The Dirty Dozen

Instructions for Surviving Fascism, 2025 edition ('cause who the eff knows how things will (d)evolve).

Well, friends. Wouldn’t you just know it. *Right after* I heralded the good news of my town having unanimously passed a resolution in support of trans, nonbinary, gender diverse and intersex folks, vandals a town over removed Pride flags from businesses and burnt them in the middle of Main Street under the cowardly cover of dark. Then a bunch of other bad news followed. Bad news like bomb-droppings and extreme heat, and ongoing genocidal atrocities (not an exhaustive list, sadly).

But then we pulled out of the nosedive and re-gained a little altitude, thanks to the jet stream tailwinds of Zohran Mamdani’s successful bid for NYC Mayoral candidacy and news of how the US Senate Parliamentarian struck the Trans Medicaid ban from the GOP Megabill, which I like to call the Baldfaced Bureaucratic Blunderbuss.

Not quite smooth sailing yet, but we’ll take it.

With those unexpected winds beneath our wings, we flew briefly above the murk of misinformation, and I glimpsed a snippet of the truth of our surreality. There it was, plain as a pikestaff:

THE RHYTHM OF FASCISM IS NOTHING IF NOT HERKY-JERKY.

One step forward, one back. Two forward, three back. Fake left, fake right, fake any which way. It’s enough to make one rush to stockpile Dramamine before RFK decides it’s a conspiratorial health hazard and gives it the old heave-ho.

Nobody warns you about the mal de mer of fascism.

Seriously though, friends. This sickening staccato has more than a few of us beyond bedraggled. Like the collective tank is on “E” and we’re hoping that somehow we’ll manage to sputter-and-stutter-step our way to the next filling station on the momentum we built during the four years between Trumpster fires.

I was feeling this very way when I logged onto

Carolyn Zaikowski

’s writing and solidarity group Sunday evening. Most weeks, I feel like I’ve crawled my way back into the bliss of the amniotic sack when I enter this lovely zoom womb of writers. But last Sunday, I felt pretty well gutted. And I doubted I’d manage to write any words at all on the few fumes I had left from the week.

Then, the miracle of the creative process took over and it came to me. I could, at the very least, play with writing some guidelines for surviving these times. Some tips for getting through the motion sickness of a totalitarian tempest.

So I looked away from my laptop and out the window, where my gaze came to rest upon leaves gently rustling on a sturdy oak. It looked so…normal. Peaceful. Words began to flow through fingers and keyboard onto screen, little bits of vitality sparking off them. It was a glorious respite.

A single spark of vitality, delivered straight from the molten center of creative life force (by way of very unceremonious fingertips on keys).

But then came Monday morning, and with it, the froth of more fasci-spasms. And now it’s suddenly Friday, or Fried-day, as it were. I don’t have any snazzy, snappy prose in me. I don’t have any pithy insights. What I do have, however, is that Sunday night list, written by some higher version of self. The Self that maintains constant contact with creative life force.

What’s that you say, friends? You’d like me to share that list? I’m so glad you asked. I’d like to read it again, too.

“Instructions for Surviving Fascism in 2025 (aka The Dirty Dozen)”

1. First, prepare for the paradoxical, which you will find plenty of in the unfamiliar land of both/and. The ground you now stumble around on is anything but stable, and you can no longer count on linear movement. And speaking of counting, count *this* as the first paradox: instability, jarring though it is, may actually be a good thing. Because in reality, the Cosmos have never pulsed in straight lines. It’s time you accept the truth of the delusion.

2. Stay awake. But don’t forget to sleep, either. This sounds simple, but it is not.

3. Stay present, but don’t let yourself be pulled into hypervigilance. The inner drugs will dry rot your insides faster than a salt-soaked life jacket forgotten in the sun.

4. Find good comrades and lean on them, but trust your own gut unfailingly. Your stomach might turn, but not on you. It will never lie to you. Ever.

5. Don’t let yourself go numb. Feel your experience, no matter how uncomfortable. Laughing and/or weeping over the absurdly obscene will be cathartic, but numbness will lead you off a cliff.

6. In that vein, remember to feel your feet and your seat. You are a gravity-bound being in a body. Don’t unfasten from it. It will moor you in this shitstorm.

7. Stay close to your non-human kin. Wild animals and plants are safer and wiser than purportedly civilized humans. They will teach you about survival.

8. Create things, especially beautiful things. This will keep a life force bigger than yourself flowing through you and everyone else.

9. Call on your ancestors. There are so many powerful unseen forces that can and will help you, but only if you call on them.

10. Balance your elements. You need the sturdy stability of your earth, the depth and soft strength of your water, the buoyancy and mutability of your air, and the spark and ferocity of your fire. But too much of any one of them puts you at risk of early expiration.

11. Imagine a better future. This is not the same as denying the present. Dreaming and scheming are necessary precursors to meaningful action.

12. Don’t give up. Just don’t give up, no matter what comes.

Slow and steady wins the race. Hunker down as needed, but don’t give up.

I hope maybe something of the foregoing may have resonated for you, friends. I sense it to be a living document that will, by necessity, co-evolve with the times. Things may need to be grafted onto it, fall from it like an abscission of leaves, or simply be honed as more is revealed not just about how to survive, but…dare I say it? *Dare I do*: perhaps thrive under conditions that right now feel so impossible.

So stay tuned. And if you have survival tips to offer, I’m all ears (comment below). I also have a couple other Substacky tidbits to offer from recent days gone by, in case you missed them:

• An interview I was invited to by the aforementioned and incomparable

  Carolyn Zaikowski

• A poem of mine that the most gracious

  Mr. Troy Ford
  published in the Pride & Poetry issue of Qstack.

In the meantime, and until next time, wishing you the sturdiest of sea legs, plenty of meclizine, and a dash of white stallion magic.

“Mount the stallion of love and do not fear the path, love’s stallion knows the way exactly. With one leap, Love’s horse will carry you home.” [Quote by Rumi; Photo by Magdalena Smolnicka on Unsplash]

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