Posted by grillcover on May 21, 2022
Originally published: 06/07/2021
"Just over five months ago, on 1/6/2021, I went on a day trip to Washington D.C. to stand with BLM and antifascist protesters against a third monthly MAGA rally. Everyone knew what was happening that day. I knew we were on the brink.
Lacking mass support, local organizers issued a stand-down order. But when violence broke out, I walked over to the Capitol anyway to watch. I had to. I returned home that night a different person.
For a lot of reasons I was afraid to tell my story, even to friends. But I think about that day, and what I saw, and what went down, every single day. It’s guided most of my thoughts and decisions since. If you’ve thought, 'Jeez, David really doubled down under Biden,' now you know why."
So began my deeply personal admission to my Facebook feed-- which as absurd as it may seem to many, is still an important communication platform for me to stay in touch with the largely Millennial peers I've met in the last 15 years, as well as far-flung friends and family I don't have a chance to see or talk to very often. It was meant to begin a sincere airing of why I'm so fixated on politics lately, why I seem distracted or flakey or have been having trouble keeping up with responsibilities and relationships. It was a scary, traumatizing day and remaining in silent fear has only made things harder. Finally being public about this was meant to be a part of the healing. But it was also a dire warning:
"We’re losing. Badly. Still. I feel a little mad how ho-hum we’ve become about the whole thing, as though the conditions that caused that day are somehow behind us. The dozen ways we’re backsliding. The missed opportunities day after day until we’re predictably whooped in the midterms, never fix voter suppression, and continue to spiral into climate chaos and fascism on both sides of the aisle.
So yeah, it’s been hard to 'get back to my life,' even with the vaccine and our 'new normal.' I thought writing about it would help. (see linked Journal, scroll a bit) And it did, a bit. I’m no longer scared of my story. And if I can keep organizing, I tell myself, and keep activating people to keep doing more maybe I won’t feel like I need to tear myself to bits trying to help stop what I see coming-- like I saw that day coming, and then had to watch, completely helpless. That’s a trauma no friend or therapist can gaslight me out of by saying I’m catastrophizing. That *was* a world historic catastrophe; most folks just didn’t actually see it, or refuse to understand."
But alas, herein I told my only lie: I am still scared of my story, which is why I've deleted the original post. And hearing that you may now wonder, well, if I voluntarily deleted the post, when and how did the censorship happen? How is this any different than the right-wing cries of censorship, making tenuous claims or falsely asserting First Amendment rights for TOS violations on private platforms?
All I know is that after I finally made the post, it appeared as usual on my feed as any recent post might. Re-reading for errors, I noticed a typo in the above portion: "lit" instead of "little." Upon making the quick edit and saving, I found the post was no longer on the reloaded page. Curious, intending to finish copy-editing, I checked my profile, but found nothing new on the list of posts. Clicking around, I was able to find a clue on the (for me) little-used Grid View: my post indeed existed, it just wasn't showing everywhere. And clicking on the link through the Grid View brought you to a "Broken Link" page that I had never seen on any of my previous post permalinks.
Truth be told, the most likely thing in my mind is that my post was scooped up in an "off-the-books" (i.e., they're not gonna send you a message for being flagged, as they normally do) Facebook algorithm designed to suppress potentially terroristic and insurrectionary threats that might be emerging across the platform, and it was auto-flagged for a number of key words relating to J6 and radical politics.
If I were truly paranoid I'd also point out the first time I tried to post, the website glitched and I lost the entire thing right as I was finishing. The more likely reality there, though, is I'd taken so long to compose & edit & pore over the post that the site simply eventually glitched. For the QA heads out there: I accepted a FB text editor spell-check suggestion, which bizarrely duplicated text upon replacing the word, and my subsequent Ctl+Z crashed the editor instead of undoing the edit as usual.
But it was important to me that I post it, so I'd re-composed the entire thing from memory in a separate document. There may have been a few things missing but I was pretty happy how much I was able to salvage verbatim. Definitely a perk of over-editing your writing and having a transcriber & stage actor's memory. Because in the end the post was meant not to incite but to inspire, not to spur violence but to promote peace and vigilantly defend the most marginalized and vulnerable, in the face of ever-encroaching danger:
"And most days, I actually feel optimistic. I’ve grown into a radical hope, compassion, and sense of possibility that verges on naïve, but is grounded in something much more righteous, and dreadful, than optimism.
I think it’s because now I really know, having seen it with my own two eyes, the alternative if we don’t succeed-- and indeed, the more likely outcome in my opinion-- and just how fucked we are. Like, in my bones, know. When I close my eyes, know. It’s not some abstract future or speculation. I just need to remember the thousands sieging the U.S. Capitol, the giddy spectators and supporters I waded through to get there, the millions they represent across the country and world, and I know. I see them every time I square off with cops. Every time someone on my feed dismisses abolition or unfriends me for talking about it. Every poll I see where people somehow think we need still more police. I know. We’re fucked. If we don't succeed.
Get super political. Join an org. Plant a garden and a hundred food-bearing trees. Form a union. Push your existing union toward greater militancy. Fight hard in these primaries. Get into mutual aid & service. Learn survival skills. 'Radicalize.' Whatever. I don’t care. Just do something that will help keep the world together, or beware the cost of ignoring it much longer."
And that was it. My most radical call to action was agitating for more union strikes. If you read my journal entry where I give my account of the day, you'll know I've been quite reasonably terrified of getting scooped up in literally and figuratively warrantless surveillance or investigation by federal agencies, by virtue of my mere proximity to the events of the day. I'm extremely mindful of the protest and organizing activities I participate in so as not to expose myself to serious legal liability, but that has never stopped the authorities from harassing those on the left when they should be rooting out their own white supremacists.
In that vein, I sent Facebook a quick report about what appeared to be a glitch or an undisclosed act of suppression. Whether it was advisable to act on my suspicions or not, I wanted to make it utterly clear on the record what my intentions were: to provide personal urgency to my friends and family that we must all work harder to prevent such or greater harm from occurring. Any other reading is libelous.
When I found that I was able to still control the Hide/Delete function through the "Manage Posts" menu, I made the decision to delete the post myself. In the, in my opinion, unlikely circumstance that it was merely a coincidental and mysterious glitch, and that I've completely lost the plot in misunderstanding the circumstances, I'm willing to feel the fool. On the other hand, despite my emerging confidence in my story being utterly benign, and my desire to heal and share these thoughts with the people in my life, I do not actually trust FedBook nor do I wish to submit myself to their scrutiny, validation, or make it easier for whichever intelligence agencies they feed these things to as a matter of course. I already knew the risks I was taking; no sense in doubling down on a bad idea.
Somehow, some way, I'm going to use this experience to help me find the closure I'd intended it to. Thanks for reading.