clooney and reading up on how Maria Ressa protected the freedom of the press so that I might do the same from my own itty-bitty little platform.
While we are talking about role models for resilience, allow me to recommend some friends who are doing God’s (?) work through their own writing right now:
Darcy Lee, AKA Darcy of the one-of-kind store known as Heartfelt in Bernal Heights in San Francisco back in the day. She is literally farming hope on her own little acre of newsletter. Highly recommended:
Sara Danver, AKA Sara who has singlehandedly saved America more than once through her stellar work for Vote Save America. She offers a variety of political and less political ways to take care of yourself and your community right now. For example, drink water!
And one more, the Southern California fires have folks calling on their own resilience like never before. Please consider a donation to my friend Margot and her husband Chris, who lost their home in Altadena. They are raising money to rebuild for both themselves and their community:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-margot-chris-rebuild-after-eaton-fire
Bonus: One Way to Cultivate Joy
Speaking of resilience, I will write *much* more about Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott and her gifts and challenges in future posts, but for now I will leave you with this dance number from Tricia Miranda’s company.
They chose the song “WTF (Where They From)” by Missy Elliott [feat. Pharrell Williams]. The song is amazing all on its own but I can’t wait for you to see what these kids did with it:
Kk now your turn! Dance like no one is watching and all that. If you can’t, move to a secluded place where no one actually is watching and dance it out there. (If you need more songs, I highly recommend my playlist entitled NSFW Work Songs (just don’t sing along at work, these are headphones-on songs to the max).)
I’m gonna leave us with a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., right here -
If you can’t fly then run
If you can’t run then walk
If you can’t walk then crawl
But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.
If you can’t dance whether anyone is watching or not, then run, or walk, or crawl, or find some form of dance you can do… even if it’s just inside the borders of your own head. That too is a way to keep moving forward.
We’re armed with dance and joy. We move forward a teensy bit at a time.
Don’t go it alone,
Genevieve