For episode 181, Elia Ayoub is joined again by Margaret Killjoy to talk about her piece “⁠The Sky is Falling; We’ve Got This⁠” published on her newsletter. We recorded this shortly after Trump was announced as the winner of the US elections and many people were feeling despair, understandably so.

Check out Margaret’s new book and first novel “The Sapling Cage” with Feminist Press!

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Transcriptions: Transcriptions are done by⁠ Antidote Zine⁠ and will be published on⁠ The Fire These Times’ transcript archive⁠.

Credits:

Elia Ayoub (host, episode designer, producer), Elliott Miskovicz⁠⁠ (sound editor), ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics). 

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Transcript via Shirley Yin and Antidote Zine:

You have to say: it’s bad, and here’s some ideas that we can try to develop about how to do something about it. We have to actually look at the situation. We can’t fight an imaginary war. We have to fight the actual war that’s in front of us.

Elia J. Ayoub: Today we’re joined by Margaret Killjoy. We’ll be talking about the Substack that you wrote right after the election results came out, called The Sky is Falling; We’ve Got This, or: yes it’s bad, no we need not despair. It’s a piece that I sent to a bunch of friends, especially those in the US and are trans, who were (and some of them still are) very understandably freaking out, and it helped them. It felt instinctively like a good idea to do an episode on this because I think it would help them, so I have them in mind with this episode, but we’ll also talk about broader themes. 

How have the past ten days been for you?

Margaret Killjoy: I’m not freaking out, but that’s not because I’m inherently smarter or something like that. It’s more that I find going into “trying to get stuff done” mode one of the best ways to avoid panic. I’ve been talking to a lot of anarchists and activists in the US, and we’ve been putting our heads down like, All right, how do we get stuff done? How do we just start? 

I mean, we’ve been “starting” for a long time, but the clock is ticking, and we have a certain amount of time until Trump’s second presidency, which we have every reason to believe will be worse than his first one, especially for migrants and trans people, but also for everyone. It’s funny, because it’s not that I’ve been avoiding thinking about it, but I wonder why I’m not more worried. The best guess I have is that I’m like, Well, I’m just trying to be productive. I don’t know.

EA: You mentioned a therapist friend of yours in the piece: “A therapist friend of mine reiterates to me all the time that acting with agency is the primary way to avoid being traumatized by negative experiences.” As it happens, today I was listening to the “Volatile Emotions” episode of the podcast On the Nose by Jewish Currents. They had on Naomi Klein; the editor-in-chief, Arielle Angel; as well as Hala Alyan, who’s a Palestinian novelist/poet and also a therapist. I first heard about this concept through her work: that even the concept of “PTSD” in the context of Gaza doesn’t make much sense because there’s no “P”—it’s been a continuous series of traumatizing events. So when do we start healing?

The title of that episode is called “Volatile Emotions” because there is this notion that in most activist spaces, such as the left/anarchist [ones], affect is usually underdiscussed, in terms of the role of emotions, and sitting and dealing with them. When are they to be trusted and when are they to be challenged? Because we all react in certain ways that are not necessarily the way we would always react, or maybe I react in the moment in a way that I wouldn’t react half an hour later. And all of this is rendered more complicated with social media because everything is permanently inked on the internet.

I bring this up because today (we’re recording this on November 17) has been very weird in good and bad ways. It’s around 8:20 in the evening for me, and today in Lebanon was maybe one of the worst days in the past four months in terms of bombardment by the Israelis, and they’ve expanded the reach in terms of where they’re bombing. There’s almost been a sense of normalization: it’s never become normal, but it feels like we know where they’re going to target, in a regular or predictable way. Today wasn’t as much like that; they’ve expanded where they’ve been bombing.

MK: I was looking at a video of that right before I signed on, of an apartment building being destroyed.

EA: I think there’s been five different buildings entirely collapsed. One of them is next to my sister’s friend’s apartment. She’s okay, thankfully, but this is on my mind. Just half an hour ago, there was a drone strike on a car next to another friend’s cousin’s apartment. Lebanon’s small, and Beirut even smaller. 

But today is also World Prematurity Day, and for me, it’s a big deal because my kid was born extremely premature. That’s a hopeful thing: we went through this nightmare for the first month of her life, and now she’s doing insanely good. Those two things are on my mind at the same time.

It’s difficult not to acknowledge one without also acknowledging the other in a way that doesn’t downplay the horror of one; at the same time, I’m trying to push back against downplaying the good of the other. The positive should also be acknowledged, but not in a way that the negative gets downplayed.

MK: You don’t want to look for a “silver lining” of the bombing, but you want to look at the things in your life that are positive and bring you hope, or make you happier alive.

EA: Initially it was survivor’s guilt, which I still have, but it was also like, Why should I enjoy this? Because this person can’t, or my friends back home, my cousins, or what have you. Last time I had you on I mentioned that for a long time, I wasn’t even able to go hiking, because I was so worried about global warming that I didn’t want to get attached to nature. I was almost protecting myself, pre-emptively.

I bring this up because one of the main arguments of your piece is that maintaining this optimism or hope is not just a matter of, Look on the bright side. Because that can get cartoonish pretty quickly, like Monty Python. But also, you need to do that in order to tackle things that are not so good. Your brain cannot function otherwise.

MK: We need to have a reason to do a thing, or we won’t do the thing; we need to trick ourselves. There’s the whole “hope is a discipline” concept, which I think originally comes from a Catholic nun—which makes sense because despair is a sin in Catholicism, so we were going to build frameworks around preventing that. But that’s what I need—in the morning, I need to say, I need to continue to try and get stuff done. That’s the only way. The only way we can get stuff done is to believe that it’s possible, and it becomes possible. Everything that is happening right now is being done by people, and we’re people too.

EA: There is a James Baldwin quote that I reposted after the election results: To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. An “academic matter” like it’s something you’re detached from and you can just study, as if you’re studying Tudor England or Edo Japan, something that is just in the past and you’re disconnected from it (although there are different ways of studying history where that’s not the case).

This is what resonates with me. My kid is thirteen months old, and Baldwin wrote to his nephew a lot. And it’s like: how can you look at that kid and tell them, Give up, it’s not worth it? Most of us don’t do that. That’s the interesting thing. We try to protect their innocence. But what does that mean? You’re doing that in a way where you have to believe, somehow, that it’s worth it.

MK: I think a lot of people are allergic to hope. My friend calls it “hopium,” this idea that Everything’s fine! Every now and then you’ll see an article that’s like, Three positive things with climate change this year! and it’s little tiny things like, We got a battery that’s slightly better, or We saved this park, or sometimes huge things like the generations of different tribes working to get dams removed in the Pacific Northwest. But, you not only need hope to get anything done, you also have to soberly look at what’s happening to get anything done. So we have to say, It’s bad. That’s the part that people get mixed up. You have to do both.

You have to say: It’s bad, and here’s some ideas that we can try to develop about how to do something about it. We have to actually look at the situation. We can’t fight an imaginary war. We have to fight the actual war that’s in front of us.

EA: I always bring things back to Lebanon. There are a lot of warlords in Lebanon (they don’t call themselves that, obviously, but I use that term because they were warlords during the civil war, and they are still in power). Some of them are very old: one of them is eighty-six, and another one is eighty-eight. It kind of feeds into the way I talk with my friends about them, because of course, Hassan Nasrallah was killed a few months ago, and he was one of those political figures who it was conceptually impossible to even imagine that he would not always be around. He was this overwhelming presence, one of the de facto kingmakers.

I find myself speaking the same way about other influential politicians in Lebanon, but the rational part of me knows that’s not true. Like, He’s eighty-six or eighty-eight and he doesn’t look good! He doesn’t have that many years left in front of him. And yet, it almost feels like, What’s the point in thinking about that? because we don’t know when or what we can do about it. 

But this other part of me feels like it’s very important to think about that, because part of their power is in their projected invincibility. It’s almost like you’re watching a movie and you have to suspend your disbelief, and forget that they are mortal. They bleed like you, and they make decisions—many of them very stupid decisions, and some of those decisions hurt them.

I had this conversation after the election, where I wasn’t trying to dismiss anything, because it is going to be bad and there’s no reason to believe otherwise. As you said, the administration is objectively much worse, and even the people who were just appointed are worse than the last time around. And of course, every time this happens it’s worse than the last time because of global warming. At the same time, how many fascists have said that they’re going to have a thousand-year reich, and were just factually wrong? It’s important to remember that Hitler got it wrong. He thought he would live longer than he clearly did. And Mussolini is the same. I know it’s one of the clichés to make Hitler comparisons.

MK: It’s pretty accurate. It gets overdone, but that doesn’t mean it’s never true.

EA: It’s important to take those people and the states and infrastructures around them very seriously, because you need to deal with the reality of their power and the impact they’re going to have, if not on you, then on your loved ones, your neighborhood, your community, your country, your world. At the same time, remember that they are also mortal. It’s a difficult thing to do and I struggle with it.

MK: I think that makes a lot of sense. There’s a meme that goes around for trans people that’s like, You need to stay alive, because things are going to change. Things will change, and you have to be alive to see things change. Most of us are younger than Trump, right? Most of us statistically are going to outlive that man, and we should try to. It’s not a failure if we don’t, but we just try; that’s all we can do.

It’s interesting, too, because it’s got to be such a strange position for you to watch both Lebanon and the United States. Because clearly, it is worse to be in Lebanon than in the United States right now. As much as I want to be like, Hey, it’s real bad—and it is bad—it’s been a while since a government has blown up apartment buildings in the United States. It’s happened before, in Philadelphia with the 1985 MOVE bombing, but it is clearly a worse time to be in Lebanon.

The thing that’s interesting and messy is that there’s more knock-on effects for the world if something bad is happening in the United States, just because we’re the center of the most powerful empire on the globe. But that doesn’t make the suffering of the American people more important. So it’s got to be really weird to watch.

EA: It is. I posted this once: If I’m allowed one very unhelpful take, it’s that it’s exhausting to have to give a shit about the Americans. I mean, I would anyway, because of internationalism and principles and shit. People are people. But it’s tiring because of the consequences—most people don’t get to vote in the election that impacts everyone in the world.

At the same time, Lebanon has a huge diaspora in the US, and so what’s happening in the US is more familiar for me personally than if it was in, I don’t know, parts of Latin America where there isn’t a huge Lebanese diaspora. I’m also based in the UK, and what happens in the US influences the UK in many ways. Knowing what happens there is also good for me to know, just personally in terms of survival, and also in terms of feeling that I can do something, because I cope by digging through something and feeling like I have a better grasp of what’s happening, because otherwise I think it feels too disarming. I would definitely feel much more helpless if I didn’t have this obsession of figuring out, What’s up with this thing, and why is it happening?

MK: I really like that attitude. I think that’s another thing that people struggle with: they either want to stick their heads in the sand and ignore it because they think that’s the way to avoid worrying, or they get so obsessed with it that they worry constantly, and that’s also not good. I agree with you; I think that soberly looking at what’s happening so that we can formulate a response is almost always the best thing to do for our own mental health, as well as any strategy that we might have.

EA: There’s a joke by our good friend Milton Friedman (that’s a joke, by the way; he’s not a good person) that I think I read in one of Naomi Klein’s books: Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. In his case, it’s important because he is one of the founders of neoliberal ideology, and his influence cannot be understated. He wrote this in the seventies, and I hate this but he’s absolutely right.

We see this time and time again, even in something like conspiracy thinking (in the case of the US). I’ve researched a lot about conspiracy thinking from the far right, including QAnon stuff, and the fact that it was initially an extremely fringe thing that was ridiculous and doesn’t make much sense didn’t stop it from growing. Because it clearly gave something to people. I’m not saying that something is good—it’s clearly not, but it filled something. That’s something that I’m trying to identify, and it demystifies it.

Earlier, I was speaking to a Ukrainian friend of mine, and she was asking me about someone she knows who was talking to her in a way that she felt was off. She was talking to her about Lebanon, which my Ukrainian friend knows a bit about, but not a lot, and she felt from the tone that something was off, so she asked me about it. I tried to contextualize things, like What’s that person’s background? Where do they come from and how might they be thinking? She was very confused about how someone from Lebanon could be not entirely anti-Israel. There are people on the right and the far right in Lebanon and in the diaspora who are so anti-Hezbollah that they’re basically happy with anything that might weaken Hezbollah.

MK: Especially if your family was targeted by Hezbollah, you’re just like, Fuck them, I hate them.

EA: Yes, shades of that exist. I contextualized it a bit and it made sense to her, such that she felt more comfortable then challenging that friend of hers, because in that moment she did not want to speak about Lebanon to a Lebanese. But just knowing a tiny bit more—and I was able to point her in certain directions about what to read—allowed her to feel a bit less disheartened by that friend of hers. 

That reminds me a bit of the stories of people who went down rabbit holes like QAnon and cut ties with their families. Because we know that even in those contexts, what usually brings someone back from a cult is that they still have some kind of connection to family or loved ones or friends, even if that connection is not at its best. They are still tethered in a way that maybe they wouldn’t be if everyone cut them off completely. This isn’t prescriptive—I’m not saying people should or shouldn’t do it. I’m saying that this often seems to be the case.

MK: I want to take a half-step back to when you were talking about our man, Milton Friedman, and this idea that during crisis, it’s the ideas that are lying around that have a better chance. I think about this all the time. I remember once when I went to this writer’s conference and the people who were in charge of the conference weren’t there. There’s like eighteen of us just sitting around and no one knows what to do, and so the first pitch of, Hey, here’s what we can do therefore sets the tone. The first person to come in and be like, I have a structure, I have an idea—that is so meaningful, and that is what is present in crisis that allows things to change so dramatically and quickly. It makes building and learning ideas really useful.

I want to make a comparison (and I might be slightly wrong about this), to democratic confederalism in the Kurdish regions. You have the PKK, who’ve been doing it forever in Turkey, and they’re ideologically committed to this thing. But it doesn’t take off past their own borders in their own areas. Then there’s a crisis in Syria, and now all of a sudden, when someone comes in and says, Hey, we have an idea about how to do this, then it can explode into this area and actually create the thing they’ve always wanted to create.

Then the other comparison—think about the three great anarchy projects with millions of people in history: Ukraine, Spain, and then Manchuria. In Spain, you’ve probably got fifth-generation anarchists at that point, and they have all this infrastructure and are just waiting for their time, and then crisis comes and they take their time. But in Ukraine, you’ve only got about twelve years of organizing as anarchists in any kind of public way, so it’s more like, Well, some people who had been anarchists had an idea and everyone needed an idea and here’s an idea. And then in Manchuria, you’re talking maybe two years of anarchism. This one’s the hardest to get any information about in English, and even in Korean, but overall, you end up with millions of people living, probably (again, the literature is really blurry about this one) in horizontal society, because someone was like, Hey, I have an idea about what to do, because we’re all in this crisis together.

The right wing absolutely takes advantage of this. I know that I’m kind of going off in a different direction, but I think about this process a lot, and it gets back to what you’re talking about, silver linings. I’m not like, Hooray, Trump won, now the United States might collapse, because there’s a non-zero chance he’s going to destroy the United States, which will have knock-on effects for the entire world that are impossible to predict. But instead, it’s more like being poised to take advantage of a situation that might occur, even if it’s not the situation that we would choose to put ourselves in.

EA: People like Trump are putting things in motion in a way that they don’t have full control over. There’s this word in Arabic called “tanfis,” which just means letting air out, like deflating a balloon. I don’t know in which context it was originally coined, but I know it’s been used a lot in the context of Syria, and also in the rest of the Arab world, especially with dictatorships. The idea is that from time to time, the dictatorships (such as Hafez al-Assad, and then Bashar al-Assad before 2011) would allow certain small-scale protests, usually when it comes to Palestine, because it looked good when pan-Arabism was still a big thing. It was like they were saying, You know, we’re still democratic, we listen to the people.

But what’s interesting is that sometimes it got out of hand, in the sense that by allowing protests, even if they are very small, controlled, and symbolic, and even telling them which chants to use, they’re letting people discover something that they didn’t have any experience of in the past, even if it’s only for a short amount of time. 

We know this in the context of the Gulf—Dana El Kurd, who’s one of my co-hosts, is Palestinian and wrote about this in the context of Qatar. The Qatari government would allow protests in the name of Palestine, but this would have a knock-on effect, because how can you be in an absolute monarchy (as a Qatari citizen at least, because Qatar is mostly non-citizen, migrant, domestic and other laborers, like most of the Gulf is) and still talk about justice for Palestinians, two-state solution, one-state solution? You’re starting to think politically.

But in the context of Qatar, you’re not supposed to. You have an absolute monarchy, and it may give you some kind of welfare state, but that’s it, and shut up about it. Tanfis is like letting off steam; as the leaders would put it: We will let them play with their cause—as long as they don’t threaten us in any fundamental way, of course. 

One can make the argument that Hafez al-Assad in the nineties was slightly (and I emphasize that he was a monster) more tolerant to certain civil disobediences, and Bashar as well after he took over in 2000, in the first few years. This inadvertently contributed to people having a possibility in their minds. In 2011, when the Arab Spring came along, people could think, I remember that in 2005 or 2002, my uncle or my cousin or my sister took part in a demonstration, and they can tell us about that. If I were sixteen and had never been in a protest before and don’t even know what that looks like (even movies were heavily censored before 2011), I may have been able to imagine it in a fantastic way, like Middle-Earth, but now I have this concrete connection.

This concrete connection was a misstep by those dictatorships. It did not benefit them in the long term. That’s what I mean when I say that recognizing that people in power are just people who have power allows me to recognize they have made mistakes, and they’ve lost things that they clearly didn’t plan for. The Syrian regime assumed they would have Lebanon until beyond 2005, but there was a big uprising and it forced the Syrian army out of Lebanon. They didn’t plan for or want that, and they assumed that they could stay forever, but they were just wrong. So what does that do to their own self-mythologizing?

Last week, I went to Dublin and took part in a debate on the question of, Do you support the two-state solution or the one-state solution in Israel-Palestine? I’m not a huge fan of this format, and it was a bit performative, but I went there out of curiosity. And I was like, Neither, really, but if I have to choose one, the one-state solution feels better than a two-state solution, and presented some pros and cons. One of the two-state solution people at some point mentioned the word “realistic,” and I didn’t have time in the moment to express just how much this concept bothers me sometimes.

I think “realism” is used in a way that masks the fact that realism, as an “ism,” is also a belief. If you’re saying, I think this is more realistic than that, sometimes you may have the facts on your side in terms of what is more probable in the short term, but often, at least in my experience, you’re making a lot of assumptions that you take for granted in order to make that claim: I don’t think this is realistic, because I don’t think it’s possible for X, Y, and Z to happen because of other factors.

At some point, you are making an educated guess. An educated guess is not the same as “being realistic,” and yet that’s what we have a lot of the time. You have “capitalist realism” as a concept and shit like that. There is that Le Guin quote: We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

MK: I hate to go back to our man, Milton Friedman, but when people talk about things being “realistic,” imagine someone who has a chain around their ankle and it is pinned to the ground, and they want to walk a mile. They can walk maybe a quarter mile, but then the chain will catch up to them, and they can’t move anymore. In that case, it feels more realistic to walk, rather than fight the guard keeping the chain there, but if you need to go a mile, it’s actually more realistic to fight the guard instead of walking the quarter mile and being unable to go further. The status quo needs to no longer be the status quo for the level of change that is necessary.

I personally think mostly about climate change—obviously, I think about fascism and genocide and war and stuff, but partially as relates to climate change. We need to fix climate change or we’re literally all doomed. Even though revolution has a shitty track record, and is complicated and messy and usually goes wrong, it still feels more realistic than thinking that the existing democratic system of the United States, the world’s most powerful empire, will allow for making the changes necessary to start addressing climate change. 

You can even see it in weird polling in the United States—for example, burning down the police precinct in Minneapolis was more popular than either of the presidential candidates that just ran. The status quo is not more “realistic.”

Going back to what you’re saying about Palestine, I think the one-state solution is more realistic, because the two-state solution isn’t going to happen. And if it is, it’s going to be, at best, the deal that was offered in the nineties, which was not a two-state solution. It was like a subjugation request, not even a compromise. You can’t have a two-state solution while Israel exists. I don’t know how else to say it, but you could have a one-state, secular, Jews are welcome and everyone gets a vote, don’t have to kick anyone out solution. That feels possible. But while Israel’s in power, they are clearly not going to allow Palestine to exist at any fundamental level. 

Sorry, that was kind of a rant.

EA: In that debate I mentioned, I felt that I got a bit of a concession that the two-state solution is unrealistic. At some point, this is what needs to happen for a two-state solution: Gaza needs to be left alone by the Israelis; the West Bank needs to be left alone by the Israelis; the Israelis need to allow or accept a bridge between Gaza and the West Bank—

MK: Controlled by Palestinians!

EA: —And also accept that East Jerusalem, which they’ve already annexed, goes back to the Palestinians; and you have to accept that they are not just willing, but can be pressured to do this. The UN vote in September concluded that the occupation is illegal (I mean, it’s been illegal, international law-wise, since it began in 1967). Even if tonight, the entire world decides that this is what needs to happen, and you have ten months or something to dismantle the settlements, that’s like 700,000 people. Even if they agreed to do it now, it’s not going to happen in a year. It’s like, even the law doesn’t take into consideration whether something is realistic or not. It’s a bit of an absurd situation we’re in.

It’s one of the many ways that sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind. Even the people who seem to be arguing for something don’t seem to believe it! They go through the motions, like, Clearly, this is what everyone else is saying needs to happen, so I’m saying it too, and I’m going to recognize the state of Palestine, which barely exists, and I’m going to continue relationships with Israel anyway, and hope for the best. That’s basically what the policies are now.

MK: I think this is a broadly applicable thing. I remember talking with someone I love very dearly about the need to change things for the climate, and I mentioned, at the very least, a Green New Deal needs to happen, and this person is like, Ah, yeah, but it’ll never go through. If the system won’t allow the Green New Deal to go through, then we should not accept the system’s existence. If the solution that could go through the system can’t go through the system, then the system can’t fix the problem!

There’s this tendency, and I think it’s particularly a liberal tendency, to have your goal be like: Well, at least I tried—and not even in a direct action point of view where you’re at least putting some skin in the game! Well, at least I voiced my concern. And you’re like, Well, look, that’s fine. I’m not doing a ton more than voicing my concern, but at least try to formulate strategies that could possibly work.

EA: I said I don’t like this thing. So…what do you want from me?

I do see that attitude a lot. One of the things you said in your piece was that things can always get worse, but that also means things can get better. That’s the thing about the future! I did an entire fucking PhD on hauntologies and temporalities, and how the past affects the present, and how that manifests itself in movies. The people who were producing the movies at a specific point in time were not talking to me, they were talking to their audience—a movie released in 1982 isn’t talking to me in 2024, it’s talking to an audience in 1982. What’s interesting is that when it feels like I am also the audience, even if that wasn’t their intention, it kind of collapses time.

It makes things like studying history feel more concrete, because here I am watching this movie or documentary, and they’re talking about their hopes and dreams, the things they’re going through, how the recent past has been for them, how they understand it—and most importantly, they have a vision of the future.

The vision of the future in American movies and TV from the fifties and sixties was more optimistic than the futurism that we have today (that was before cyberpunk). I think a lot about The Jetsons, because we are roughly at the midpoint between when it was released and when it’s set (in the 2060s). What was interesting was that they have all of this high-tech shit and robots, but you still had 1950s white American gender norms. Those people imagined a future, but couldn’t imagine beyond rigid binary gender norms.

That’s why I love Star Trek, and I like to pick apart which bits feel “realistic” and which don’t. It helps me take the present very seriously, but also not take it as the only way things can ever be, because it’s factually incorrect to believe that.

MK: You look back at what people thought the future was going to be in the fifties and well—we didn’t build flying cars, but we sure broke gender.

I don’t know if you knew this, but white people in America don’t say the best things about the Middle East.

EA: Oh no, I didn’t know this!

MK: There’s this absolute fatalism from anywhere on the center and probably everywhere else too, like: Those people are always fighting each other, as if it’s this intrinsic characteristic, in a horrible racialized eugenicist way. First of all, everyone’s always fighting each other. You can just say that about humanity. But also, the Israeli-Palestine conflict is as old as Israel, and I know people who are older than that.

EA: It’s younger than my grandmother.

MK: So that’s just not true. There are things that Americans care deeply about and consider like yesterday, like the civil war, that are twice as old! The things that are don’t have to be the way things end up. I told this to myself for a while, and I tell it to a lot of my friends who are going through certain types of hard times, where sometimes your only job is to keep your head down and stay alive. Because things are going to be different.

Maybe your skill set or what you have to offer to change the world, or maybe the way you wish the world was isn’t what’s happening right now—but like, just try not to die for ten years, and it’s going to be different and you can look again. I don’t mean in a hibernation way—reading grand, epic fantasy novels, they fast-forward and suddenly it’s five or ten years later, and the characters are all older. And then they get back at it, and it’s like, What were you doing for the past ten years? I was happily married, or, I was miserable and drinking, or some combination of the two.

EA: I don’t know if you know that meme of Gandalf where he says, Wait for me to Frodo and then he fucks off for like fifteen years.

MK: And to Gandalf it’s not a big deal, you know? That’s just what happens sometimes.

Obviously, a lot of things can’t wait, and any activism we can do that could possibly impact things is going to have an impact. I almost feel bad saying this, but one of the things that I think is very depressing is that most of the activism within the colonial core has not changed things. We ended up with two presidential candidates arguing about who hated Palestinians more, and no one was bothering to mention, Hey, even if we pretend it’s okay for Israel to do this to Palestine, why is it okay for it to do it to Lebanon? 

That’s not even a conversation happening in the mainstream political space, so it’s really easy for people to get disillusioned by activism. Granted, you can look at some of the direct action activism that actually did change at least a little bit of things, like, The following company is no longer going to manufacture things that are going to Israel, but What is the point when you can’t stop a thing? is one of the things I think about all the time, and I don’t have an answer to.

A friend of mine got arrested with Jewish Voice for Peace and was reflecting a year later like, What the hell did that accomplish? The only thing I can say is, it does not stop what’s happening in Palestine, but it helps make the argument more clear to more people that anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism.

EA: I know this from friends in Gaza, especially those who are younger, who genuinely have never met a Jewish person who is not the IDF. For them just to know that such a person exists is not something to underestimate. Now, obviously, many people can just go online and see that not all Jews act like a fucking IDF member, and it’s almost banal to say that out loud. But I come from a context where many people don’t have experiences other than their immediate experiences. 

It does make a huge difference—I’m a Lebanese Palestinian and I feel I was inoculated against antisemitism from an early age because of the people that I ended up discovering online, like Emma Goldman, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, and others who happen to be Jewish. This was before I understood the role of antisemitism and conspiracy thinking and the history of it. Before I got into the intellectual side of it, I was able to, almost by happenstance, inoculate myself emotionally: This just feels wrong, because I have someone in mind who contradicts what you’re saying.

I want you to talk a bit about your novel, which I’m excited to read. But I’ll briefly introduce the concept of shifting baseline syndrome. The example that’s usually given is: if you’re a fisher in a certain area, and you’re used to a hundred tons of fish every year, your child then gets used to seventy tons of fish because of overfishing, and then your grandchild, forty tons. To your grandchild, what that third generation is used to is the world. This is reality. Maybe they have some memories of their grandparents telling them, Actually, back in my day, but maybe not because too much time has passed. Unless you’re part of a community that has strong oral storytelling traditions, which most people unfortunately aren’t anymore, you don’t have this connection of, Well, actually, I know that two hundred years ago, this was common.

My grandfather once told me it was not uncommon to see something called the Syrian bear in Mount Lebanon and the mountains of Palestine. It wasn’t every day, but it wasn’t uncommon. Recently a Syrian bear and cub was spotted in Lebanon and it was fucking news. It was like, Wow, this huge thing happened that wouldn’t have been rare two generations ago. That’s the negative side of shifting baseline syndrome.

The positive side of shifting baseline syndrome is that most of us don’t have to worry about DDT and the ozone layer, as basically everyone was in the nineties. I wouldn’t say that the problem is gone forever or that things are just amazing, but there was something that was done that did fix a problem that people were really freaking out about. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation had that good thing not happened. 

So even the good cases of shifting baseline syndrome are things that we end up taking for granted. For example, if some anarchists end up killing a dictator, we may know about that in the background, but we live in the aftermath of that world, good or bad. And we take it for granted either way, because that is the world we live in.

If we reverse engineer this, something that we do today may not be something that we even live to see the fruits of (you mentioned your orchard the last time you were around). But it doesn’t mean that there won’t be fruits. That’s that’s the difficult bit, like the “seventh generation” principle where there’s three generations on either side of you. It’s a framework that makes more sense to me.

MK: Assuming that there’s enough people to do books and stuff four generations from now, when we look back at what’s happening, most of the world is going to look like assholes. What the fuck, you all just let that happen? What’s wrong with you? But then people will be like, The following group broke into the following weapons manufacturer, or, The following people did all of this stuff, or, The following people went there and tried to witness.

It’ll probably be the same problem where the people who are not Palestinian will be held up higher. Actually, that might not be true. If you look back at World War Two, the most talked about genocide in America, we do actually hold up the Jews who fought the genocide a lot more than non-Jewish “saviors” or whatever. So maybe there’s some hope here with that.

EA: Have you read the book, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan by Sho Konishi?

MK: No, but it sounds familiar.

EA: I bring this up because Konishi is a Japanese academic, and he has this quote that was in an interview published four years ago by Matt Dagher-margosian. The quote is: If you feel like you are locked in, but you feel no other way to survive in this world, do something outside your ‘employed’ time which can be locked in by forces that you feel are outside your control. There are alternative times that belong to you, when you can create and belong to another temporality, and yet act in effective ways.

The conversation was in the context of his book, which is about conversations between Japanese and Russian anarchists and other anti-authoritarians in late 1800s and early 1900s. The idea of Russia as a “Western” state (and that’s complicated) was being put into question, partly because the Russian Empire was defeated by Japan in a battle, which was a big thing at the time because it was the first time that a non-Western power defeated a big Western power. It goes back to the idea that when crisis occurs, many things were up for grabs or for questioning. 

I found it fascinating to read about Japanese people conversing with Russians, and I was like, In which fucking language are you doing this? You don’t speak the same language. But there were Japanese people who spoke Russian, and people learn. The effort people made to learn other languages fascinated me.

MK: They might have used Esperanto.

EA: There were some using Esperanto; this was mentioned in the book as well. But there were also Russians who learned enough Japanese, and Japanese people who learned enough Russian. They were talking to each other without having what we consider “the West” today in mind. 

I’m part of From the Periphery Media Collective, and this would be a periphery-to-periphery conversation, without going through a medium. Part of the problem we have even today is that if I want to converse with someone who’s from Hong Kong or Ukraine, for the most part we’re going to do so in English. The impact of this is not just in the language itself, but even the references that we may have between each other is likely to be something that’s Western.

MK: And a lot of stuff will get translated to English and then back.

EA: Exactly. So this has its limitations. Konishi was saying that it’s very difficult, but it’s very important to remember that when you feel locked in or stuck in the mental space you’re currently in, more often than not, you’re objectively wrong. Something can still happen to get you out of that mental state, and it can be something as banal as You need to take a shower, or go for a walk. 

We know this scientifically as well, that actually it does quite literally change your brain. Therefore, this objectively has an impact, and yet in the moment, it can feel like What’s the point? It’s difficult to remember to do a thing that is worth doing in a moment when it feels like it’s not worth doing it.

MK: When I was learning to control my own brain with cognitive behavioral therapy to get out of a panic disorder, one of the things we would talk about is that it’s based on “fake it ’til you make it:” pretend like you’re free; the only way to become free is to act like you’re free. Obviously, if we all immediately acted entirely on our own will, it might go badly; I’m not saying to ignore any sirens behind you.

EA: There is the cliché of If someone had killed baby Hitler, things would have ended up differently. I don’t think you should kill babies, but that seems a logical thing to conclude. But that didn’t happen, and therefore the timeline we’re on was “locked in,” and that led to this ultimate horror of the Holocaust. I think the best historians try to imagine if things could be done differently, not in an unrealistic way, but because we literally know what happened and why it happened, so it’s not impossible or unrealistic to ask ourselves, What if this other thing that seems to have been just as likely to happen, happened instead? What would have followed after that?

MK: What if the Zionist project had done the cultural Zionism instead of the geographic Zionism? Or had even just showed up and…been nice, you know? For example, the Jewish work thing, where in early Zionism, they would only hire other Jews in Palestine and created their own economic sphere. There’s so many what-ifs in everything. 

Maybe what you’re getting to is, we forget about the what-ifs of what we’re doing right now. We’re so worried about What if someone went back in time and killed a different fly with a time machine, then the entire world would be different, but clearly what we’re doing right now is like…killing flies.

EA: I think the people who want us to despair can be wrong. We should not “prove them wrong” because I don’t care what they think, but we should do so regardless, and do it despite them. Because factually, we can.

Okay, talk to us about your novel.

MK: I wrote a book called The Sapling Cage. I actually wrote it around 2017 and it took a while to get it published. It just came out in 2024 from The Feminist Press. It’s technically a crossover book, which is like YA, but it knows that its audience is also adults. There’s not like, more sex in it or something like that, but there’s certain rules for YA in the American publishing market that I don’t have to follow, in terms of the way the characters’ emotional space looks, and things like that. 

It’s set in a fantasy world, a secondary world, and it’s about a young person who wants to go be a witch, but she’s not allowed to be a witch because she’s a boy. Her best friend has been promised to the witches and doesn’t want to be a witch, and so our protagonist Lorel dresses up as a girl and goes off and joins the witches, and then discovers her own womanhood as well. 

It’s funny, that’s the pitch of the book, like “trans witch YA,” but then the actual book, like every book I care about, is about power. In this case, there’s this blight that is killing all the trees, and it’s a story about people consolidating power at the expense of the natural world.

I believe very strongly in the power of myth and story. I also believe that escapism actually matters. I actually think the ability to step outside of ourselves sometimes is an essential way to cope with things—we shouldn’t just disappear into our own heads, but I don’t know, sometimes when the world’s horrible, you need to just read a book for a while.

EA: For me, Star Trek was that. Reality would get to be too much and I would need to pause it for a bit, and pausing it for a bit and doing something else then allows me to do reality again.

MK: I often quote Tolkien and Le Guin and I always get the two mixed up, which is funny because they’re very different, but they’re also, in weird ways, not. But they both have quotes about escapism being essential, and people talk shit on them for being escapist, and one of them was like, Could you imagine telling a soldier in a POW camp that he shouldn’t escape when he can? This has to be Tolkien, right? Because he fought in the war. [Transcriber’s note: this quote is often attributed to Tolkien, but the direct quote is Le Guin paraphrasing something she said she heard Tolkien talking about.]

EA: Margaret, thanks for doing this again. I hope listeners get something out of this. A friend of mine got The Sapling Cage and then sent it to this other friend who’s traveling to the UK, and I’m going to see him at some point.

MK: Oh, good. I know that it doesn’t have great international distribution right now because it’s a small press.

EA: I don’t know, it might be in the UK already, but I just happened to have a friend who’s visiting and is going to give it to me. 

But yeah, thanks for doing this. Take care.

MK: Thank you.