Notes On Planning

by Felipe De La Hoz

Today we stare down some unknown amount of uncertainty about who will sit atop the federal bureaucracy in a couple of months, and I am thinking about planning, in a way that feels a little more urgent than usual. Who might be able to take care of my cat if some meathead with a badge kicks in my door? What does my life really look like in the absence of New York City, in the grand weight of the idea that I might never come back?

I have something of a running joke with friends, in which I like to pile on the reasons that I won’t be wriggling out of whatever crackdown comes. Because I’d be an obvious target for the likes of Stephen Miller: I’m an immigrant, I’m Latino, I’m a liberal coastal elite who is both a journalist and a college lecturer—perhaps the two most hated professions among the cadre of freaks that is MAGA (with the possible exception of librarian). I’m queer, too, with a semi-public profile defined largely by investigating and criticizing the entities that would carry out the very immigration “reforms” envisioned by the Trumpist right. I don’t check every box, but I’ve certainly done my level best

A few people who care about me have asked in recent weeks—in the tentative, half-joking way that you use to somewhat defuse the power of a thought—if I was going to be okay, really, if Trump wins. Not in a, Will you be emotionally okay way, but more obliquely asking, Will you be one of the 15 million on Trump’s deportation list? 

The answer is, nobody knows what’s going to happen if Trump were to make it back to the seat of power. The militant types led by Stephen Miller have spent the past four years hungering for another bite at the authoritarian apple and they are going to try. Will I be a public enemy? Perhaps.

Our species wouldn’t have survived without some hard-wired optimism, the expectation or just the hope that things would get better, or at least remain in the ways we understood and could stomach. But maybe we’re too good at optimism, especially when you mix in the swirl of exceptionalism running throughout American society. I can see it in the discomfort of people trying to talk around the possibilities we’re facing, somehow unable to voice them outright because the truth sounds too absurd, too unbelievable, when laid bare. We’ve survived this long in the shadow of Trump and his movement; surely it can’t really get that bad. Not here, not now. And I don’t know.

What I know is that these people want unconstrained fascism. They want something that has never really been seen in the United States before, but which is familiar to those of us who’ve faced it elsewhere. There are many, many countries in which the idea of military dictatorship isn’t just possible, it is daily life. Trump has not hidden that he wants to preside over this type of government. He and his supporters want to throw people out of helicopters. They want people to die because they are trans, or on the far left—eventually, maybe, because they are Democrats. They’ll do it if they can. No cosmic rule stops them, no firm hand of fate, only the eternal questions of the exercise of power

Strangely, I’m not anxious about it per se; if there’s one thing I learned from my father—forever a pragmatic man—it’s that there’s not much point to worrying about things that haven’t happened yet and may never happen. Yet I do it idly, in the in-between moments as I’m loading up the dishwasher or walking to the train, thinking about the minutiae of my life—what could or would I take in a hurry, if I had to? Who might be willing or able to come with me?

Planning is not my forte, but thinking through what happens if a burgeoning fascist government orders troops to come round up people like me seems advisable, sensible, in the same way that starting a 401K does. Where would I even go? My mom is in Colombia, my father in Ecuador, and I’ve never really lived in either. Would I continue to write about U.S. politics from outside, or shift my vision entirely?

If I can’t vote, at least I can plan. Hopefully someday I’ll come across these plans again, unused, a distant memory.