Observance: Demons in the Shadowland of Autocracy, or Fear is the Mind Killer

Photo credit: yours truly

Feb 25, 2025

Yesterday while I was at work and my first grader was at school, my partner’s phone rang and seconds later my partner ran into my office screaming, breathless: “They took our child! They have our child!”

The phone rang again and on speaker I heard my daughter’s voice, sobbing and crying and whimpering for help. A man’s voice came on, shouting “We have your daughter, what are you gonna do to get her back?”

It was horrifying, panic-inducing, terrifying.

In panic I quickly dialed the school. Seconds later they confirmed, our child was there, safe as a bug.

The call was a scam. A hateful fucking AI scam. Designed to cause fear and drive extortion.

We shook it off, reported it, calmed down, and moved on. Fear is the mind killer. You have to face the fear, and permit it to pass over and through. You cannot let the fear control you. We were rattled, deeply, but we shook it off.

This same day, and in the days and weeks before, the news was filled with Musk and Bannon’s Nazi salutes; the firing of thousands of federal workers; funds cut off to foreign aid, family farms, food programs and countless life-supporting services; economic wreckage-in-the-works; Congressional appointments to fill federal agencies with white supremacist sex offenders, Putin apologists and sycophantic Trump loyalists; twisted lies and blackmail towards Ukraine; psychotic rambling about turning Gaza from a warzone to a Riviera; science-denying anti-trans pronouncements and racist anti-DEI orders; planes crashing as the Federal Aviation Administration is gutted; measles and bird flu spreading as the CDC is decimated; dictators worldwide salivating as U.S. diplomacy, security, and alliances are rent asunder; and all manner of illegal, unconstitutional, hateful acts by Trump and his henchmen.

It’s been horrifying, panic-inducing, nauseating.

The wholesale destruction of the U.S. government, the rule of law, civil rights and democracy. Flawed and harmful as U.S. neoliberal democracy has been for many, the first month of Trump’s blitzkrieg is far, far worse for many more: heartless, hateful, tyrannical, stupid, criminal, cruel, wreckless, and mind-bogglingly dangerous.  

The tyranny is built on scams and lies, designed to cause fear and drive extortion – but unlike an AI voice scam, it is not wholly invented. It is real. The Executive Orders, illegal though they are, are real. Tragically, much – though not all – of the U.S. government has behaved as if these illegal dictats are real, and has obeyed in advance.  

Too many have been buying the story, the Trump story, the windigo story, this vision from Hell, and letting it be too real.

Nonetheless, fear is the mind killer. You cannot let the fear control you.

Last night – the night of the AI phone scam – it was hard to sleep, and in the wee hours I was startled awake by a nightmare: I had been at a party outdoors in California (in fact, the week before I had been at an outdoor party near San Francisco); many friends were there, drinking and dancing, in flowery crowns and Hawaiian shirts and Indonesian batiks. But one by one, they were being murdered. No sooner had I made this observation than I spotted the killer, standing by a birthday cake with a long knife. Without thinking I picked up what was nearest at hand – a container of sour cream and onion dip, as it happened – and I chucked it at him. My chip-dip chuck was comically ineffective and the killer – a white man with beady eyes and bad hair – turned and started to come at me, knife out…

I woke up, breathing heavy, sweating. Panicking.

A few breaths later, I shook it off, calmed down, got out of bed and greeted the dawn. I was still rattled, but I opened the window shades, let the wintry light stream in, let the fear pass over and through, and moved on.

Just days before, in San Francisco, the poet, artist and housing rights activist Fernando Marti had invited me to a poetry reading at a Latinx-run bookstore and cultural hub in the Mission District called Medicine for Nightmares. For years, Fernando has been producing a series of handmade volumes of poetry under the title Amor y Lucha/Love & Struggle; that night in la Mision, he handed me a copy of the most recent volume.

This morning, after I shook off the nightmare about the murderer, and the other nightmare of the AI phone scam, and prepared to face the ongoing nightmare of my country’s utter destruction, I found Fernando’s Amor y Lucha and opened it to this poem:

Demons

The shadow moves among us,

moves in and out of us

possessing us:

the ravenous, the ravager, the rapist,

the gunman at the schoolyard

the torturer in the prison

the cop with his baton

but – also

the bitter drunkard in the plaza, or

at home, with belt and open hand

and in the highest places

trailing clouds of sulfur and rotten eggs

to a lectern at the United Nations,

the committers of genocide

those who approve the kills

those who move the money

those who profit from the weapons

and maybe even

those with little choice

but to work in the factories or the armies.

I don’t believe in original sins

but we are

born into stories

the stories own us.

Are we all, good people of this earth,

slowly becoming possessed by this story?

I hear the light crunch of the windigo

falling in behind me on the asphalt.

It’s a story, the windigo,

Algonquian and Anishinabe,

like demons and naguales

shifters and vampires.

We are nothing but

the stories we tell ourselves.

The story always makes it right.

What story is the windigo living?

What story does Bibi tell himself at night?

What do Joe and Kamala tell their grandchildren

just before bed?

What story do the genociders tell themselves,

Who possessed them?

The windigo must feed, always feed,

even of its own flesh, its hunger knows

no bounds

the more it eats the more it hungers.

What story

will extirpate this demon?

• Fernando Marti, Yelamu (San Francisco), October 2024