If You’re a White Guy Like Me, It’s Easiest to Just Stay Silent

It'll all be over soon, and we'll all be richer for it

I’m in one of the few demographics considered safe under America’s new authoritarianism. I should have no cares in the world, no matter how much of it burns around me.

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I’m old. I’m white. I’m Christian. I’m male. I have, almost exclusively, northern European ancestry. I’m even a protestant, of sorts. As the crowning glory of all, as the ultimate sanctuary against this wicked regime, I’m almost absurdly hetero. This means, obviously, I have the perfect gender identity.

I am in almost every way perfectly shielded. I could be Susan Wiles’ long-lost son. Wouldn’t that be the most grotesque of discoveries?

So why do I want to escape? Why does my body cry out to leave this comfort zone? Why did I have a stroke one day before the election? Why did my brain, quite literally, explode? How did my body know what was on the horizon before I did? Before you did? Before any of us did?

If there were an algorithm predicting my future abduction by ICE, it would deliver such a statistically insignificant probability that you could just call it zero.

I don’t worry about stepping outside and being chased by hooligans in a pickup truck after someone nearby discovers that I’m trans. I don’t slam my hands on the steering wheel if I’m pulled over. If I walk into a fancy boutique, the owner doesn’t follow me with her eyes until I finally leave.

I don’t have to look out for masked men emerging from black SUVs with tinted windows or worry about getting rounded up while I’m mowing the lawn.

Lawmakers don’t try to regulate what I do with my body. My neighbors don’t try to collect a bounty on my head for taking a pill.

Nobody tells me to move back to my country.

The easiest thing for me and others in my demographic, even those who oppose the regime, is to lie low and hope it all blows over. Abdicate my responsibility to be at the forefront of resistance. Refuse to leverage my inherent advantages to effect change, refuse to maybe help pass along my good fortune to my neighbors, who mostly do not share these characteristics. Refuse the simple act of insisting that we all share what belongs to all of us.

After all, I didn’t vote for this shithead. It makes a lot more sense to shut up, focus on my fiction writing, and shut the politics out, to quit writing about it, to just let the country burn and hope enough remains from the smoking cinders for me to find my writing niche or even just go back to writing software code. Mind my own business. Don’t make trouble.

Besides. Mixing politics and fiction in a Substack is a dumb way to grow a newsletter. Take the politics out, write like a fiend, hope it all just goes away. By mixing the two, I annoy one or the other group of subscribers almost every time I hit the send button. Fiction readers sigh at the politics, and readers of my political rants are indifferent about the fiction, even though most of it is slightly subversive and tied at least loosely to the cause.¹

There are days when I wish I could do that. Just skip the politics.

But it’s impossible.

Not one day goes by when I don’t want to run into the streets and yell at the top of my lungs, “What the hell is wrong with you people?” Where are the protests, where’s the anger, where’s the utter disbelief in what we are witnessing? How did we become this?

Most of all, where are the men?

The women? They’re fuming. They’re enraged. They’re being heard.

Where are the men?

Most of all, where are the white men, but… where are the men? Where are the young men? One of their gamer friends just blew a hole in the neck of one of the chief propagandists who helped transform their vote into what has since become one of the most foul regimes in modern history.

Where are the men, dammit?

I look at the polls and see that this regime still manages a 40% approval rating. I can’t understand why, even after I talk to people who admit to being one of those who approve. None of their explanations make sense to me. It’s like their cognitive reasoning is broken, as broken as a fragile plate of china thrown to a marble floor by an insane ape.

How did we become this?

Sometimes, I think I know the answers, or at least some of the answers. But usually not.

Jimmy Carter spoke of the nation’s moral decay before he left office, chased out for high egg prices and for losing a battle against a proud nation we tried to control through a proxy dictatorship, until that one fine day when the dictator fled.

“Iran, Iran,” said the Shah, and Jimmy Carter paid the price for decades of American hegemony in the Middle East, all for oil, all of it, all for the right to control the thick, black goo of ancient plankton.

When I think back to those days, I see the warning signs everywhere. Some of us spoke of them, but most of us buried ourselves in work, confident that if we just kept our heads down and worked hard enough, all would be well.

Corporations gobbled each other up like little Pac-Man jaws, chasing each other around, chasing us around, sucking our incomes dry, leaving an obscene amount of wealth in a handful of bank accounts, enough wealth to fix every problem in the nation a dozen times.

Disneyland turned from something for every family to rush toward on that special summer into an escape only the wealthiest families can consider.

Buying a first home became a fanciful dream buried under a level of unprecedented wage theft. Sending our children to universities required a second mortgage. Major sickness catapulted us into bankruptcy.

We all crammed into flying Greyhounds while a chosen few pulled the curtains shut and drank martinis or eschewed flying Greyhounds altogether and flew on private jets to exclusive destinations.

And we all thought we could be part of that rarified group, so we shut up and kept our heads down and worked and pretended we weren’t building a modern feudal society.

A few of us did make that wondrous leap we all strove for. These rare accomplishments, advertised on social media through insta photos and selfies, sustained the feudal system.

If someone demonstrated a propensity to hit a baseball harder and more often than the rest of his peers, or shoot a ball through a hoop with magesterial skill, he made infinitely more money than his teammates, signing contracts that now approach a half billion dollars, deferred money or otherwise.

Performers like Taylor Swift become billionaires. At least she was smart enough to seize control of her music, but she’s also spawned 30 million more young girls who think they can do the same thing, who stand in front of their mirrors and practice fame.

For every actor snagging $30 million for one movie appearance, thousands are sitting in trailer homes or squalid apartments, working whatever gigs they can cook up, all hoping they can be the next star alighting on a magic carpet of money into an awards banquet where they mingle with the stars.

Coders around the world, from the American West Coast to Bulgaria, from India to China, pound away at their keyboards with dreams of becoming the next tech multibillionaire.

It’s all within reach if you just try hard enough, keep working, ignore the strife around you.

This is what happened to some friends of mine in Ukraine who worked, it seemed, 24 hours a day, dreaming the big dream, until it all crashed down upon them because a sociopath wanted to seize their country.

Yet, we keep working. We see what is happening around us, but 40% of us are unmoved. We keep working. We calculate our stock trades or hatch real estate deals or set up financing on corporate acquisitions, thirsting for that day when we can clink our glasses together as our trade groups fete us or someone like us with meaningless awards.

We notice that the addition to the neighbor’s house has been in the same state of incompletion for three months because the workers have mostly gone into hiding or returned home, but it’s not our home. Not our problem. We shrug it off, keep our heads down, keep working, as the Tyvek next door flaps in the wind, slowly gaining a darkening hue from the weeks of rain and lack of maintenance.

In many of our neighborhoods, the roofers and landscapers are gone. There are no men in red hats slinging shingles in ninety-degree heat, so when the wild hailstorms of our era cleave our roofs, the wait for repair extends into months.

We might, on occasion, mention what a shame it all is to see a neighbor stuck with a construction manager who can’t finish the work, but it’s not our problem, and we put our heads down, and we work.

We might wonder where all the Home Depot dudes have gone, but with little more than a shrug and maybe even relief. Tired of seeing that. Send them home. Good.

If we react at all, it’s to hurry a deal over the finish line. Call Jerry. Get the contract signed, stat. We don’t have time to waste. Move mountains if you have to. Just get it done.

Because deep inside, we know we need to scramble. Things could collapse very quickly, but nobody will say that out loud. We need to pile up the money to protect ourselves. And we need to do it fast.

That, and we’re always a signature away from that one deal of a lifetime. Sure, times are a little weird, maybe a little rough, but we’ll figure it out, we always do. We’ll adapt to the tariffs. We’ll take an equity loan on the house if we need to. Anything to get it done.

We’re Americans.

If you’re white like me, this strategy might work for a time.

But eventually, history will burglarize our homes. It will tell you that’s not how it works. History will speak, bringing with it unimaginable claps of thunder that will shatter your world, shake you to the core, and turn you into another of history’s tragic stories.

And everything will be gone. All of it. Maybe by floods, or fire, or winds. Maybe by war, maybe by an economic collapse so pure that history will invent a brand new word or phrase for it. Maybe by another pandemic, only this time, because the American health infrastructure has been stripped bare, it will be apocalyptic.

Maybe nuclear war, sparked not by strategic considerations, but by two infantile regimes caught up in a bizarre game of chicken that may have its roots in a worldwide ring of pedophilia.

The best scenario is that your children will live in a hellfire created by the climate change denial we officially embraced last November. The very best scenario is that they suffer instead of you.

Smoke from fires thousands of miles away will choke the life out of them. They’ll run out of water, food, places to live. Insurance companies will collapse from the roar of catastrophic storms, taking the economy with them. Crops will dry up. Farmland will turn into desert. Waters will engulf beachfront property.

But there’s more to it than that. We live under a regime so abjectly amoral that it’s changed everyone, turning even the calmest of us into bitter shells of our former selves.

Living in a nation that refuses to expel a leader with Donald Trump’s kind of history is as close to a guarantee of catastrophe as is possible. We warned you that all that has transpired would happen, but it’s actually been worse.

We’re warning you again.

White skin won’t protect you from the outcome of this thing. It’ll burn away just like everyone else’s.

I look upon the landscape of this nation every day asking the same question.

Where are the men? Especially the white men. So many of them are quietly cheering on the disaster that I’ve found myself racially profiling them. You want to do my taxes? Sorry, you’re a white guy in Georgia. I’ll take my chances on the Black dude, thanks. How can I trust someone with my taxes if there’s a 70% chance they voted for this?

Is that unfair? Maybe. I don’t care.

Maybe I’ll change my mind if that 40% wall of approval breaks, but it damn well better do more than break. It should have broken by now, anyway. It should have shattered into a million pieces.

It hasn’t.

So I ask again.

Where are the men?

And if you’re a white man, especially, where are you? Why do you remain silent? So many of you are lonely, even if you’ve managed to remain married. Is it really any wonder why?

Footnotes

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Thanks for reading!