Today was the third 4th of July that I’ve spent outside of the United States in of the last four years, and maybe because I’ve got almost 4,000 miles of distance between me and the flag-waving and fireworks and history-rewriting nostalgia back home, I have a few reflections on the nature and uses of patriotism.
I started off today by making a playlist of deliberately unpatriotic songs, songs taking aim directly at the policy or mentality of the US. There were a lot of songs.
One song that I decided to include, though, has a somewhat different tone: “Power and Glory,” by Phil Ochs. I stocked my playlist with plenty of Ochs’s far more critical or cynical songs, but “Power and Glory” is the closest I got to praise for my country. It celebrates--if that’s the right word; acknowledges or admires might be better--the country itself, the land and the people, not the government or history or so-called morals or policy or the like. And it declares not just that the land is beautiful and valuable but that it is not equal, not free, not strong--or rather, only as equal and free and strong as its citizens. I don’t know if I’d call the song patriotic, exactly, but it has a message that I think deserves equal airtime on my list, alongside such excellent titles as “Blood-Red, White, and Blue,” “Stuff is Messed Up,” and “When You Don’t Control Your Government, People Want to Kill You.”
Overall, the idea is that we can appreciate and build off of the possibility and the places and the roots that we may have even while we despise the surreal nightmarescape of our corporate government and national (in)security state (or, more succinctly, the “subliminal mindfuck America,” as Green Day nicely puts it).
Beyond the satisfaction of having a slightly more balanced playlist, I think that if we are going to redeem, rebuild, reclaim, or even maintain the world we have, we are going to need more than hatred for the places that we live. Not necessarily our countries by any means, but the places that we all, however enthusiastically or reluctantly, call home.
The borders that outline the 197 or so countries of the world are arbitrary, we have to remember, and fundamentally hold no meaning beyond what we give them. Borders, whether militarized, hotly contested, or porous, are a construct and a tool; they are not natural, permanent or necessary. Most of them came about because of imperialism and capitalism, by map-drawing fiascos like the infamous Sykes-Picot treaty or by forced seizure like the Mexican Cession and the treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo. Borders are largely created by and for the benefit of those who hold the most power, who can redraw the map and make that paper reality come bloodily to life. Borders, then, are tools to maintain power inequality.
In order to foster the belief in a nation-state, and to foment the useful force of patriotism within that state, the populace needs to believe in the borders--that they are natural, permanent, and necessary, which they are not. We need to believe that borders protect our interests--that the people on the other side are as outside of a snowglobe that we must not allow them to penetrate. Borders, and the concept of nation-states, help chiefly to develop and maintain an us-versus-them dynamic.
As an aside, cultural identities, a set of traditions, an attachment to a certain place--these are not bounded or determined by the nation-state within whose artificial borders one resides. Dispossessed people stripped of their land can still feel deep roots there; a person far from home can still partake in a culture outside of the nation-state associated with it. Nationalism in some cases can be a defensive force to unite people against the predations of an occupying power or assault; this is not to deny that. Yet it can just as easily be channeled to support a hateful and exclusionary ideal of what a “country” represents and who it belongs to--who has the power to tell its story.
Conventional patriotism, then, refers to the sentiments of allegiance to an entity that does not actually exist, an artificially contrived nation-state or territory whose borders have been arranged to serve the interests of some particular group in power.
There are less narrow definitions, however. The patriotism of songs like “Power and Glory” is not the patriotism of fealty to the United States in the sense that we owe our country anything, but rather that we live in a place worth loving, and--because we recognize that it is deeply flawed--worth fixing. Worth fighting for, for our own sakes, not worth dying for in the interests of others.
There’s another song I put on my playlist, by the band Desaparecidos, that begins with the lines “I want to pledge allegiance to the country where I live/ I don’t want to be ashamed to be American…” and then goes through plenty of reasons to be ashamed. I do feel ashamed of my country. But I don’t want that shame to extend to the point where I believe that everything shaped by the US is irredeemable. I don’t want to be ashamed of being born and raised in the northwestern hemisphere, because it is not inherently the place nor the people that makes it a beacon of shame. I believe that there is “patriotism,” of a sort, outside of allegiance to a country.
There is also patriotism in believing that we can take the bitter divisions and the dangerous fragmentation of the world we live in and make it better, that struggling for reform and not offering only adulation is the duty of a citizen. I don’t believe that merely reforming our countries and governments will be enough, but I do believe that activism could be construed as patriotism, that the struggle for a better world is a patriotic act. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism, as they say. To unspool that statement reveals the assumption that the activism is being undertaken in the service of one’s country. My allegiance is not to my country, and I would not call my activism patriotic; my ideal endgame is not just a nicer version of the governmental and societal status quo. But by all means, if the sentiment of so-called patriotism can be re-harnessed for activist work, that would be appreciable. I don’t think it’s the best route to encouraging people to make some part of the world better, but it’s something. In this sort-of-free country, it is a duty of morals and conscience, let alone patriotism, to dissent in this age of profitable terror, corporate tyranny, sacrifice zones and sacrificed people.
“Love will save this place,” writes Naomi Klein in her anticapitalist clarion call, This Changes Everything. Building a livable world, salvaging what we have not ruined, repairing what we can, forging solidarity among everyone marginalized and cast off, refusing to leave anyone behind--this process must be one of love. To build that vague and fluffy-sounding Better World that we all dream of will fail, unequivocally, if we cling to our narrow loyalty to our various nation-states and their imaginary borders. Love will save this place--non-divisive love. When loving your country means hating or mistrusting the people on the other side of the border, that is not love. That’s bigotry. The kind of patriotism we need is an allegiance to place, to the value of the earth, to the awe that “Power and Glory” tries to get at. An allegiance to each other. Solidarity.
There’s a slam poem I recommend, called “To the Oklahoma Progressives Plotting Mass Exodus,” by Lauren Zuniga. Its message goes out to all the liberals wishing to abandon ship and leave the throttling atmosphere of deep-red states, and urges them to stay--that they will be needed there more than anywhere. Multitudes of voices are needed to weave the love that will save us. There can be no abandoned areas--no sacrifice zones, politically as well as environmentally. The solidarity that we will need is predicated on faith, but not faith in a “country” or a romanticized and militarized image of what we think our national character ought to be or once was. The faith we will need is in each other.
And if you want to call that a different kind of patriotism, well, it’s probably the best use we can get out of that word.
Monday, July 4, 2016
Saturday, July 2, 2016
To Go or Not To Go: Some Thoughts on the Implications of Brexit
Some of the initial shock and sensationalism has subsided since Britain’s exit from the EU last week, but questions, vacuums, misunderstanding and possibilities persist. The immediate response seemed to be, among the informal majority-youth online communities I was keeping track of, an outpouring of dismay and disbelief that the United Kingdom would really go so far as to leave the European Union in what was widely deemed a sort of shortsighted tantrum, motivated solely by xenophobia. The New York Times and other senior largely mimicked that hysteria, but here and there, when I searched for them, I found small voices of opposition or calm, better analyzing the nuances of the “Brexit” for the positive facets as well as the disappointing.
Though sites like Twitter and Tumblr exploded with posts calling the Brexit a betrayal of the youth by older voters, and lamenting it as an inconceivably stupid and terrible move, we ought to first stop and consider exactly what Britain has done: left the EU. This is a game-changer and a notable event, but is it really a crisis? To answer that, one might have to ask whether the European Union is actually a beneficial entity to begin with, for the UK or for any other country. Upending this status quo may well be a good thing.
Think of Greece, which considered exiting the Eurozone last year because of its ongoing neoliberal strangulation. That exit didn’t go through, but the austerity policies forced on Greece met with a resounding denouncement in a vote by the populace. The Syriza government has largely kowtowed to the demands of the Troika, but there was real resentment against the ways in which Greece was forced to manage its economic crisis due to its membership in the EU.
Britain’s resentment is premised on different grievances, though the fallout of austerity has not skipped them either. Can the Brexit vote, too, be viewed as a rejection of the EU’s neoliberal economics, the harmful doctrine of rapacious capitalist globalization? Could the UK’s exit be considered a triumph for the delegitimization of that globalization? Was it a resounding expression of anti-elite anger coming from the working class?
At least, it offers a serious shock to the accepted status quo of the EU. Every entity may seem unquestionable until it is shaken, and perhaps it’s about time the EU was shaken.
The EU serves a couple of functions: it is a dysfunctional and not very democratic bureaucracy, a military tool to fall in line with the US, and a neoliberal enforcement machine. However, if any country ought to leave the EU for chiefly reasons of disillusionment with and opposition to globalization, it would seem more logical that that country be a country like Greece, Ireland, or Spain, whose economies have been severely damaged since 2008 and whose people have been punished by austerity. That it was Britain, not quite one of the most economically downtrodden EU countries, that exited brings into question the triumphant rationale put forth by some of the far left, such as the Socialist Party in the UK, which endorsed the Leave position--that this was at its core a major denouncement of the EU’s neoliberal, anti-working-class politics.
In a referendum, it’s a yes-or-no vote, and we don’t know precisely who voted for what reasons. It is probably no more truthful to make the sweeping statement that the Brexit was a resounding defeat for neoliberalism than it is to say that it was an absolute victory for racism and xenophobia.
It’s important to recognize that although the working class in majority voted to leave, that doesn’t mean that their rationale was overwhelmingly based on opposing the EU and economic oppression. That level of class consciousness can’t be assumed, and we don’t know, again, why which people voted the way they did. We ought to remember, too, that a lot of working class support goes to people like Donald Trump, in the US, as well as to the left, because legitimate frustration at being systematically disempowered can just as easily be channeled into anger at fellow have-nots of a different condition--be that race, citizenship, etc.--as it can be aimed at the elites.
But as skeptical as we should be of the monolithic narrative that says this represented a working class revolt, we must also be skeptical of the monolithic narrative that says it was entirely a stunt pulled in the name of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. Certainly, those forces are on the rise in Europe, and other countries--Netherlands, France, Germany--have seen their right wing elements take heart from the Brexit and raise their own calls for referenda on exiting the EU. And certainly the Brexit owes its success in part to racism and xenophobia.
Still, it is an exaggeration to say that the older generations, by supporting Leave, committed a mass betrayal of the youth, who largely voted to stay, and although conservative mentalities predicated on nationalism and xenophobia may have motivated many of the older voters, they are also the ones who may remember Britain before the EU and are more able to evaluate its negative effects. Memories of stronger working class protections and less neoliberalism may also exist more with those older voters. Still, it is irresponsible and dangerous to discount the fact that the youth considered the forces of racism and xenophobia such significant, central threats that they voted en masse against the Brexit.
We have to acknowledge that right-wing bigots drove the leave effort, but that staying did not guarantee tolerance and good economic conditions. It is a fallacy to memorialize the EU as a functional and beneficial entity. Furthermore, there was a deficit of multifaceted narratives before the vote, with the Leave campaign mainly orchestrated and amplified by the right wing. The left was divided, with socialist support for the exit while the Labor party remained uncertain, and Jeremy Corbyn declined to take a strong position that could have clarified leftist support for the exit. The right wing managed to control most of the narrative around motivations for leaving, but it need not--must not--be reduced to a black-and-white party-line divide.
Rather than concluding that staying would have been the lesser evil, though, we should try to analyze all the points of this exit: that it reflects both the racism-stoked frustration with immigration and the refugee crisis as well as frustration with the austerity policies and general dysfunction of the EU.
In the short term, then, the exit will be turbulent, as it is overwhelmingly portrayed as a victory for racism, not anti-globalization or the working class--although, as a point of interest, the coverage by the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal are treating the Brexit as more of a class revolt than racist stunt. In the long term, it may help to precipitate or lay ground for more exits from the EU on explicitly economic grounds; other countries or territories may be emboldened to follow suit, such as, in Europe, the ones worst impacted by the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and the austerity politics that followed: Greece, Spain, Ireland. Puerto Rico, facing a massive debt crisis of its own, has also raised the question of exiting the US’s damaging sphere of influence, in similar fashion to Britain and the EU.
It is interesting to note, though, that while the media wails over the lack of coherent leadership or plans for Britain, and as people from immigrants in the UK to British students in the EU face uncertainty and new obstacles, the effects on people are not nearly always at the forefront. The New York Times ran a piece the other day that focused on Obama’s concern that the Brexit may spell disaster in the realm of trade, both for Britain itself, which will have to renegotiate its own deals that formerly were covered by the EU, and, perhaps more significantly, for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Atlantic corollary to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a nefarious neoliberal power-grab. Without the UK to act as the US’s tool in the EU, it will be a great deal harder to force through the unpopular and harmful TTIP. In this sense, then, the Brexit is a victory for anti-globalization and anti-neoliberalism, for a challenging of the status quo that could yield very positive, democratizing effects.
Even if the Brexit were driven by class consciousness and workers rejecting the undemocratic EU, those concerns will not just vaporize with the UK out of the EU. Neither will xenophobia and racism produced by the shifting of demographics and the influx of immigrants and refugees simply disperse. For one, there is a genuine refugee crisis in Europe that people are reacting to--but that crisis is largely of the US’s making, with some European collaboration. Exiting the EU will not help countries deal with the floods of refugees. Better strategies and goals on that front would include pressuring the US to end its wars in the Middle East, ceasing to funnel weapons and military aid into that region, actually providing humanitarian aid through agencies like the UN, and easing the burden on Mediterranean countries by accepting more refugees elsewhere, especially in countries like the US.
As for the immigration issue, the ruling classes and racists of Europe will have to reckon with their lovely policy-ideology contradiction: they depend on the free movement of people so as to provide easy sources of cheap labor for exploitation, yet they simultaneously desire a kind of fortress-Britain, an imaginary, isolated and homogenous society. The Brexit will not solve this issue for them. Like the US, there is huge dependency on immigrant labor, and measures like mass deportations and increased border security will have a serious impact on the demographics and availability of exploitable labor in Britain. To deal with these issues and provide a workable alternative, the shaky left in the UK will need to clarify, solidify, and amplify its platform, membership, and movement.
As Lenin commented, a “United States of Europe” would be either reactionary or impossible--and we are witnessing now that it is both. At this stage, it is most important to recognize that there were valid reasons for leaving as well as bigoted, and time will have to tell which reasons can seize the day and the leadership vacuum, and guide the country from here on out.
Though sites like Twitter and Tumblr exploded with posts calling the Brexit a betrayal of the youth by older voters, and lamenting it as an inconceivably stupid and terrible move, we ought to first stop and consider exactly what Britain has done: left the EU. This is a game-changer and a notable event, but is it really a crisis? To answer that, one might have to ask whether the European Union is actually a beneficial entity to begin with, for the UK or for any other country. Upending this status quo may well be a good thing.
Think of Greece, which considered exiting the Eurozone last year because of its ongoing neoliberal strangulation. That exit didn’t go through, but the austerity policies forced on Greece met with a resounding denouncement in a vote by the populace. The Syriza government has largely kowtowed to the demands of the Troika, but there was real resentment against the ways in which Greece was forced to manage its economic crisis due to its membership in the EU.
Britain’s resentment is premised on different grievances, though the fallout of austerity has not skipped them either. Can the Brexit vote, too, be viewed as a rejection of the EU’s neoliberal economics, the harmful doctrine of rapacious capitalist globalization? Could the UK’s exit be considered a triumph for the delegitimization of that globalization? Was it a resounding expression of anti-elite anger coming from the working class?
At least, it offers a serious shock to the accepted status quo of the EU. Every entity may seem unquestionable until it is shaken, and perhaps it’s about time the EU was shaken.
The EU serves a couple of functions: it is a dysfunctional and not very democratic bureaucracy, a military tool to fall in line with the US, and a neoliberal enforcement machine. However, if any country ought to leave the EU for chiefly reasons of disillusionment with and opposition to globalization, it would seem more logical that that country be a country like Greece, Ireland, or Spain, whose economies have been severely damaged since 2008 and whose people have been punished by austerity. That it was Britain, not quite one of the most economically downtrodden EU countries, that exited brings into question the triumphant rationale put forth by some of the far left, such as the Socialist Party in the UK, which endorsed the Leave position--that this was at its core a major denouncement of the EU’s neoliberal, anti-working-class politics.
In a referendum, it’s a yes-or-no vote, and we don’t know precisely who voted for what reasons. It is probably no more truthful to make the sweeping statement that the Brexit was a resounding defeat for neoliberalism than it is to say that it was an absolute victory for racism and xenophobia.
It’s important to recognize that although the working class in majority voted to leave, that doesn’t mean that their rationale was overwhelmingly based on opposing the EU and economic oppression. That level of class consciousness can’t be assumed, and we don’t know, again, why which people voted the way they did. We ought to remember, too, that a lot of working class support goes to people like Donald Trump, in the US, as well as to the left, because legitimate frustration at being systematically disempowered can just as easily be channeled into anger at fellow have-nots of a different condition--be that race, citizenship, etc.--as it can be aimed at the elites.
But as skeptical as we should be of the monolithic narrative that says this represented a working class revolt, we must also be skeptical of the monolithic narrative that says it was entirely a stunt pulled in the name of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. Certainly, those forces are on the rise in Europe, and other countries--Netherlands, France, Germany--have seen their right wing elements take heart from the Brexit and raise their own calls for referenda on exiting the EU. And certainly the Brexit owes its success in part to racism and xenophobia.
Still, it is an exaggeration to say that the older generations, by supporting Leave, committed a mass betrayal of the youth, who largely voted to stay, and although conservative mentalities predicated on nationalism and xenophobia may have motivated many of the older voters, they are also the ones who may remember Britain before the EU and are more able to evaluate its negative effects. Memories of stronger working class protections and less neoliberalism may also exist more with those older voters. Still, it is irresponsible and dangerous to discount the fact that the youth considered the forces of racism and xenophobia such significant, central threats that they voted en masse against the Brexit.
We have to acknowledge that right-wing bigots drove the leave effort, but that staying did not guarantee tolerance and good economic conditions. It is a fallacy to memorialize the EU as a functional and beneficial entity. Furthermore, there was a deficit of multifaceted narratives before the vote, with the Leave campaign mainly orchestrated and amplified by the right wing. The left was divided, with socialist support for the exit while the Labor party remained uncertain, and Jeremy Corbyn declined to take a strong position that could have clarified leftist support for the exit. The right wing managed to control most of the narrative around motivations for leaving, but it need not--must not--be reduced to a black-and-white party-line divide.
Rather than concluding that staying would have been the lesser evil, though, we should try to analyze all the points of this exit: that it reflects both the racism-stoked frustration with immigration and the refugee crisis as well as frustration with the austerity policies and general dysfunction of the EU.
In the short term, then, the exit will be turbulent, as it is overwhelmingly portrayed as a victory for racism, not anti-globalization or the working class--although, as a point of interest, the coverage by the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal are treating the Brexit as more of a class revolt than racist stunt. In the long term, it may help to precipitate or lay ground for more exits from the EU on explicitly economic grounds; other countries or territories may be emboldened to follow suit, such as, in Europe, the ones worst impacted by the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and the austerity politics that followed: Greece, Spain, Ireland. Puerto Rico, facing a massive debt crisis of its own, has also raised the question of exiting the US’s damaging sphere of influence, in similar fashion to Britain and the EU.
It is interesting to note, though, that while the media wails over the lack of coherent leadership or plans for Britain, and as people from immigrants in the UK to British students in the EU face uncertainty and new obstacles, the effects on people are not nearly always at the forefront. The New York Times ran a piece the other day that focused on Obama’s concern that the Brexit may spell disaster in the realm of trade, both for Britain itself, which will have to renegotiate its own deals that formerly were covered by the EU, and, perhaps more significantly, for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Atlantic corollary to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a nefarious neoliberal power-grab. Without the UK to act as the US’s tool in the EU, it will be a great deal harder to force through the unpopular and harmful TTIP. In this sense, then, the Brexit is a victory for anti-globalization and anti-neoliberalism, for a challenging of the status quo that could yield very positive, democratizing effects.
Even if the Brexit were driven by class consciousness and workers rejecting the undemocratic EU, those concerns will not just vaporize with the UK out of the EU. Neither will xenophobia and racism produced by the shifting of demographics and the influx of immigrants and refugees simply disperse. For one, there is a genuine refugee crisis in Europe that people are reacting to--but that crisis is largely of the US’s making, with some European collaboration. Exiting the EU will not help countries deal with the floods of refugees. Better strategies and goals on that front would include pressuring the US to end its wars in the Middle East, ceasing to funnel weapons and military aid into that region, actually providing humanitarian aid through agencies like the UN, and easing the burden on Mediterranean countries by accepting more refugees elsewhere, especially in countries like the US.
As for the immigration issue, the ruling classes and racists of Europe will have to reckon with their lovely policy-ideology contradiction: they depend on the free movement of people so as to provide easy sources of cheap labor for exploitation, yet they simultaneously desire a kind of fortress-Britain, an imaginary, isolated and homogenous society. The Brexit will not solve this issue for them. Like the US, there is huge dependency on immigrant labor, and measures like mass deportations and increased border security will have a serious impact on the demographics and availability of exploitable labor in Britain. To deal with these issues and provide a workable alternative, the shaky left in the UK will need to clarify, solidify, and amplify its platform, membership, and movement.
As Lenin commented, a “United States of Europe” would be either reactionary or impossible--and we are witnessing now that it is both. At this stage, it is most important to recognize that there were valid reasons for leaving as well as bigoted, and time will have to tell which reasons can seize the day and the leadership vacuum, and guide the country from here on out.
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Solidarity in the Breach
For a school assignment recently, I had to write about something that I believe in, and I chose to write about solidarity. I believe in the necessity and the power of solidarity as a force to hold each other together--both in the context of a political struggle and also in the microcosm of friendships and personal hard times. I wrote about the importance of presence, in the sense of showing up for other people’s struggles and being there when people need support.
I believe in the greater ramifications of solidarity as well, that the quality of togetherness in struggle is the way through which we can rebuild our broken interpersonal connections, break down barriers between us, learn to live mutually and respectfully rather than hierarchically. But it is in the small moments, when you are not an isolated individual but a living and breathing and fighting member of something greater than yourself, that I feel solidarity as a superstructure underlying the choices I make and the way that I try to view the world.
Solidarity is what I have been seeking now, what I am leaning on as I struggle to come to terms with the massacre on June 12th of LGBTQ Latinx people in Orlando. Once again, solidarity is triage as my friends and my community and I grieve. And it is seeking something larger to be a part of, something in which to find if not closure, at least some measure of solace.
I attended a vigil last week in Boston. I found out about it at the last minute, jumped on a train and ensconced myself in the throng of people flooding the plaza in front of the city hall. Crammed toward the back, I couldn’t hear anything that was said, but the solemn faces of the crowd, dotted with flashes of rainbow, were a comfort that I needed, though a scant one. As the vigil broke up, many of the people stayed, wondering if that was all. Then a voice from behind me began to sing, “Ain’t nobody gonna turn me around….” and in concert, several voices rose to meet hers. I joined in, this small tableau of singers locking eyes with each other. The woman who’d started the singing led us through several rounds of the song, switching out “nobody” for “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “Islamophobia,” “ignorance,” and “fear.” At the end I shook hands with two women singing near me, and I felt that I had found the solidarity I came for.
There is power in music. There is power in spontaneity, in the sorrow and defiance of that song. There is solidarity in music; we can try to take succor from song. I nearly did my project for school about punk rock as a force I believe in, and as counterintuitive, strange or superficial as it may sound, I believe that there is depth and even wisdom to be found in those often angry, intense songs, three chords of sometimes quite shrewd and cutting political commentary. I find the most relatable and helpful lyrics and take the most strength from the discordant noise and intensity of punk rock, as well as from the more contemplative lilt of my other fallback genre, folk music.
I am reminded of a Rise Against song, “Give It All,” in which several times they say “There’s a reason why I sing.” I notice a thematic bridge between that statement and the song that concludes the album, titled “Rumors of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” I think “Rumors…” is the explanation of the “reason” for singing that “Give It All” refers to. I have offhandedly named “Rumors…” as my theme song since eighth grade (maybe in part just because I just like reeling out that whole title), because of the chorus, which I strongly identify with:
“When I die, will they remember not
What I did, but what I haven’t done
It’s not the end that I fear with each breath
It’s life that scares me to death…”
The fear of time, of dying without leaving a legacy or a litany of accomplishments, is something I think is widely shared. Part of this may be the effect of cultures that urge us to “make something of yourself” and “do something meaningful,” that insists that in order to matter, we have to live on a large scale and set our names down in history. “Give It All” includes the line “today I offer up myself to this/ I'm living for my dying wish,” and I interpret that wish as the wish to be remembered for having accomplished something impressive, and the wish to live a life that matters in the inevitably short time we have. Because of various chronic medical conditions, my projected life expectancy is at least ten years shorter than the US average, and that’s before I thought to worry about the risk of death from homophobic violence. As it is, lately I’ve been grappling a lot more than usual with the knowledge that our lives are so fleeting, so questionable, so little. We don’t all have the chance to live for our dying wish. We don’t all have the chance to live much at all.
Is the belief in solidarity enough to counter the fear of time? I have to believe that it is, more or less. I have to believe that the small ways in which we matter microcosmically are as or more important than any historical significance that might be bestowed upon us. We matter to each other. It’s not realistic to ask everyone to live every second as if it were their last, but the way in which I deal with the questions in “Rumors… ” is to spend as many moments as I can in actions and spaces that give me meaning, strength and solidarity. I have long identified with a phrase from the Green Day song “21st Century Breakdown” that refers to “the pillar of damage control.” I feel often like the pillar of damage control--and I don’t mean that as a lament or an insinuation that I burden myself with people’s problems. I am a pillar of damage control because I believe in solidarity, that we have to carry this weight together and hold each other up. It is not really altruism. It is reciprocity. We are each other’s pillars because we are all we have.
In the past week or so, I have quite literally leaned on people as pillars as I am working through the personal aftermath of the shooting. My town held its own vigil last Thursday, a nice ceremony, actually, with candles and thoughtful words and a reading of the names of the murdered people. The last speaker asked the audience to hold hands, and I gripped the hand of the person next to me like an anchor in a whirlpool. As we released each other, she offered me a hug, and it felt like a lifeline, or a lightning rod--something to ground me.
I have grieved and raged over gun violence and racism and all manner of atrocities for years--I wrote an article so vehement after the Newtown massacre that my school paper refused to publish it. But this latest attack shook me in a way that no other had, leaving me untethered and emotionally turbulent.
On the one hand, this might be the worst mass shooting in US history, but it isn’t a new phenomenon--neither the gun violence nor the targeting of LGBTQ people. But from my vantage point of privilege and insulation, it seems like the spectre of something we hoped we’d put behind us, now rising from its grave. Of course, homophobic--let alone racist--violence was never extirpated. And coming to terms with an identity outside of the heteronormative mainstream has never been easy. But never before now have I feared my life ended in wanton, senseless violence--never have I felt so acutely that the relative safety I have grown up swaddled in was only an illusion, a small firebreak against a still-towering blaze.
Besides the privilege of geography and political climate, there is also the privilege of age. I didn’t grow up with hate crimes as constant background noise. I learned about the torture and death of Matthew Shepard from reading The Laramie Project in a high school English class, not from watching immediate news coverage or struggling to cope amid the vying of shock and bigotry and sensationalism. I got to experience that pain from the remove of my entire life--I was born and grew up entirely in the post-Matthew Shepard years, and beyond that, I grew up in the liberal snowglobe of a Massachusetts town.
The other day, I read a series of Twitter posts by an older lesbian, lamenting bitterly that this kind of violent hate crime, this kind of landmine in our still-fragile community and movement, was supposed to stay in the past, was supposed to belong to an ending age. We, the youth, were not supposed to grow up and still have to fear for our lives. We were supposed to be safe. We were supposed to be free. The older generations have been through this before, but it was an eruption that shook many people of my generation like nothing we’d ever known.
Perhaps there has been too much sheltering, although how can we believe that the LGBTQ youth of today are really free from living under the heavy skies of bigotry? To extend that metaphor a little, there have certainly been many rays of light slipping through lately--marriage equality, a broader debate over trans rights, some recognition of the experiences of LGBTQ people who aren’t white cis men--but the clouds have never disappeared. Though being jaded about the persistence of violence doesn’t necessarily mean one is less affected by that violence, but to be as wrecked as I was after Orlando testifies to my privilege, in a way. For people who have never experienced a community without omnipresent judgment and/or violence, these attacks may not be so surprising. Even examining the state of national dialogue--in the presidential campaign, for an easy example--it is clear that acceptance is still a long battle away. But progress did seem tangible, pride seemed straightforward, and for many of us, our lives were better than our predecessors could have imagined.
I frequently trot out the line that what we need most for social justice movements is for people to show up. I do believe in the power of presence and the importance of showing up in solidarity for struggles not your own. Most of us wish for activism to be easy, a one-time engagement; we want to flood the streets and shout and go home, mission accomplished. In the LGBTQ movement, I have observed that although we have our gatherings and our marches, we are more celebratory, less militant. The celebration is critical, as well, and it’s a milestone in itself, but it’s also, to me, a bit like the activists who want to go home after one event. Especially as Pride events become corporatized, their message is diluted, and there is not, as far as I can tell, a great sense of urgency or a call to action there.
It is interesting to me that at Black Lives Matter protests, the chant I’ve heard goes “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! And if we don’t get it - shut it down!” At the Boston Pride events that I’ve attended, the “shut it down” part is always omitted (the same is true, in my experience, at Bernie Sanders rallies). There is no promise of retribution or even action if our demands for justice and rights are not met. There is no sense that the struggle continues outside of the immediate chanting, since, to me, the “shut it down” part represents a recognition that drastic action against the entire system is what will be necessary if reforms and asking nicely doesn’t work. The LGBTQ movement, perhaps, is rather too good at asking nicely. Neither is it alone--the peace and environmental movements are both, nowadays, comprised of a great deal of asking nicely. There is some shutting down going on there (in direct action against pipelines, for example), but the monumental system change that will be necessary--is necessary--is generally absent from the mainstream and majority elements of the movement.
I heard a story at a peace conference several weeks ago of a delegation that visited Japan and met with hibakusha, survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. And what struck the members of the delegation, what they reported at the conference, was that the hibakusha apologized for the failure of their work to eliminate nuclear weapons and rid the world of that very great danger. These are people who were more directly impacted than anyone by the US’s vicious, callous, and racist decision to drop atomic bombs, people who have spent upwards of sixty years working to build a more peaceful world. And they express regret, apology, that they did not achieve the victory they wanted.
In the anguished comments of the Twitter user who posted an apology to the queer youth, I notice a parallel to the apologies of the Japanese hibakusha. It is that bitter truth that too often, lives dedicated to activism end without the corresponding end of the injustice that they fought against. It is also the feeling of inadequacy, of ineffectiveness, that I have struggled with and that Rise Against expressed in “Rumors of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” Will we die having accomplished anything? Will we be remembered for our action, or our inaction, or for anything at all?
I am an activist because I believe that it is both a prayer and a buffer to be aware and involved. It is an act of faith to show up, to speak out, to organize and press onward and get up when everything keeps going wrong. It requires a faith that I sometimes can’t muster, because my energy and my emotional reserves are not limitless or unshakable. In those moments, activism becomes a buffer, something I do to keep the world at bay, because holding a candle or riding a train to a rally or speaking at a vigil feels better than crying at home. After a point, it doesn’t matter as much if I personally make the difference, but it matters that I am making the attempt, that I am taking myself to a place of solidarity and hopefully, healing. When adults congratulate me for being involved, I’ve often answered, “Someone’s got to do it,” but it isn’t just a sense of duty but a search for solidarity and strength that I am showing up for, again and again.
Is it, after all, our responsibility to rid the world of oppression and injustice and violence? Perhaps it is our responsibility to try, as best we are able, but it cannot be our absolute expectation to succeed. Martin Luther King Jr.’s arc of justice is nowhere near ending; perhaps, in fact, we are still closer to the early part of that arc. The endpoint of justice towards which it bends may be beyond many horizons yet.
I have not considered myself religious for years--the extent of my relationship with God, back in elementary school or so, was to pray for help only when I desperately needed it, and otherwise to just pray for toys. But there is one verse from the Bible that I learned of recently that resonated with me, particularly around the questions of activism and regret and ineffectiveness: “Those from among you will rebuild the ancient ruins; You will raise up the age-old foundations; And you will be called the repairer of the breach, The restorer of the streets in which to dwell.”
The idea of being a repairer of the breach, someone who begins in the ruins and rebuilds from there, accurately enunciates the way I think of activism. There are so many breaches to repair, and they are wide and deep and marked with immeasurable history and suffering. But there is also solidarity to be found in the ruins, people who are ready to build something better, to repair and restore. It is not the task of a single person, but of any who take up any part of the mantle of repairing the breach. The sorrow and the apology in the Twitter posts culminated in the writer urging the LGBTQ youth to join with those who have been fighting for decades, to reify or develop the intergenerational solidarity that we need to continue our struggle for justice. They hoped we would be spared the hatred and the violence of past decades, but since we were not spared, we must unite and continue living, continue loving, continue fighting.
As I wrote in my English class essay on solidarity: “Solidarity is building the human bridges that get us over rough waters. Solidarity is the defiance in believing anyone is a potentially ally… Solidarity is struggling to believe that each of our small actions matters; it’s what I draw on when I’m failing to answer the question ‘do you have hope for the future?’ with a yes. I believe solidarity is the struggle to forge that hope. Solidarity is holding each other together when the world is trying to kill us. Solidarity is screaming to the sky: we are here and we are staying.”
Repairing the breach requires solidarity. It doesn’t mean certainty or victory or even necessarily hope, but it means resolve. The words about the repairers of the breach reminded me of a Jackson Browne song aptly titled “Standing in the Breach,” which is one of my favorite songs. It’s ultimately affirming, but it has a sobering tone, an acknowledgment that failure is possible, but we who choose to try to repair the breach still remain resolute and in solidarity. The lyrics that express this best go as follows:
“You don’t know why it’s such a far cry
From the world this world could be
You don’t know why but you still try
For the world you wish to see
You don’t know how it’ll happen now
After all that’s come undone
And you know the world you’re waiting for
May not come
No it may not come
But the change the world needs now is there
Within everyone.”
I’ll end with a selection of lyrics from another Jackson Browne song, “For A Dancer,” which, at a recent concert I attended, he dedicated to the victims of the Orlando massacre:
“Keep a fire for the human race
Let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know what could be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
Just as easily it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around
… And somewhere between the time you’re alive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
But you’ll never know.”
It reminds us, I think, that we never know what is the future holds, what kind of joys and tragedies and seismic shifts and possibilities are approaching. The future is fluid, and so is the present, and even the past. We may never know what will matter. We may never know what kind of ripple effect we will cause. We may never know the full extent of the power that we have to restore the breaches in this world, but I believe in the solidarity of trying.
I believe in the greater ramifications of solidarity as well, that the quality of togetherness in struggle is the way through which we can rebuild our broken interpersonal connections, break down barriers between us, learn to live mutually and respectfully rather than hierarchically. But it is in the small moments, when you are not an isolated individual but a living and breathing and fighting member of something greater than yourself, that I feel solidarity as a superstructure underlying the choices I make and the way that I try to view the world.
Solidarity is what I have been seeking now, what I am leaning on as I struggle to come to terms with the massacre on June 12th of LGBTQ Latinx people in Orlando. Once again, solidarity is triage as my friends and my community and I grieve. And it is seeking something larger to be a part of, something in which to find if not closure, at least some measure of solace.
I attended a vigil last week in Boston. I found out about it at the last minute, jumped on a train and ensconced myself in the throng of people flooding the plaza in front of the city hall. Crammed toward the back, I couldn’t hear anything that was said, but the solemn faces of the crowd, dotted with flashes of rainbow, were a comfort that I needed, though a scant one. As the vigil broke up, many of the people stayed, wondering if that was all. Then a voice from behind me began to sing, “Ain’t nobody gonna turn me around….” and in concert, several voices rose to meet hers. I joined in, this small tableau of singers locking eyes with each other. The woman who’d started the singing led us through several rounds of the song, switching out “nobody” for “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “Islamophobia,” “ignorance,” and “fear.” At the end I shook hands with two women singing near me, and I felt that I had found the solidarity I came for.
There is power in music. There is power in spontaneity, in the sorrow and defiance of that song. There is solidarity in music; we can try to take succor from song. I nearly did my project for school about punk rock as a force I believe in, and as counterintuitive, strange or superficial as it may sound, I believe that there is depth and even wisdom to be found in those often angry, intense songs, three chords of sometimes quite shrewd and cutting political commentary. I find the most relatable and helpful lyrics and take the most strength from the discordant noise and intensity of punk rock, as well as from the more contemplative lilt of my other fallback genre, folk music.
I am reminded of a Rise Against song, “Give It All,” in which several times they say “There’s a reason why I sing.” I notice a thematic bridge between that statement and the song that concludes the album, titled “Rumors of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” I think “Rumors…” is the explanation of the “reason” for singing that “Give It All” refers to. I have offhandedly named “Rumors…” as my theme song since eighth grade (maybe in part just because I just like reeling out that whole title), because of the chorus, which I strongly identify with:
“When I die, will they remember not
What I did, but what I haven’t done
It’s not the end that I fear with each breath
It’s life that scares me to death…”
The fear of time, of dying without leaving a legacy or a litany of accomplishments, is something I think is widely shared. Part of this may be the effect of cultures that urge us to “make something of yourself” and “do something meaningful,” that insists that in order to matter, we have to live on a large scale and set our names down in history. “Give It All” includes the line “today I offer up myself to this/ I'm living for my dying wish,” and I interpret that wish as the wish to be remembered for having accomplished something impressive, and the wish to live a life that matters in the inevitably short time we have. Because of various chronic medical conditions, my projected life expectancy is at least ten years shorter than the US average, and that’s before I thought to worry about the risk of death from homophobic violence. As it is, lately I’ve been grappling a lot more than usual with the knowledge that our lives are so fleeting, so questionable, so little. We don’t all have the chance to live for our dying wish. We don’t all have the chance to live much at all.
Is the belief in solidarity enough to counter the fear of time? I have to believe that it is, more or less. I have to believe that the small ways in which we matter microcosmically are as or more important than any historical significance that might be bestowed upon us. We matter to each other. It’s not realistic to ask everyone to live every second as if it were their last, but the way in which I deal with the questions in “Rumors… ” is to spend as many moments as I can in actions and spaces that give me meaning, strength and solidarity. I have long identified with a phrase from the Green Day song “21st Century Breakdown” that refers to “the pillar of damage control.” I feel often like the pillar of damage control--and I don’t mean that as a lament or an insinuation that I burden myself with people’s problems. I am a pillar of damage control because I believe in solidarity, that we have to carry this weight together and hold each other up. It is not really altruism. It is reciprocity. We are each other’s pillars because we are all we have.
In the past week or so, I have quite literally leaned on people as pillars as I am working through the personal aftermath of the shooting. My town held its own vigil last Thursday, a nice ceremony, actually, with candles and thoughtful words and a reading of the names of the murdered people. The last speaker asked the audience to hold hands, and I gripped the hand of the person next to me like an anchor in a whirlpool. As we released each other, she offered me a hug, and it felt like a lifeline, or a lightning rod--something to ground me.
I have grieved and raged over gun violence and racism and all manner of atrocities for years--I wrote an article so vehement after the Newtown massacre that my school paper refused to publish it. But this latest attack shook me in a way that no other had, leaving me untethered and emotionally turbulent.
On the one hand, this might be the worst mass shooting in US history, but it isn’t a new phenomenon--neither the gun violence nor the targeting of LGBTQ people. But from my vantage point of privilege and insulation, it seems like the spectre of something we hoped we’d put behind us, now rising from its grave. Of course, homophobic--let alone racist--violence was never extirpated. And coming to terms with an identity outside of the heteronormative mainstream has never been easy. But never before now have I feared my life ended in wanton, senseless violence--never have I felt so acutely that the relative safety I have grown up swaddled in was only an illusion, a small firebreak against a still-towering blaze.
Besides the privilege of geography and political climate, there is also the privilege of age. I didn’t grow up with hate crimes as constant background noise. I learned about the torture and death of Matthew Shepard from reading The Laramie Project in a high school English class, not from watching immediate news coverage or struggling to cope amid the vying of shock and bigotry and sensationalism. I got to experience that pain from the remove of my entire life--I was born and grew up entirely in the post-Matthew Shepard years, and beyond that, I grew up in the liberal snowglobe of a Massachusetts town.
The other day, I read a series of Twitter posts by an older lesbian, lamenting bitterly that this kind of violent hate crime, this kind of landmine in our still-fragile community and movement, was supposed to stay in the past, was supposed to belong to an ending age. We, the youth, were not supposed to grow up and still have to fear for our lives. We were supposed to be safe. We were supposed to be free. The older generations have been through this before, but it was an eruption that shook many people of my generation like nothing we’d ever known.
Perhaps there has been too much sheltering, although how can we believe that the LGBTQ youth of today are really free from living under the heavy skies of bigotry? To extend that metaphor a little, there have certainly been many rays of light slipping through lately--marriage equality, a broader debate over trans rights, some recognition of the experiences of LGBTQ people who aren’t white cis men--but the clouds have never disappeared. Though being jaded about the persistence of violence doesn’t necessarily mean one is less affected by that violence, but to be as wrecked as I was after Orlando testifies to my privilege, in a way. For people who have never experienced a community without omnipresent judgment and/or violence, these attacks may not be so surprising. Even examining the state of national dialogue--in the presidential campaign, for an easy example--it is clear that acceptance is still a long battle away. But progress did seem tangible, pride seemed straightforward, and for many of us, our lives were better than our predecessors could have imagined.
I frequently trot out the line that what we need most for social justice movements is for people to show up. I do believe in the power of presence and the importance of showing up in solidarity for struggles not your own. Most of us wish for activism to be easy, a one-time engagement; we want to flood the streets and shout and go home, mission accomplished. In the LGBTQ movement, I have observed that although we have our gatherings and our marches, we are more celebratory, less militant. The celebration is critical, as well, and it’s a milestone in itself, but it’s also, to me, a bit like the activists who want to go home after one event. Especially as Pride events become corporatized, their message is diluted, and there is not, as far as I can tell, a great sense of urgency or a call to action there.
It is interesting to me that at Black Lives Matter protests, the chant I’ve heard goes “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! And if we don’t get it - shut it down!” At the Boston Pride events that I’ve attended, the “shut it down” part is always omitted (the same is true, in my experience, at Bernie Sanders rallies). There is no promise of retribution or even action if our demands for justice and rights are not met. There is no sense that the struggle continues outside of the immediate chanting, since, to me, the “shut it down” part represents a recognition that drastic action against the entire system is what will be necessary if reforms and asking nicely doesn’t work. The LGBTQ movement, perhaps, is rather too good at asking nicely. Neither is it alone--the peace and environmental movements are both, nowadays, comprised of a great deal of asking nicely. There is some shutting down going on there (in direct action against pipelines, for example), but the monumental system change that will be necessary--is necessary--is generally absent from the mainstream and majority elements of the movement.
I heard a story at a peace conference several weeks ago of a delegation that visited Japan and met with hibakusha, survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. And what struck the members of the delegation, what they reported at the conference, was that the hibakusha apologized for the failure of their work to eliminate nuclear weapons and rid the world of that very great danger. These are people who were more directly impacted than anyone by the US’s vicious, callous, and racist decision to drop atomic bombs, people who have spent upwards of sixty years working to build a more peaceful world. And they express regret, apology, that they did not achieve the victory they wanted.
In the anguished comments of the Twitter user who posted an apology to the queer youth, I notice a parallel to the apologies of the Japanese hibakusha. It is that bitter truth that too often, lives dedicated to activism end without the corresponding end of the injustice that they fought against. It is also the feeling of inadequacy, of ineffectiveness, that I have struggled with and that Rise Against expressed in “Rumors of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” Will we die having accomplished anything? Will we be remembered for our action, or our inaction, or for anything at all?
I am an activist because I believe that it is both a prayer and a buffer to be aware and involved. It is an act of faith to show up, to speak out, to organize and press onward and get up when everything keeps going wrong. It requires a faith that I sometimes can’t muster, because my energy and my emotional reserves are not limitless or unshakable. In those moments, activism becomes a buffer, something I do to keep the world at bay, because holding a candle or riding a train to a rally or speaking at a vigil feels better than crying at home. After a point, it doesn’t matter as much if I personally make the difference, but it matters that I am making the attempt, that I am taking myself to a place of solidarity and hopefully, healing. When adults congratulate me for being involved, I’ve often answered, “Someone’s got to do it,” but it isn’t just a sense of duty but a search for solidarity and strength that I am showing up for, again and again.
Is it, after all, our responsibility to rid the world of oppression and injustice and violence? Perhaps it is our responsibility to try, as best we are able, but it cannot be our absolute expectation to succeed. Martin Luther King Jr.’s arc of justice is nowhere near ending; perhaps, in fact, we are still closer to the early part of that arc. The endpoint of justice towards which it bends may be beyond many horizons yet.
I have not considered myself religious for years--the extent of my relationship with God, back in elementary school or so, was to pray for help only when I desperately needed it, and otherwise to just pray for toys. But there is one verse from the Bible that I learned of recently that resonated with me, particularly around the questions of activism and regret and ineffectiveness: “Those from among you will rebuild the ancient ruins; You will raise up the age-old foundations; And you will be called the repairer of the breach, The restorer of the streets in which to dwell.”
The idea of being a repairer of the breach, someone who begins in the ruins and rebuilds from there, accurately enunciates the way I think of activism. There are so many breaches to repair, and they are wide and deep and marked with immeasurable history and suffering. But there is also solidarity to be found in the ruins, people who are ready to build something better, to repair and restore. It is not the task of a single person, but of any who take up any part of the mantle of repairing the breach. The sorrow and the apology in the Twitter posts culminated in the writer urging the LGBTQ youth to join with those who have been fighting for decades, to reify or develop the intergenerational solidarity that we need to continue our struggle for justice. They hoped we would be spared the hatred and the violence of past decades, but since we were not spared, we must unite and continue living, continue loving, continue fighting.
As I wrote in my English class essay on solidarity: “Solidarity is building the human bridges that get us over rough waters. Solidarity is the defiance in believing anyone is a potentially ally… Solidarity is struggling to believe that each of our small actions matters; it’s what I draw on when I’m failing to answer the question ‘do you have hope for the future?’ with a yes. I believe solidarity is the struggle to forge that hope. Solidarity is holding each other together when the world is trying to kill us. Solidarity is screaming to the sky: we are here and we are staying.”
Repairing the breach requires solidarity. It doesn’t mean certainty or victory or even necessarily hope, but it means resolve. The words about the repairers of the breach reminded me of a Jackson Browne song aptly titled “Standing in the Breach,” which is one of my favorite songs. It’s ultimately affirming, but it has a sobering tone, an acknowledgment that failure is possible, but we who choose to try to repair the breach still remain resolute and in solidarity. The lyrics that express this best go as follows:
“You don’t know why it’s such a far cry
From the world this world could be
You don’t know why but you still try
For the world you wish to see
You don’t know how it’ll happen now
After all that’s come undone
And you know the world you’re waiting for
May not come
No it may not come
But the change the world needs now is there
Within everyone.”
I’ll end with a selection of lyrics from another Jackson Browne song, “For A Dancer,” which, at a recent concert I attended, he dedicated to the victims of the Orlando massacre:
“Keep a fire for the human race
Let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know what could be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
Just as easily it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around
… And somewhere between the time you’re alive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
But you’ll never know.”
It reminds us, I think, that we never know what is the future holds, what kind of joys and tragedies and seismic shifts and possibilities are approaching. The future is fluid, and so is the present, and even the past. We may never know what will matter. We may never know what kind of ripple effect we will cause. We may never know the full extent of the power that we have to restore the breaches in this world, but I believe in the solidarity of trying.
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Too Many Martyrs - a poem for Orlando
**This poem roughly follows the format of a pantoum, in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza reappear as the first and third
lines of the following stanza, and the first line also serves as the last. Title is taken from a Phil Ochs song of the same name.**
__________________________________________
Oh, let it never be again
We are broken glass bleeding in the wreckage of what we build
Grief rends me weeping and hollow, dredging my saltwater heart
It was never supposed to be this way
We are broken glass bleeding in the wreckage of what we build
On our shoulders we find the weight and seethe of our history
It was never supposed to be this way
The knowledge writ in blood that we are still not free
On our shoulders we find the weight and seethe of our history
We are drowning in ashes and tears
The knowledge writ in blood that we are still not free
And our rainbows were only mirage, refracted light
We are drowning in ashes and tears
Our safety was only an illusion
And our rainbows were only mirage, refracted light
Bullets shattered our sanctuary and we felt our world cave
Our safety was only an illusion
The structure we perch on was not ladder but scaffold
Bullets shattered our sanctuary and we felt our world cave
The braying for our blood has dimmed but never died
The structure we perch on was not ladder but scaffold
Strung up as spectacle, bodies swaying in media static
The braying for our blood has dimmed but never died
Still we plead - Oh, let it never be again.
Sunday, June 12, 2016
For Orlando, in Memoriam: Cautions and Trepid Hope
Yesterday, I was at Boston Pride in a crowd of rainbows under gray skies, complaining about the corporatization of pride celebrations. A friend and I grumbled about the fallacy of treating marriage rights as a trophy at the end of the struggle when the struggle is so far from over. We mentioned how we should be focusing on things like combating employment discrimination.
Or, you know, death. Hate crimes.
Tonight, I got home and opened my email to messages of mourning and prayer for Orlando, Florida. Clearly, I was a little behind with my news--I’d known nothing the whole day, and then suddenly I was hollowly scrolling through articles that mixed mourning with fearmongering, and the cogs of the media machine are already crunching through the grief and confusion and small shining moments of humanity to create a portrait of a terrorist attack, to shore up our paranoia and our anger and our insecurity.
It is, of course, an act of terror to walk into an LGBTQ nightclub and open fire until fifty people join the shooter as dead bodies on the floor, and then a SWAT team storms the building, and the city shuts down in a state of emergency. It's being called the deadliest mass shooting in US history, and Obama has yet again addressed the country and urged unity and strength in the face of this violence (I feel sometimes as though some of Obama's finest moments as president have been the powerful speeches he makes after mass shootings. But how wretched is it that he has had the chance to get so much practice with this?).
It is critically important as well that we acknowledge this also as a hate crime, targeting a gay nightclub during Pride Month, and especially a gay nightclub featuring Latinx night, providing a space for people facing at least a double oppression. And it is too a crime enabled by the easy procurement of assault rifles--incidentally, the same assault rifle in this case (the AR-15) has a remarkable tally of mass shootings to its name, building its death toll from Aurora, Colorado, to Newtowne, Connecticut, to Orlando, Florida; from those alone the body count is over 75 people.
That the shooter was Muslim and claimed ties to ISIS does more to provide a convenient and profitable narrative for the media and fearmongers than it does to help us parse our grief and reconcile with our trauma, both as individuals affected and as a nation. It gives us a target, a familiar target, into which to channel anger and sorrow. It offers ammunition to people who already believe the Other is also eternally the Enemy, that terrorism is inherent to Islam, perhaps even that the victims deserved it.
However, if we chose to take back our storytelling agency, we could reframe the narrative. We could talk about the violent danger of allowing such a lackadaisical preponderance of assault rifles without laws to leash them or keep them from the hands of those who would misuse them. (For those who say that gun laws won’t stop criminals because criminals ignore laws anyway, I might mention that the Orlando shooter bought his guns legally.) We could talk about the government’s inability to identify real threats, even while they batten down the hatches in this police-state-lite that we’re living in (the FBI had previously identified the Orlando shooter as a potential threat because of his radicalized beliefs; also, radicalized or not may be irrelevant, since the shooter’s parents report that he had a history of violence and was far from a devout Muslim anyhow). We could talk about the dangerous, shortsighted, and irresponsible outsourcing of blame to already-marginalized groups, be it Muslims or mentally ill people, scapegoating them for crimes that were nurtured just as much by our culture of normalized violence, homophobia, racism, militarism, and fear.
It is imperative in this case, as always, to challenge the story about terrorism and Islam, to duck the derailing of the conversation into the quagmire of rabid gun rights, to acknowledge the ways in which this crime, too, might be a manifestation of blowback from US foreign policy if indeed the shooter had developed ties to so-called Islamic extremists.
But as this is also a hate crime, the LGBTQ community is also at the heart of the issue. It is our particular pain to grapple with as we decide how to move forward. It is a brutal reality check for us that safety, let alone civil rights, is still not guaranteed. We must remember and reify our conviction that this--the work for equity and respect of gender and sexuality--is a fight, a struggle. It is not a trend to be mainstreamed or a flashy aesthetic to be adopted or an opportunity to be capitalized on. Of every social movement that I have been involved in, I have never witnessed one that has won more mainstream acceptance yet currently comports itself as less struggle-minded than the LGBTQ movement. Have we traded away our duty to protest for the right to celebrate ourselves? Have we taken the quickly-turned tide in favor of our rights and let that be called a lasting victory? This fight is so far from over. If there is any moment to re-mobilize, it is now.
In mourning and in shock, however, we must also respond with compassion. We must resist the pressure to bow to Islamophobia and to paint Muslims as inherently and violently homophobic. We above all, the affected people, must not give in to the fear narrative. We must not let ourselves be divided, or exile from our spaces of mourning the Muslim members of the LGBTQ umbrella.
I think the early signs are hopeful here. As in Charleston after the A.M.E. church shooting, the community has gathered to affirm love and reject hatred. Statements from various religious denominations--including Islam--have condemned the attack and offered prayers and support to the survivors and the grieving. People organized vigils from Canada to Mexico and across the US tonight, and spread the word about blood drives for those injured in Orlando.
In disaster we find solidarity--“a paradise built in hell,” as the essayist Rebecca Solnit titled her book about this phenomenon. In shock and suffering there is blame and fear and bigotry, but there is also the brighter side of human reaction--strength, compassion, care. There is hope. There are many ways to deal with tragedy and terror and hatred, and already, signs of responses both harmful and helpful are visible. The coming days will be our test--for the average citizen, for Orlando, for the LGBTQ, Latinx, and Muslim communities--of whether we will stand up to violence with solidarity or dissolve into divisive and accusatory static.
Or, you know, death. Hate crimes.
Tonight, I got home and opened my email to messages of mourning and prayer for Orlando, Florida. Clearly, I was a little behind with my news--I’d known nothing the whole day, and then suddenly I was hollowly scrolling through articles that mixed mourning with fearmongering, and the cogs of the media machine are already crunching through the grief and confusion and small shining moments of humanity to create a portrait of a terrorist attack, to shore up our paranoia and our anger and our insecurity.
It is, of course, an act of terror to walk into an LGBTQ nightclub and open fire until fifty people join the shooter as dead bodies on the floor, and then a SWAT team storms the building, and the city shuts down in a state of emergency. It's being called the deadliest mass shooting in US history, and Obama has yet again addressed the country and urged unity and strength in the face of this violence (I feel sometimes as though some of Obama's finest moments as president have been the powerful speeches he makes after mass shootings. But how wretched is it that he has had the chance to get so much practice with this?).
It is critically important as well that we acknowledge this also as a hate crime, targeting a gay nightclub during Pride Month, and especially a gay nightclub featuring Latinx night, providing a space for people facing at least a double oppression. And it is too a crime enabled by the easy procurement of assault rifles--incidentally, the same assault rifle in this case (the AR-15) has a remarkable tally of mass shootings to its name, building its death toll from Aurora, Colorado, to Newtowne, Connecticut, to Orlando, Florida; from those alone the body count is over 75 people.
That the shooter was Muslim and claimed ties to ISIS does more to provide a convenient and profitable narrative for the media and fearmongers than it does to help us parse our grief and reconcile with our trauma, both as individuals affected and as a nation. It gives us a target, a familiar target, into which to channel anger and sorrow. It offers ammunition to people who already believe the Other is also eternally the Enemy, that terrorism is inherent to Islam, perhaps even that the victims deserved it.
However, if we chose to take back our storytelling agency, we could reframe the narrative. We could talk about the violent danger of allowing such a lackadaisical preponderance of assault rifles without laws to leash them or keep them from the hands of those who would misuse them. (For those who say that gun laws won’t stop criminals because criminals ignore laws anyway, I might mention that the Orlando shooter bought his guns legally.) We could talk about the government’s inability to identify real threats, even while they batten down the hatches in this police-state-lite that we’re living in (the FBI had previously identified the Orlando shooter as a potential threat because of his radicalized beliefs; also, radicalized or not may be irrelevant, since the shooter’s parents report that he had a history of violence and was far from a devout Muslim anyhow). We could talk about the dangerous, shortsighted, and irresponsible outsourcing of blame to already-marginalized groups, be it Muslims or mentally ill people, scapegoating them for crimes that were nurtured just as much by our culture of normalized violence, homophobia, racism, militarism, and fear.
It is imperative in this case, as always, to challenge the story about terrorism and Islam, to duck the derailing of the conversation into the quagmire of rabid gun rights, to acknowledge the ways in which this crime, too, might be a manifestation of blowback from US foreign policy if indeed the shooter had developed ties to so-called Islamic extremists.
But as this is also a hate crime, the LGBTQ community is also at the heart of the issue. It is our particular pain to grapple with as we decide how to move forward. It is a brutal reality check for us that safety, let alone civil rights, is still not guaranteed. We must remember and reify our conviction that this--the work for equity and respect of gender and sexuality--is a fight, a struggle. It is not a trend to be mainstreamed or a flashy aesthetic to be adopted or an opportunity to be capitalized on. Of every social movement that I have been involved in, I have never witnessed one that has won more mainstream acceptance yet currently comports itself as less struggle-minded than the LGBTQ movement. Have we traded away our duty to protest for the right to celebrate ourselves? Have we taken the quickly-turned tide in favor of our rights and let that be called a lasting victory? This fight is so far from over. If there is any moment to re-mobilize, it is now.
In mourning and in shock, however, we must also respond with compassion. We must resist the pressure to bow to Islamophobia and to paint Muslims as inherently and violently homophobic. We above all, the affected people, must not give in to the fear narrative. We must not let ourselves be divided, or exile from our spaces of mourning the Muslim members of the LGBTQ umbrella.
I think the early signs are hopeful here. As in Charleston after the A.M.E. church shooting, the community has gathered to affirm love and reject hatred. Statements from various religious denominations--including Islam--have condemned the attack and offered prayers and support to the survivors and the grieving. People organized vigils from Canada to Mexico and across the US tonight, and spread the word about blood drives for those injured in Orlando.
In disaster we find solidarity--“a paradise built in hell,” as the essayist Rebecca Solnit titled her book about this phenomenon. In shock and suffering there is blame and fear and bigotry, but there is also the brighter side of human reaction--strength, compassion, care. There is hope. There are many ways to deal with tragedy and terror and hatred, and already, signs of responses both harmful and helpful are visible. The coming days will be our test--for the average citizen, for Orlando, for the LGBTQ, Latinx, and Muslim communities--of whether we will stand up to violence with solidarity or dissolve into divisive and accusatory static.
Thursday, June 9, 2016
The Zeal of Judgment, the Absence of Justice
“Judgment comes in many forms but never scarce or shy/
for the litany is long as the confidence is strong…”
- Bad Religion, “Scrutiny”
~~~~
I would like to believe that there is a breaking point for denial. That eventually, no matter how grisly the truth, we will all be forced to confront and acknowledge it. But as with the growing peril of climate change, denial continues to stubbornly thrive in the thorny terrain of debates over sexual assault, rape culture, and victim-blaming, as can be witnessed in the recent slap-on-the-wrist verdict delivered to a Stanford swimmer who attacked a young woman and will not, it seems, pay very dearly for it.
The judgment rendered in this case--to let so utterly off the hook the perpetrator of an egregious, uncontestable, and deeply damaging crime--reflects not only on the appalling and chronic justice anemia that the US legal system and most certainly rape cases suffer from, but also on the judgment passed on the worth of a woman (of any non-(cis)male, actually) in US society, of her body and her lived experiences and her voice.
True ambiguity is not a cornerstone of sexual assault; questioning the choices, be they behavioral or clothing-related, of the survivor does not equate to lessening the assaulter’s guilt. But despite the evidence of the survivor’s hospital examination after her assault--which proved that it happened and that it happened brutally, as did the accounts of some Swedish students who noticed the assault and intervened--she has faced (and called out) the typical barrage of questions about her own actions, meant to shift blame to her and, because a woman’s word is weighed so callously, delegate the authority and control over the narrative of what truly transpired to the default voice of candor, the male.
For anyone, but most especially anyone who is not male in the US, this case is deeply chilling. I read the survivor’s statement after the so-called sentencing late at night, not heeding the trigger warnings, and wound up sobbing for several minutes after, shaking. To read in excruciating detail of the agony of the survivor’s experience and her pain, to witness through her blunt and powerful words the exquisite dysfunction of the legal system so deeply laced with sexism--it is not just a bitter and visceral story but a horrific paradigm that stands as a threat to any non-male person in this society. As she says in her statement, even had she not attended a party and drunk alcohol--for which she was castigated far more harshly than was the man who actually violated her--the victim would have been someone else. It could be any of us. Could be me. You. Think about it.
This is the reality of the world we live in. These are the risks we run in just surviving--the violation of our bodies, our privacy, our safety, our rights, and our minds, since the toll on mental health can not be understated. These are the demons that wait for us somewhere, for the one in four women who can expect a sexual assault, for those of us who will never know if we are next. We have had it confirmed in this ruling, its message crystal clear and morally sterile, that our stories and our lives and our peace do not matter.
To quote Bad Religion, in a verse of a song that alludes to abortion but applies here as well:
“A bitter debate and a feminine fate lie in tandem like two precious babes/
While the former grows warmer it’s the latter that matters, except on the nation’s airwaves…”
On the nation’s airwaves and in our court systems and on our campuses and on our streets and in the air we breathe. The “feminine fate” has received confirmation of its unimportance. The default remains. The status quo stands. The brutal calculus is reaffirmed: the hassle of a trial and the revoking of a male’s sports scholarship carries suffering superior to that of the woman violated, exposed, degraded, haunted, scrutinized, criticized, and denied justice.
Perhaps this case reveals with especial clarity how deeply the scales are tipped away from justice, but this ought to be no dramatic revelation. It is an ugly illustration but it is not new. To see it as a “one bad apple” sort of case, an anomaly, a surprise, is to place it in a vacuum. This case is replete with context, with precedent. This rapist and judge deserve condemnation, but so does our history, our present: that survivors are berated for the preventive measures they may have failed to take--wearing “appropriate” clothing, staying inside at night, not drinking, not partying, not walking in the wrong place at the wrong time or saying the wrong thing--and the rapists are pitied for the ruin of their lives and scolded for drinking, perhaps. This teaches us that we must expect assault, and that when, not if, it happens, it will be our fault for failing to live in the shadow of that anticipation, taking every possible precaution, every moment of our lives. No blame shall fall on the perpetrators (above all, it must be said, when they are white).
I am reminded of the case of a teenager named Ethan Couch, who killed a couple of people in a car accident but was let off the hook because of the way his wealth had warped his perception or rendered him too delicate to be subjected to punishment--the “affluenza” defense, you may remember. What clever name shall we call it by when rather than justice for the victims, what receives the most concern is the wellbeing of the perpetrators, of the men--for it is by far usually men--and how much their lives have been damaged? Perhaps we could just acknowledge it as male privilege, that ubiquitous force and custom that makes men the centre of every story, the lightning rod around which the conversation is always focused, the one whose life matters more.
Think also on the fact that the conviction rates for rapists are nearly the same as the rates at which rape allegations are found false--barely a few percentage points. Victims are as likely to lie about being raped as rapists are to ever spend a day in jail: very, very unlikely. It would be the equivalent of convicting only the rapists who were accused falsely, and letting all the others go free. Can we not admit that this dynamic mangles the concept of justice? This is a massive problem with such a paltry application of repercussions that analogies about iceberg tips and bandaided wounds are inadequate still. This is not even a bandaid. This is not even an attempt to stop the bleeding, except to insist that the survivors have no right to it, their own pain.
Nor should this violence serve only to show us that sexism and rape culture are far from bygone ills or myths; sexual assault may find its roots first in sexism and gender violence, but it spirals out farther than it seems. The mentality of intersectionality--recognizing the ways that different oppressions combine and interact--is so critical to activism precisely because the oppressions against which we fight have long solidified their intersectional approaches. Solidarity is crucial because the powers that be already are in solidarity with each other, against us. We can’t unravel a single thread of this matrix--the kyriarchy, the oppression-industrial complex, if I may call it that--without acknowledging, to paraphrase John Muir, that any thread comes away linked to all the others in the universe.
Sexism interlocks at a fundamental level with all the other oppressions we conveniently choose to forget: gender-based violence interacts with racism when we consider the situation of the thousands of Indigenous women who have (or have been) disappeared, or the story of Marissa Alexander, whose warning shot against her abusive husband earned her a vicious prison sentence, or the untold numbers of untold stories of people--especially gender-nonconforming people and people of color--who face sexual violence as reprehensible as the recent Stanford case but never receive the publicity. Sexism has a muting effect: the mere fact of a person’s gender being other than male begins the process of quieting their story, silencing their protest, invalidating their experience and motivations and trauma.
What gives me a bleak hope is that survivors of this particular torture are not complacent. It will never be enough that they can speak forcefully and eloquently about the unimaginable trials they have been through, that they can offer grace and fury and kindness and vulnerability and resolve all together. But the beacons of their resistance must remind us that however long and bloody, however devastating and infuriating and ridden with despair, this fight is not over, our stories still demand telling, and we will go on, and we will not go quietly.
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Naming the Real Enemies in this War; Remarks from an Event on the Syrian Refugee Crisis
** This is a copy of a speech I gave at a forum about the Syrian refugee crisis yesterday. It is a hybrid of a slam poem I wrote and a speech I gave at a rally a few months ago and put on this blog already, but I'm reposting it here again anyhow.
______________________________
This year, as far away
people reap what our foreign policy has sown, Islamophobia is breaching
the walls of my town’s rich-white-liberal snowglobe. I start to hear things in
the hallways. A girl I know says we have to keep the refugees out because
they're probably terrorists. She says it's in their religion.
But if there’s a religion
whose doctrines mandate war and terror, it is less Islam than US foreign
policy. But for now we here—in my town, in Massachusetts, in the US—are still at
enough of a remove that we don’t yet have to reckon with the “refugee crisis.”
We can think of it in terms of numbers, but in terms of people? Lives? I’m not
sure. People live there. People live there, but do we realize that? We take the
people fleeing the violence we visited on them, and brand them the potential
enemy. We look at our Muslim neighbors and brand them dangerous. We look at the
politicians forcing their perpetual doctrine down the throats of countries
whose names we can't pronounce while spoon-feeding us national insecurity.
Shouldn’t it be those politicians who warrant the branding of enemy or
dangerous?
Haven’t you heard those
phrases, “People who forget history are condemned to repeat it?” How about
“doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the
definition of insanity?” There’s some truth in those. Wars that never worked
are not going to start now. Spreading terror and calling it democracy
does not make it democracy, but does undermine what democracy we might have
here in the US. Bombing terror will only seed more because you can't
bomb terror, you can only bomb people, and we have.
In Massachusetts, in cities like mine, we like to style ourselves progressive. But there’s actively progressive and then there’s passively progressive--doing something or just kind of thinking
something. We have the luxury to choose to keep sitting back, hoping the
military solution will work this time (remember, definition of insanity),
hoping that we never have to face up to the role of both our aggression and our
indifference. Never mind that the refugees are fleeing the same people we’re
thirsting for war with; that they are not the aggressors. Never mind that we’re
grudgingly admitting what, a couple thousand people? into the US, despite our
disproportionate responsibility. Even Europe is facing the tip of an iceberg
compared to the numbers that countries like Lebanon and Jordan are shouldering.
Never mind that it was our military misadventures that caused the crucible of
instability and brutality and devastation that spawned this crisis in the first
place.
But no, never mind all
that. (Or actually, please do mind.) Because the official line is the same as it
always is: be afraid, be very afraid. Even in places like here, we’re hardly
immune to fearmongering.
Fear is useful to the
architects of war. The fear that makes us malleable is a tool that will be used
against us, to drum up support for policies that don’t make anyone safer. This
is the fear that makes us accede to legislation that strips away our rights and
laws, and wars that drain money and human lives. This is the fear that spirals
into apathy when our reaction is to batten down the hatches and seal ourselves
off from what we may call terrorism.
One of the best antidotes
to mindless, racist fear is knowledge. Awareness of the facts on the ground and
the possible courses of action. The knowledge that this atmosphere of fear and
instability and warmongering is a strategy, advancing the interests of the
corporate and military elite. It has been done before and it will be done
again. But it’s not a foregone conclusion. The outcomes still depend on how
people choose to think, and how we choose to act. So let’s call the refugees
our future neighbors, colleagues, teachers, doctors, friends. And redefine
enemy—as war, Islamophobia, empire, racism, hatred, fear.
Here’s one last appeal to
the youth here: we have a certain power to remake the world. We have an
especial vulnerability to feeling that there’s nothing we can do, but I see
hopeful things alongside the flashes of bigotry. I was at a slam poetry
competition recently and several of the poems people performed focused on
Islamophobia and rejecting fear and hatred. There is a broader, more humane
consciousness growing here, I want to believe. That’s what peace organizations and political clubs like mine are trying to tap into. We know how to think. We
can stand up to the narratives we’re taught. We can make the difference.
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