Meant to Live?

Today I’m writing from a mindset that springs from being sandwiched between Rebecca Solnit’s powerfully luminescent intro/extrospection and the calamities of the world, such as the fact that the Senate just passed Fast Track for the TPP. After the House tied its own hands in the same way, I was too deep in the clutches of a kind of nihilistic depression to write anything coherent about it. If I could find people to take this to the streets with me, I would like to launch some kind of protest--maybe a United States version of the Zapatistas, using this new trade deal as our catalyst, but recruits are scarce in the highly gentrified, highly privilege-bubbled town I live in. I could always have a solo protest, walk around with signs or some such, I suppose. But for today I am coping through music, which instead prompted this piece of my thoughts.

With Anti-Flag a little too intense and Jackson Browne a little too mellow, I gravitated towards a middle ground--Switchfoot, specifically the song “Meant to Live.” I thought it mournful and political enough to match my bitter mood, and while it didn’t really soothe me, it did get me thinking, especially the following line:

                We want more than this world's got to offer…

The thing about that sentiment is that it’s perfectly logical--from a certain perspective. It implies, firstly, that the events and experiences you will have in your life are on offer from the world--as if you are a passive receiver and the world is simply an omnipotent force doling out what you get or don’t.

For much of the world, that is the story of their lives--the banks and barriers of the paths they can travel were determined by distant forces beyond their control. But for the members of Switchfoot, I doubt many paths have ever been expressly or inherently blocked. So in this case, in this melancholy anthem, “we want more than this world’s got to offer” seems to come from a place of defeatist apathy--criticizing the world at large for not supplying a less difficult and tragedy-stricken planet on which to live out our lives. The problem with this sentiment coming from Switchfoot--and take note: I don’t intend this as a specific critique of the band, merely the sentiment that this line may convey, and that I see all too often--is that projecting this feeling, being trapped and resentful that you can’t achieve all you were meant for, allows the idea that we in the US, in the privileged snow globes of the first world, are unable to fight the misfortunes this cold distant world is meting out to us.

However, the world is not an entity that has in it for you. The world is not offering anything except nature, and it is humans who have taken and ruined and corrupted and claimed that gift. The world has much to offer us, both the land and the resistance and lives of people everywhere who are struggling with trials far greater than those that the members of Switchfoot have likely faced. To assert that you want more than what you’ve been given implies that you are in a place of static underprivilege, that the odds are stacked against you and you have no agency. This sentiment, in an age of endemic apathy among those who still retain the means to do so much with what the world has already given them (if that’s how you want to phrase it) is toxic.

Some of it may be simply an expression of exhaustion with activism and struggling, which I certainly feel. The frustration of finding power structures resistant to our efforts to shake them, the demoralizing sorrow of losing yet another battle in this precarious fight for a precarious future… But the world is not to blame. We were not “meant to live for so much more” than this (I suppose it is arguable that some of this mentality, specifically in the song, hearkens back to Switchfoot being a Christian band, and perhaps the sense of defeat could be interpreted as a wish for God to step in and finish the job we’re sick of?). I wish to hell and back that the fallout of this unstable world were not my generation’s inheritance, and I do feel a sense of loss, that we have lost the chances for an easier life, chances we never had. But the human race has run out of chances for a blithe and easy future, and we can’t spend our time wishing for a different way, feeling entitled in a way that has not even been possible for much of the world.

I am reminded of something I once read in an interview with Noam Chomsky: that when he gives talks in the US, people ask him afterwards “What can we do?” Whereas when he speaks to peasants in Colombia or Kurds in Turkey, they don’t ask what they can do, they tell him what they are already doing. This missing link, this step between awareness or outrage and action, is something the armchair-bound Western world has a serious problem with. We are waiting for someone to tell us what we can do--as if it is we who have expended our capacity for change and now wring our hands at the ends of our ropes.

We may have run out of space for that preferred type of action in the US (I am speaking generally of the middle and upper classes when I reference the US and the West)--that civilized and clean and tidy type. The mentality of activism that so many share here--that we can make a few efforts, sign a few petitions or meet with our legislators or attend a colorful protest, and then go home--is from what springs the sense of frustration that we have done all we can and now blame the world for our failure to see much earthshaking change for the better.

But we have not run out of capacity for meaningful action. We are not nearly at the end of our reservoirs of power for change. Especially in recent years, when it has grown ever more critical, we have only caused ripples on the surface.

We with power cannot sigh and sit back, consigning our rights and our agency to inertia. The destructive power of that inertia--the gathering storm of climate change, the slide towards ever more radical and hateful right-wing ideologies, the perpetuation of the disastrous economic systems that will march us off the plank--will destroy this planet and our species, along with countless thousands of others. I too want more than the dark future we are facing, and more than the wars of our fathers, as Switchfoot mentions a line later. But we in the Western world have not exhausted our struggling capacity and our power, and we cannot bemoan the choices this world offers as painfully limited--yet. Other Switchfoot songs, like “This is Your Life,” carry a far better message--one that demands action. But keep bemoaning, keep feeling that we have had the idyllic life we were “meant to live” precluded, and we may yet end up in that hollow place, as trapped as our apathy already suggests we are, defeated before most of us have even begun the real fight.

We were not necessarily meant to live for anything at all, but if we mean to live, we cannot live like this.

Deconstructing Trade Myths

"Free trade" could bear no more ironic moniker, no matter how many times President Obama claims that new treaties will be good for America and that "nothing is secret.” Trade deals are easy to dismiss as obscure or bureaucratic, but the trickle-down effects will be visceral. The two critical-to-watch trade treaties pending are the Trans-Pacific Partnership, among 12 nations of the Pacific Rim, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, between Europe and the US. It can seem pointless or futile to fight esoteric trade laws, but at this juncture our apathy will be our death sentence. The TPP/TTIP threaten our entire democracy, but multinational companies and corporatist politicians stand to gain from everything we lose--droves of US jobs, labor rights, banking regulations, environmental protections, internet freedom, affordable pharmaceuticals, food safety inspections, and the semblance of control over our political system.

The TPP and TTIP were written in secret with the help of 600 corporate advisors. No part of them has been released to the public except through WikiLeaks. Congress is currently debating Fast Track legislation for the TPP, which would allow Obama to advance the deal; Congress would be presented with a final form of it for an up-or-down vote, no debate or amendments allowed. Fast Track would tie Congress's hands and leave the fallout of the deals to neoliberal inertia. The Senate has already approved it.

The Obama administration is vociferously promoting these deals, and may yet get their wish to see them fulfilled. On Friday, Congress approved Fast Track (or TPA, Trade Promotional Authority) by a narrow margin, but the entire package is stalled due to a failure to pass the TAA, Trade Adjustment Assistance, which was meant to help workers who would be impacted by the TPP--and funding that aid by cutting Medicare.

TPP and its accompanying components will likely be back up for another round next week, so this fight is far from over. Most Democrats voted against the trade bills, but Obama and the Republicans continue pushing the issue. John Kerry and Ash Carter recently published an article in USA Today, twisting the script to attempt to portray the TPP in the favorable light it does not deserve.

To begin with, Kerry and Carter claim that the "TPP is an indispensable tool for one of the most important projects of our time. Since World War II, U.S. leadership of the global trading system has helped usher in an era of peace and prosperity unparalleled in history. It has brought jobs to our shores, partners to our defense and peace and prosperity to those around the world who have embraced openness, fairness and freedom." While there is no doubt that expanding US influence around the world has been one of this country's "most important projects," that the TPP is a tool to further that cause is less than comforting. US leadership of just about anything has not "usher[ed] in an era of peace and prosperity" in any way visible to most inhabitants of the world.

Rather, since World War II, US leadership of the global trading system has helped entrench neoliberalism, promote the fallacy that the Cold War was "won" with the triumph of capitalism, further stratify the world in terms of the one percent and all the rest, ensure corporate control of industries, livelihoods, and governments, and accelerate a race to the bottom in terms of health, safety, and environmental and working conditions. The peace and prosperity that Kerry and Carter claim responsibility for? Not so apparent.

Additionally, trade deals have historically sucked jobs away from our shores, as lifting trade barriers has consistently led to waves of outsourcing as employers depart for the countries with the cheapest labor. Kerry and Carter did add a qualifier for the "peace and prosperity" they assure us we've been seeing--it has been delivered only "to those around the world who have embraced openness, fairness and freedom." Perhaps the countries whom we have brought to our side--or forcibly restructured to our liking--have been rewarded with that peace and prosperity, though it still seems elusive. Capitalism we have certainly delivered, and all the trappings of neoliberalism, but peace and prosperity are not quite what those seem to accomplish. Rising unemployment and falling wages are the more customary accompaniments when a country has had its trading system pried open and convinced to "embrace openness, fairness, and freedom." Perhaps the "openness" that discussed here is not the same kind referenced in discussions of that other "openness" phenomenon, "transparency."

Kerry and Carter also seem to be laboring under the delusion that continued US leadership in the Asia-Pacific region is what the inhabitants of those countries want (or perhaps what we have judged that they need). US presence there ought not to be looked on as quite so rosy, however: Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines, at least, should recall well the consequences of excessive US presence in their region. Perhaps a good, novel idea could be allowing the people whose region it is to exercise the leadership of said region. Our trade ambassador-cheerleaders assure us that "in meeting after meeting across the region, we hear calls about the importance of TPP and the desire for more U.S. engagement," but remember that the meetings they were conducting were with government echelons, not the people in the countries whom these trade regulations--or deregulations--would strip even more control from.

They do add that the "TPP would help us promote a global order that reflects our interests and our values," which is probably true. Those interests and values, however, are rarely protected in the public interest or in such a way that they value the lives of the faraway people on the ground who must deal with their ramifications. The "cooperation, accountability and greater respect for human dignity" that Kerry and Carter insist TPP would bring lack historical precedent in the "tradition" that they say the TPP continues. NAFTA certainly did not deliver; nor has any other notable free-trade agreement.

"One of the greatest bulwarks against the spread of violent extremism is to replace poverty with opportunity, and TPP would create economic growth and unlock opportunities for workers and businesses across the region." Yet who locked those opportunities in the first place? Poverty is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, nor is it an unfortunate consequence of lazy backward people who don't know how to work in an industrialized advanced economy. It is a byproduct of the same kind of global economic system that the TPP (and TTIP) would deepen ever further: Kerry and Carter may claim that "the alternative [to the TPP] is a race to the bottom," but that is no alternative. That is precisely the race Congress would be signing us up for by choosing Fast Track/Trade Promotional Authority, let alone the TPP itself.

The other unpleasant side effect Kerry and Carter would attribute to the failure to approve the TPP is that without it, "America's influence abroad" would be "undercut." In the next breath, they invoke the threat of China, who might arise to fill the power vacuum that the lack of TPP would ostensibly create. And so now we come to one of the core reasons these government officials are cheerleading so hard for this deal that is the virtual photographic negative of everything they paint it to be: China. The possible challenger on the horizon, the threat to our hegemony, to our influence abroad, to that most pristine economic record of delivering the "peace and prosperity" they're sure you've been experiencing... Allowing China to gain a handle on trade in its region might, yes, perhaps "reward those quickest to abandon values and compete at any cost." But that path of global trade and policies will not be one for China to blaze alone--we have walked it first, and over and over again. The TPP will be a familiar jaunt down that same road, though the destination could be darker than ever before, given the enormous threat of climate change that Kerry and Carter blithely skip over. They assure us that the TPP will contain stronger environmental regulations than ever before, but that should be neither reassuring nor placating.

From what little we know of the TPP, it is clear that activism of any stripe is on the chopping block, from human rights to the environment. One especially ominous clause is called State-Investor Dispute Settlement: it establishes secret tribunals in which multinational corporations could bring lawsuits against any country’s laws or public safety regulations on the grounds that those laws hinder profits. The implications of such unrestrained power are enormous, inhibiting the struggles for justice of everyone from environmentalists to labor unions to Boycott-Divest-Sanctions activists in Palestine.

The Obama administration, Republicans, and Kerry and Carter, here, insist that the TPP will "revitalize and expand the system that has served us so well." I don't doubt that the system has served them well, but it might do them well to remember that the word "us" extends far beyond the corporate captains of this sinking ship.

We've seen this before. We are choosing to repeat history. Already, under NAFTA (which eliminated a million US workers' jobs as manufacturers departed for the cheapest labor), corporations have sued the US, Canada, and Mexico, claiming that their profits are being hampered by consumer- or environment-protection regulations. The TPP/TTIP would only make cases like these more rampant.

At a point where we need to force serious action against climate change and grant rights to the poor, oppressed, and disenfranchised, the TPP/TTIP are a recipe for disaster. This is no "new-and-improved" trade deal. It's not improved, and it isn't even new--it's the same old toxic medicine, with stakes higher than ever. If ever there were a time for the US to change its foreign and economic policies and begin learning better, urgent lessons from history (and current events), that time is now.

USA Today article:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/06/08/tpp-tpa-trade-democrats-vote-house-obama-column/28566641/

Political Fantasy Writing vs. Avoidance

    To cope with the onslaught of the world, so to speak, I've learned to start compartmentalizing in terms of what I could do with the shocking or devastating information I learn, how I could use it in a book, whether that quote or that statistic could be incorporated into my latest story. Not "how can I take action and make people aware of this?" or "how can I change this?" but "how could this fit into my novels?"
    This is a problem.
    On Friday I was at a talk on the state of Gaza after the Israeli war last summer, and I was trying so hard not to break down into sobbing the whole time, I was trying to see these pictures and hear these stories with a distant ear, a writer's ear, so that I could channel this devastation and this tragedy at a later moment.
    But this voice in my head nagged me, saying, "their tragedies are not yours to use, to take and bend and put in a book set in a universe that will never exist, with characters who live only in your head."
    Why was I trying to keep this distance, trying not to cry? It wasn't that I wanted to remain unmoved by the accounts of terror and desperation and misery, but that I feared being broken by them. That it was easier to process if I transplanted their stories into my imaginary world.
    But that is not where they are happening. Those collapsed buildings and shattered homes and tortured people, I did not invent them and they will not go away if I tie them neatly into my fantasy stories.
    I like to think that I write fantasy because I can make political commentary subliminally, that I can worm subversive thoughts into people's heads without them realizing what I am actually talking about. But maybe I also write about fantasy worlds because I am afraid to write about the real one. Afraid to co-opt stories that aren't mine, afraid to "get it wrong," afraid to face what is going on here for real, instead of piecing together a fantasy world based on Palestine-Vietnam-Iraq-Chile-whatnot.
    I went to a writing conference where the keynote speaker was Aminatta Forna, an author from Sierra Leone, who spoke of writing about politics and how in the Western world, so many see this as taboo, a borderline that fiction should not cross. Whereas in the rest of the world, almost every book is inherently political, because "politics"--that icky, gritty sphere we like to keep at arm's length--colors every aspect of people's lives in a way that we over here have likely never experienced. We can live in our snow globes and poke things away as we wish. If politics is too messy and unappealing (or, heaven forbid, won't sell well enough), we can just leave it by the wayside.
    I guess in my snow globe, I've been watching the world through the glass--not ignoring, never ignoring, but not interacting. I reach out and snare little pieces of what's swirling around out there, and then spin it into my own story so the snow-globe-bound might start to care about what's out there.
    But that is a limited narrative. And even reading the last paragraph, I notice how US-centric it is--"out there," especially. The people who live "out there" are inherently "not here"--it's othering. Do I write, then, from a divisive standpoint? Also, the ones here, the "snow-globe-bound," tend on the whole to be less bound by any outside forces than anyone else--it is their own fear or ignorance or indifference that keeps them stuck inside. They are not the ones who need the world brought to their doorsteps--it is already there, if they would care to see it.
    If I am employing this language, if I am focusing on little pieces of the world like I'm casting a selective fishing line through it, I am still seeing with snow-globe lenses. I am not representing anyone's story fully, I am bringing nothing to light. I am giving in to the same narrative that says "politics should stay out there, I don't really need to think about it." It is from a very privileged worldview indeed that I can say, "I don't want to think about that too hard because it makes me so desperately sad, so I'm going to put some of it in a story instead and distill it out so I can handle it."
    It makes me sad? I am afraid I will be broken by it? I, who live at such a reserve from all of this "war stuff," as a friend of mine deemed it? I must protect my delicate psyche by averting my metaphorical eyes from it? I can do that--it's been made so easy for me. But how many people can't, don't have that compartmentalizing option, to separate the terrors of the world from the everyday going-ons of their lives, because they are one and the same?
    Transferring those feelings and stories to fantasy also inherently brands them made-up, not real. And isn't that the last thing I want to do--dismiss the suffering around the globe (largely wrought by the US)--but is that what I have been unintentionally doing? Not extremely egregiously, I don't think, since of course the real world influences all stories we write, made-up or not, and there's a line between doing what I meant to do--placing real-world events in a fantasy context to generate new thinking about the world--and avoiding it. Armed with avoidance tactics is not how I want to live in and view the world.
    Some sorts of these thoughts have been germinating in my head since I heard Aminatta Forna give her talk. If I want to write about politics, if I want to crack the snow globes, why must I stick to a hypothetical situation loosely based on catastrophes happening right here and now? If I want to write a story influenced by the US war on Vietnam, why not set the story in Vietnam? Why not write about the Palestinian children in the presentation I saw, rather than pluck up their stories and replant them elsewhere? Can not a story set in its own habitat be more powerful than any distant, distorted reflection?
    Fantasy often need be a vehicle to talk about the real world, but need not be one to avoid that real world. If I am trying to escape it, trying not to feel the intense sorrow and pain and horror of the world by imagining how I could use it in my stories, I am doing no one a good service. Fantasy writing as activism is a powerful thing only so long as it does not keep me from fighting for and with the real people whose lives influenced my writing. And that's what I'm afraid my compartmentalizing of our horror-wracked world has been doing.

On Walking

     This isn't my usual sort of post--not political, not organized or angry or anything, just a scattered account of this restlessness that's gotten worse lately, and turned up in this very strange wandering session last Saturday. I haven't parsed the significance, if there is some, and I don't think myself really the type to delve into philosophical meaning, at least not right now, but I just want to record this, and maybe come back to it sometime.
     So. I'd just gotten off the train after a LGBTQ festival thing, and I was walking home when I took a detour off on a side street that ran past my first elementary school. I realized I was walking very slowly, sort of meandering, but meandering always had this light quality to it, like one was so wrapped up in the day or their thoughts that it just carried them around, buoyed them. I was wandering, which has a foggier, heavier pull to it.
     I started out singing Rise Against songs, because that's what I do when I walk, I sing--but by the time I got to the elementary school I'd moved on to Jackson Browne and Roz Brown. I walked past this little woods path that goes along an aqueduct, and I usually dislike woods and walking, but I deliberated for a few moments and then swerved to walk along the aqueduct. I'd sort of expected it to be enclosed and sheltered and quiet, a little enclave next to a school parking lot on a Saturday, but instead it edged up against people's houses, right into their backyards. I could see kids playing on a trampoline and I could hear a baseball game going on and it wasn't any kind of quiet retreat like I suppose I was looking for. I wasn't planning to sit on a log and think Deep Thoughts, per se, but I just wanted it to be quiet, to be alone.
     I walked up to a baseball diamond and felt very much like the scary punk kid who's always skulking in the background of public parks, the one the parents shield the children from. So I walked back the way I came and just kept going till I got to the library, taking all the back roads so I wouldn't have to decide whether or not to go home, since I really didn't want to go home just then but if opportunity presented I would have to choose, and I'm not so good at that.
     I got it in my mind that I needed to find this book by Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust, which I'd heard of but not felt the need to read before, since walking and wandering had never been something I'd been compelled to do--I mean, I walk to school every day and I've never felt so restless, so in need of someplace to wander, and keep wandering. But the library didn't have the book, so I got out several other Rebecca Solnit books and now am plowing through them. One's called The Field Guide to Getting Lost, and I guess I was a little lost on Saturday, or trying to find a place where I could find things or figure things out, but I couldn't get lost enough maybe. (Though I did wear my combat boots to pieces walking all over my town.) I want to travel desperately, though I think I've probably romanticized it in my head and the world's nowhere safe enough for me to traipse off to all these countries I want to see without some preparation, but I could list handfuls in an instant if you asked me where I want to go--Morocco, Iran, Venezuela, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Kiribati, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Mexico... It goes on.
     I'm always threatening to go run away to Mexico or Canada or planning to drive across the country with my friends once I can drive and can get or rent a car, and now I know why, and what I want to find on that journey. I want to get lost, and I want to become found.

On the Tsarnaev Trial Verdict

     I was about to leave a school club yesterday afternoon when a kid lifted his computer to show us the screen, with a Twitter news alert which read "Boston bomber sentenced to death."
     The room went silent, and I just felt this seeping exhaustion, like turning around a corner on an easy walk to find a sudden grueling uphill. I closed my eyes.
     I don't know which I would rather wish for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: death or a life condemned to the US prison system. I am appalled to find myself wondering whether the latter might be the worse option, that the death penalty of all things could be mercy for this young man.
     With how horrible this affair has been--and I mean the entire affair, not just the bombings but the atmosphere afterwards, the SWAT team manhunt through Watertown, the media's portrayal of the event and the perpetrators, the rapid, ubiquitous adoption of Boston Strong, the calls for capital punishment from people I thought would have abhorred such an institution--I might be glad that it's drawing to a close, but I am still sickened that this is how it is ending.
     And it is not even really over: the media was exclaiming this morning that an appeal could take ten years--so a decade from now, all this frenzy, all this pumped-up patriotism, all this shallow appropriated sorrow, all of it could be dredged back up for us to feed on. So we can continue to fear sensationally for our country and ourselves, to support or pity the victims but never seek the deeper causes of their suffering, to condemn the bombers and their religion with no soul-searching of our own.
     I am also reminded that the family of a victim of the bombing specifically asked that Tsarnaev be kept alive and made to spend his life in prison rather than receive the death penalty. Beyond all helpless fury or bitter sadness I feel over the verdict, it is denying the families the closure they asked for. What kind of closure beyond a sick satisfaction could the death penalty ever bring us?
     The US is the only country in this hemisphere with the death penalty. Think about that. Think about our foreign policy of capital punishment, too--all the wrong-place-wrong-time crimes around the world that have been penalized by death thanks to the US military machine. Think about civilians incinerated in Pakistan by drones; think about prisoners tortured in Iraq; think about every leader we've overthrown and every country on which we've visited chaos, violence and unendurable suffering. Think of how very much we've done to provoke hatred.
     I don't condone the Boston Marathon bombing. I grieve the dead and wounded, and I remember that day well; my father and brother were barely a few blocks away when the explosions went off, and it was terrifying when they called me to assure me they were safe while I watched muddled, panicked news reports of bombs and death hit the internet. But if the brothers truly were acting out of fury at the US's overseas activities...how can I say they did not have just cause?
     9/11 was blowback, mostly-unforeseen consequences of this country's actions--consequences few expected and fewer connected the dots for. Our collective response consisted, unhelpfully, of more of the same policies that provoked the attack. The Boston Bombing response was not, of course, as severe--we didn't start two wars, for one--but the same deprivation of context is evident. Acts of terror are rarely entirely senseless and groundless. They only appear that way because we lack the context to understand their motivations. Disproportional, irrational, futile it may be, but terror in the general political sense springs from deep wounds of injustice, which are rarely in the public eye. This lack of understanding only creates a breeding ground for more blowback. An endless positive feedback loop of destruction, if you will.
     I also suppose the Tsarnaev trial jurors might have been thinking of themselves and the repercussions they personally could face from fanatics who would have been furious to see Tsarnaev live. It's the patriotic thing, I suppose. The need to feel vindicated, to imagine that "justice"--in this country so devoid of it--has been served up, like dead meat on a dinner plate.
     Eye for an eye, are you happy now? Just as everyone wanted--more collateral damage, so many wrongs that will never be made right. Eye for an eye.
     No wonder this country is blind.

An Entreaty Against Indifference

"When it all comes down, will you say you did everything you could?"

The answer to this question, when it comes time for me to give it, I hope with all my heart will be yes. I'm not an activist because I think it's trendy, or for the shock value of telling people I tried to push through a police barricade once. I fight--and I'm not even a particularly strong fighter or one who's seen much of the world or thrown themself in much danger--because I am a privileged American who refuses to add apathetic to that already condemnable description.

Today I was trying to explain to my brother two things that I learned in eighth grade that took until ninth grade to actually sink in: the construct of race, and neoliberalism. The construct of race exploded into a heated and dead-end discussion/argument in my eighth grade class, and for that one my brother was mostly just dismissive of what had been up for debate, why it mattered. The nuances of racial relations are already something I've come up against a brick wall with him about (a la microaggressions...), but today I was just frustrated to tears again.

A thing I loathe about myself is my inability to keep cool and logical during arguments; I lose my eloquence, I sometimes lose my voice. My mother told me I sounded too lecturing or some such today, and I wish I could exchange that tone for one of compassionate urgency, but I only come off as pleading, I think.

I didn't understand neoliberalism when my teacher tried to explain it in eighth grade, beyond thinking, "Oh, Anti-Flag sings about that. I know what it is. It's bad." And yeah, it's bad, but I had no idea what I was talking about until I read The Shock Doctrine, learned about economics and foreign policy and the US's legacy of overthrowing democracy abroad while subverting it at home...etc. Etc. So I was trying to explain why one ought to actually care about neoliberalism, and foreign policy, and my brother simply says, well, if he doesn't want to go into politics, why should he know all this? Why should he know about every terrible thing that goes on in this world when he'll never be able to change them?

This is something I come up against time and time again--why should I care? Why should I bother to change things? And, of course, the perennial "Of course I understand that it's bad, but I don't want to know all this--it'll make me too depressed."

To which I say a) you know what does not help with depression? Apathy. And b) you know what is depressing to me? Yes, wars and climate change and the agonizing suffering of the victims of US policies and all those things are depressing, but what is worst to me is how the people who have the most potential to effect change and the most power to demand action are often the most content to sit back and watch from their armchairs or through their TV screens as if this protest, that shooting, this bombing, that war, this overthrow, that suicide, this natural (or not so) disaster is just another commercial break before we return to the viewing of what we really care about.

We meaning generally white, generally middle- or upper-class, generally American people. The ones who can most easily ignore. The ones who are taught apathy and consume it like candy. The ones who are fed individualism until we are so disconnected and dismissive that we are the worst kind of hive mind.

And yes, when I impel my brother to act, when I plead with him to care what is going on in the world, when I ask him how apathy could possible be better than the depression of facing the world--yes, I know that he alone or I alone will not shake the world's foundations or change everything. But with every person who accepts the status quo and turns their back, how many die? How many of those who have no option of looking away will pay for the luxury of your indifference?

I know it sounds melodramatic when I say it aloud. But I have no idea how to break through to people who will never walk on the other side, who have every privilege you could possibly pull out of the privilege lottery, who will probably never understand a life in which political is something that you can't help but be.

My brother says yes, activism is important, but if he wants a well-paying job and a happy family, well, environmentalism won't cut it. But think about it--what are you really winning with that happy family and that nice job? How thick is your bubble? How long can you live like that, and only think of your own security? We live in a very rich-white-Jewish area, and the privilege bubbles here come safety-sealed and steel-reinforced. My brother attends a private school with the kids of upper-crust society, and the way they preach political correctness has turned him to mocking it instead of understanding the theory (a rant for another time). So I understand where his mindset springs from. I see it all the time. He is my archetype for the problem of privileged indifference, but he is not alone--and let me be very clear: he is hardly the worst. And I am no paragon either. I am not doing as much as I could, as I should. Don't let it be said that I think him heartless and uncaring; he knows more about the world than I'd wager most of his grade does. But the infection is there anyway, probably a contamination from the friends around whom activism and politics and selflessness are laughable, distant problems for distant people.

The thing is, you reap what you sow. The problems we have created and turned our backs on have festered while we hum away at creating new ones. The explosive fallout of American exceptionalism, of racism, of imperialism, of everything--that will not stay contained in faraway lands. We cannot drone-strike it out of existence. It will come back to roost. It is called blowback. So no matter how removed you are, how little you think you need to care, you will wish one day that you had paid attention. When it all comes down, you will be caught blindsided, with no context for what is crashing all around you. Remember 9/11? Oh, I'm sure you do. That was a taste of what I mean.

When it all comes down, my brother will have done barely a fraction of what he could. And that is what drives me to tears, what keeps me awake at night, what propels my ranting and my fury and ultimately, my activism. My need to answer that question (posed by Rise Against in the song The Eco-Terrorist In Me, by the way) with a yes. And hopefully-- "Yes, and I was hardly alone."

On Microaggressions

    My brother, who's in middle school, recently received a report card which mentioned that he sometimes fails to notice that his "microaggressions" hurt others' feelings. This was apparently discussed in class and my brother reportedly understood why he might have hurt someone, but he insisted that since he didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings, it shouldn't count against him that he did.
    (Now, I don't know what exactly he said that was considered a microaggression--I'm guessing it was probably race-related, maybe gender-related, but I can't be sure. I don't know that it matters.)
    My mother was a bit upset that this incident, whatever it was, had been explicitly referred to in the report card, and it fell to me to explain microaggressions and the damage they do.
    My examples came from an online graphic I saw which portrayed people's interactions with/reactions to a white woman versus a black woman. In one panel, a college admissions officer asks the white woman if her family's a legacy at the college. The admissions officer asks the black woman if she's the first in her family to go to college. In another panel, the white woman is walking with a young girl and is asked if the girl is her sister. The black woman, in the same scenario, is asked if the girl is her daughter. 
    The experiences of the black woman are examples of racial microaggressions--insidiously offensive comments that don't necessarily mean badly but clearly make assumptions that perpetuate stereotypes and demean the black woman, while making positive assumptions were it a white person instead.
    This is significant because although these exchanges shown in my examples may seem like social faux pas, or meaningless stupid assumptions, they are contributing to ongoing stereotypes, hurtful and demeaning to receive, devaluing of people of color through negative assumptions, and revealing that these negative subconscious judgments are very, very common and easily overlooked.
    My mother initially defended my brother's point that if you don't mean it, you shouldn't be held accountable.
    But the hurt people experience is not contingent on whether it was intended. A stereotype or an assumption doesn't have to be maliciously intended for it to do damage. The point of calling them microaggressions is that they aren't overt examples of racism and may easily be made by people who would never believe they harbor racist tendencies.
    The message I was trying to impart to my family is that well-intentioned or not, the microaggressions in question are often assumptions that would not be made were the recipient white. And therein lies the problem--not that the microaggressor meant to insult, but that their assumption would have been more positive had it been directed at a white person. That my brother didn't mean to offend anyone, but he judged someone based on a trait like race which made his comment or reaction to them insulting instead of complimentary. That he is unknowingly operating on stereotypes. That anti-microaggressions rhetoric may seem like a nitpicky hallmark of political correctness--as my brother probably wrote it off as--but that it is necessary to understand why it is hurtful, since people believe that to not intend harm is as good as not committing it. It means, of course, that we still have a long way to go towards open minds and societies, and that curtailing more overt prejudice is not enough.