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An invasion, Noah’s mom called it. Why can’t they all just stay in their own country? What about me? What about Kelsey? Alicia asked Noah’s mother at the table, point-blank, in front of Ash and his whole fam, Christ, everyone, having held her tongue as long as the first serving of turkey. What do you see when you look at her? Your own granddaughter? Mom said, no, no, she wasn’t talking about her daughter-in-law or granddaughter. She was talking about those other people.
Such a city mouse, so at home in their multicultural neighborhood, so different from the white suburb Noah grew up in. But even here, Alicia is sometimes mistaken for Kelsey’s Haitian nanny. It’s everywhere, even in their liberal haven. Unavoidable. Inescapable.
It started off with small things. Tiny cracks in her civility. Nothing too noticeable. Definitely nothing worth pushing back on. But when they spoke on the phone, Noah began to detect buzzwords. Slogans. Batshit news headlines she must have picked up from Fax. Mom never had a political bone in her body. A farm girl plucked up from Powhatan and planted in the suburbs, she raised two boys on her own. Their household was her world, and she rarely bothered to venture beyond it.
Noah calls out, louder now, competing with the anchor, Paul Tammany, that perpetually pissed-off pissant with a brick chin.
Chinese. He remembers Dad calling it “chinky-poo” as a kid. Noah didn’t know any better. He just assumed that’s what everybody called Chinese food. So when he casually repeated it during recess and his teacher overhead, he received one hell of a drubbing from his principal, telling him what chink really meant. Those were just different times, Mom tried to explain to Noah when he came home furious at his own family. That’s just what people said back then.
Their chyron flashes BREAKING NEWS, but isn’t news always breaking nowadays? Isn’t the news all broken by now? Smashed to bits?
They have woken up. They have opened their eyes. The Great Reawakening is finally here. Heaven help us. Half of us, at least.
He was well aware of how social media siloed people into echo chambers of recycled misinformation. He saw it in his own family. All the scrolling. His wife got her news from Facebook, of all places. That wasn’t news, that was simply an algorithmic force-feeding of bullshit masking itself as info.
Even then, her skull throbbed, the fluorescent lights microwaving her head, set to slow cook.
You’re the worst kind of liberal, Noah. An uninformed liberal.
