So I was reading this article on CNN by a guy who goes to Yale, and his angle was that he’s a Jew advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza—actually he used the word “fighting” rather than advocating, and I wondered to myself if that isn’t a slight misnomer, but why quibble? The guy’s got an article on CNN, ferchristsake—barely twenty-two and featured on a national platform, good for him. Everybody and their mother’s got an article about Gaza at the moment, but viva the Echo Chamber. Strike while your iron is hot, etc.
(An article on CNN: a worthy goal one should strive for? Would I ever be ready for that kind of attention? Definitely not now, probably never. The trolls alone! I may wallow in the warm bath of this Substack writer-incubator forever. 🐣)
Anyways, I just couldn’t get to the end of this kid’s article because my attention span has never been great. I’m convinced I have an undiagnosed attention deficit disorder, but also I already know the drumbeat he’s marching to, and I wholeheartedly agree: Stop.
But this isn’t about Gaza, or Ukraine, or Yemen or Syria or Myanmar or Sudan, or even the neo-American Civil War looming, it’s about a person’s right to choose the narrative of their own life—to focus their attention and efforts on the things their conscience dictates—and whether that means I or anyone may disengage from discussions about the Israel-Hamas war, or Putin’s war, or the bajillion hot debates and spicy takes crowding the infotainment news cycles. What if we choose to just not?
(Incidentally, I sometimes wonder if taking an especially vociferous position on any one issue while apparently ignoring the host of others vying for our attention is not some sort of coping mechanism for the sheer volume of problems and atrocities screeching through our screens every minute of every day.)
(And p.s. it is not lost on me that for many people, the narrative of their lives is written for them in presidential palaces, war rooms, and board rooms by other people for whom these decisions are rarely about actual survival so much as political and financial hegemony—if I were going to take a strident stance, it might be to direct our attention to the actual oldest profession in the world: tyranny.)
But like I said: What if I choose to not add my voice to the madding clamor? What if I choose to turn off my screens, to narrow my focus on my own writing, my own little mindfulness and sobriety journey, my husband, my dog, our walks on the beach, the two or three books I’m reading at the moment—for my sanity, as a silent protest? Does that mean I’m apathetic? Can I live with that?
It is one of the reasons we moved to Spain, after all—to turn down the volume.
I trace some of my fear of apathy back to ACT UP in the 80s/90s and the Silence=Death posters, which also brought the pink triangle to worldwide recognition as a symbol of gay oppression and solidarity. Around the same time that “If you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention” became a popular motto/bumper sticker, a lot of us felt it was our duty to scream from the rooftops: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Especially going to school at Berkeley.
(We have a pink triangle memorial here in Sitges btw; it just got a new drought-resistant landscaping makeover. Go eco-gays.)
I was part of that in-between generation who already knew about condoms when we first started having sex, who never knew a time when intimacy wasn’t fraught with fear of a painful, gruesome death—and shameful too, because preventable.
For many in my cohort, we did not have whole swaths of friends die, did not feel we were personally inundated by death—ours was more often a solitary foreboding, a sense of grim inevitability, punctuated by moments of relief at negative HIV tests which only lasted until the next dick slip.
(You may or may not be familiar with the term bug chaser—this was when a guy became so exhausted by worry and fear over becoming infected that he would go out and have rampant unprotected sex in the hope of “taking control” of the situation by intentionally becoming HIV+. I believe this practice has largely stopped since the advent of Truvada and PrEP, as has the use of condoms become more rare again, coupled with a concomitant rise in other STIs, but nobody’s really talking about that.)
I skipped the memorial service of a friend who died of AIDS, miraculously my only actual friend who succumbed. This was maybe 1999? I was playing croquet in the backyard of a friend who also later died of AIDS, though by then, we had parted ways over his strident rejection of trans people. Oy.
At the time, when I was supposed to leave the garden party to go to the memorial, I remember saying I would rather spend time with the living than wallow in grief, and although this was vaguely true, the other side of that was my belief that we don’t attend funerals for the dead, but for the surviving loved ones.
In this case, I really didn’t know any of my dead friend’s other friends well, and I dreaded having to make somber small talk without the assistance of alcohol. I was early into a fragile sobriety, and most of them were members of the SF Gay Men’s Chorus, a group I volunteered with for a short time, and in front of whom I had made a complete fool of myself on several occasions while drinking.
I was afraid my no-show might be interpreted as a personal failing, but in my heart I’ve always known that the dead don’t hang around their own funerals taking the measure of their lives based on who shows up and what they do or don’t say.
But we were talking about what, if any, obligation we have to declare ourselves for or against the myriad issues presented by mass media, and to actively imbibe—daily, hourly—the stream of information that blasts us in the face from the moment we wake up until we put our heads back down.
If we’re not with you, are we against you? If we say nothing, are we complicit? Must we take a stand, or be sheeple? Is there a line, what with all of the lines constantly being drawn everywhere by others?
Do we not take a positive step toward civility and cooler heads when we step back from stratification, polarization, and brinkmanship for quiet reflection?
We ran into an English woman the other day, a friend of the friend I was walking with, and she apologized for “putting her foot in it” at dinner the other night because she’d criticized the American president. She lived in L.A. for twenty-five years, so it’s not like she’s completely unfamiliar with our politics.
“I mean, Trump is Trump,” she went on, “but what about the other guy…”
(‘The other guy’—as though an anonymous bureaucrat had won on a technicality; as though we would have ever heard the names Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, or Amy Coney Barrett in this little game of whataboutism if people weren’t so overwhelmed by toxic rhetoric they can’t tell the difference between a narcissistic charlatan and a lifelong civil servant.)
“He’s rather dreadful too—so old, so muddled,” she said, going all in with the other foot.
I imagined asking her if she’d ever needed an abortion, but decided to keep my mouth shut.
As satisfying as we imagine comeuppance to be, ten times out of ten it is not our right to exact retribution or judgment.
The only foolproof method I’ve found to turn anger into not-anger has been forgiveness and goodwill, and this has worked to lower the temperature of my ire even with regard to Tang-stained gasbags. (Progress not perfection. :)
The point is not to confer grace, modesty, or contrition on someone with no awareness of these virtues, it is to move toward them ourselves so that we may live always with more compassion rather than less. Fortified with peace, we can feel more confident that our vote, our protest, and our voices resonate further, preferably without shouting.
This 10-Day Lovingkindness Challenge with Sharon Salzberg, renowned teacher of Buddhist meditation, is incredibly simple but effective in transforming feelings of disquiet and anger for anyone else struggling with the ear-splitting volume of our times.
THREAD: “What we talk about when we talk about ‘Song of Myself’”
SoM, v. 19 | “I will not have a single person slighted or left away…” | AUDIO
I think "Silence = Death" really applies when no one is talking about the problem or there is active effort to suppress the talking. I look at all the discourse surrounding certain issues these days and... My position has been covered well and often by others. Staying quiet on it myself doesn't mean I don't care. I'm just tired. Let the people who are not tired (or care deeply enough to overcome their tiredness) say it. I'm a disabled parent working 7 days a week; it's okay if I don't personally save the world today.
As I'm sure we've all heard before, never in history have we known what is happening everywhere in the world in real-time, it's not healthy! Our nervous systems are designed to take in what is going on in our village and the surrounding community, anything beyond that gets to be too much. It results in our hearts breaking about things we cannot control no matter how much we wish to help.
I've thought about this a lot which is why I love this post. We create change by showing up as our best selves which has a ripple effect on our family, community, and world in general. Just because we turn inward and stay within our circle does not mean we don't care, it does not mean we wouldn't advocate if the opportunity was on our doorstep, but it does mean we are not giving away our energy for things we cannot change.
I love the pink triangle memorial in your community!