if i had the answers, i wouldn't be here
thoughts on what it means "to care" and why trying to convince people is no longer a priority to me
I don’t want to be a nihilist. I understand that wallowing in the depths of sadness in the aftermath of tragedies in the news is not beneficial for me on an individual basis or for political movements and the work necessary to envision and create a better world. The word “tragedy” doesn’t even accurately capture what happens these days. Anger is not sustainable. We have to care for the people suffering today, right now, while also pushing for the structural changes necessary to prevent more people from suffering in the future. There need to be all kinds of people with all kinds of perspectives. This planet, these people, this life is worth fighting for.
There is the suffering and the death, and then there is the denial of it, the “I pretend I do not see” from powerful people. The expectation that we all keep working and grinding along despite the mass death around us, the grief and the hopelessness and the loss. The endless circles of discourse and rhetoric and blame. We can’t even all agree on what the problems are. There are many, many people who not only want to uphold the status quo but would prefer we regress farther and farther.
I don’t think there is a person who does not care about people, I increasingly just feel like other peoples’ definitions of people are less expansive. When they say people or lives or rights, they do not mean people who are queer, or trans, or not white, or not Christian, or not people they personally know. Some combination of those exclusionary criteria.
Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote after the Uvalde shooting:
“We post pictures of the dead and the bereaved. We do this because we cannot or will not accept that others know the same facts that we know but care less about them than we do. In these moments, we struggle to make the other side care. Parents know that children are murdered. Religious faithful know that the elderly are murdered in church. Politicians know that their constituents live in fear of being gunned down. But other things matter more to them. Winning an argument. Owning a gun. Making money. Never having to think of distasteful things. And winning more arguments.”
It is not a matter of caring, it is the hierarchy of what they care about. At that point, it is not an argument I can win, there is no level of persuasion I can leverage. That energy is better off spent elsewhere.
As Jia Tolentino writes today, “We’re not going back to the time before Roe. We’re going somewhere worse.” We are better off envisioning and implementing new realities and helping people materially than we are bitterly arguing about who counts as a person and trying to patch up the failed state working in degraded mode. We can’t keep living in this cycle of heinous event, donations and protests, calls to vote, no change, next heinous event happens before we’re even done talking about the first one.
Donate to your local abortion fund. And after that, to my profound and constant disappointment, we all have our own paths to figure out what we do next, and how we do it together—some combination of protest and volunteering and doing something you can’t even imagine yet perhaps.
Read:
“We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse.” by Jia Tolentino
“The Woman Who Killed Roe” by Kerry Howley
“Over and Over Again” by Aubrey Hirsch (note: this is about gun violence)
“What happens if Roe v. Wade is overturned? LGBTQ+ legal experts are worried about civil rights.” by Kate Sosin and Orion Rummler
This is what really gets me: "The expectation that we all keep working and grinding along despite the mass death around us, the grief and the hopelessness and the loss."
I think there will be a price to pay for this attitude. Perhaps we are beginning to pay it already, some of us more than others.