Megan Matson

I grew up rambling with my adventurous mom in a ’59 VW bus that could camp anywhere, and did. I took America’s largesse of spirit and gorgeous expanse as a permanence. All through college years and beyond, the 48 contiguous states stretched out like a giant playroom rug, well into our own cross-countries as parents. Whatever rough horror played across the news in a given decade, America was still the wide welcome of the National Parks, National Forests, and the easy-going roadsides. You wouldn’t want to live with everyone you saw, but it wasn’t scary, and it was all one country.

In 2018, this sense of a varied but unbroken country began to give way to the shock lines of travel bans, mockery of the disabled and of military service, and then most seismically, the family separations of 2018. This is my country? We do this? As I’m sure generations learning Cambodia or Pinochet in real time have felt, it shames, grieves, and cracks your identity with the whole of America to see it. Parts of the U.S. now appear to believe more guns are more divine, all liberals are pedophiles, and women are baby vessels. America begins to break up like an ice floe. Talk of civil war, of vermin infestation and poisoning of blood. Nazi flags creep from their holes in full throated display down main streets, and wave against us all in the end. Door knocks for the parents of trans children in one state, books locked away in another, diversity and inclusion labeled disease not cure, and the seepage of political threat over the public service of American librarians, poll workers, nurses and now prosecutors, chisels us away from the idea of one nation. Entire states disappear behind a wall of backwards cruelty and spectacle, and America constricts to just the safe lands of worried liberty for me and mine. In what gun-riddled white nationalist county would you camp with your Democrat pedo commie car and your Barbie playlist? Hugging tight to the remaining states of the sane and the free is no remedy for a nation.

How do we stay big? We remain strong and we stay kind, is a start. We use the freedoms we still have to fight back in the tough places. We confront, reject and defeat hate with noise and action, not retreat. We show more courage than is necessary, and we connect. We protect the vote and use it.

That’s how America stays large. This country is ours, all of us, the whole of it, is what I learned since the fear-mongering assaults began.

When Senate Bill 8 passed in Texas in 2021, the six-week abortion law with a $10K bounty snitcher provision, the follow-on effects film-reeled forward in my mind like a movie trailer. How can a modern democracy pass such stupid, brutish, unworkable laws? Citizen snitches? We’ll be stoning each other in no time. America felt smaller to me with that news, by 172 million acres, or by the second-largest state in America.

I like Texas. I moved there from California to work on the last surge of Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign. I went down again when he was the first to stand loud against Trump in 2019. It was a bright gathering of lovely, worried people, with Beto speaking kitty-corner to Trump’s lurching dark rally of the macabre in El Paso. In the before Before Times, I got to hear Ann Richards, Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower fire it UP at a Democracy for America summit outside Austin.

Texas has a tradition of these fierce and talented fighters for democracy and still, it joins 13 other states in a total ban against women terminating pregnancies for, effectively, any reason. Now keep in mind that fertility is not for the faint of heart. It’s not a bus service. You don’t climb on at conception and step off nine months later. There are complex reasons along that arc, why women used to die like crazy around child-bearing. Improved medical care works, but now doctors fearing felonies retract the care that saves. Medical maternity units in hospitals and clinics like Planned Parenthood are shutting down in Texas and other extremist red states; maternal and infant deaths are skyrocketing. Texas is now a Russian Roulette for the fertile.

But I’m not in Texas, you say. Or, I had my kids. The problem is that what happens to the women of Austin, the women of Nashville, of New Orleans, of Tulsa, Miami, Louisville and Kansas City, hits us all. When one state falls away from liberty, we need to feel like a tyrant has landed troops on our shores. Autocracy is not coming, it is here. The greasy-eyed preacher-types and their gun-studded brethren are annexing swathes of our land. This blanket of repression falling over formerly free cities, and over the bodies of formerly free women, is not about when life starts. If it were, they wouldn’t be coming after contraception. This is that most ancient expression of male fear and of male power: the theocratic subjugation of women. Knuckle-dragging, bible-thumping power clingers are forcing birth at all costs on free American women, one state at a time. And they are coming for you and yours.

You can feel a surge of power underway from the American Woman. She has shown up with moral force, ferocity, and action in response to the attack. At every vote since Dobbs, starting with a 56% defeat of a ban in Kansas and proceeding to a 7-for-7 record to date, women have registered at unseen rates, and have busted records for turnout. Power is in the air, and it’s not just the votes. Beginning in 2017 when Me Too broke like a pandemic against sexual assault, abuse of power, and the structures that protected attackers, it was a joy to see women hired everywhere as the one safe bet (to those same positions of prominence that had toppled for the abusers), by rattled corporate boards. Since then, we have seen the rampaging commercial success first of Beyonce’s world tour, then the global phenomenon and utter social explosion ongoing of Taylor Swift. The vision of courage that was E. Jean Carroll in victorious linked hands with Robbie Kaplan and her ace women lawyers was a gift to all. Barbie grabbed the nation by the face for a summer, and infused the Oscars with a rowdy, “girl-did-we-have-fun” hot pink. The tenacious strength and fight of Letitia James and Fani Willis against hate, threat, and persecution inspires, and the Grammys, and the Oscars and yes even the Super Bowl, look like all of the powerhouse women have made tight friends, and are having a pounding good time being their biggest selves together. May this collective surge of pleasure, power, triumph, courage, beauty and voice, continue to strengthen minds and hearts of women and men in every corner of America, toward the defeat of women’s shitty would-be oppressors and their bad, bad laws.

The bounding expressions of musical force, cinematic adventurism, inventions, social change, business experiments, humor, technology, science and medical discovery, all are astonishing to me in their velocity in America. Free minds presume discovery. Individualism is easy to condemn in a time when we so need the commons to be restored, but each American’s belief in his/her/their own story and significance unlocks a rich and lively humanscape. America overflows with opinion, ways of working, ways of selling, facial expressions, hairdos and hairdon’ts, vibes and hustles, and stuff stuff stuff. America at its best encourages her people to figure their own thing out, and to find their own place. The variety and vital force that surges everywhere when that’s the invitation is dazzling.

The autocrat is the alternative to liberty and the rioting creativity of her citizens. Have you seen the culture of the autocrat? Crass, routine tributes to Dear Leader wrap vehicles and ballrooms. The music is all chumpy soundtracks and odd artists from another time, and the humor is often thuggish and cheap. Ornamentation is meant to signal money, not design, and does so but poorly. Fashion is in line with the never-ending disco ball that signals nightfall on the golf course, where clothes you wouldn’t know where to buy show up below lips the size of islands. At mad rallies, gold statues and posters and clothing line up to pay tribute to Dear Leader, so there is nothing left to create but his image. The autocrat eventually threatens and coerces the arts and individuals to bend and corrupt to him and his grotesque unitary tastes. America will begin to lose the influx of talent that migrates here to make film and music, for instance, from all over the world. But a comfort: we will always have Kid Rock.

An unnatural rain falls. It has come down with pressing insistence for weeks. Trees keel from their wet beds when the air horn blasts of unnatural winds join in. The roads around my small town have been closed, then opened, then closed again, as treefall and powerlines are cleared and recleared. Fifty-three years of living in this place know these rains are wrong and that we made the wind. America is daft. To know and not to heed is addled at a species level. To know, and still, daily, to drive, to meat, to buy, to fly like it’s a stroll down the block, is so young of us. I eat meat in round-eyed American innocence in the unnatural rain, just as I gassed up briskly under fire orange, smoke-dimmed skies. America is young and selfish of mind. We are a cauldron of innovation, expression, and merchant activity, but asked to reflect and restrain, we blink and surge onward. The knowledge has been there sitting on the sideboard since James Hansen of NASA first spoke in the ‘70s. Nobody could claim innocence after Al Gore put Inconvenient Truth on America’s big screen in 2006. Yet still we churn onward, making our own new weather and then trying to survive it.

My guess is that America’s daft ways mean weather will be the only news that matters in what, three years. We will look back on these days when there was time for trial updates, non-stop opinion, and celebrity guests. It will be a quaint time to recall. The weather in three years won’t be told as passing dramatics and recovery. It will be the wreckage of another event, followed by the squalid tedium of non-recovery. There are only so many times extraordinary effort in repair can be deployed. The disasters are ordinary now, and they rove. Where once “mutual aid” arrangements could reliably send first responders from one state to the afflicted state and pool resources, now the risk, frequency and novelty of the hits grows too great. Some states say we are sorry, but we cannot. When insurance leaves, or prices out to an impossibility, there is only so much a beleaguered government can fix in its wake. Roads that went to single lanes until repaired will, after the next wet season, remain one. Single lanes then, will eventually close to nowhere. “Reroute” will be the word we’ll have to train to, around King tides and lost beachfronts. “Adapt” will be a lurching personal mandate, not a theory, around winds of a new severity, or drought that never leaves.

The really wretched thing I’ve been discovering about freedom is the responsibility! In a free society, there is a burden that lands on each decision the individual makes. Carping on and on about how things are lands pretty tired when you know that how things are is ours for the making. To rest or to act, to speak or be silent, to solve or to damage, to care or to retreat: we’ve the bees’ nest of choices served up by the hour. With no dictating authority but the most outer bounds of law and morality to govern, this kind of moment-to-moment freedom can be unsettling. When you have the freedom to act freely and you are still not happy, for instance, it is a more punishing unease. The discomfort can make a susceptible personality surrender to the black-and-white conviction of theocrats, cult leaders, and the strongman. Certainty, no matter how ignorant and ill-founded, can blinker a brain troubled by overmuch liberty and the modern hailstorm of information. The steadfastness of cognitive simplicity combined with strong and coarse emotion is the elixir cocktail of megachurches, cults and tyrants alike. Under democracy, each of us is answering the question of micro-leadership, expressed most simply in the Golden Rule. Is my choice in this small moment lifting me and others upward, or downward? Is this action lame, or good? Choose again, and then choose again, and then choose again, my husband echoes to me from his well-thumbed Hyperion Cantos book series. In a free society, run not by one but by the everybody, the burden asks further, “If everyone took the action I just took, if everyone said what I just said, would we all be better off or worse? If all carried the silence I just carried, or retreated as I retreat, are we better, or worse?” The freedom of choosing from one minute to the next holds this danger in it: There can be a building cascade of low-lifery as the micro-decisions of the masses go wrong.  Enough individuals say f’ it or f’ them or f’ me, and it slides slow at first, then faster, as one choice reacts to the next, downward.

The Holocaust started at the edges but happened for all Germans for all time in the end, not just those at the Fuhrer’s core. The book bans, the political violence, the truth-killing and the slide of the courts all converge now with the Dobbs decision and its aftermath.

What the red states have done is a bludgeoning of individual liberty in its most fundamental form, and this abrogation of the right to bodily autonomy against the state, is our America until we make it not.

The separation of families at the border by those who fear immigrants, the banning of books by those who fear thought, and the erasure of histories that bring us closer together in understanding, are all now part of our shared history. And we are a smaller country for it.

When Texas in 2021 invented bounty-hunting pregnant women, it would have been soothing to say to oneself, “Well that’s Texas,” or, “I’m not pregnant” and “That won’t happen here.” But the moment tyranny and brutality marked one win on our shores in one place, tyranny and brutality arrived.

What made us give so much room for this rot? Is it the leakage of therapy and wellness over into every last decision being made? Is it the saturation of consumer messaging and now the mega-billionaires courting our digital attention, attention, attention? The movie Wall-E and the movie Idiocracy both scorched the rank passivity and people’s slouch down to lowest needs, where lowest needs are a giant soda, stretchy clothes and a screen pasted to the face. The burden of research, thought, and responsible action in civic life has sloughed off to leave pure spectating amygdalas on legs, all over the field. Bookstores collapse down to gift-and-coffee airport stores, and papers become blinking scrolling headlines. Day drinking is right there on the menu, and “because you deserve it” pumps through every speaker of remaining retail. Fake is now fine: from “yes, please touch up my appearance ” now a shameless checkbox on Zoom, to bathmat eyelashes, fake tan men and Mar-a-Lago pontoon breasts, no one knows what “brazen” means, or “artifice,” or thinks they are bad things to be if they do. People change their faces like they’re putting in a new bathroom. Personal power is expressed as “No longer giving a f” and while I do share that sense of liberation from self-consciousness, what if one person’s “not giving a f” looks like a party dress and a bold truth, but another’s is “F it, I’ll steal things and try child porn?” Or “Let the whole thing burn down.”

In America, the freedom is so easy to breathe we can go ages without cherishing it. Taken for granted, freedom becomes license. The difference between license and liberty matters more than the dictionary will tell you. License is a permission, even a laxity. Liberty is a responsibility. Defined, “Liberty is the freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control, or the power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice.” Americans making full use of their liberty act against, speak against, think against the encroachment of arbitrary and despotic control in these states.

We are born equal to the writers of first laws, born equal to the builders of first institutions, born equal to this President, and born equal to the knuckleheads out there creating corruption and tyranny. But we forget we are born with responsibility equal to our freedom, to keep creating democracy. Are my actions creating MORE democracy, or less? Choose again. Am I treating others as my natural equals and fellow Americans in the experiment? Choose again. Am I expressing my liberty and my power? Choose again. Am I sharing the civic burden of mutual leadership? Choose again. Your thing might be work itself, art or music, helping the hurting, beauty and building things, teaching, solving complicated problems, caring for family, studying, protecting people, feeding people, making a lot of money and doing good things with it, using science, WHATEVER YOUR THING IS––can you/are you creating more democracy with it? Choose again. More equality, more progress, more truth, more health, more connection or community, more shows of common responsibility? Choose again. Because America has created democracy before and we can choose again to restore and protect it now.