It’s been about three weeks since the country decided by ballot that their greatest interest is in fortifying its brand of white Christian nationalism, even though some of the voters — by their very race or ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, job, ability — are, by their identity/ies, named as “enemies” who are “poisoning the blood of the nation.” The mind games they’re played in order to be able to cast such votes: that they’re “one of the good ones”; that these new edicts will only affect the people they and The Administration can’t abide by — and even if the voters are collateral damage, they can revel in the cruel joy of witnessing these common “enemies” suffer even more.

In this shell-shocked stillness before The Handmaid’s Tale becomes full-on reality — with Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who is a disabled white man, offering about 1,400 acres for Trump’s deportation camps — non-Black people of color in my community have approached me with questions and requests that boil down to asking me to offer words of wisdom or advocacy, to verbalize a moral compass or a game plan to navigate these impending terrible times.

[Image: AI-generated, prompted by me]

And I have nothing to say.

No grand statement. No grand plan. No escape route.

I’ve said so much, published in legacy media and on social media outlets, over the years, with warnings dressed as conversations or sandwiched in between clips of adorably juicy babies. I’ve Cassandra’d when the threat was much farther away; perhaps those who heard me thought my caution was another part of my personality: awfulizing Andrea.

But now, the enemy isn’t me — regardless of what the new administration wants to label me as –but my enemy is telling everyone that they’re preparing more battering rams to help demolish the last of this fragile armistice of the American Human Rights Era that began full bore with the Civil Right Movement and was full-stopped around the time trans people gained visibility.

Seventy years. About an average lifetime. What feels like a lifetime to me of words to the wise about the malicious, malevolent foolishness that is taking its final form as white Chrisofascism.

When one of my friends — a Latina — asked me “what are we going to do?”, all I could say was “I have an inkling.” What I told her in private was she would either need to go or get a gun.

And, to me, that felt like too much to say. Again, I’m asked to “say something,” be wise even though 55% her own male skinfolk betrayed her and the other Latinas by voting for Trump.

My words are too fatigued, joining the rest of the 92% of Black women who also warned and cautioned and admonished about the GOP’s playbook of cruelties, Project 2025, and Trump’s historical and current bigotries. And I think part of that fatigue — partly out of the last-straw betrayal from white women and people of color who voted for Trump or third party or not at all — is also our rewrapping our justified rage into the delicate phrases of “y’all got it,” “it’s above me now,” “I’m staying hydrated and minding my own business,” and “don’t ask us for shit!,” complete with the bow of rueful chuckling because we *knew* this could happen and we *knew* a vote for VP Harris was, if nothing else, a maneuver of practicality — as per our usual voting reasoning — as much as it was a vote of confidence that a Black and South Asian lawyer and vice president had to be (HAD. TO. BE.) a sight better than the rank racist and rapist running again for president, right? RIGHT?

I guess not.

I’m tired of talking.