No power

Hurricane Helene, the debate, abortion bans, and apartheid

This week, as I texted with my sister in Georgia about the loss of her power at her home and the powerlessness she felt in the face of the storm, I thought about who is saved, who is spoken for, and who is spoken about. 

Climate change and powerlessness

Four years ago, in the beginning of October, I had just gotten power back after not having it for nearly a month. In August, an inland hurricane tore apart my town and my life.

I spent weeks writing about the plight of my friends and neighbors, stringing for the Washington Post, writing for my local newspaper. I delivered meals to people who called the newspaper wondering where they could find food. And I helped serve meals in the parking lots of destroyed apartment buildings, where people had set up tent camps, sleeping outside in temperatures that reached 100 degrees, waiting for help.

Help was slow to arrive because our city- and state-wide leaders were slow to ask for it. We were fine, our mayor implied via emails to agencies offering help. Meanwhile, people on the other side of town were without water or walls or floors. 

I had no power for a month because the storm tore the power box off the side of my house. I had to get it reattached before the power could be restored. I was on multiple waitlists for electricians, but I was a working single mother with no power, no food, and no childcare. I got in trouble at work for taking breaks to make calls. But cell service was spotty at my house.

Eventually, I broke down and called a friend and told her everything. She in turn called another friend, who came over and reattached the box. That night, I had air conditioning and a cold beer and I cried. 

This week, Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the East Coast. The death toll is around 140 and is expected to rise. Whole towns have been lost. We are only now just beginning to learn of the devastation. My little sister is in Savannah. She’s been without power for three days.¹ 

There is nothing like a natural disaster to remind you of your powerlessness. To reduce you and everyone around you to the quivering essence of your own frustrations and needs. These disasters remind us of the way our lives are held together by the benevolence of the wind and water. And that all it takes is one surge, one angry storm. 

In Tennessee, at least seven employees at a plastic plant were washed away in the flood waters. The loss of their lives wasn’t an accident: Their managers refused to let them leave work.

I wonder what we will pull from the remains and what we will leave behind. Who gets to be saved and who gets to survive and be called resilient? 

Here are the places I am donating:

• My sister says that Renegade Paws, an animal shelter in Savannah from which she adopted her perfect little dog, Jesse James, is in need of help after losing a fence during the storm.

• The Diaper Bank of North Carolina has an Amazon wishlist of diapers and period products.

• And the City of Tampa Bay, Florida, has a list of places with critical needs.

If you want to recommend a nonprofit supporting those affected by Helene, please post it in the comments. Thank you for being such an incredible community. You all helped me raise over $130,000 during the derecho and I’ll never not be so grateful for your kindess. You are the helpers.

Politics and speaking for the powerless

Last night was the vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. Compared with the last couple of debates, this one was toned down. There were fewer verbal punches; there was more pandering, more well-actuallying. You could say it felt more substantive, but I think that’s just because it felt more boring. 

I had a couple of observations from watching the debate. The first was how little forgiveness there was for Walz’s stumblings and lack of eloquence. I don’t think being a smooth orator is a sign of an adept politician and I don’t think a lot of voters do either. But I was interested in how worried Walz’s stumblings made the people watching the debate with me in the newsletter chat and the pundits on CNN. There is a whole history of politicians (always cis white men) as stumbling orators. George W. Bush, Charles Grassley, Donald Trump, to name a few. But the examples I can think of are Republicans. It made me wonder about the Democratic appetite for populism. What tolerance does a party have for candidates who we pick apart pedantically? And how willing are we to swallow what a smooth talker can sell us?

The Vance on the debate state last night was smooth. Forged in the fires of Ivy League debate societies. Listen, I was speech and debate captain in college. I get it. 

Walz was not smooth at all. But you can’t ask for an everyman, a populist, someone who “speaks for the people” and then demand he act as if he learned to lie at a Speech and Debate National Tournament.

I had an argument with a political journalist in Iowa recently. He also happens to be my podcast producer, Zachary Oren Smith. I argued that Charles Grassley was a bad communicator. Zach said he was actually good. He was good because he spoke in a way that his supporters recognized. It was one of the few fights where I accepted defeat. Of course, Grassley critics would say he’s a bad speaker. But is he? He communicates with his audience. And the audience gets it. And when opponents criticize his orations, his defenders call them elitist snobs. I thought about that while watching the debate. Being a good orator is one thing; being a good communicator is another. And I think it is very telling that we have a political environment that would fawn over an orator rather than a communicator. 

How many times has America fallen for a smooth-talking Nazi in a suit? How many times have we fallen for a bumbling orator farmer who ended up supporting those Nazis?

The other thing I noticed was power — how both men claim to be a voice for the voiceless. Both men are attempting to speak for the normal guy. Vance repeatedly talked about his drug-addicted single mother and growing up food-insecure. Walz is lauded for his everyman style of folksy political banter. But who are each of these men, as Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out in the New York Times, campaigning for or campaigning on?

When Vance talks about wanting pro-family policies out of the same mouth as he advocates for mass deportations and refuses to answer questions about family separations, he’s stating clearly that he’s campaigning on white grievance. The pro-family policies Vance advocates for will always only include white families — not immigrants, not people of color.

And, as NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out on Bluesky, “the thing about ‘hardening school defenses’ is that jd vance’s kids will never in their lives attend the prison schools he wants to build.”

So when we think about populism and the people, who are the people we are speaking for? Whose grievance holds the power? And whose is ignored? I remember thinking this during the 2016 election — that the rage being centered was the rage of the white man. But what about marginalized women, queer people, immigrants? Whose rage has political capital and whose is ignored?

Georgia judge lifts abortion ban

This week, ​​Judge Robert McBurney in Georgia overturned the state’s abortion ban. In the decision, the judge wrote, “Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have. … For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability.  It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could — or should — force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

The judge also wrote, “When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then — and only then — should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it.”

Women are the deciders of our bodies and our destinies, not politicians, not medical boards, not our fathers, or partners, or shitposters on Twitter. 

So much of our laws and of our country is built upon the ideas of men who didn’t see Black people as human, LGBTQ people as human, or women as much more than incubators. These laws written by these prejudiced men should not be the captains of our fate; we ought to be.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on power and apartheid 

In a now viral interview, Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke about his book The Message, apartheid, justice and ethnostates. His book is for writers and is about how the stories we tell shape reality. Coates used his power to speak truth to power about people without power.

1. She just got her power back last night!