We Are All in Over Our Heads
Yesterday the Seattle police shot a pregnant black woman to death in front of her children. She had called them to report a burglary in her home.
Yesterday in Virginia a human being beat a Muslim teenage girl to death with a baseball bat in a fit of rage.
To say I feel powerless is an understatement. I feel useless in the face of the ongoing horror of white supremacy. Of humanity’s original sin, patriarchy.
And yesterday was also Father’s day. Trying to process my own father. His father. My partner’s absent father. Trying to wrestle with the ways my own fathering has been gutted by a former partner. And I had made plans earlier in the week to watch Wonder Woman. Zionism and white feminism and violence solving violence and impossible body types stirred in with the joy of watching the feminine lay waste to tools of war. For pretends.
My partner and I have been inviting friends to watch social-justice-y documentaries and talk about them. In the conversation following the last film, a friend introduced a category that has been haunting me: How much can we care?
I went to my first Halloween houseparty in middle school dressed as a Swing Kid. I had recently seen the movie and loved it. Teenage Germans defying their Nazi government’s attempts to outlaw swing music, swing dancing, swing albums. Quickly switching to nationalist patriotic music and good traditional German dancing when the lookout signalled that the Gestapo were coming.
What the hell were they doing going to dances? World War fucking Two was on. Millions of people were dying. Why in god’s name weren’t they blowing up Nazi headquarters, going to concentration camps in solidarity with their Jewish neighbors, or at least reading up on fascism and democracy?
Wonder woman’s manly co-star sat in a recently liberated German village on screen last night. The citizens were celebrating and dancing, drinking. His quirky teammate offers him a beer and he waves it off. He has too much to do. He needs to procure a German uniform to sneak into German poison gas headquarters and save the world the next day. His buddy protests. “There’s nothing you can do tonight.” He sighs and takes the beer. He may or may not get it on with an Amazonian demigod later that night.
What can he do? When do we drink? When do we dance? When do we make love?
What the hell is Wonder Woman doing smiling and drinking and dancing. She could be out beating German soldiers to death with her impervious body and superhuman strength. But even Amazons need to sleep.
My Facebook community keeps wanting me to say their names.
Trayvon Martin.
Eric Harris.
Walter Scott.
Jonathan Ferrell.
Sandra Bland.
Samuel DuBose.
Freddie Gray.
Michael Brown.
Walter Scott.
Tamir Rice.
Eric Garner.
Alton Sterling.
Philando Castile.
I know about Trayvon. I know about Sandra Bland. I know about Freddie Gray. I know about Michael Brown. I know about Eric Garner. I know about Philando Castile. But I don’t know about the rest, off the top of my head.
How many names am I supposed to know? How many stories am I supposed to know? How much should I know about those lives, those stories?
How much could I know?
How devastated should I feel about the next shooting that’s mass enough to make it to my Facebook feed? The next van into the next crowd?
How wide a-woke can any of us possibly be?
We evolved to live in traveling tribes. 100 people. 1,000 people. You might make it a whole lifetime with 1,000 neighbors and never have a cop shoot a pregnant black woman. You might have the luxury of grieving only one terrorist act in your entire life. Maybe one child would be abducted. Maybe none. This is the amount of trauma we evolved to process.
Our brains can’t fathom 10,000. 10,000 and a million look the same to us. 10,000 and a billion look the same to us. One of my children learned to count as a toddler, one, two, and three. One toy=one. Two toys=two. More than two toys = three. Seven toys was “three.” Four toys was “three.”
Millions, billions, gajillions, googlefinity. We don’t know how to quantify the level of horror our news cycles bring us.
I stopped believing in progress when Trump was elected. I know I wasn’t supposed to believe in it before that, but I still did, secretly. When Trump was elected I took MLK’s moral arch of the universe and buried it alive.
The arch isn’t bending anywhere. There is no wave of fairy magic carrying our species on to peace, love, and justice. Change doesn’t happen by default. Change doesn’t happen by persuasion, charisma, kindness, empathy. Change comes by force. The force of thousands of people’s sweat and blood and tears. By boycott and riots and Federal legislation and Justice Department reforms. Things get better when people make it more painful for the powerful to stay as they are rather than concede to our demands. Racist rednecks like LBJ signing sweeping civil rights legislation.
At the end of Schindler’s List, Schindler breaks down, quantifying the value of his car and his watch and calculating how many more Jewish laborers he could have purchased and spared from the Holocaust. One more life.
30,000 people die every day from lack of access to clean water. Mostly infants and toddlers. Mostly from diarrhea. $1, on average, creates clean water access for one person for one year. Someone gets to live another year. $100 gets a little village another year. $500 gets all 100 of them another five years of clean water.
Why would any of us ever spend money on anything else?
A billion of us have $300 or $700 a year to live on. Food, shelter, medicine, education. It’s still the stone age for them. No computers, no electricity, no doctors, no running water.
Why are we not all Gandhi, spinning our own cloth to make our own clothes? Why haven’t we all taken a Franciscan vow of poverty to never let money touch our hands? Every one of those dollars cleaning up an infant’s water so she can live. Providing contraception or menstrual pads or schooling for a teenage girl.
There are no adults. No one to explain Trump’s election to me. Only empty wind and posturing. Nate Silver is reading tea leaves and Noam Chomsky is ad libbing. Rachel Maddow’s doctorate in Politics from Oxford can’t answer my fundamental questions. Cornel West doesn’t know how to cajole justice to rain down from on high over our land.
We are sheep without a shepherd. The closest thing we have to a saint is the illicit love child of Mr. Rogers and a scrappy, can-do Jewish woman from Vermont. But even Bernie doesn’t know how to martial the electorate to rend equality from the corporate plutocracy that’s burning the ice caps to fuel their yachts. Even he doesn’t know how to love small Palestinian children. Doesn’t know how to beat swords into plows.
No one knows how justice happens. No one knows how to resurrect Charleena Lyles or Nabra Hassanen. No one know how Black Lives could actually Matter. No one knows how human hearts change. How infidels can fall in love with the beauty of the hijab. The tender love of Allah, disentangled from the toxic masculinity injected into his story.
No one knows the way.
How many “Fuck Trump” stickers do I have to design before he’s impeached? How many more dollars do I need to donate to the ACLU before America’s police force is disarmed and dissolved? How much do I need to donate to Black Girl Dangerous before queer people of color rise up to positions of power and influence? How many more Spike Lee films do I need to watch before I stop bestowing violent menace on black men’s bodies? How many more Maya Angelou books do I need to read before the toxic anti-black racism that swirls in my subconscious is eradicated?
Am I allowed to buy swing music on vinyl while the Third Reich gears up for genocide? Can I have a beer while I wait for sunlight for my daring poison factory raid? What are these dollars even for?
How much can any of us hope to accomplish in the face of evil, violence, injustice? Are we all doing the best we can?
Is anyone doing the best they can?
