Draft Four: When can we do life again?
Keep shoveling snow.
Last week I sent an out-of-stream email asking you to fill out a reader survey about Draft Four and the role it plays in your life. Thank you to everyone who took time for it; the responses will improve my work and my stories. They already brightened up my life – here’s a bit of feedback from the responses that also inspired some of today’s letter:
“This is going to sound cheesy, but it brings back some hope. It makes me think deeply about things, even ones I don't usually think about. I finish reading, I take a deep breath, I get up and I'm ready to do life again.”
I’ll keep the reader survey open until February 28, so if you have some thoughts on what makes Draft Four worth it for you, please fill it out.
The news, right?
A relentless barrage of chaos and juvenile jubilation at the crumbling of existing order. King Trump (have you see this image out of the White House?!) overseeing a gutting of the federal service, installing loyal servants everywhere, and telling the world a false story of increasing efficiency and restoring freedom, when what this actually means is giving wealthy private individuals access to federal data, favoring friends, and blessing a version of Christian nationalism that is theocratic and misogynistic (these times do give Handmaid’s Tale).
America is in a coup run by the executive, fueled by the money, rage, and hubris of tech bros, marching into a constitutional crisis where Congress and the courts either won’t challenge these moves, or where their decisions will be ignored.
This is what running a country like a heartless CEO looks like – something reactionary idealogues have clamored for –, and it’s dispiriting. True, even some well-meaning people are ecstatic the world is finally seeing America for the opportunistic empire it is, and has always been. I find that a tad nihilistic and unhelpful confirmation bias, though there is truth to the Empire State of Mind.
What’s funny (in a dark way) is how Romania keeps popping up in the discourse, which is partly why things have felt heavier. With Elon Musk repeat-tweeting about us, JD Vance mocking our democracy, and US envoys pushing Romania to pardon the Tate brothers, I don’t remember feeling this brain numb since the early days of the pandemic.
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So, Romania – let’s address us, too. Longtime foe of the Russians. Longtime lover of the US. And now, the US and the Russians are cozying up to one another and snubbing Ukraine. Or, as Luiza Vasiliu and Victor Ilie well put it in their must-read newsletter, the US is paying Russia back for a decade worth of propaganda. Propaganda then repeated by an American administration planning to ditch Ukraine unless they fork over 50% of mineral resources, and working to rewrite the history of who invaded whom in the first place. (Spoiler: Russia.)
There was a fair amount of European panic at what looks like the world re-arranging: the US being willing to let the EU deal with Russia on its own, while doing everything they can to push MAGA-like clones into the continent’s governments. Viktor Orbán has been the GOAT of illiberal democracy, and a Trump-led US would love more of him everywhere, including Romania, where they are pushing for Călin Georgescu in the presidential race, because he’d be another a great trumpet for de-wokification, calling journalists traitors, supposedly serving national interests, and generally blowing shit up. (Georgescu eagerly obliged, saying he'd dismantle NGOs in his first day in office – something the president has no power over).
Unfortunately, this is not out of the blue. Russian-backed propaganda has been assaulting our social media feeds for years. And yes, our flimsy democracy and the real inequalities it has been fostering were indeed susceptible to messages sewing distrust in expertise, in NGOs (spawns of Soros, enemies call them), in progressive causes, in the idea of independent journalism, and so on. There is no better show and tell of our idiocy then the leader of the social-democrat party and Romania’s prime-minister meme-posting himself as an Elon Musk-fanboy cutting the much-maligned state apparatus by close to 15%. Fixing the state is for normies, not kings.
There are and there have been always been dormant extreme rightwing sentiments in Romania. Now, they have the semblance of a movement to latch onto – one that also includes confused and disenfranchised and angry Romanians of all walks of life, who don’t agree on much but they agree on this: “Let’s burn it down!”
Thus, local MAGA-followers now have ideological brethren in power in the US – let’s not forget that the early seeds of the pro-Trump white power movement included neo-nazis enamored with Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the Captain of Romanian fascism.
I still doubt that our ultranationalist-revival or our anti-EU is an organic movement. In Moldova this type of stance was paid for, in cash, from Russia. In Romania, it’s powered by thousands of fake social media accounts that give the impression of a groundswell. (Activist Valeriu Nicolae tried to speak to Georgescu supporters that were cursing him in the comments and found that the vast majority were bots). Groundswell or not, the political mainstream is terrified, which is why it has pretzeled itself into sounding as reactionary as possible: cutting jobs, speaking out against LGBTQ+ rights, ridiculing green energy, manifesting admiration for unfettered executive power etc.
And we still have more than two months until the presidential elections. Bad, right?
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I rushed through everything above to make three points.
1. There is just too much going on, and too many takes. Our minds can’t take this much. We live in the news, not in the now, and one of the only recourses to the discomfort is to create more content to throw into the world.
This letter is just as guilty of that. It’s what has made internet content creators like Kinezărie say fuck it and stop making stuff (the link is to his goodbye video) – he says he refuses to keep adding to this unfathomable volume of information. (Especially since most of us are creating content that big tech companies can place between ads).
In a sense, he’s right: reading or watching everyone’s takes for hours a day doesn’t make us more informed citizens. It makes us feel involved, while we’re actually on the sidelines, playing politics. Even if some of videos were correct, even if some were useful, Kinezărie believes he was still contributing to brain rot. He’d also love a healthier information ecosystem, with trusted information delivered by trustworthy sources – remember journalists? But journalists are struggling with lack of funds, credibility, and – to some degree – an inability to package our work in ways that help people.
There is no solution, but you too can reduce input, and increase support. Take in less takes, less content, remember doom scrolling is bad for you, and also support (I mean pay) the journalists, creators, artists that allow you to feel like you’re thriving, not just surviving.
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2. There is a bigger picture (or more). Beneath the craziness are inklings of the future (albeit a dark one). One thing the new kings and wannabe dictators have in common are the enemies they pinpoint to. And the number one enemy? Migrants.
The oft-quoted JD Vance speech from the Munich security conference – where he name-checked Romania as being anti-democratic, and told Europe to fix its own house – goes on to say that migration and migrants are “the enemy within”, and they are at fault for the destruction of European civilization.
This has been in the air for the last decade in Europe – Polish and Hungarian autocrats won elections campaigning against migrants. Hell, Orbán put up posters in all of Hungary a decade ago saying “if you come to Hungary, you cannot take Hungarian jobs”. But they couldn’t possibly be deterring migrants, as they were written in Hungarian. So the audience was never the potential migrants: it was Hungarians, who needed to both be frightened and re-assured they are protected. It worked.
It's almost a miracle Romania’s 2024 election bonanza didn’t have migrants as the enemy. It looks like they’ll escape this spring’s presidential replay, too. (Although nationalist leader George Simion just tweeted that “multiculturalism ruins communities and lives.”)
It’ll be their turn next. Picture a Romania with Călin Georgescu coming to power, in a bizarre relationship with a Parliament of uneasy party-alliances, all presiding over ongoing inflation, jobs cuts, energy cost spikes, information warfare. The elections won’t change the underlying realities, but a few months from now we’ll start to need some new enemies. My bet is it’ll be the migrants: taking jobs, polluting our Romanianess, engaging in crime.
I hope I’m wrong, but just think about this – the number of work permits given to foreign workers – many coming from Asia – has expanded exponentially since 2015 (from a few thousand to over 100.000 a year). More than 300.000 people received right to work permits in the past three years alone. What if they’re branded as our “enemy within”?
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3. So what to do? What can you do? I was chatting to a friend the other day (who’ll also be speaking at our upcoming Power of Storytelling conference), and she said she is finding it hard to keep up with everything, stay sane, but also do something. “All I have to give is journalism”, she told me. “But I’m not giving my journalism skills to that particular cause.”
This hit home – all I can do is report, write, synthesize, but very little of my time is devoted to real-time monitoring and sense-making of every day. I’m acutely aware of my lack of power, and grateful to the journalists handling the disaster in real time. But it’s not where I give what I have.
We all serve where we can. My friend said her role right now was in community: the family, the neighborhood, her work.
What connects that overwhelming sense of dread to the shame of not acting is the distorted perception that we, as individuals, can shift the balance the world. So we wait for something big to be part of, and neglect the small acts of courage, participation, and care that are the stuff of daily life.
In Bucharest it snowed for three days straight this week: every sidewalk is still only about 50% walkable. The walkable parts are because of people who came out with a shovel and cleared the way. “Shovel the fucking yard”, I said to myself one night, too, stepped into the -10 degrees Celsius, cracked the ice that had formed outside the building, and cleared a path so others don’t slip and break something.
I’m not saying don’t pay attention to the news. I’m saying shovel your yard, too, because you won’t be paying better attention if you’re also nursing an injury from tripping.
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I’ve done small “d” democracy at the homeowners’ association for a while now (remember my musings on the trash bins?). I think I’ve spent 6-7 years as its president, but my latest mandate expired Friday, and I asked someone else to take over.
To make it official, we met in the hallway of our nearly 100-year-old building, on a cold night, everyone bundled up in jackets. There were seven of us, pretty different people, enough to have quorum though. I felt guilty saying I couldn’t be president anymore, especially since my reasons seem selfish: I’m tired, I’m thinking of moving, I don’t have time for the bureaucracy, I need a break from cheerleading people to get involved.
I didn’t do anything revolutionary over the past few years, but I did bring us into the present: fired a super who was pocketing money and running deals, write up new bylaws, make payments more transparent, lobby to raise money and make some improvements (the wiring was so bad our building was a fire hazard) etc. Basically, shoveling snow.
No one wanted the president of the homeowners association job when I took it on. No one was involved in any building improvement – hadn’t been for a decade. Now others are shoveling snow, too, or helping out with other tasks. One even stepped up to replace me in the president’s role, and I’ll help her as much as I can while I’m there.
Here’s a small lesson from running an association that might help in divisive political times. Do you have any idea how complicated it is to even call an annual meeting by following the law? I am sending letters through the mail to people who own apartments in our building. I am writing the decisions by longhand, in a notebook, and getting our accountant to certify it – by signing and stamping. (So it looks harder to fake, which is laughable). The bank asks me to come in once a year to prove we still exist. And more.
So Georgescu coming into the presidency and closing NGOs? Have at it, brother. If that were to happen legally, it’d take a shitload of work, and many many MANY people bending rules, and many many MANY roadblocks popping up. If an administration bulldozes past them, then at least you have a clear answer of whether a leader is playing by the rules, aimed at destroying, not improving.
Knowing all of this what I can do every morning is take a deep breath, get up, and get ready to do life again.
SIDE DISHES:
Arkady Martine is among my favorite science fiction writers. She once wrote that “the apocalypse has been happening all along, but to other people”, which is a humbling reminder that others peoples, nations, have had it this bad (and worse). Arkady also wrote one of the best Sci-Fi takes on Empire in: A Memory Called Empire, which is a terrific read. (Yes, Arkady is also coming to The Power of Storytelling).
I’ve been listening to On the Media for as long I can remember binging podcasts. It’s a great show about journalism, but also about our informational ecosystems, and the way politicians and billionaires exploit them. Here’s a recent episode debunking, among others, some of Musk’s lies.
You know I’m a big Oliver Burkeman fan. His most recent newsletter also touched on staying grounded in reality, not in news: “make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world”.
Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny is never not important.
So are Mumford and Sons – they are gearing up for a new album release on March 28. Malibu is their most recent single.