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[I meant to get this out before Halloween, but life got in the way — previous Janet stories — Part One | Part Two ]Janet left Two Moons Yoga Studio, where a gaggle of concerned American citizens — the true patriots — held an emergency “No Kings, Cancel Halloween” meeting to save democracy. The attendees were Janet’s age. They were her neighbors, but she didn’t know most of them. They were all directed to join the NextDoor app to get to know each other better online.Janet used the app frequently. Even though they had a rule about no politics, she would use NextDoor to inform her neighbors if ICE agents had entered the town’s perimeter. She would also warn neighbors about the e-bikes speeding through town, endangering animals and pedestrians. She would take pictures of people whose dogs left messes that their owners did not pick up and post them on NextDoor, and she would make sure to let everyone know how many people were responsibly wearing masks at the Farmer’s Market.COVID wasn’t over, Janet knew. It was still a constant threat, especially to the marginalized, trans people, Black and Brown people, and immigrants. It was her duty to wear a mask at all times, even at the meeting at Two Moons Yoga. Only some people there were wearing masks, but not all. Janet was sure to jot down their names in case she needed to warn people later.The meeting went well. Everyone was on the same page that democracy and their way of life were now under a grave threat. This is not normal, said Barack Obama. Janet agreed. Their action plan was to go door to door and inform their neighbors that Halloween would be canceled due to the government shutdown and the fascist occupation of the country. They had even bigger goals, like canceling Thanksgiving and boycotting Christmas, too. But one step at a time. Halloween was in just a few days, and it was time to send a message to the government that we would not be buying candy or trick-or-treating while Nazis roamed our streets.Everyone had a list of the neighborhood’s sections. Janet would go that evening after she watched MSNBC. She didn’t want to interrupt her neighbors, who were probably just as glued to their TVs. That was the only way to stay informed now that the country has been overtaken by fascists.Nothing else can be trusted now. The media is terrified of Trump, not even the ladies of The View talk politics anymore. Janet can only watch for five minutes before they move on to shallow interviews and publicity hits. Trump has intimidated everyone, suing networks, disappearing Jimmy Kimmel for a joke, and that has had a chilling effect on free speech. Janet wasn’t exactly thrilled about knocking on doors, but she had to do something. She couldn’t just stay home and post about HIM on Facebook and NextDoor. Some had suggested giving out bags of groceries to those whose SNAP benefits would run out. Yes, a community effort for the poor and downtrodden. It’s just that Vista Butte isn’t a town full of poor people. It was expensive to live here. Were there poor people in this town? Then she remembered the maid who comes to clean her house once a month, and everyone has a gardener. Maybe she would approach them with a bag of groceries when she saw them at work. Would it be weird to take a selfie and post it on Instagram to show how important it is to recognize the poor right now?Assuming the maid was poor just because she cleaned houses for a living wasn’t racist, was it? Is it offensive to call her a maid? What’s the appropriate term? Janet asked ChatGPT. The answer: housekeeper, house cleaner, or domestic worker.” Okay, so domestic workers might be the poor people in Vista Butte, like immigrants. Janet did her best not to offend marginalized people. She didn’t know if any such people lived in Vista Butte. The town was, after all, 96% white, affluent, and very liberal. But on the off chance she might encounter one, she wanted them to know she cared about their health, too. That’s why she wears a mask outside every day.Janet began walking up her street and could feel the October breeze. This was the best time of year in Vista Butte. It wasn’t too hot and it wasn’t yet too cold. It was one of those perfect fall days. Every so often, you could smell smoke from a fireplace off in the distance. She didn’t want to think about HIM on a day like this. She needed to be living in the moment more. Self-care. Meditation. Daily walks. Breathing exercises.The election was almost one year ago. Janet’s hair had finally grown back after she shaved it to protest THE FASCIST in the White House. She thought about keeping it because people were so kind to her when they thought she was battling cancer. She never said she was. They just assumed, and she kind of let them. It felt good to have people be nice to her.Things aren’t getting better, Janet knew. They’re getting worse. Much worse. He disembowled the East Wing to put up a Nazi building. He defiled the Lincoln bedroom’s bathroom and put in a Roman bathhouse. Everything is ugly, tacky gold. He hates America! He had a late-stage Roman Empire ball at Mar-a-Lago, apparently. While millions were about to starve because of the government shutdown. He was having a party for billionaires!Janet tried not to think of it. Instead, she looked around at all of the Vote Yes on Prop 50 signs that were stabbed into the lawns of all of her neighbors. What good people they were. They raised $120 million. Imagine that. Of course, it will pass. We have to save democracy, she thought, by adding more seats in Congress. Janet herself donated around $300. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear buzzing, whirring, what is that sound? She knew before she even saw them that it was those kids on the electric bikes that had been terrorizing the town. E-Bikes. Everyone had complained on Next Door. Even the MAGGAt, who goes by the name RedHat. Even he, or she, or they, no he or she, hated them. They were dangerous. They were loud. It was the only time she and RedHat agreed on anything. He was always the first to chime in on her ICE posts. “Good job, ICE,” he would say. “We need to protect American workers,” and “the media is lying about ICE and scaring people.” But Red Hat was living in a Fox News fantasy world, Janet knew. Their fights got so heated that Janet had to block RedHat and then warn everyone on Next Door not to engage with him. There is no point, she would say. He is too lost and can’t be helped. All we can do is block him. But he just made a new account. What will we do with all of these racists who voted for Trump? She thought, We can’t live with them. We can’t forgive them. Their days are numbered. Already, the Democrats are leading in the polls. It’s just a matter of time before we take back the country and save democracy. But what to do with all of those bad people? Janet didn’t know. But she hoped someone did. Red Hat was right about the bikes, though. The kids didn’t know how to control them. They went too fast down the road. They scared dogs and cats, and they scared Janet. She could hear them off in the distance now. Then, she could see them. There they were, a gang of about six boys speeding right toward her. Janet was still holding her No Kings sign, which she’d brought to the meeting, which said No KKK No FASCIST USA and NO KINGS. She held it up in front of her so the boys could see her clearly in case they weren’t paying attention. Could they see her? They had a devilish look on their faces and were speeding right toward her. Were they planning on hitting her? Would they hit a middle-aged woman in a mask carrying a No Kings sign? Yes, Janet knew, they would because they’re DUMB KIDS. It was now a game of chicken, and Janet was not playing that game. Just as they got within a few feet of her, she leaped out of the way and stumbled, falling face down onto the concrete. She could hear them screaming with laughter as they sped by. “Chicken!” one of them called out. Janet was furious. She ripped her mask off her face and stood in the middle of the road with her cell phone aimed right at them. “I’m recording you!” She said. The boys screeched to a halt on their bikes and turned around to look at her. They apparently thought this was really funny because they could not stop laughing. “Go ahead, No Kings,” one of them said, and that cracked them all up even more. “I will!” Janet said, “And then I’ll call the police! How do you like that?” “We didn’t do anything,” another said. A couple of them had their own cell phones out and began recording her. “You tried to kill me!” Janet said. That made the boys burst into yet more uncontrollable giggles as they began mocking her. “Oh, no! She almost died!” ”Death by E-bike!”“You don’t even live in this town, do you?” Janet said. “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” “Why don’t you?” One of them said. “I live here. Do you?”They didn’t answer, but just thought the whole thing was either super funny or a waste of time. And with that, off they went, with their noisy, irritating, dangerous E-Bikes headed for who knows where. Janet searched around for her mask, but the strap was broken. She was too traumatized to bother picking it up. She did take her sign, which was wrinkled and dirty. She looked around to see if any of her neighbors had witnessed the ugly scene. She might need a witness if she called the cops. But why bother? What could they do? She would keep trying to get E-Bikes banned so the neighborhood could be peaceful and orderly again. She was just a block away from her house now. Tears were streaming down her face. Why did those kids have to be so mean? Why are they so aggressive? Boys, that’s why. Boys who grow up to be men. Boys who can’t be controlled. That’s what is wrong with our society, Janet knew. Just look at all of the damage caused by Trump. The Gestapo was disappearing people off the streets and putting them somewhere, ripping children from the arms of their mothers and putting them on trains. Sending grandmothers to concentration camps. All because they’re Brown and the racists on the Right want only a WHITE AMERICA.He’s sent in the military to occupy our cities. It’s not to protect ICE, stop crime, or clean up the streets. It’s to implement MARTIAL LAW to put all of us under federal control. It won’t be long before we’re snatched off to death camps just for making a joke or having a NO KINGS rally. Of course, Fox News will shrug it off. That’s how the Holocaust happened. The Good Germans did nothing. Janet finally got home and flopped down on the couch. That was too much activity for someone who never left the house. She closed her eyes to take a quick nap before checking social media. Just as Janet was drifting off, she heard her phone ping. Someone had texted her. She glanced down and saw it was the woman who organized the Cancel Halloween meeting. The message said, “Call me. It’s urgent.” Janet’s first instinct was not to call her back, to pretend she didn’t get the message or that she slept through it. Whatever it was that was urgent, Janet didn’t want to know. But she picked up her phone and called anyway.“Kim?”“Hi Janet, thanks for calling. ””Yes, Kim, how are you?” Janet was trying to counter Kim’s panic with calm. ”I’m okay, I just—have you looked at Facebook?””No, I just got home. I was about to work out.””You should probably check it now. Did you tell an immigrant and a mixed-race child that they didn’t belong in this town and to go back where they came from?”A cold chill ran down Janet’s spine. Her palms began to sweat. She could see the scene play out in her mind, the cell phones recording her as she said those exact words. But “go back to where they came from” just meant whatever town they lived in that wasn’t Vista Butte.“Well, I didn’t say that exactly,” Janet said.”That’s what it looks like in that viral video.””There’s a viral video? It just happened like 15 minutes ago.””So it did happen,” Kim said.”Well, I mean, they tried to kill me.””You’re a white woman, Janet.””And what’s that supposed to mean?””One of those kids was mixed race,” Kim said.”They all looked white to me,” Janet said. ”One kid’s stepfather is Black, apparently,” Kim said.”Stepfather? So that’s not his biological father, Kim. And what is he, like the only Black person in Vista Butte?””Well, I’m just telling you what is happening online right now. You should go look, and I think, given the anger and tension around this, it’s best that you do not go door to door or engage with anyone on behalf of our group.”And with that, Kim hung up the phone without even saying goodbye. Janet sat there, stunned. One of those boys was a migrant child? A Brown child? And she told him to go back to where he came from? And a mixed-race child? In a town that’s 96% white. Her phone was pinging with Nextdoor notifications. She checked there first. There was a whole thread about her, the so-called “racist” video was now playing on the app. There was Janet screaming at the kids, “Go back to where you came from!” It was filmed from a different perspective, though. It was from someone watching from inside their house. They must have posted the video. Who would do that? She read the comments. “What a terrible person.””That’s scary.””It’s sad what’s happened to her.””I didn’t know there were Karens in this town.””Racism is ugly and so is she.””I always knew there was something weird about her. She just seems off.””The kid has a mom who works at the local Wendys and ICE has just taken her. He’s worried he’s next.””She’s MAGA now.””I hate ugly people, don’t you?””She lives near me.””I see her walking outside sometimes. Scary.””There is nothing wrong with standing up for your morals and shutting these people out of your life forever.””We should meet later and figure out what to do about her.”Only one person, RedHat, pushed back. “Everything is racist with you people,” he wrote. Great, the MAGA guy. That’s how low she sank. She was sick. Her stomach hurt. How could this be happening? Why did she say what she said? They all looked white to her. Were they all white? Now she couldn’t even remember their faces. She only saw them laughing.She didn’t want to look at Facebook, but she had to know what they were saying about her. There were dozens of posts on her wall calling her the worst names she’d ever heard in her life. There were lengthy posts from people she only knew online explaining why they were walking away and unfriending her. “It’s a matter of morality,” they would explain. “Of decency.” “She is toxic,” one said. “She needs help,” said another. “Some people can’t be helped,” said her old co-worker from years ago. “Racism is a disease,” said one of the women from the No Kings protest.Racist? Janet was starting to get angry now. She wasn’t racist. She did everything she could to not be racist. She was careful never to say the wrong word. She wanted only the best for all of the marginalized groups. She hated white people. She knew they were the colonizers and the oppressors. She thought America was a rotten, corrupt, white supremacist empire that would elect a twice impeached, four times indicted, adjudicated rapist, felon, fascist, dictator! They were the racists, not Janet. Not JANET! Now things were starting to get weird. Should she call Kim back? Should she apologize on Facebook? That’s what she did. She apologized. She sat down and wrote, “I am very sorry that I said those words. But I am not a racist. I don’t have a racist bone in my body. I’m sorry if I offended anyone.” Then she posted it. Right away, the comments flooded in. “Too late,” one said. “It’s always the racists who say they aren’t racist,” said another. “You should take responsibility for the harm you caused.”Janet sank into the couch and put her head in her hands. Then she heard a knock on the door. Who could that be? She slowly approached the door and looked through the peephole. It was the women from the meeting. They were standing there, arms crossed.“Open the door, Janet. I know you’re in there,” said one of the women. Janet said nothing. They pounded the door again. “You are not welcome at our meetings anymore, and we want you out of our neighborhood.” The other women chimed in, and they began clapping and chanting, “GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM! YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE! Janet clutched her chest and fell to the floor. What is happening? She couldn’t breathe…she couldn’t breathe, and then, suddenly, she realized she was now on the couch and awake. She’d been dreaming. It was all a bad dream. She was sweating through her shirt. Her heart was pounding. She picked up her phone and looked at the screen. No notifications. She checked her history, no call from Kim. She looked on NextDoor, and there were no posts about her. She checked Facebook, same thing. And that was when she looked up to Heaven and thanked God. She had never done that before—not ever—but it seemed appropriate now. Thank you, God, she said. She knew there was a reason she’d had that dream. She knew it was a wake-up call to be a better person. Did that mean she should maybe try to make friends with RedHat? Would that be enough to redeem her? No, she knew. That dream was a warning. She had to be very careful from now on. And she would be. She would not break any rules. She would not even try to get the E-Bikes banned. She would be quiet and go along to get along. She picked up the phone and called Kim. “Hello?””Hi Kim, it’s Janet. I was just wondering what time we would all be knocking on doors tonight.””Oh, hi, Janet. That would be around 7:30. We can meet down at Kate’s Koffee at 7.””Sounds great!” Janet said. “See you then!”She turned on MSNBC, and there was Rachel Maddow looking worried, as usual. What now? Islamophobic attacks on Zohran Mamdani. A woman being manhandled by ICE agents. There were real problems to worry about, Janet realized, much bigger than whether some awful little brats had a damaging video of her. And yet, just as she felt herself relax, she heard her phone ping. She looked at it and said aloud, “Oh no.” TIP JAR// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe