Seraphic Strangers

Two days before the election was called, I called the election. I listened to the playlist that had been brewing in my head for four years, danced in the streets by myself, had a moment of doubt by the Hudson River, and returned home feeling not quite satisfied.

The first thing I heard on Saturday, November 7th was a smattering of applause outside my Manhattan window. At first I thought it was something else to be forgotten and I rolled over in my sleep. Then Alex, my flatmate, came in playing Frank Sinatra’s unapologetic anthem from her phone: “Theme From New York, New York.” The race had been called and at that first moment I was unaffected, but agreed to go out at Alex’s urging. After getting dressed and coffeed, we went out to soak in the occasion. Even from the stoop in that late morning heat, the streets felt bubbly with the rising feelings of release. The music of people banging pots and pans was enough to turn a political agnostic into a last-second Biden devotee. 

The first person we saw was a man who was confused by the ruckus. We explained to him that the race was over and he asked if it was official. He supported Trump. I had no clue what to tell him. I told him that the results were beyond doubt and to please take care of himself, before skipping down the street like I had just discovered ice.

 It was somewhere around noon when we reached Sheridan Square. This was where the first hint of a party and the resulting COVID-19 indifference revealed itself. Seeming strangers shared wine arm in arm on a park bench. There was a man dressed in cutoff denim shorts, a white tank top, and aviator sunglasses, carrying a tote bag and shooting off confetti at every passing car. He would reach into his bag to pull out popper after popper as cars promenaded by with hands hanging out of windows. USPS trucks blared their horns and were applauded like they had just scored the winning run in the World Series. At this moment, as the day was just starting to take a hold of us, but before it fully held us in its grasp, there was an understanding that in some not-so-distant places, people were mourning. Frankly, we didn’t care. 

The most mild celebrations that day would have been considered outrageous at any other time during the pandemic: a window designer canceling work for the day to enjoy Prospect Park, a cyclist sacrilegiously ending a ritualistic ride mid-workout to race back to the city, Senator Chuck Schumer leaving his office to stop by Barclays Center to enjoy the festivities. Every server was called in from their lives so that restaurants could keep up with the carousing. 

My uncle gleefully sprayed champagne at people eating their brunch and then immersed himself in an hours-long lunch with family and friends where we toasted the sky, the sun, the fact that Stoke City F.C. won today, doctors and nurses, and talked for unrushed hours, where different groups of people sitting around tables burst into applause again and again, causing the street to erupt as if the news just broke. The whole day, the city was a cacophony of noise ranging from waves of applause and bellowing horns to masses of people attempting to sing “Empire State of Mind.”

 The day definitely had elements of a self-celebration, as if New York City swung the election at the last possible moment and we were the heroes of the day. But the victory had nothing to do with us; it had everything to do with the exhaustive work done by Black and Brown organizers across the country. No one was under the pretense that Joe Biden would save us. Even in the midst of celebration, we were all keenly aware that only the people around us might save each other. 

Every passing stranger was seraphic for the day. The sense of community with people who yesterday were random strangers and tomorrow would be once more, is something I wish upon everyone at least once in their life. Cars cutting off pedestrians were forgiven and forgotten without a second glance, every wave of noise was a call and response asking if we would be okay, always answered in the affirmative. Everyone was thanking the bus drivers, the delivery people, the street sweepers, each other. Chants oscillated from “U-S-A” to “U-S-P-S” back to “U-S-A” and back again to “U-S-P-S” and then faded into the background as people re-remembered the reason for their revelry. There was not a universal moment when the city’s rising feelings of release were uncorked, but somewhere between the outstretched arms of strangers fist-bumping in the streets, the breaks between the words in chants of—“FUCK TRUMP!”—“WE JUST DID!!” and nightfall, the city had combusted.

Jazz in the streets. DJs on balconies. Violins and flutes that made every step feel like a pirouette forward. Open brownstone doors and an overserved actor inviting anyone from the street inside for a drink or five. It was easy to find quiet streets but just as easy to stumble into a party. It was the type of day where you might see a DJ playing on a second-floor balcony and you would start dancing and within five minutes, there would be fifty people in the street all dancing alongside you. 

It would get to the point where you might be uncountable miles from sobriety and lie down on someone’s car, and the owner would glance at you and then burst out laughing and lie down on the car next to you and you would hug each other with the relief that the sky had not started to fall. 

Or your friends would be leaving and so you would go outside to catch a breath of fresh air and not thirty feet away, there they are with dozens of other people packed into an intersection where cobbled streets meet pavements and everyone is dancing to a group of musicians you think you recognize from the most scattered places—Jimmy the drummer from Washington Square and is that Adam from KGB bar? And they are playing Bon Jovi of all things and for a moment everyone is believing and everything is only happening because Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania grew beyond the mandatory recount threshold and all of that feels five thousand miles away because in front of you beautiful strangers are staggering to the music, and you are feeling sublime as heels get stuck in the gaps between cobblestones and glide across concrete. And the world is so vividly alive with the sense of possibility and you swear up and down that you are sober and only life-drunk and it is the piano that has been drinking.

At some point in the evening, Kamala Harris was going to speak. We found a laptop, a website, and put the speech on but nobody gave a damn what she or Joe Biden was going to say. Alex put it best, saying: “Who cares what they say? No matter what they say it’s fucking brilliant!” None of us caught a word of Harris’ or Biden’s speeches, but we raved about their poetry and sharpness and the intelligence of their vision. They were the best two speeches I never heard in my life. 

With the world coming and going, people lost and found, and one last taste of summer sweat and urine lingering in the air, we danced well into the morning before we returned to find Washington Square covered with what remained of NYC’s spontaneous race to drink itself dry: mountains upon mountains of trash lay next to overfilled garbage cans where we only slept after one final waltz through the village exhaling: exalted and exhausted. Even the streetlights were waning because they too had been up celebrating and needed their rest.

The next morning, there was just about enough jubilation lingering to soften the accusatory glares traded between pedestrians and drivers into glances filled with good-humored resignation.  

To be entirely clear: my actions that day were plainly irresponsible from a COVID perspective. I put myself and others at risk, as did everyone involved in these reckless mass gatherings. Despite knowing that there is a tangible possibility that others are suffering as a result of my actions, I still cannot completely cast the memory of the day aside. It’s the type of memory that you bring back when it’s been raining for a week and the last hints of possibility have seemingly all vanished, and you have just as many messages with or without do not disturb turned on and each moment of each day trudges on—and with the recollection, the promise of the unknown tugs you toward the next moment.

And so we wait once more for the next moment to come.


Faucet Theory: “After the passing of irresistible music you must make do with the dripping of the faucet.” -Jim Harrison. 

Drip. 

            Drip.

                         Drip.

Lettitor

Dear Reader,

On top of everything else going on in 2020—an increased awareness of the systemic racism that has built and sustained this country, a pandemic taking hundreds of thousands of lives, and state violence enacted against protestors all over the nation—it is also an election year. And democracy has scarcely felt more fragile than it does now.

 After weeks of heightened anxiety and days spent refreshing election results on Google, the man in the White House has been voted out. Some don’t think he’ll leave. Some think that even if he does leave, he’ll continue to maintain dangerous influence over this country.

 In this issue, writers delve into the anxiety, pain, division, and joy that this election year has generated. Hope Stonner takes us on a walk through the Old North End, where neighbors have silent feuds through their political yard signs. John Michael McCann dances through the streets of New York City on the day the election was called. Anya Steinberg explores why many anti-communist Vietnamese Americans choose to support Trump. Eve Stewart reflects on the anti-science Christian community she grew up in and how she navigates lasting relationships with people she now fundamentally disagrees with.

 Many spent this summer and fall campaigning and phone banking. This work is immensely important, and we want to thank those who devoted their time and energy to it. And while voting in our democracy is a crucial step, the work does not end when Biden and Harris enter the White House. We must continue to hold ourselves and our representatives accountable. The ongoing struggle toward a country that is more equitable, just, and loving continues. 


Yours in solidarity,

Logan and the Cipher Staff

Street Lights and Salvation

Content warning: mentions of transphobia, sexual assault, and victim-blaming


My first major self-revelation during college was triggered by “Wizards of Waverly Place.” I was sitting at my desk, staring out my dorm room window at the orange glow of a street light. It was the same orange glow from the street light outside my childhood bedroom window. My roommate had just been teasing me about all the pop culture references I could not understand because of how restricted my television and internet usage was while growing up in a conservative Christian household. While I never expressed a strong interest in music as a child, I also never tried to explore it because most popular music was off-limits for my young religious ears. I was told that as a Christian, I was somehow too good for it. I remember downloading exactly one Katy Perry song on my dad’s iPod and being told it was the only song of hers I would be allowed to listen to. After my dad saw the cover art for her album “Teenage Dream,” he deemed it too risque for me. I used to love shopping with my mom—not just for the clothes but also because I could stand in the middle of the aisle and strain my ears to hear the songs coming from the store speakers. 

This conversation with my roommate about “Wizards of Waverly Place” made me realize the huge discrepancies between our experiences, especially with pop culture. Looking at the street light by my dorm, I was reminded of less innocuous beliefs my family and I used to have. My beliefs have changed drastically since I was a child silently jamming to Taylor Swift in the middle of a Target, back when I was immersed in a community that helped give rise to an anti-science movement. 

Let me clarify what I mean by “anti-science.” Anti-science beliefs treat what most would consider objective facts, like the deaths from COVID-19, as if they are not empirically proven and are up for debate. They rarely claim that all of science is flawed, and often use their own form of science to support their ideas. For instance, Young Earth Creationists often claim that radiometric dating (one of the most common and most trusted ways geologists date fossils) is an inaccurate method but instead try to use other knowledge of geology to scientifically “disprove” evolution. Anti-science beliefs also often overlap; many of my friends who do not believe in evolution also harbor varying degrees of disbelief in COVID-19. My former church and homeschool community are home to many anti-maskers today. Especially because motivations for these beliefs are often rooted in religion, it is common to use the word “believe” in these circles when referring to things like COVID-19 and evolution. Thus I will be using phrases like “believe in evolution” to refer to people who accept common scientific thought.

Growing up, many people within my church and homeschool community identified as Young Earth Creationists, or YECs. Essentially, YECs believe that the theory of evolution is a conspiracy against the Christian faith and that the earth is only about 6,000 years old, hence the “young” in their name. Not every Young Earth Creationist has an explicitly hostile attitude towards all aspects of science, though many of them do. Radiometric dating? That’s a lie. Fossils? They’re fake and scientists don’t know how to date them. Science? It can’t prove anything.

 The sentence “Science can’t prove anything” was written in bold capital letters in the first chapter of my Christian biology textbook from a series called “Apologia,” as this principle is central to a YEC outlook on science. There is nothing wrong with taking religious beliefs into account when assessing science or one’s worldview. As a practicing Christian, I still do that every day. However, I think the overarching flaw in the YEC movement is its resistance to reconciling religion with empirically grounded science. Instead, it frames science as the enemy of religion. It claims there is an anti-religious agenda behind theories like evolution. My acceptance of evolution does not mean that I hate organized religion or that I believe all human behavior can be explained by some cold, nihilistic form of social Darwinism. But I was trained to think that every “believer” in evolution saw the world that way. 

While my family was never as passionate as many of my friends and teachers were (and still are) about this battle against science, we still once identified ourselves as Young Earth Creationists. As a child, I believed that the earth was created in a six-day process, as described in Genesis. It was thrilling to learn arguments in some of my homeschool classes that could silence misguided evolutionists so that they—like my family and I—could be saved from the lies of mainstream science. Statements like “evolution is just a theory” have been pounded into my head over the years. We also harbored a more general distrust of science. When I struggled with depression in middle school, I believed if I ever told my doctor I was sad, I would be taken away from my family and locked in a mental facility. I was told that the only way to address depression was by praying, so there was a time where I would spend almost every night reading the same Bible verses over and over again as I sat in the glow of the street light by my window, begging for relief. 

In 2017, when my family and I collectively came to the realization that not every verse in the Bible must be taken literally and that evolution is indeed compatible with our religion, we had to address this change of heart up front with our friends. We felt the need to do this because many in our community thought that “believing” in evolution indicated a weak faith in God. They saw it as a slippery slope that could lead to us not believing in the Bible at all. My friends’ parents did not want them associating with anyone who could lead them away from their faith. It felt like our relationship with our religious friends depended on these conversations. During the awkward conversation I had with one of my best friends about this revelation, I watched the look in her eyes change from curiosity to condescension. I was a “touchy-feely liberal” now, too attached to the ideas of mainstream science to truly follow Christ. I was the brainwashed one. She is still firm in her stance against evolution, and while she tried to spare my feelings, her shock at the news was evident. She must have been wondering what would come next. Would I start believing in climate change? Would I start believing people when they say their sexuality is not a choice? Would I pursue higher education at a secular school? The answer to all of these questions was yes, much to her and many others' obvious disappointment. While our families are still close, their comments on how much we have “changed” and how we are “liberal” now do not go unnoticed. To this day, there is still tension between my family and some of our oldest friends over this issue. 

Until coming to Colorado College, I was surrounded by people in the Young Earth Creationist community. Even after I moved from my homeschool community in Pennsylvania to a private school in Arizona in 2017, many of my friends and neighbors were YECs. At school, my brother and I were often mistaken for atheists just because we “believed” in evolution. YECs like to frame the “debate” around evolution as if it is a partisan issue. Even today, I catch myself accidentally using flawed terminology. I am tempted to use the terms “right” versus “left” to describe people who do and do not accept evolution as fact. But of course, not every Republican harbors anti-science beliefs and not every coronavirus denier identifies as Republican. My community growing up claimed that their denial of science came from both their religion and their political stance. Because of that, many YECs act as if my choice to call myself an “evolutionist” must mean that I hate God. They have been trained to see trust in science as a political, moral, and religious matter. 

I still find myself becoming angry at these people despite having once been a part of their world, but I have to force myself to stop and step into their shoes. When I was a part of the YEC community, fighting evolution was seen as an unfortunate but necessary moral imperative. I remember wishing that I was “liberal,” as we termed most people we disagreed with, because I hated the conflict I feared was being spread through my beliefs. 

There are people who are not worth engaging with; people who seem to have sunk too far into fear, ignorance, and hate. They need to be called out and have their platforms removed, as we cannot continue to tolerate systemic oppression or pretend that it is a new problem in this country. In my eighth grade biology class, my teacher refused to even talk about evolution, claiming that it was just too ridiculous to entertain. Our textbook dedicated an entire chapter to why evolution is a lie, but even this was not worth our time, according to my teacher. Instead, she focused on more “important” pursuits which involved very violent transphobic and homophobic ideas. We were taught that queerness was a willful act of disobeying god, an act of rebellion against our religion. My teacher once led class exercises on how to identify transgender people on the street so that we could properly evangelize them. I remember sitting in class wondering how anyone could have the nerve to actually walk up to someone on the street and tell them that their identity is invalid.  

While I would like to engage with and forgive people from the anti-science movement who are open to discussion, the damage that can be caused by their beliefs should not be ignored. People who deny that COVID-19 exists do not wake up every day hoping for the sickness and death of thousands of people, but the harm caused by their ignorance cannot be overlooked. 

  Conversation and offering alternative ways of thinking are, in many ways, a form of mercy. Though many people like my biology teacher exist, there are also a lot of people who are still genuinely trying to grapple with what is true and right. Though not all people are, some may be willing to change their minds with time and through dialogue. But being in the position to take on dialogue with the anti-science community is in many ways a privilege. Having grown up in anti-science circles, it is significantly easier for me to have sympathy for them. And being a cis, straight, white woman, I have never been subject to some of these people’s harshest rhetoric and discrimination.

I’m still in touch with some people from my old community, and I recently talked to some of them about these issues. One of my closest friends, Anya, left her Southern Baptist church where she was raised as a YEC a few years ago, upon discovering that one of the pastors was a convicted child molester. 

Within our churches, Anya and I both experienced the pride people have in claiming to have discovered “objective truth.” Even at my Christian high school, teachers referred to Christian principles as “the capital-T Truth.” They claim their answers to questions are the end-all and that every other religion is incorrect and damned to Hell. When people use religiously fueled anti-science reasoning, they do not view it as a personal preference, but as objective fact. That is part of why trying to convince people that evolution or COVID-19 are real is not always as simple as showing them CDC data.

“The people who talk the most about searching for objective truth are the ones who think they always have it. It makes it near impossible to change their minds,” Anya told me.

When spreading the word about their pastor’s criminal record, Anya and her family expected outrage from the church. Instead, many members defended him; they claimed the church was right to forgive him of his sins and to put him in charge of the nursery. 

“When you’re in that environment, you don’t know what to research,” she said. “You don’t even know your beliefs are a problem.” 

Anya is not the only friend I spoke with. While she has grown beyond her former church’s beliefs, I still have friends who identify as YECs and who still cling to anti-science reasoning. But I realized that I could not quote them directly. In those conversations, some of them expressed that they think borrowing money from the government is a sin and that queer-identifying people cannot be “real” Christians. I do not wish to spread that kind of discriminatory rhetoric.  

I often catch myself using the exact same tactics as the people I argue with to shut down conversation. It is easy to look at the people I grew up around and simply feel enraged at the hurt and misinformation that they have spread. The deaths caused by COVID-19 are a tragedy, and outrage is a warranted and proper response to the mismanagement we have seen. But while rage can fuel change and can get people’s attention, in my experience, it does not fix anything alone. 

Part of how people like Donald Trump acquire such large and blindly supportive crowds is by focusing on what divides us. He makes his more zealous followers feel like vigilantes for justice against the insanity of the “radical left.” Given my experience within, and now outside of such circles, I have never found responding to aggressive rhetoric with aggressive rhetoric to be effective. I do not want to involve some of the friends I interviewed in this article because I still think they can change. Many are willing to come out and say that they need to do more research on certain issues now that they are older. They do not realize how hateful their beliefs are. So while this does not excuse the harm their words cause, it makes me less inclined to use them here. My friends are working towards a different understanding of the world at their own pace. I would rather help them as they walk than embarrass or enrage them. 

I found in my community that a lot of anti-science beliefs are ultimately based in fear of the unknown and pride. I share the following story not to encourage readers to sympathize with the racists or the fascists of our world, but to acknowledge that there are a lot of kids out there like I was who, despite being raised around MAGA-hat-wearing Republicans, secretly wish they could read real science textbooks. 

The guest preacher at my church had been preaching for 35 minutes already. I was sitting there on the hard wooden pew kicking my legs back and forth. I was so proud of myself. I had actually listened to the entire sermon! It was just some story about a rebellious teenage girl, not the usual complex theological analysis that I could never hope to wrap my head around as a 12-year-old. The girl in the story was heading out to a party. She was mad at her boyfriend and wanted to distract herself. The preacher noted her short skirt. That’s when my stomach dropped. I knew what was coming. The story ended with the girl being gang-raped at the party. The preacher smiled and said, “She was raped, obviously, because of her short skirt. When we disobey God like her, we pay the price.” Even after being raised around such rampant sexism, I sensed there was something wrong with that narrative. There was a voice inside my head saying that this story felt unfair. How could the actions of boys at the party be the fault of the victim? But the congregation just kept smiling, nodding in agreement. 

Growing up, my family and I drove 45 minutes each way to a small Presbyterian church in central Pennsylvania every Sunday. My family did not agree with everything the people around me believed, but I was always told to listen to my pastor and the elders of the church. After all, we drove farther than any of my friends did to church because we thought we had found a great fit. I grew up in the middle of many conflicting beliefs. We would drive to church, where I was discouraged from reading the Bible since it was not my role as a woman to do so, but then return home where my dad would read chapters of his huge biblical commentaries aloud. I would go to my homeschool co-op where my history teacher would talk openly about why women must submit to their husbands, but then return home to see my mom making big decisions right alongside my dad. Between this and my own moral compass, I found that I was conflicted about many of my beliefs. But to mask this conflict and anxiety, I simply leaned into these beliefs even more. It made me feel more powerful against the non-Christian world that I had never experienced but was told I would have to fight against. 

I was told I should not read the Bible myself since I apparently would not have the capacity to understand it. My understanding did not matter anyway, since it was my role as a woman to just believe whatever my father (and later, my husband) told me. I grew up watching my dad read countless commentaries on theology. I always wanted to be like him, to know the god I was supposed to pray to every day. Wanting to emulate my father, I would ask to attend the elusive Bible studies he was invited to after church services. They were called “Head of Household” meetings because they were only for men. As I’m sure you could have guessed, I was not invited. So while my dad was able to have discussions about faith as the “head” of our household, I was left in the nursery to watch my younger siblings and to foster what my parents called my “maternal instinct.” When I spoke too harshly or was not eager enough to care for my siblings, I was rebuked, even called “evil” at one point for my lack of conformity to our standards for women.

My dad would talk excitedly with my brother on the way home from church about all he was learning, saying that my brother could be a pastor someday because of how inquisitive he was. During one of these drives, I mustered the courage to ask if I could be a pastor someday. My dad looked at me in disbelief and simply said, “No” before continuing to talk with my brother. My dad was not trying to be mean, but given our family’s beliefs about a woman’s role in society, the answer to my question seemed obvious.

 In my homeschool community, similar ideas were enforced. As I have already mentioned, my history teacher liked to go on long tangents about how I was to submit to my husband when I got older. When taking a mock trial course where we examined cases of domestic abuse to learn more about American legal procedures, my teacher told us that if we were ever hurt by our husbands, it was our biblical duty to keep it a secret. We were to consult with our pastor to find out how we could please our husbands best.

I want to take a moment to make a disclaimer for the sake of my parents who will be reading this. Here is my official disclaimer that NO, my childhood was not a sad and horrible experience. NO, people reading this should not look at my parents like they are terrible or ignorant people. My parents have changed their minds about more things than most people do in their lifetime. So, while they may have spent time in circles they now disagree with, their growth is a testament to their humility and intellect. There are definitely experiences from my childhood that I am recovering from, but I am ultimately thankful for the insight they have given me. Despite how it may sound, even at their most conservative my family was more tolerant than many on the religious right.

I want to emphasize how difficult it is to leave anti-science schools of thought. The people around me treated my stance on evolution like it determined the fate of my soul. Even when people have the power to educate themselves—whether it is through school, the internet, experience, or dialogue—they risk losing their family and friends if they become dissidents. I was told that we were different from the rest of the world. We were better. We were smarter. We were like an underground resistance fighting against people who hate God and who hate Christians. Between having this mentality beaten into my brain my entire life and the risk of losing those closest to me, the only way to silence all my anxiety seemed to be to ride along with my community on the Trump train back in 2016. 

My dad was always reading, and after years of exposing himself to different viewpoints, he realized how much he disagreed with the people surrounding us. When watching Donald Trump respond to the leaked recording of his infamous “grab her by the ...” comment, he stood up and said he could not believe what the country had come to. Our move to Arizona catalyzed even more change for my family, as we removed ourselves from the anti-science voices we had been surrounded by for so long. My family and I began to embrace our new views as we wrapped up the school year connecting with our homeschool co-op in Pennsylvania online. The following year, I attended a local private Christian school and came face-to-face with some of the beliefs that I had evolved beyond. 

My principal senior year told me that going to Colorado College would be a disaster. “They are a secular school,” he warned me. “They hate people like us.” 

“Eve, you need to focus on what’s important for a girl like you: how to be a good wife and a good mother.” He stopped there. That was it. That was all I needed to be focusing on. Every one of my senior year teachers discouraged me from coming to CC. They perpetuated a victim complex where they claimed that Christians are hated by everyone outside of the church. Perhaps to their surprise, I have not been chased with pitchforks by my classmates at CC. If anything, I have found this space to be much more open and tolerant than any of the Christian environments I found myself in as a kid. I am only a first year, so I have not been here long or had the typical first year experience, but I do not see my atheist friends as wolves in sheeps’ clothing trying to snatch me away from God. No one leaps for my throat when I say I am religious, as I was warned they would when I was a child. 

I thought that by coming to college I would be able to transform into a new person unaffected by my past, but I have realized my old church will always be a part of my story. The words of that guest preacher live inside my mind along with all the other voices I have been trying to silence for years. Even here at CC, I am not free from the influences of my former anti-science community. But these stories do not have to be a weakness. The point of this article is not to incite pity for me or shock at how I grew up. 

While my friends here love and accept me, my childhood sounds pretty weird compared to many of theirs. The ideology I was raised on was rather one-sided, so it is easy for me to say that I was sheltered. But if you have lived your whole life surrounded by the same ideas, you are sheltered in those ideas no matter how true or tolerant they are. So, I encourage anyone reading this who is unfamiliar with the anti-science movement and the community that surrounds it to take a moment to consider the mindset and experiences behind it. 

The shame of having once been a part of such a toxic culture sticks with me. It is still hard for me to wear short skirts. It is only within the past few months that I have mustered the courage to wear crop tops. Even when I am just with my family, I will find myself changing out of my single spaghetti strap top the moment I put it on because I feel ashamed. I feel like I’m being watched. I feel like I could be touched or grabbed or raped at any moment because of my outfit. Growing up, that is what I was taught. 

Even writing this article is difficult. I cannot just sit down and rant about my experiences because I have to protect myself and my family from losing our friends and being called heretics. It has been a painstaking process trying to choose which stories I can and cannot share in an attempt to both depict the reality of the brainwashed mindset so many science deniers have and to protect the people I care about. This process has made me realize how brainwashed I really was. It is still difficult for me to gauge which stories are worth sharing and which have rhetoric that is too harmful to repeat because I was desensitized to all of it for so long. 

People outside of anti-science communities, myself included, love asking how on earth anyone could believe COVID-19 is not real, or that the CDC is lying to us as part of some conspiracy against Donald Trump, or that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Growing up, I had a sense of pride in my victim-complex. Most of my community felt like we had uncovered some secret trick—a trick that proved we were the ones who had it all figured out, not the scientists. The people I know who claim evolution is not real are not trained in science, they are afraid of it. They deal with their fear by trying to convince themselves that they do not need science because they are somehow above it. People feel like they are irredeemable. Many cling to their outlandish beliefs because the chasm of shame and guilt they know they would have to cross in order to get to the other side feels too large. I am indescribably thankful for my family’s change of heart, so if I can help bring that to even just one more person, all of the uncomfortable conversations I have had will be worth it. 

There are still 12-year-old girls sitting on their floor and praying in the glow of the street lamp outside their window, not realizing that someday they will be able to stand up and leave. I thought I was all alone. I thought that no one would accept me if I changed my mind on issues I was convinced would determine my salvation. As I sat there staring at my street lamp, countless other kids of all kinds of political beliefs and religions were perhaps staring at theirs, wondering about the world and their place in it. We can all stare at the same thing and draw completely different conclusions. While the street lamp outside of my dorm room can trigger unpleasant memories, it reminds me of how far my family and I have come. It gives me hope for the friends we have left behind. For all of the pastors and teachers who seem unwilling to change their minds, there are a lot of people who someday just might. There are street lights everywhere.

As Denver Pulls Police out of Public Schools, Colorado Springs Increases Law Enforcement

Throughout the nation, public school districts enlist law enforcement personnel known as school resource officers (SROs) with the intent of warding off violence and protecting students during the school year. Though school resource officer programs have been around since the 1950s, the rise of school shootings in recent years has led to their increased presence. In cooperation with public school administrators, these officers perform “community-policing and criminal investigation functions” throughout the academic year. However, this year, in the wake of police killings of Black Americans around the country, some cities are rethinking the effectiveness of cops in schools. 

Two of those cities are in Colorado—and they have responded in very different ways. 

While Denver made the effort to remove SROs over the summer, the school boards in the more conservative city of Colorado Springs haven’t mentioned them at all in their recent meetings. 

In an interview via Facebook messenger, school board Vice President of Colorado Springs School District 11, Julie Ott, told me, “The District has no plans to discontinue its SRO contracts. At this time, there has been little public pressure to remove them.” 

In fact, District 11, which encompasses 33 elementary schools, nine middle schools, and four high schools, has plans to phase in five more SROs this year alone, as mandated by the 2017 Mill Levy Override Implementation Plan Budget. The budget is a bond measure (a question on the ballot often regarding the raising of property taxes to support local or district schools) that Coloradans voted for to support education within their community.

“The District is funding some of them through its 2017 Mill Levy Override; it could be argued that meeting the public's expectations for fulfilling that funding requires us to continue using SROs in our schools,” Ott added. 

The five new officers will be specifically assigned to the nine middle schools in the district, and each will receive $71,000 in salaries and benefits. 

Meanwhile, about an hour north of Colorado Springs, the Denver Public School District (DPS) plans to do the opposite. 

In June, the DPS Board of Education unanimously voted to phase out SROs from its public schools, reported the Denver Post. This was largely due to a push from the DPS Secretary At Large Tay Anderson, who, at 22, is the youngest member of the school board and an avid activist for the Black Lives Matter movement. 

In a formal resolution, DPS mapped out its plan for the 2020-2021 academic school year: 

“The action taken by the board directs us to reduce the number of SROs by 25% by the end of the calendar year, to end the SRO contract with the police department at the end of the next school year, and to convene a taskforce to develop the transition plan.”

“Our goal is to add full time nurses, counselors, and restorative practices,” said Anderson on social media. “Our schools will no longer be ground zero for the school-to-prison pipeline.” 

The school-to-prison pipeline, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, is a disturbing phenomenon happening across the country; public school students are funneled into the prison systems after years of in-school contact with law enforcement and experiences with suspensions or expulsions. 

For Anderson and DPS, the move to cut ties with the police department was important in preventing juvenile incarceration and protecting students from SRO arrests. 

According to The New York Times, several studies have shown SROs to criminalize young people for “ordinary misbehavior” that is common during adolescence, such as rowdiness, impulsivity, or aggressiveness. In a 2011 report by the Justice Policy Institute, research showed that students of color and those with disabilities tend to be more affected by school-mandated disciplinary policies. 

Yet, for some in Colorado Springs, SROs are not seen as a threat but as a necessary presence for security. 

“SROs are there for a [sic] resource . . . their job is not to punish,” said Sgt. Jason Newton of the Colorado Springs Police Department. 

Newton is a former Campus Resource Officer (CRO) for Colorado College in Colorado Springs. He said the relationship between students and trained officers in schools is “extremely strong.” 

Now working in community relations for the CSPD, Newton advocates on behalf of resource officers. This past October, Newton participated in a Colorado College virtual town hall meeting about policing protocols, which was hosted by the student-based group the Collective for Anti-Racism and Liberation. His prominent Blue Lives Matter flag in the background of his picture during the virtual meeting sparked rage from many students. The open display of the flag was seen by most as insensitive toward the recent attacks against the Black community and antagonistic towards efforts to combat police brutality and systemic racism. 

According to Newton, the SRO programs in the Springs focus on restorative justice and think of alternative modes of  discipline, understanding that “arrests are not productive.” District 11 currently requires all SROs to undergo a total of 40 hours of training to learn “crisis prevention, first aid, CPR, school law and juvenile law,” and Newton fears the removal of SROs in Colorado Springs’ public schools will lead to fewer conversations between students and law enforcement.

According to Newton, without SROs working with students on campus to address their misbehavior and “talk about it,” officers called to the scene may become “reactive” and resort to the easiest form of discipline: arrest. 

During a phone interview, Newton expressed how SROs are aware of child misconduct as an intrinsic part of “growing up.”  

“We’re not perfect. We’re human,” said Newton. “And we can turn a student’s bad moment into a learning moment.”

According to Newton, the CSPD is not quick to criminalize adolescent misbehavior. Instead, they try to counteract disorderly conduct with restorative measures, which could include facilitated conversations or collaboratively working with students to determine consequences. 

Yet, the arrest and suspension of 12-year-old Isaiah Elliot this past August tells a different story. 

On Aug. 27, Isaiah, a Black student who attended Colorado Springs’ Grand Mountain School at the time, was arrested by SROs in his own home for waving a toy Nerf gun during a class Zoom call. What was seemingly a harmless act quickly escalated into a five-day suspension and a “record” with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office. Or, as The Washington Post called it, “a mark on his school disciplinary paperwork saying he brought a ‘facsimile of a firearm to school’—even though he was in his own home doing a virtual class.”

Indeed, the punitive actions inflicted on Isaiah do not quite align with the “restorative practices” that Newton claimed the CSPD supported. 

Isaiah’s story and many others points to the ineffectiveness and harm of SROs in school settings. Although seen as defenders against school shootings and school violence by some, SROs have the abusive power to turn “academic punishment” into “criminal punishment,” as the advocacy organization Rethinking Schools points out

A review of minutes from school board meetings from August to October of three school districts in the Colorado Springs area reveals no discussion about SROs. They include Colorado Springs School District 11, Falcon School District 49, and Harrison School District 2. 

This lack of effort to incorporate policing into school district discussions can be disheartening for many students and family members like Dani Elliot, Isaiah’s mother, who told the Post in an interview that it was “irresponsible” for the school to send SROs to her house “given the frequency of police violence against Black people.” 

Around the nation, however, the debate over SROs rages on. 

School districts in cities such as Portland, Seattle, and Oakland are making the call to terminate their contracts with law enforcement and rid their schools of police officers. 

But, for Colorado Springs, as long as the district school board members choose to ignore the issue altogether,  the SROs—at least for now—are here to stay.


Not Your Typical Republican

Content warning: mentions of anti-Blackness, police murders, and violent war tactics. 


Some days Minh Pham* gets so fed up that she takes me on a tour of her father’s Facebook. My longtime best friend will FaceTime me in a fury, appalled by the latest link her father has shared. Scrolling through his feed with her is like wading through a flood of the most potent misinformation. Minh shows me a meme of President Obama and Hillary Clinton edited behind bars with the caption “Bunch of crooks and traitors” emblazoned above them. A few links down we find fake satellite images, supposedly showing China secretly burning bodies to cover up coronavirus deaths. Each post is like a glimpse into an alternate universe—a universe that is increasingly exasperating to Minh.

Minh’s father is a Vietnamese American Trump supporter, and he is not alone. Vietnamese Americans, in greater proportions than any other Asian American ethnic group, rally around Trump. In a September survey done by Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote), Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Data (AAPI Data), and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, 48% of Vietnamese Americans reported their plans to cast their ballot for Trump this fall, compared to 36% for Biden. No other Asian ethnicity displayed this trend.

I came across this pattern of political support in mid-July while interviewing Asian Americans for a podcast I host called “New Narratives.” The podcast explores the nuances of Asian America by highlighting community issues and experiences. I interviewed Minh about her dad for an episode focused on anti-Blackness in Asian American communities. In our conversation, Minh pointed me towards Việt Solidarity and Action Network, a progressive Vietnamese American Facebook group dedicated to unpacking, among other things, the widespread pro-Trump stances and anti-Blackness of the Vietnamese American community.

Most Vietnamese Americans are relatively new to this country. Many are second-generation families who arrived in the U.S. following one of two major historical events: the 1965 repeal of the 1924 Immigration Act, which had barred Asian immigrants for half a century, and the end of the war in Vietnam in 1975. 

Many Vietnamese Americans share the experience of being refugees from war. Today, compared to East Asian Americans, they have lower college-education rates and are more often low-income. Despite this, a majority of the Vietnamese American community does not support Joe Biden, the candidate who is trying to expand college access and increase the minimum wage. Instead, their candidate of choice is frequently Donald Trump—champion spewer of anti-immigrant and anti-Asian vitriol.

To understand why this is the case, we have to travel back in history to 1950 when the U.S. first began meddling in Vietnam. At the time, the U.S. was in the throes of the Red Scare and Vietnam was partitioned into two regions: the North, controlled by communists, and the South, controlled by corrupt anti-communist autocrats. 

Gradually, the U.S. began to send “advisors”—military personnel and troops that assisted the South Vietnamese army—to Vietnam to stop the spread of communism, which they saw as a threat that, if left unchecked, could consume all of Southeast Asia. By the end of 1963, there were 16,000 “advisors” in Vietnam, including soldiers who were already fighting on the ground and engaging in chemical warfare with Agent Orange. The U.S. war in Vietnam began in earnest in 1965 with escalation on President Johnson’s orders. The catalyst was an alleged attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, an event which has since been deemed untrue or, at the very least, exaggerated.

Due to the brutal violence and enormous loss of life for both soldiers and civilians, Americans and Vietnamese alike regard the war in Vietnam as a crime against humanity. The U.S. government was exceedingly deceptive throughout the war. They promised Americans the war was almost over while covertly orchestrating atrocities in Southeast Asia. As part of a CIA operation, bombs were dropped in Vietnam and Laos. The U.S. wanted to destroy foliage to improve visibility, so they doused North Vietnam with 20 million gallons of Agent Orange, a chemical they knew to be highly toxic. Today, children in Vietnam are still born with birth defects caused by exposure to this chemical. 

The U.S. approach to the Vietnam War is best characterized by its policy to fight a “war of attrition.” Rather than trying to simply claim territory, the U.S. aimed to kill as many of the “enemy” as possible, including civilians. By the end of the war, the U.S. had fired 26 times as much ammunition as was fired in World War II, and had dropped the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnam.

Over the span of the war, 2 million Vietnamese people were killed, 5.3 million were injured, and another 11 million became refugees. The war finally ended when Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to communist forces in 1975, and U.S. troops were airlifted out, leaving the Vietnamese to clean up the devastation. 

Refugees fled Vietnam in droves after the fall of Saigon. It was too dangerous for those who had allied themselves with the U.S. to remain behind. The journey to America was extremely treacherous; in the days following the fall of Saigon, hundreds of asylum seekers crammed onto fishing boats, bracing themselves against the tumult of the South China Sea. 

One refugee, Dr. Tuan Tran, described his escape from Vietnam in an interview with CBC conducted 41 years ago. He left covertly with his children, for fear that he would be apprehended by the secret police. His wife remained in Vietnam to provide an alibi for them. They traveled by bus, cargo truck, and taxi to a Chinese safe house where they hid for days until their final ride to the Americas arrived: a fishing boat. 

Dr. Tran described his first impression of the boat, saying, “If I knew this [before], I wouldn’t dare to venture like this at all.” The boat was 18 meters long with 200 people inside. The waves of the South China Sea had beaten menacingly against the hull until the third day of the journey, when they finally spilled over onto the deck, threatening the lives of everyone aboard. By the time the Tran family was able to reach Canada, they had narrowly escaped Thai pirate attacks and endured dismal conditions at Pulau Bidong, an infamous Malaysian refugee camp.

Over half a million people died in the process of fleeing to the U.S., many during the treacherous transoceanic voyage. But others were unable to even begin the journey. Nam Anh, a young Minneapolis-based activist who is originally from Ho Chi Minh City, knows her father tried to escape in a boat but was captured. I interviewed Nam Anh Nguyen for my podcast in July. She told me her father’s experiences during the war were traumatic. Not only was her grandfather killed, but after the end of the war, her father was put in a communist-run “re-education camp,” which was essentially a prison camp. Like many other South Vietnamese people who allied with the Americans, he was forced to perform grueling labor with meager rations.

Although there was a flood of Vietnamese refugees following the war, it’s important to note that not all Vietnamese people wanted to escape. Many stayed by choice and for good reason: Vietnam was where their land, family, language, and culture were—it was their home. Nonetheless, the aftermath of the war in Vietnam was painful and traumatic for both those who fled to the U.S. and those who remained. 

Minh thinks her father’s current political beliefs are connected to his experience as a refugee. In his early twenties, Minh’s father came to the U.S. after his own father was released from a prison camp and could join him. Due to his experiences in Vietnam during and after the war, her father still holds a deep disdain for communism—both abroad and exemplified by some American politicians who he perceives as “communist.” When Minh graduated from high school, she was chosen to carry the Vietnamese flag to the stage at the beginning of the ceremony. She wanted to represent the country her family had come from and the arduous journey they had undertaken for her to graduate high school in America. Her father, however, was not pleased. He told her, “You shouldn’t be carrying that flag, that’s the communist flag.”

Moments like that help Minh see the tie between her father’s support for Trump and his stance on communism. She said that he always tells her, “Minh, you don’t understand. You didn’t grow up like I did. Trump is what is saving our country from becoming a communist country.” 

Minh’s father grew up poor in Vietnam in the throes of the U.S. war. She believes that his fear of war and hatred for communism drives him to support politicians that ridicule communists, promise to build impermeable borders, and create a strong military to protect Americans. Minh told me, “I don’t even know if he could say an actual policy Trump has implemented that benefits us, except that Trump hates communism and China. But that’s enough for my dad.”

Moreover, Minh has noticed a change in her father since he became an avid Trump supporter. “Trump has definitely helped him feel more American,” she said. Pre-Trump, her father would re-share anti-communist news on Facebook disparaging Vietnam, which Minh thinks helped him feel better about abandoning his communist home country for “democratic” America. However, since Trump’s ascent to the presidency, Minh’s father finally feels seen in America. While he used to criticize Vietnam on Facebook in order to justify his immigration to the U.S., he now posts about Trump’s vision for America. Trump legitimizes the prejudice and resentment Minh’s father holds against communists and, subsequently, China. Ultimately, Trump makes her father feel like someone in political power is finally listening to him and reflecting his beliefs.

Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric doesn’t shake her father’s devotion. In 2018, Trump started to deport Vietnamese refugees who had previously been protected. Minh thought that, surely, her father would see this move as a betrayal. But to her dismay, her father supported the deportations. He saw himself as different from those refugees. “He said, ‘I’m a citizen. They can’t deport me. I work hard, unlike other Vietnamese people,’” Minh told me.

Minh tells me that much of the information her father consumes is from a pro-Trump, anti-comminist podcast that is in Vietnamese, so she is unsure of the name. He spends much of the day at work listening to episodes full of misinformation. Sometimes he shares snippets of the podcast with her, hoping she’ll agree. Minh remembers arguing with him over the summer about whether or not Democrats and China are teaming up to blame the COVID-19 pandemic on Trump. At this point, Minh believes he’s too ingrained in his beliefs to change. “If [he] spends eight hours a day listening to this stuff, I don’t know how to spend an hour telling him that what he’s listening to is not true or is misleading,” Minh said.

Similar to Minh, Nam Anh told me that fake news has skewed the political beliefs of her father and some extended family members living in Vietnam, all of whom are Trump supporters. This has strained her relationship with her father considerably. Nam Anh explained the last time she tried to confront him about Trump, saying, “He was sending fake news to our family group chat. It got heated, and he left the group chat.” She hopes that one day she’ll be able to have a conversation with him, but, for now, there is still too much tension.

Unlike Nam Anh, Minh told me she’s never felt able to approach her father about his political beliefs. Their relationship is tenuous, partly because Minh feels like his beliefs directly harm her. “A lot of things Trump does can directly impact me and my mom and my sisters. It’s horrible. Especially being women and being poor. Like, what has Trump done to actually help us?”

Minh’s sisters and half-sisters have all tried talking to their father, but it always ends in a stalemate. “You have six kids who all try to talk about it with you, but you just think you’re so right and [you] can never change,” she said, her exasperation clear. Minh believes confronting him isn’t worth it. She feels like the conversation would damage their relationship beyond repair, putting unnecessary strain on her mother and sisters. She recently unfriended him on Facebook to avoid the deluge of fake news reposts, hoping to avoid future arguments with him.

Divisive clashes with Trump-supporting family members took on a new urgency this summer, following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, and too many other Black Americans. Both Minh and Nam Anh see anti-Blackness in Vietnamese and Vietnamese American communities as connected to their support for Trump. Shortly after protests in Minneapolis began, Minh remembers her father sending her a fake video of protesters setting a woman on fire. “He was like, ‘You see, this is what protesting does!’” Minh said. 

She thinks that Trump—with the swirling cloud of misinformation and hate speech that he spews—reinforces and legitimizes her father’s racist beliefs because they’re coming from the president’s mouth. By perpetuating anti-Blackness, Minh’s father is placing himself on a hierarchy above Black people. Minh believes he does this for the same reason he thinks of himself as superior to other immigrants, even other Vietnamese refugees. “It’s something he does in order to feel like [he] belongs in America.”  

The irony is not lost on me. America, forever the “freedom crusader,” rushed into Southeast Asia, guns blazing, to fight democracy’s greatest foe: communism. The resultant war created a refugee crisis spanning all of Southeast Asia. Vietnamese people, along with Hmong, Lao, Cambodian people, and others, were forced to leave their homes because of the war. The trauma this caused resulted in many Vietnamese being staunchly anti-communist. And who, today, is our anti-communist crusader? None other than the man prompting scholars to ask whether our democracy will die an explosive death.

Many young Vietnamese Americans are working hard to combat their community’s anti-Black and pro-Trump tendencies, but it’s difficult. People still have such visceral reactions to communism, even among more progressive Vietnamese Americans. Nam Anh witnessed one of these fiery debates in a progressive Vietnamese Facebook group she’s in. “The founder of the Black Lives Matter movement came out as a Marxist and there were so many heated arguments about it,” she said. “People were like, ‘Why can’t we just support Black people but still be anti-communist?’”

This issue becomes a nearly impossible balance to strike for young progressive Vietnamese Americans. They must combat their family’s political ideologies and anti-Blackness while also validating and honoring their experiences with war and trauma. In this situation, the path forward can’t be about cancel culture or abandoning people who hold beliefs you find despicable. Instead, political discussions become the ultimate exercise in patience and empathy. 

I struggle with this as an Asian American woman. I see myself and my community as targets of Trump’s racist rhetoric, and I am sometimes embarrassed by those in the Asian American community who support him. It is so easy for me to condemn every Trump supporter because the ideologies Trump stands for are so problematic, if not inherently evil. It’s difficult to see his supporters as separate from those stances, especially when they often tend to embody and act upon them. But canceling all Trump supporters creates more division, whereas it is uniting empathy that this country needs. Vietnamese Americans have had to survive the brutality of American imperialism, which is not a unique experience in Asian American or American immigrant communities more broadly. Progressives frustrated by Black, Indigineous, and people of color (BIPOC) voters who are conservative-leaning must understand what they have endured. Hearing their struggles is the only way to grow together, away from fear and hate.

When we talk about voting blocs, we easily slip into a tendency of expecting people to hold certain political ideologies based on the way they are racialized. To be honest, there is a part of me that wants to believe today’s Republican Party is synonymous with white voters and that the Democratic Party is everyone else. Though Trump’s supporters are overwhelmingly white, the shock of Florida’s stubborn redness in the 2020 election, aided by Cuban American support, should be evidence enough that this is not the case. Politics are shaped by our life experiences, and some Trump supporters were brought to the movement through traumatic experiences I can barely fathom. They discovered Trump out of darkness. Perhaps Trump is comforting because they fear the past, they long for a sense of belonging, and sometimes, because they have swallowed the idea of the American Dream whole. 


*Name changed for privacy.

In This House We Believe

I’ve been going on little walks since freshman year. I might be gone for 10 minutes or an hour because I’m never actually going anywhere. I’ll wander aimlessly through the Old North End listening to half a podcast, turning back towards campus when I get hungry or bored. My little walks have been a comfort, a coping mechanism, a form of escape that I have always clung to. My dependency has been exacerbated by the pandemic. The landscape hasn’t changed much in the past couple of years, except for this fall when yard signs suddenly became prolific. 

Make America Great Again signs, which feel old. Biden signs. Biden flags, which feel new. Yards with signs imploring passersby to vote one way or another on a state proposition, signs explaining local propositions. Lawns littered with signs for down-ballot candidates, sometimes including every single seat up for election, right down to county commissioner. I’m a senior Political Science major, and I’m still not quite sure what they do and why we vote for them. 

There are signs that emphasize the slog this year has been: Fauci 2020, Any Functioning Adult for 2020, Nobody, Everybody Sucks, We’re Screwed 2020. These I find flippant, absurd. Plenty of people thought Grab Him by the Ballot was clever enough to earn a place on their lawns. There’s a couple of Byedon signs — a riff on the name Biden that is so much of a stretch I had to say it aloud a few times to figure out what it means.

One enormous house on a corner, with a fence so tall it would obstruct any potential yard signage, flies a Trump flag from a twenty-foot pole. 

Driving home from King Soopers, I saw a slew of anti-abortion signs along a stretch of busy road that backed into brush. Only when I tried to figure out how I could take them down (Sprinting across the street during a lull in traffic? Pulled over with hazards on? In the middle of the night?) did I realize how much effort it must have been to put them there in the first place.

Yard signs advertising political candidates have been around since the 1800s — John Quincy Adams was the first presidential candidate to use them for an election. They boost name recognition and can be a worthwhile fundraising tool but aren’t all that effective at swaying results. A 2015 study found that yard signs could (at most) give candidates a 1.7 percentage point boost. In qualitative terms: not a very big one. In a presidential election, it’s highly unlikely that a yard sign (clever, or not, or trying to be) would swing an observant pedestrian’s vote. But with an election as fraught as 2020’s, it’s not surprising that folks are taking to their lawns. What is surprising is the variety of signs I saw walking around the Old North End.  

Most neighborhoods in cities tend to be politically segregated. Much of this has to do with forced racial segregation, the product of decades of racist housing policies. But this alone cannot account for partisanship along neighborhood lines: there is evidence that people’s lifestyle preferences — such as employment, school choice, and recreation — affect where people choose, if they have a choice, to live. 

I grew up in Washington, D.C., a city that overwhelmingly fits these trends. Biden easily won the city’s three (granted, measly and inconsequential) electoral votes by 92%. I knew approximately zero vocal Republicans growing up, but that’s not to say that they didn’t exist. The point is, if you are conservative in D.C., you likely aren’t going to advertise it. Certainly not on your front lawn. 

D.C. is also one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the country. Since 2000, more than 20,000 people have been forced to move from their neighborhoods due to rising property taxes and rent. Public funds have been poured into “revitalization” efforts, mostly commercial and residential real estate developments, across the city. At the same time, little has been done to address the high rates of displacement, a direct result of these initiatives. The city government, cozy with developers, continues to fail to provide adequate and affordable housing for many of D.C.’s long term residents.  

The neighborhood I grew up in has been majority white for decades, ever since the federal government displaced the then-integrated community to redevelop the land in 1926, less than a hundred years ago. 

Exclusionary housing policies have endured. In 2017, a city proposal to build transitional housing in the area was met with significant backlash. The building was eventually opened in 2020, after negotiation with existing community members placed increasing restrictions on the structure and its residents. 

This isn’t unique to D.C.; systemic housing inequality has shaped how and where people live across the country since its founding. Today this is often fueled by a largely white, wealthy antagonism towards affordable housing. And while the majority of city-dwellers tend to be liberal, the “Not In My Backyard” phenomenon persists. 

In every way, my neighborhood in D.C. is visibly more uniform than the Old North End. Each street is dizzyingly similar, each house a red brick colonial, most yards featuring signs with liberal affirmations that are some spin on the same message: All Are Welcome Here.

Given the history of the neighborhood and its current demographics, I find these signs to be one of  the laziest statements a person could make. You don’t need a lot of time or energy, you just kind of stick it where you want. As a form of performative allyship, it’s about as impermanent as you can get. Signs leave no lasting trace: a manicured lawn will be just as manicured when the signs have been removed. At least bumper stickers show more resolve — then you have to contend with scratched paint. 

Even when signs have been stuck in the ground, they don’t really seem to mean anything. Sure, you can say anything. Yard signs now aren’t just limited to candidates or ballot measures. Allyship signs allow people to publicly profess their values, cement allegiances, declare what they claim to think and feel. These have ostensibly nothing to do with voting (which is okay!),  but there’s nothing tangible about these signs. Okay, I see that your lawn ornament states in a confusing array of fonts: Black Lives Matter Women’s Rights are Human Rights No Human is Illegal Science is Real Love is Love Kindness is Everything. But as statements smushed together on a piece of reinforced cardboard, it just seems like a self-aggrandizing move to prove you have surpassed the lowest bar in the world: you believe in human rights. 

This statement seems especially performative when all of your neighbors are doing it too, when it’s the neighborhood norm, the unspoken status quo. In my neighborhood in D.C., yard signs professing allyship stand in stark contrast to the vocal hostility to adding affordable housing in the neighborhood, despite the high need across the city.  It’s like using a leaf blower to move debris off your lawn into the street. It sure makes your yard look nice, but you’re ultimately just contributing to a mess that someone else has to clean up. 

So what does it mean to put a sign proclaiming that iN tHiS HoUsE wE BeLiEvE that you don’t care where your neighbor comes from or love <3 wins? 

I think it does mean more when your neighbors aren’t all on the same page. In the Old North End, some sign placements seem more intentional — reactionary, even. 

One yard offers a homemade sign that reads: My Biden Sign Was Stolen But My Vote Wasn’t.

A house with a Pride flag draped across its front sits opposite one flying a MAGA flag, in an emblematic show-down. 

There are still full yards that say very little. There’s Better Together, which makes no sense to me since, in this particular moment, we should all be taking steps to be apart. There’s a house with a BLM sign placed right next to a CSPD sign, which feels the same to me as putting no signs up at all, since the statements cancel each other out. 

On one block, every single house has gotten in on the game. A sign in support of the CSPD is flanked by a Black Lives Matter sign next door. The alternating allegiances continue with every other house, where CSPD signs mingle with those that have more liberal commitments. The whole thing is comically tit for tat. The house at the end of the block had a yard sign asking dogs to Please Not Shit Here, as if they wanted to get in on the game but didn’t want to make too strong of a statement. Apolitical enough to get invited to all the potlucks.

In the Old North End, certain signs have been cropping up that seem to have more depth. Signs that all start with “I am ready” and continue with statements like “to engage in the work to uproot, dismantle, and end racism” or “ to tell the truth and hear the truth.” These signs are made by Truth and Conciliation, a Colorado Springs organization committed to dismantling systemic racism. These signs stuck out to me because the language is active and personal, when so many other slogans sound passive and removed. I thought that folks who chose these signs would be willing to talk to me, so I left notes at their houses. Only one person got back to me, an older white man who didn’t want his name to be published, and we spoke over the phone. His sign read: I am ready … To transform our nation for all our relations and generations to come.

I told him I was interested in the assortment of signs in the neighborhood and what a stark contrast it was from my own back home in D.C. I wondered if he had put his signs up because of this variety. “Our signs aren’t up favorably or antagonistically,” he said, “it’s just sort of our statement. We tend to be private people. We are in our mid-sixties and this is the first year we’ve had a sign up in 40 years of marriage.” 

So why this particular sign? “In part because of the election and because of Black Lives Matter, I don’t want to call it a movement, but an awareness that, to these white eyes, are a bit more evident. That’s not the word I want to use, but I’m not sure. We’ve both been in the military and we believe in protecting all Americans. Was it [the sign] a promise to myself? I think so. We’ve talked more with neighbors and family. Contributed way more financially and wrote more to elected officials. We need to do a lot more than we’ve been doing. We work full time, so it’s difficult to contribute time.” 

On whether he would take the signs down after the election: “None of our signs are affiliated with a political party. They will come down when they are tattered and worn out. To be replaced with what, I’m not quite sure.”

I got to hear about this particular man’s intent, and some of it surprised me. I’ve spent this whole time belabouring the timidity of yard signs, but here is someone for whom putting up a yard sign took a lot. Some of the things he said reminded me of a lot of the people I grew up with in D.C., who contribute financially to liberal causes and express their tolerance publicly on their lawns, but whose work ends there. An article I’ve been citing throughout this piece is entitled “Liberal Guilt is Official’s Latest Tool to Build More Affordable Housing in D.C.’s Wealthiest Ward.” 

This declaration (which almost reads like a headline from The Onion), might signify a possibility—and starkly highlight the need—for more tangible change. This man knew that he had been falling short, a sentiment I think many white liberals would be quick to agree with. If yard signs do indicate the motivation to do something more tangible, how can that energy be appropriately leveraged towards action?

Big Food, Big Problems

The food industry can be difficult to define, as it includes a diverse group of businesses involved in the production, preparation, packaging, distribution and sales that supply food to the global population. When you go into a supermarket, you see all kinds of products, labels, and brands—you have unlimited choices. But the source of this array is less transparent than it might seem.

Many people are not aware that most of these products fall under the huge umbrella of just a few corporations. What do Deer Park, Smarties, Toll House, Coffee-Mate, Hot Pockets, Lean Cuisine, Sweet Earth Foods, Drumsticks, Haagen-Dazs, and even Purina pet food all have in common? That’s right: they’re all owned by Nestle. Nestle is the largest food company in the world, owning over 2000 brands. While the consumer is given the illusion of choice, just a few companies dominate the production and sales of food, often forcing smaller brands to fail. These companies frequently abuse the immense power they wield, too often unbeknownst to the public. The term for this concept of total domination by a few large companies is Big Food. 

Big Food is the next Big Tobacco. The tobacco industry had a playbook, which included denying scientific findings, casting doubt on claims that hurt their image, and connecting their products to idealistic American values when all else failed. The food industry uses these same strategies. 

In order for the playbook to be effective, an industry must have an established policy monopoly, which means they control political conversations that impact the success of their sales and maintain the positive image of their policy. David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), explained

“When we launched our investigation of tobacco at the Food and Drug Administration, we had no idea of the power wielded by the tobacco companies. But we soon learned why the tobacco industry was for decades considered untouchable. Tobacco employed some of the most prestigious law firms in the country and commanded the allegiance of a significant section of the Congress. It also had access to the services of widely admired public figures ranging from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to Senator Howard Baker.” 

Like the tobacco industry, Big Food is able to exert tremendous influence, as David Kessler made clear in the same report. One example was the beef industry’s fight against the FDA’s daily calorie intake recommendation. Fewer calories mean consumers are buying less food, which means less money going into the beef industry. Therefore, they wished to exceed this limit and refused to label fat contents on their products. Kessler wrote: 

“From the White House, the pressure [from beef industry executives] moved down to the Office of Management and Budget, which had the power to block our regulations. As required, we had submitted draft after draft of the final rule to OMB and often had it returned to us with industry-sought changes. More than once, OMB's wording had been taken almost verbatim from food industry comments we had already carefully considered.” 

Big Food, however, is less cohesive than Big Tobacco: rather than having a single main product, food involves thousands of products produced by thousands of companies. Despite this, the industry is still politically powerful and organized in intentional ways. Many companies own multiple chains. Pepsi-Co owns Frito and Lays; Yum! owns Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, and more. In terms of the players involved, tobacco and food are not as distant as they initially appear. For example, until recently, the companies that manufactured Marlboro and Virginia Slims cigarettes were a part of the same corporation as Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Kool-Aid. RJR Nabisco owned the companies that made both Camel cigarettes and Chips Ahoy! Cookies. Although many food companies have split from tobacco companies, the two industries still rely on alarmingly similar strategies. 

Many major companies in the food industry are able to exert influence over policy, as they are represented by lawyers, lobbyists, and trade organizers. As a result, their power often extends into surprising and troubling places. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should be promoting healthy eating, their main objective is to bolster American agriculture by selling more food. This goal generally prevails over public health when the two conflict. 

Leaders in both the USDA and other government departments are frequently recruited from food industries and then return to businesses like lobbying firms after working for the government, a cycle known as the revolving door. Tommy Thompson was the secretary of the USDA and is now a partner with Akin Gump, a law firm that has defended both tobacco and food companies. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) claims to be a “source for science-based food and nutrition information.” They create Nutrition Fact Sheets that appear on their website to provide the public with nutritional advice. However, food industry sponsors pay AND $20,000 per fact sheet and participate in writing the documents. Some of the Fact Sheets that have been included on their website include “What's a Mom to Do: Healthy Eating Tips for Families” (sponsored by Wendy's), “Lamb: The Essence of Nutrient Rich Flavor” (sponsored by the Tri-Lamb Group), “Cocoa and Chocolate: Sweet News” (sponsored by the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition), “Eggs: A Good Choice for Moms-to-Be” (sponsored by the Egg Nutrition Center), “Adult Beverage Consumption: Making Responsible Drinking Choices” (in connection with the Distilled Spirits Council) and “The Benefits of Chewing Gum” (sponsored by the Wrigley Science Institute). Unsurprisingly, their longest-running sponsor is the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The food industry is very similar to the tobacco industry, as it is also made up of a select few companies who have a lot of power and who choose to ignore human health and even lie to the public for profit. 

Once the corporation is able to exert power over the government and influence public perception, they have successfully established a policy monopoly. Not only have they diminished consumer choice and controlled supply, but they are also able to maintain the dominant image of their product despite controversy. In order to maintain this image, corporations deny scientific evidence that is against their industry’s products. Denial was the first tactic employed by the tobacco industry after the Surgeon General declared that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer in 1964. At the release of the health risks associated with foods that Americans consume, the food industry also clings to this strategy.

The World Health Organization (WHO) released a report classifying processed meat as a Group 1 human carcinogen, which places it in the same category as tobacco. Red meat was categorized in the next worst category as a Group 2 carcinogen. The North American Meat Institute (NAMI) replied that this finding “defies common sense” and cited a list of studies showing no correlation between meat and cancer, many of which were conducted by the meat industry. They use the convoluted argument that essentially everything causes cancer, even saying: 

“Don’t breathe air (Class I carcinogen), sit near a sun-filled window (Class I), apply aloe vera (Class 2B) if you get a sunburn, drink wine or coffee (Class I and Class 2B), or eat grilled food (Class 2A). And if you are a hairdresser or do shift work (both Class 2A), you should seek a new career.

They end by vaguely stating that a balanced diet is the answer, the specifics of which are left up to the interpretation of the reader. The WHO, in contrast, looked at over 800 studies, and the American Institute for Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund International reached the same conclusion after reviewing 7,000 studies. Despite the clear scientific consensus, the industry denied the science immediately, maintaining control over their public image.

The same process of denial also occurred with sugar. In 2003, the WHO released a draft outlining a global strategy to address public health, which recommended reducing sugar intake. In response, the United States Department of Health and Human Services, under pressure from the sugar industry, sent a 28-page report to the WHO criticizing the science and claiming that there are no “good” or “bad” foods. They also expressed concern for “the hard-working sugar growers and their families,” which is ironic from an industry that exploits child labor, physically and mentally overloads workers, and exposes them to pollutants and dangerous working conditions. The president of the Sugar Association even wrote a letter to the WHO, threatening to use “every avenue possible to expose the dubious nature” of the report, “including asking Congressional appropriators to challenge future funding of the U.S.’s $406 million contributions … to the WHO.” 

In addition to denying scientific evidence against them, the big industry playbook includes casting doubt among the public about previous research by conducting their own privately funded research. After the Surgeon General condemned smoking, an executive at Brown & Williamson (which is owned by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company) said in a memo, “Doubt is our product” when referring to their proposals for the next steps of the tobacco industry’s public relations

Despite the scientific evidence that a whole-foods and plant-based diet is superior for human nutrition and longevity, the food industry has been extremely successful in confusing the public. Recently, the news was filled with headlines claiming that football players who drank chocolate milk regularly showed superior cognition after a concussion. This study was completely false and funded by the dairy industry. A meta-analysis on dietary cholesterol cited by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) asserted that cholesterol was “no longer a nutrient of concern.” However, 92% of the studies analyzed were funded by the egg industry, which also funds institutions who have members serving on the committee. The American Beverage Association, as well as Coca-Cola executive Katie Bayne, have adamantly claimed that there is no scientific evidence that connects sugar-sweetened beverages to obesity. All of this sounds dangerously similar to tobacco’s “deny, deny, deny” tactic. Readers would have to look past the headlines to investigate if there is a conflict of interest, so these erroneous studies and statements are often extremely effective at quelling health concerns, and thus, the general public continues to buy products strongly associated with health risks. 

Once the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly stacked against the industry, they will often shift their argument to the issues of freedom and individualism. Tobacco executives utilized this strategy by asking: “What will they try to take next?” This tactic turns attention from concrete science to the abstract idea of freedom. When confronted with the health risks of McDonald’s food, the CEO remarked, “All of us have to make personal choices.” This argument has been used to block legislation; Congressman Ric Keller supported banning lawsuits against fast-food restaurants that claim health damages. He argued: “We’ve got to get back to those old-fashioned principles of personal responsibility, of common sense, and get away from this new culture where everybody plays the victim and blames other people for their problems.”

These statements reflect the larger corporate strategy focused on shifting the responsibility from the industries who make and market these products to the consumers who purchase them. They blatantly ignore the extent to which industries manipulate customers, especially vulnerable populations. Across the United States, healthy food is often expensive or unavailable in supermarkets in urban neighborhoods of low socioeconomic status. Living in these food deserts leaves people little choice but to consume processed foods, which are often of low nutrient-density. Further, when comparing communities with similar poverty rates, Black and Hispanic neighborhoods have fewer grocery stores than white neighborhoods. This inequality is no mistake; the food industry uses targeted marketing, government subsidies, and federal food policy to limit the options of these already vulnerable populations

Children are another targeted population since they are susceptible to persuasion and are great candidates for becoming lifelong consumers. The food industry employs a number of tactics to heavily advertise unhealthy foods to children, including television advertising, in-school marketing, product placements, kids clubs, the internet, toys and products with brand logos, and youth-targeted promotions. These tactics begin when they are toddlers, in order to hook them on certain brands and influence purchasing behavior. At this age, children have no understanding of the persuasive intent behind advertising. Studies have shown that before ages seven or eight, children tend to view advertising as fun, unbiased information. Even into adolescence, when they understand the purpose of advertisements, teenagers are especially susceptible to their messages. The industry exploits children’s inability to evaluate advertising, only focusing on potential profits. They are constantly shown Happy Meals, sugary cereal, and candy, often accompanied by cartoon characters and prizes. Similarly, the cartoon animal Joe Camel was used to attract children to cigarettes. Under pressure from the State Attorney General, Joe Camel was retired in 1997, but the food industry continues to use this strategy today. 

Today, we know the truth about tobacco, and the industry has been punished. Through the Master Settlement Agreement, tobacco companies are indefinitely required to pay state governments for smoking-related illnesses in exchange for not being sued by state and local governments. Also included in this agreement were restrictions on tobacco advertising, closure of the tobacco industry’s trade association, and increased funding for anti-smoking campaigns. However, it took 50 years and the loss of countless American lives for this shift to occur. Currently, diseases linked to unhealthy diets—such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes—are the leading causes of death in the United States. The food industry has effectively established a policy monopoly and are manipulating the public using the same playbook at the cost of public health. Ultimately, they are profiting off of the idea of freedom of choice when, in reality, consumers have none. 

Eschatology

For as long as humans walked the Earth, we had watched over them. We shaped them in what was once our image and they strengthened us with their desperate reliance on a higher power, on beings that could be thanked for their fortunes and blamed for their misgivings. They had brought gifts to my temples and praised me for temperate winters, cursed me for summer droughts. Apollo, they begged, have mercy. Grapes withered on stalks and wine turned sour. Famine ravaged their countrysides, and they pleaded for healing, for forgiveness. They were dependent on us and we enjoyed it. We watched them grow together, grow apart, grow oppressive, and then grow unforgiving. They had to break eventually, as we had. In hindsight, I suppose modeling the human race after us was dooming them to repeat our mistakes. The world as they know it ends gradually, and then all at once.

We’d seen it coming for a while. Elections and protests and wars could only accomplish so much before the human race finally snapped. It started with the United States, with the riots and the looting and the burning of government buildings, only this time the people were angrier than they had ever been. Angrier and more exhausted and armed to the teeth with indignation and nothing left to lose. The tide spread: to Asia, to most of Europe, to South and Central America, and on and on until governments were collapsed at best, utterly demolished at worst. The people turned against each other, as history dictates they do. And so, the Last War began. 

Warfare looked different around the world, shaped by whatever was left of the forests or the plains or the mountains. Here in the Anzac battlegrounds of Turkey, where the coasts were once drenched in Greek and Trojan blood and my temples lay buried beneath miles of sand, the humans laid out their automatic weapons and drove tent spokes deep into the earth. They dug trenches, haphazardly and with no regard for the sanctity of the land. The trenches were deep and wide, thousands of feet of stark, violent slashes reaching across the coast. They were meant as tactical bases or mass graves—whichever necessity arose first. This land was no stranger to battle; we’d spent ten long years here before Troy finally fell, my family at odds with each other and the humans even moreso. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that this would have a certain kind of finality on a scale we had never witnessed before.

Humanity had never been kind to itself. First came the conquering and re-conquering of the Mediterranean. Then the crusades. The genocides. The colonization. Slavery. The civil and world wars. Some thought the latter would be the catalyst. I’d heard others place bets on it being the internment camps. Artemis was banking on the gradual loss of autonomy and freedom. By the time humanity had invented nuclear weapons, we’d become morbidly fascinated.

I remembered the silence as my cousins and I stood by and watched the bomb drop on Hiroshima. We had stopped betting by then.

            “They’re so much more … resolute than before,” said one, resigned and bitter. “They’ll tear each other apart.”

            Another had muttered darkly, “This is cruelty, not resoluteness.”

            Even Ares had grimaced at the mushroom cloud as it hovered above the city. A god of war and yet even he had carried a weight in the corner of his eyes for a long while afterward. It was a stark reminder of the brilliant cruelty that could be exhibited by people who seemed so very small.

At the beginning of the end, Artemis had come to my side as I sat watching the Hellenic Parliament burn. “What do you make of all this?”

It had taken me a while to respond. “I’m not sure yet.”

“Athena says it’s the beginning of the end.”

I had a feeling she was right. There was a deep-seated wrongness in the pit of my stomach, a feeling that humankind had passed a critical precipice from which there was no hope of return. “Hm.”

There were a few moments of quiet; the only sounds to be heard were the crackling of the flames licking out the windows of the government building and a far-off alarm ringing tinnily. Uselessly. Then my sister said, “The president of Brazil is dead.”

Good was my first thought. Then—oh. “Athena is right, then.”

Artemis sighed. “She usually is.”

“Does father know?”

“They all do.”

Confused, I look over at her. “All?”

“Everyone. Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, the Americas.” My sister possessed the natural stillness of a hunter, yet I could tell how carefully she was holding herself when she said, “They think this is it.”

“And what do you think?”

The flames reflected in her eyes as she watched the fire spread. “I think it’s about time.”

In the Beginning, the first wars were primal battles between chaos and peace. We’d torn each other apart, but we couldn’t die, and in that purgatorial void of the After, we’d created humans as a source of entertainment. We gave them bodies shaped like ours and watched, bemused, as they stumbled around blindly in the dark. Time went on and they figured out fire, then agriculture, and we blessed them and cursed them as we saw fit. We’d enjoyed being needed and felt their dependence on us was both appropriate and necessary. For a long while, we’d been enamored by humanity. They had been philosophical. Adventurous. Inquisitive. They had thirsted for knowledge, and as somewhat omniscient beings, we couldn’t help but admire the lengths to which they had been willing to go to quench that thirst. And then they started getting greedy. They started hoarding wealth and power and the knowledge they’d worked so hard to attain. They made incredible advancements and slaughtered millions on a scale we would never have been able to imagine.

Beneath the searing heat of the sun at the end of the world, I watched them draw their lines in the sand and divide their space into territories. The Turkish flag was bright red. Against the cool blues of the ocean, it was a jarring reminder of what this battleground used to be. The canvas tents did their best to deflect the worst of the sun’s rays, but I knew they didn’t do much. The heat, the low buzz of terror, and the stench of men permeated the air around us. It was not so different from Troy after all.

In reminiscing, I lost focus of my surroundings and suddenly found that I wasn’t alone. Huitzilopochtli stood next to me, hands folded solemnly behind his back as he surveyed the flurry of activity on the beaches before us. The humans continued to set up their camps, their soldiers, and their weapons of mass destruction while we walked amongst them, undetected. 

“Is this it, then?” he asked. “Does it end now?”

It struck me that finally, after millennia of human observation, we might get to escape the burdens of divinity and godhood we’d placed upon ourselves. “I suppose so.”

He exhaled, long and slow. “Finally.”

Huitzilopochtli ventured over from Central America from time to time. He said he wanted to keep tabs on how warfare differed across the planet, but I thought that he didn’t want to witness his people destroy themselves. As much as he was their war god, he was also their sun, and I cannot imagine how that paradox tore him apart. I couldn’t fault him for it. As anticipated as this had been, it still caused a deep ache in my chest. 

We watched a truck rumble past, filled nearly to bursting with automatic weapons and ammunition. It kicked up sand in its wake, and the humans covered their faces and coughed. 

“They’ve fallen far.” Huitzilopochtli shook his head. “War used to be honorable.”

“Did it?”

He turned away from me, gazing out at the miles of flags and tents and bustling movement. “Men used to stare into the eyes of their enemies as they killed them on the battlefield. Watching the spark of life drain from your opponent’s face haunts the soul.” I hummed in acknowledgment. Huitzilopochtli continued, “They don’t get close enough to do that anymore.”

“It must be easier now,” I mused, “to have such a distance between themselves and the destruction they cause.”

“I believe killing a man takes a toll on the mind,” said Huitzilopochtli. “No matter how far away they are when they do it. I imagine their capacity for violence has not necessarily grown at all.”

Interesting. “How so?”

Huitzilopochtli looked at me carefully. “Are you forgetting the first wars? Achilles alone tore apart an army and the Greeks razed your precious Troy in turn. The Mongols held far too much power, as did Napoleon and Alexander and the armies they commanded.”

“I remember Achilles well,” I said dryly. “And all that happened here in Troy. I’m asking if you truly believe the humans to be only as violent as they were millennia ago.”

There was a weighted sadness in his voice when he said, “Seventy million innocent people have been killed in the name of ideology. They have not grown to be more hateful; they are simply able to execute their hatred on a scale we had never thought to imagine. Had they been able to harness poisonous gasses and nuclear warfare in ancient times, I am certain they would have done so.” He sighed. “Now, it will be their undoing.”

Thousands of years ago this sand was soaked with blood, but as I watched the camps it sat warm and golden, shifting steadily beneath their boots. The tide lapped at the shore, the gentle crash of the waves constantly at odds with the clamor of war preparations around me. There was poetry in my presence on the shores of Anatolia where my beloved Troy fell to the Greeks. Thousands of years later, I had returned, primed to watch just one of the many final battles humanity was about to wage.

The days blurred. The war preparations were always the most boring part; when my sister had stalled the Greeks for months at Aulis, I had nearly switched sides just to spite her. My love for planning had not grown in the many wars since. I wandered the tents aimlessly, sometimes venturing to China or Brazil to see how other continents were faring, but for the most part, my feet favored the shores of Anatolia. I could feel the ancient bones of Troy far, far beneath the sand and dirt. I knew these coastlines, their dips and crags as familiar to me as my father’s voice. I remembered the way screams echoed off the rocks and throughout the landscape, how rivers ran red and heat turned deadly, how there was no divinity to be found in the piles of bodies burned on the pyres.

Humans truly were doomed to repeat our mistakes.

Few gods bothered to venture beyond their own domains to witness the early stages of humanity’s destruction. One in particular surprised me—she was the only one of her kind to travel to the shores of Anatolia where I waited. None of the other creation goddesses had wanted to bear witness to the destruction of their children.

“You’re wasting your time,” said Nuwa. “What do you hope to gain from sitting here watching them?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” I responded, surprised by her question. “I suppose I feel that I owe it to them.”

Nuwa, who had once dredged mud from the banks of the Yellow River to breathe life into its clay, had turned hard. Bitter. Cracked along the edges like ancient pottery. “I bear responsibility for them. I must see them through this.”

“You don’t—” I stopped myself, realizing my error. Motherhood was not something I could ever hope to understand. How must it feel to watch your children morph so horribly into something you could never fix? Never undo? How could she stand there, watching them destroy everything they had worked so hard to accomplish?  “Do you truly believe they’ll make it out on the other side?”

Her whisper was so faint I barely caught it. “I hope for their sake they do not.”

I still didn’t know whether or not I agreed. There had been a quiet sort of resignation among us as we’d watched humankind go on. They seemed to stray away from any sort of unity. The second world war, in particular, had sickened most of the war gods—the sheer scale of destruction and death had not even been conceivable fifty years before. By then, the only gods who had held any faith in humanity to improve itself were the ones who believed wholeheartedly in the power of healing and growth.

It didn’t take long for us to turn, despairingly, to our counterparts across the globe. How were we to fix this? Could we fix this? It felt wrong to abandon humanity, particularly when they seemed to need us the most, but at some point, we realized there was nothing we could do. We’d done this ourselves, after all. In a fit of arrogance, we had created humanity in our image and, in doing so, had doomed ourselves to see our history repeated—an experience humanity would not be fortunate enough to undergo.

“They’ll never have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes as we have,” I said. 

“Have we learned from our mistakes?” Nuwa turned to me. “I must have missed that. Are we no longer violent beings? Do we not hunger for the destruction of our enemies? Or have we merely learned to be patient and sit with our anger as we wait for it to ruin us again?”

“I think that we better understand the consequences,” I replied.

“You are young,” Nuwa scoffed. “And naive to think we did not know exactly what our intentions were when we set out to destroy each other.”

She was right. I didn’t remember much of our First Wars. My father and his brothers were generals leading their armies of deities to be punished for the arrogance and cupidity of their superiors. I remember battle but only in flashes—metal clanging, too loud and too close. The panic of my fingers closing over an empty quiver. Grass turned slick with golden blood. A world plunged into dichotomies: darkness and light, fire and ice, chaos and peace.

Battle between gods was complicated. My father slew lightning over his enemies, and they blocked out the sun in turn. Ra battled Apophis for what would be the final time. Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalóatl grappled in the West. Geography around the world was reshaped, forever changed by the elemental chaos of godly warfare. We had utterly destroyed each other. In the process, however, we had brought about an era of peace in which the creation goddesses bore humanity. It was mass destruction on a scale we’d never known, nor would we ever think to know again—until now. 

My family appeared occasionally. Ares and Athena spent most of their time in the stuffy heat of the war tents, peering over the shoulders of generals and commanders and reporting back to my father. We were all here in some capacity—gods tended to remain where our roots were strongest, and the Mediterranean had been my family home long before Europeans even thought to colonize the West. Hermes flitted around the planet gathering information, and Dionysus had disappeared to Tuscany after spending the last few days whining about his vineyards. Otherwise, everyone was here watching. Waiting. Those who weren’t would make their way home eventually. My sister, for her part, spent most of her time in the rainforests of South America. She’d found the largest swathes of wild lands and stayed. 

The night before the battles were set to commence, she and I met on Delos. The sun was beginning to dip low in the sky, a one-way trip towards the horizon. The temple stones had been bleached white over the years, the detailing on our lion statues worn flat, and yet they sat proudly atop the dust and dirt. The setting sun washed everything in a warm, golden light. It was quiet, the only sound being the waves crashing on the distant shore—far too peaceful of an evening for the end of times.

“How are things on your end?”

Artemis stood still next to me. “They’ve lost control of the fires.”

“I wish it was surprising that they thought they could control fire in the first place.”

“Their continent will burn,” my sister muttered. “As will everything on it.” Including them, she didn’t say, but I heard it.

“Do you think they know?” I asked.

“That they’re going to vanquish each other?” she scoffed at me. “Of course not. They haven’t become self-aware all of a sudden. They never will.”

I nodded. “They were, once.”

“Maybe.”

I knelt to press my fingertips to the sun-warmed stone, worn smooth by thousands of years of worship. We’d begun here, my sister and I. We would watch the End not too far from here too. She would be returning to South America when the sun set—whatever remained of it. “You’ll come back once it gets close?”

Her hand squeezed my shoulder. She smelled very faintly of smoke. “Of course, brother.” Then she was gone.

I returned to the battlefield with my birthplace still dusting my fingertips. The moon was rising in a darkened sky, and the harsh shine of electricity dimmed the glory of the inky heavens above. Huitzilopochtli waited for me at the fringes. He was pacing.

“Updates?” I asked.

With a small shake of his head and a gesture, my gaze was drawn to the airplanes being loaded. Missiles the size of canoes were strapped into place by men with expressionless faces. At that moment, I wished desperately to feel their emotions. To know whether they felt the slightest remorse for their impending actions. Maybe then I could forgive them, just a little.

“It begins tomorrow?” Huitzilopochtli confirmed, and I nodded. Athena and Ares had been in the tents for two months now. From Hermes’ journeys around the globe, we knew the ins and outs of this war; we knew who would win and who would lose and who would think they were winning until they realized no one would be around to win a war again.

He and I stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the humans throughout the night. There was a breeze blowing off the sea, blessedly cool, that caused the flags to flutter. The darkness had stolen their red coloring and cast their symbols into shadow. One by one, the lights blinked off, allowing the shadows of nightfall to creep closer and closer to their campsite, and there we remained until the sun came up on the beginning of the end of the world.