And, yet.
This is my attempt to muddle through the past few weeks, including violence in NYC and in Israel and Gaza. If reading about that might cause you more pain, please don't! And I always welcome feedback.
I haven’t written in a few weeks, in part because I was busy and in part because I’ve been paralyzed by anxiety and in part because I don’t know what to say. More than anything, my political consciousness since the Trump election has been characterized by a fight against the paralyzing effects of despair. To believe that change is impossible is to guarantee it. To believe we cannot make a difference is to ensure that we cannot make a difference. I am relentless, and often annoyingly so, in my mission to empower us all with the responsibility and capacity to take action. And, yet…
And, yet.
I find myself tripping towards hopelessness now, flirting with the edge. Not just because there is violence in the world, but also because our response to it seems to beget more hate, more violence, more craven self-interest.
Recently, an activist was murdered in New York, and internet trolls immediately and with sickening intensity, tried to turn his death into an object lesson against soft on crime, soft on drugs liberalism. Their gross distortion of his life and his work, and their vicious harassment campaign against his loved ones is an appalling dehumanization of their political opponents, meant to bolster their own cruel and violent view of the world. They took a moment of deep grief and fear and twisted it with their insidious darkness to suit their own ends. How are we supposed to face that?
Hamas perpetrates a horrifying attack in Israel, inflicting immense and despicable terror and violence against innocent Israeli citizens across the border. And the Republican response is to waste no time tying President Biden to the attacks with easily disprovable lies. With absolutely no care for the victims and hostages, nor for the victims of the coming war, they seemed almost giddy with this new “great opportunity” to attack Democrats. The government of Israel, in turn, has wasted no time in multiplying the violence, killing or displacing thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza as they hunt Hamas fighters. Gaza, which has been described as the largest open air prison by UN experts, and where 2 million Paletsinians live, half of whom are children, already faces crippling poverty and destitution which will only be further magnified in the coming siege.
As migrants from the Mexican-American border continue to arrive in New York City, our mayor wants to overturn the right to shelter in the city. Locals are shining bright lights and playing threatening messages on loudspeakers outside shelters to torment new arrivals. Along the river between Texas and Mexico, Greg Abbot has strung a floating barrier of barbed wire. As people flee poverty and political violence, they are met with disdain, violence, and targeted harassment, in this the home of the purported American Dream.
We answer violence with violence. We answer vengeance with vengeance. We think, locally and globally, that if we can just cause enough pain, enough suffering, we can make ourselves safe. If we are strong enough, if we are violent enough, we can eradicate violence.
It’s not just the violence that breeds despair, although that would be enough on its own. It’s a government staffed by politicians who would rather exacerbate tension for short term political gain than make any kind of genuine effort towards solving problems, and these people get elected and re-elected again and again. It’s the gleeful celebration of violence against our enemies, at violence that we can distort to support our politics, at the death and fear and poverty we think ourselves justified in inflicting. It’s the platforms that were meant to connect us devolving into cesspits of harassment and disinformation. It’s a conflict that goes back centuries becoming a political stepping stone in 240 characters.
This is normally where I would start to turn this piece around, where I’d suggest that the best antidote to despair is action, where I’d remind you of all the many ways and places you are empowered to fight back. It is, and you are. But one thing I’m learning in therapy and as I get older, is that sometimes you just have to feel things.
I am heartbroken. I am heartbroken for the grief and fear and uncertainty swirling around us at home and abroad, and I am heartbroken that so many of our ostensible leaders see that pain and suffering as tools to further their own ends. I am heartbroken at dead children and families torn apart, about all the thousands of people who can never go home again. There is so much fear and pain out there and we are capable of so much more, of heights and potential that we keep refusing to reach. Sometimes, I guess, you just need to be heartbroken.
In our heartbreak I hope we can find grace for ourselves and each other. I hope we can find and hold onto our belief in the future and possibility. I hope we never stop believing in each other. And I hope that we remember, that even in our heartbreak, we can and will change the world.