Elizabeth Lurie

Decades ago, when I was young and green and had aspirations of a career in theatre, I went to an advertised networking lunch of women dramatists.

When I got to the restaurant and found the table, I was slightly disappointed to find only two other women had come. One was a large woman whose white femme brush-cut and other features put me in mind of Ursula from “Little Mermaid.”

The other was an agreeable, quiet woman of middle years.

I can't remember if they had known each other prior to the lunch; it's possible that never came up. There was already a certain dynamic clear, where the white-haired woman held forth and the other mostly nodded along with a pleasant smile.

We chatted. The service was on the slow side.

At least one of us had likely vocalized the observation that it's a bit slow here, isn't it. No big deal, but it'd be nice to order soon, that sort of mild remark.

Without warning, the white haired woman, red faced, smashed her hand on the table and roared,

“WE NEED SERVICE HERE!!!”

My memory goes vague here, but I expect it wasn't long after that the server came over, and our orders were taken.

The woman's energy dropped back abruptly from 60 to 0. She settled back and said, smugly,

“That's how you get them to pay attention.”

The other two went back to pleasant chit chat. I was probably a bit dazed at this point, and may or may not have contributed to it. What I remember most clearly about this part was being especially perturbed that the other woman hadn't reacted to the big woman's outburst as though anything were out of the ordinary in the slightest.

At any rate, I knew I didn't want to be there anymore. I dithered over it for a while, and finally ventured:

“You know, I think I need to put money in the meter.”

I probably said it nervously. It felt like an excuse; it WAS an excuse. As I remember the shouty woman's response, it may have felt like she was suspicious, but of course they said oh by all means, take care of it.

I hurried out to my car.

Now, here's why I remember this little vignette as well as I do, thirty-plus years later:

I went back to the restaurant.

Why? I can't remember, now, exactly. Possibly there was some guilt because I'd already ordered, some idea that I was sticking others with a bill for unpaid-for food? Did I think I might somehow regret cutting off a possible networking connection later? Maybe.

But I don't think that was all of it.

Even if it had been, I doubt very much the restaurant would have charged the others for a third meal if I'd never returned, and what on earth was there to gain professionally from...that?

In hindsight it's clear to me in a way that it wasn't then: there was no sufficiently good reason to return to what had become an absolutely miserable experience. Yet, I did anyway.

So why did I go back?

I'd call it a vague but insistent fear.

Fear of violating a social code, i.e. don't just ghost people in the middle of a meal (with or without the bill aspect), don't lie. (Despite that the woman herself, the reason i wanted to leave, had grossly violated that code).

Most of all, bizarrely, irrationally, but I believe this is so: fear of the woman herself.

Even though she had absolutely no power to do anything to me if I'd left.

Even though, if anything, I was making myself more likely to be vulnerable by spending more time with her.

I went back, I ate something like a dryish chicken sandwich, we made more small talk and shop talk. Eventually, it ended, I went home, and we never contacted each other or saw each other again. And that was that.

So why am I telling this now?

Because, I'm thinking now that despite how irrational and unnecessarily fearful for all the wrong reasons my former self's actions seem to me today. actually: that kind of dynamic happens all the time.

I can judge my former self (harshly, if truly) for being awkward, shy, young, naive, unnecessarily anxious.

But consider the other woman at the table.

She didn't act as though anything was abnormal at all.

In fact, as I'm remembering, she nodded and smiled at the other woman when she announced that this is how you HAVE to act in order to get what you want in life. Like she was agreeing with an assertion about the weather.

And: at least for the moment, the shouty woman was right.

She DID get what she wanted, at least in the short term: attention. Service. Yes, ma'am, so sorry to keep you waiting.

Now, how that served her in the rest of her life is another question. As I'm remembering it, she'd been complaining a lot about how hard it was to find work (imagine).

But in that moment, she'd gotten her way.

By jump-scaring the shit out of people.

And we'd proven her point as well:

Being loud and angry and domineering, even when you have no obvious power behind it, can get you quite a long way before someone protests or stops you.

Mileage varies, of course. In the same situation, some other restaurant might have had a manager who had no time for that nonsense and would have chillingly is-there-a-problem-ma'amed her into submission or getting the hell out of the restaurant, for example.

If the other person at the table had looked at her incredulously and said, “are you okay?? What was THAT?” then excused her own self, I'd have been likelier to follow suit, perhaps.

My point is this:

It's harder—for most of us, anyway—to stand up to this kind of blatant social contract violation than you'd hope.

Because, by and large, we're not trained for how to respond in such situations.

In hindsight and from far away, it's easy to say “my god, stand up for yourself! Have you no pride? What can this lunatic do to you, anyway?”

If you ARE actually in that situation, that last question ceases to be rhetorical. What can they, what will they do if you push back?

In this case, the two of us other customers were free to get up and leave, almost certainly without real repercussion. The server, on the other hand, no doubt wanted to keep her job, and chances are, she wasn't confident the management would have had her back if she'd given attitude back, for good reason.

But this is about more than the kind of calculation you make with your logical, thinking brain over how to respond.

A sudden shout and a slam on the table, say, are designed to, and usually succeed in, startle the other person. It sends you out of rational thinking mode, at least for an instant. It triggers what's called the “fight, flight, or freeze” (or “fawn,” among other “f's”) response.

If that woman made a habit of gestures like that irrespective of context—say, she decided to go to a biker bar at 3 in the morning and got equally cranky at the lack of service—she could be unpleasantly surprised by a very different response. Those bikers, if indeed startled, might well default to “fight,” say.

But you know, I'm betting she knew better than that.

She'd come to this strategy of getting what she wants via experience, after all. If she regularly or even ever had the experience of severe retribution for that kind of behavior, she a) wouldn't do it at all or at least b) probably had at least some sense of who she could try that behavior with safely, and who she couldn't.

A couple of other polite women at a restaurant table, one young and nervous seeming, and a (female) server paid to wait on her: safe enough, as it turned out. It worked. We did not respond with “fight.”

What I -started- to do, technically, was “flight,” and frankly imo a perfectly reasonable response, executed within the niceties I was so hesitant to break. Oh, this has been lovely, but I forgot, I just need to go iron my dog, excuse me, won't you?

The server reacted with what I suppose you could call “fawn,” if you figure that that's basically what a U.S. customer service job is, most of the time.

And the other woman at the table?

Well, she was, and remained, pleasant.

Whatever was going on inside of her, somewhere along the line, she'd developed a strategy in the face of irrational, scary behavior: smile and act like everything's normal.

Everyone has strategies for getting through life, including in the face of a potential threat. Mostly, they run on autoplay; we don't tend to articulate them as such or even know we're doing them. It may not even occur to most of us that there IS any other way to deal with such situations. Or, our experience has taught us that other ways don't work, when we tried.

That shouty woman was an exception, as she did actually articulate her strategy, after having deployed it. “That's how you get what you want from people.”

That she knew what she was doing, and particularly that she was able to return to calm immediately afterward, to me suggests a certain level of control. Which is another advantage that she has over most people she unleashes her aggression on.

It's a strategy used, I would say, less frequently by women, because of how (most) women are socialized, and also how the culture, particularly men, are socialized to respond to angry woman. Other social factors play their role; I expect that her being white counted for a good deal (the “Karen” stereotype doesn't come out of thin air).

I would also imagine that her imposing physicality and well-trained, deep, loud voice made her particular style of acting out (more dominating, less “help me”) more natural or successful than it would have for her smaller, quieter companion; or for me, who was much younger.

Now, imagine another person with a similar life-strategy, also large and loud; and who, further, has the experience of being a white man with a lot of money.

Imagine that, like this woman, this person has training in the art of performance. Knows how to command a spotlight and keep it.

You may have guessed where I'm going with this.

This is has been, among other things, a roundabout way of attempting to answer the question asked by so many of us:

What IS it about Trump, for god's sake? Why do even powerful people just fall in line? Is it greed, is it pay for play? Does he have some blackmail material on them?

Sure, all of that may be true. Obviously there is a scope and complexity to the political landscape that my little slice of life anecdote doesn't encompass (I suppose you could argue that the fleeting thought that this woman might somehow be a “connnection” is a sort of ambition)

And now, of course, the man's accrued a depth and hardening of real power that there are calculations of real, serious potential consequences to standing up to him now. Financial or career ruin were already long on the table; now, perhaps, even physical safety.

But how'd we get here? Why do and did so many people do what Timothy Snyder says is the first rule of things NOT to do in the face of tyranny, “comply in advance?”

I'm now wondering whether some of it is the same thing, in a way, as what happened to me/us in that restaurant long ago.

It's instinct. It's trained. It's even biological. What, after all, is the impact on the average nervous system, confronted with screaming, hurled ketchup bottles, perhaps even hands or fists?

My point is this:

It's probably not all or even mostly all that rational.

For the clearest example of this I would point to the people who still sign up to work for the man personally. Look at the revolving door. Listen to their testimony once they leave. Look at the strained, exhausted faces.

Yet, people still sign up for the ride. Some report initial personal charm and consideration (“he's really different when you get to know him up close.”) But eventually, even many of those people acquire the same taut, exhausted look.

During the campaign, I read an article about his internal pollster: evidently the man was expected to work something like 19 hours a day, sometimes more, depending on what time Trump decided to rouse him out of bed to demand what the hell THESE numbers were supposed to mean??

Long story short: this is how abuse works.

You can see it at the micro level, you can see it ripple out to the people who are not in his personal orbit but are subject to pressure behind the scene. You see it broadcast to the nation, the world from his platform, and how people, how systems respond.

Fascism is abuse writ large.

Authoritarianism, generally, is abuse writ large. There are stylistic differences and complications at scale; the end result is much the same. Shouting, capitulation, fear, gaslighting, shame, impotent rage, intermittently reinforced punishment keeping one forever hypervigilant, at lowered capacity to think clearly.

So, knowing this, as people far from the locus of political power, we come back to the eternal question.

What do we do?

I suppose what I'm suggesting here is: start at home.

Meaning: not just doing what activism you can locally to make concrete difference in others' lives, though that too.

But also, try to sit with the experience of what this general ambiance of, frankly, abuse, is stirring up in you.

What's been your strategy?

There are, again, variables depending on how you're situated sociopolitically/privilege-wise, now more than ever, of course.

The threat is very real and immediate, for some of us far more than others. And our experience up til now, and the strategies we've developed in response, depend on many factors, very much including such axes as: being trans, being poor, having disability/medical vulnerability, being BIPOC.

And even within those axes, there's our own individual experience.

How do you respond, what do you do, in the face of the threatening, the irrational, the impervious to please for empathy or mercy or calm logic?

I don't actually think there's any one “right” answer. Context is everything.

I do think that becoming aware of how we act and why is a start.

Beyond that, I'm starting to study and work with trauma more these days.

The question of how to deal with past trauma compounded by fresh and ongoing trauma is one I'm still looking for answers on.

I will close here by noting that the Project 2025 authors specifically say at one point that their object is to “traumatize” career bureaucrats.

At the time of this publication, that operation, or at least the attempt seems well under way.