For all its horrors, the Internet contains wonderful resources when it comes to learning anything -- from how to knit to how to interpret that annoying little illuminated wrench on your car's dashboard. Hundreds of thousands of generous people freely share their hard-won knowledge there with strangers around the world. One of them is Julia Bausenhardt, a German artist and illustrator. I've learned so much from her many video lessons on sketching the natural world. Above all, I've learned that drawing is as much about what you do with your eyes as with your hands. It's about learning to look.
Like most drawing teachers, Julia emphasizes the value of observing "negative space." If you want to understand, for example, how a tangle of overlapping leaves and blossoms relate to each other, take a look at what isn't there. Consider the negative spaces around the shapes you're drawing.
I wonder whether those of us seeking to forestall an autocratic takeover of this country would benefit from focusing on the negative spaces around the Trump phenomenon, looking for what isn't there as much as what is. I suspect that's what the historian Timothy Snyder is doing when he counsels those resisting Trump not to "obey in advance." There's no reason to fill in the space around the future autocrat with our own obedience before it's even demanded. Let's decorate it with resistance instead.
Similarly, in the spaces around the program Trump's handlers have devised (most explicitly, Project 2025), we can discern what's missing from it. Surrounding its blueprints for destroying public education (the foundation of democratic life), decimating labor unions, and resurrecting long-buried regimes of child labor, forced marriage, and childbearing we can discern negative space.
What's missing from the Trumpian program is something human beings require as much as we need food to eat and air to breathe: respect for human dignity. Don't mistake my meaning. Respect is not acquiescence to another person's racism or woman-hatred. Respect for human dignity requires evoking -- calling out -- what's best in ourselves and each other. That means avoiding both cowardice in the face of conflict and any kind of arrogant belief in our own superiority.
In some ways, this fight is about who our society counts as human, who deserves dignity. Over seven decades, I've fought alongside millions of other people to widen that circle -- reducing the negative space around it -- to include, among others, myself, as a woman, a lesbian, and a working person. Now, we have to figure out how to hold -- and expand -- the perimeter of that circle of personhood.
We must do this work collectively in organized ways, but we can also do it individually in small ways. As I contemplate another four horrific years of Donald Trump, I'm also thinking about the negative spaces of daily life. I'm thinking about small daily interactions with strangers and acquaintances. I'm thinking about the in-between times that surround the events of our lives -- "negative time," if you will. In the era of Trump 2.0, I hope to fill my negative time waiting in lines or sitting in yet another endless meeting with small acts of attention and respect. Those, too, can be acts of resistance.
Copyright 2024 Rebecca Gordon
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