what is "us"?

I've mentioned before, but the one social media I use regularly is Tumblr, which skews far left. The mood is...well, there've been a lot of suicide hotline lists going around, and a lot of posts reminding people that the worst of the incoming administration would surely love it if all the variously "undesirable" people would simply die already.

But there's been a moderately popular sentiment going around, as a reaction to the whole "we've made it through worse before". The sentiment is well-encapsulated by this poem by Clint Smith:

It is demonstrably true. Even setting aside the unknowable (like how many lives could have been spared by a competent, responsible approach to COVID), in just the last month or so we've started to learn some of the names and faces of women who've died due to the Dobbs decision: ProPublica ran stories on Josseli Barnica, 28, and Nevaeh Crain, 18, last week, and that's only taking into account people reported by a single newsroom whose lives were ended by the complications of wanted pregnancies in Texas.^[1] Those women (one of whom was younger even than me, was in middle school in 2016) should be alive and they're not, because Donald Trump won the electoral college in 2016.

There will surely be more. I have absolutely no doubt on this point.

I do not want to discount any of this. Smith and those who make similar arguments are absolutely correct that many of us will suffer under a second Trump presidency, and some of us will die.

It is, however, worth thinking about the pronoun there. "Us": I've seen it used as a catchall for members of a wide variety of vulnerable groups. The presumptions inherent in this sort of shorthand are interesting to interrogate. When people have taken the space to elaborate, I've seen queer people, disabled people, people of color, and women in general listed as constituents of this "us". This is, in many ways, not a terribly coherent group. If COVID has shown anything, it is that the group of people whom Donald Trump can injure with his witch's brew of incompetence and malice is the entire human community.

Smith presumes a specific reading of the statement, that for "us" to survive means all of "us" individually. This is a valid reading, and a very John Donne one at that.^[2] I think it brings an interesting question to the conversation—it is the closest to a specific exploration of the presumptions of "us" that I've yet seen. More than that, I sympathize with it. In the wake of the 2016 election, that was very much my position.

But this time around, I'm choosing to read "us" differently. For example, I fully believe that queer people will still exist the day Donald Trump drops dead. If the man were to live as long as Methuselah, I would still believe this to be true.

We as queer individuals did not all survive the AIDS crisis. It took a terrible, generation-defining toll on our community. This was not Donne's "clod [] washed away by the sea"; it was a landslide, and it was devastating.

But we as a queer community survived. We lived—battered and diminished, but we lived.

The goal of those in the Trump administration, past and future, who want "us" gone is not only to have individuals of various marginalized groups dead. It is to end our communities, for us to give in or give up or else disappear entirely, depending on their specific bent and our specific variety or varieties of marginalization. It has not yet succeeded, because we, we the communities, are still here even if not all of us, us the indivuals, are. And, God willing, we'll still be here in four years, even if the continent that is "us" is diminished.