Love You. Be Good. More Later. - 6/24/25
No Kings, No Tyrants, No Babies!
Hello my comfort, welcome to the resistance!
One of my earliest coherent memories is of attending a student protest at SDSU with grandma and your Uncle David. I was six, so I don’t want to overemphasize my own contributions, but let’s just say the momentum built that weekend would ultimately culminate in the 1992 vote of no confidence in President Thomas Day. Pretty good. As I recall, my brother and I spent most of our time making necklaces out of candlewax and paperclips with a shirtless Indian dude on roller blades. Mom was like “hey kids, who’s this; who’s your new friend?” and we’d be all “oh, Mom.” Even then, Moms just didn’t understand.
But make no mistake: people, some portion of the People, have long understood even the nuanced ins and outs of many of the messes we keep getting ourselves into and which you will soon learn about in History class. As such, protest is a very old thing. Like any of the Cardinal Things - like food, like music, like drugs, death or doorways - you will probably have an evolving relationship to protest. For now it is but sound and fury signifying nothing, but we took you out to our local Santa Rosa No Kings Day parade anyway. This letter is me trying to explain why, and what it meant to us at the time.
I once felt that to abjure violence in all forms and at all costs was the highest good, no matter how oppressed one might be. Now I don’t. I urge you to make and remake your own opinion about that as needed, but more than that I urge you to work in good faith toward good outcomes the whole time, despite the ongoing unknowability of the universe. Make mistakes, swallow your pride, and improve. Embrace change. If you’re too scared to make a mistake, you become complacent. If you persist with a bad idea because you’re afraid to change it, you become poison.
I try not to be poison, but I have been complacent, which is another way of saying “busy with other things.” It’s a common affliction, and something I’d like to transmit through time to you is that for the first half of my life I had the luxury of thinking of History as something that Had Happened and Was Over Now. One layer of that was simply the fact that American kids in those days weren’t as keyed into world events, but I can tell you from experience that there are such things as More or Less Interesting Times, and like the roving red eye of Jupiter the storm of History struck our place, time and income bracket just about as you were conceived. Oops! Although we didn’t always feel it, the trouble, of course, had been brewing for centuries.
So although we practice care, feel deeply, and post very well-worded statements of allyship online, it was nevertheless notable that jenn and I got off our asses (while our newborn is in the middle of a sleep regression no less!) and took you down the street to join in with throngs of chanting citizens, all of us united by a shared fear that Humanity is going One Way, instead of The Other Way. Here’s some reasons we’ve been feeling that way lately:
America continues to abet an ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Our President is racist, a rapist, a fascist, a multiple felon and not very nice. Between you and me, we’ve actually had plenty of crooked, racist, rapist, and even slave-owning Presidents, but perhaps never so “all at once,” or so closely correlated to what seems to be the Decline of Law.
That man just bombed Iran because no one came to his birthday party. Whether History records the story that way or not, it’s the Truth.
He did so without asking permission, which you’re really not supposed to do.
The supreme Court said it’s fine though! Yeah, they’re fine with it.
Relatedly: elections are now largely decided by legal chicanery, fiat, and corporate backing. Insider trading among the political upper class is the norm, while the average person is bombarded daily by increasingly sophisticated fake news, scam texts and government propaganda from what were once trusted sources of information.
Speaking of Justice: policing, gun control and incarceration are all irreparably broken in our country.
Oh, healthcare too! Our head of it doesn’t believe in vaccines and life expectancy just started going down for the first time in generations.
As for education, if there’s still a functioning public school system when you come of age to attend it, I will worry with good cause every single day that you might get shot by another student.
Trans people are being cruelly targeted worldwide and stripped of their right to pursue their own health and happiness.
nazi chuds and faceless government stormtroopers roam the streets with impunity, hiding their identities, kidnapping our neighbors and family members and sending them to third-world prisons without due process. For the record, if your first words are “fuck ice,” we’ll forgive the swear.
Comically flawed “AI” technology is rendering everyone jobless, but not in the post-need Star Trek way. They’re just…jobless and can’t pay for things. Then they don’t have those things, often food or medicine. It’s not at all clear what the Shareholders and Billionaires plan to do when they’ve stacked literally all the money and everyone else is deported or dead from eating dust, but they will certainly have High Scores, and perhaps that’s what counts.
The democratic party, the only major institutional force in a position to oppose these awful things, is secretly in League with Evil and Always Has Been, it just took most of the early 2000’s for most white people to understand and/or admit that to themselves.
Behind it all, the environment quietly struggles to sustain its children, which it turns out there are even more of than we thought.
To paraphrase a Garfield bumper sticker I saw once, THIS IS NOT NORMAL.
Well, okay, a bunch of it has been festering and flourishing behind the scenes for a long time, but not all eras are created equal and this one was STACKED. “Fraught” would be a not-inappropriate descriptor. That’s why I want to mark a place in the road - Something Changed Here - and admit to you that I don’t know what it means yet. I know I have been too complacent, historically, and that I want to do better in that regard and raise you in a tradition of resistance.
As I mentioned last letter, a lot of parents report struggling with the idea of “bringing someone into this fucked up world.” In thirty years, will you resent being thrust into such a post-9/11 situation? I doubt it, and frankly I don’t care! If we’re indeed at an inflection point, then a battle is unfolding, and Humanity needs you to keep fighting for our survival and collective dignity. On the other hand, if we’re already doomed, well - every generation feels on some level like they may be the Last, but Rome took a millennium to fall. I figure that’s still plenty of time to carve yourself an interesting life. Look to art and nature, listen to music, imbibe the stories of our ancestors, enjoy your body. If it’s any consolation, I’ve been through some awful shit, and even wanted to check out at times…not only am I glad I’m still here, but I cherish the awful shit.
It will take some more time for me to explain that one, and some more living for you to be ready to understand it. For now, let’s assume we aren’t past the point of no return and pledge ourselves - you and me - to rising to the challenge of our times. Make the world be Star Trek and not Orwell, son. It is your destiny. You could have been born a medieval scullery maid waist-deep in human excrement, but you weren’t. You could have been born the King of Mars in the year 5000, but you weren’t. You were born into a busy world wrestling with Capital and Tech for the Fate of Humanity. There’s work to be done.
I hope you never regret being invited to the party, but when you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting (to show you Kill Bill Vol. 1 [and then all the movies Kill Bill is ripping off]).
Love you. Be Good. More Later.
Dad
Skillup Milestones:
You now reach for things you want, the core of any developing character. I’m told this is a fairly major milestone in your sense of “I.” This week I read you the Myth of Tantalus and you reached for the book, but I had to pluck it away lest you ruin it with drool and thereby destroy the very thing you sought. I near fainted, sweltering as we were under so many itchy layers of symbolism.
You ate your first piece of solid food, a small cube of avocado. Hated it. Full-on meltdown, green mush everywhere, passed through your system undigested and came back out your butt as a small cube of avocado. We’re told this is normal and a Big Success. Congrats!
First time biting mom’s nipples, pulling mom’s hair, bopping us both in the face and kicking me in the balls (separate occasions; you’re not Moe Howard). In short, you have learned to grab and flail. So there’s definitely violence in you, and that can be good for toppling tyranny. Hone that.
First big, full human laugh - from me pretending to eat your tummy. What a feeling! I couldn’t make Paul F. Tompkins laugh backstage at San Diego Comic-Con, but I made you laugh your first full-on laugh ever, and that’s
even betteralmostjust as good in a different way.
Dad Joke of the Day:
Q: What if somebody calls us a ‘pair o’ pathetic peripatetics?’ // CREDIT: Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.
Cool Good Word of the Day:
Peripatetic. Itinerant, traveling from place to place by nature or in order to work.
Correct Usage - “Because of the seasonal nature of farming crop pickers often live a peripatetic lifestyle, making the job a difficult one that provides a clear and vital service to the community and deserves union protections and a fair wage.”
Incorrect Usage - “Move peripatetically and break things. That way, by the time your bad tech idea has unwound society, you’ve already recused yourself to your Billionaire Survival Vault.”
Songs You Heard This Fortnight (RESIST Edition):
Whose Side Are You On? by Pete Seeger
Sisyphus by Andrew Bird
Way Down the Line by The Offspring
When the War Came by The Decemberists
Heart Problems by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Fight Test by The Flaming Lips
Human Behavior by Bjork
One Chance by Modest Mouse
Big Mess by Devo
White Punks on Dope by The Tubes
Books I Passed in Front of Your Face This Fortnight:
Julián Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love
A is for Activist by Innosanto Nagara
Cat’s First Baby by Natalie Nelson
Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith
Movies and Shows You Saw This Fortnight:
Nightmare Alley (Underrated!)
Andor (Rated Accurately [as Very Good]!)
President Big Boy’s Happy Birthday Tank Parade (Overrated!)
Video Games You Were Exposed to This Fortnight:
Neon White
UFO50
Baba Is You
Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I Am Dead
The Simpsons (Arcade)
Street Fighter II (Arcade)
Rampage (Arcade)
Tron (Arcade)
Marvel vs. Capcom (Arcade)
19XX (Arcade)
Burger Time (Arcade)
The Avengers (Arcade)
Donkey Kong Jr. (Arcade)
Pac-Man (Arcade)
LESSON of the Day:
When we fight, we win.
That first laugh is like a drug, OMG. All the months of hell beforehand became instantly worth it.