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.
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