Screaming Into The Sea
My friend Lucy lives out of state, but every few months she flies to my city for work. Whenever she is in town, we try to get together and catch up, and Lucy happened to be visiting last week. We went out to dinner at this really lovely seafood restaurant near the water, where I normally love to sit and relax and enjoy the ambiance, but this time was different. Lucy and I had not stopped talking since we met up at her rental, and in the restaurant I found it hard to keep my voice down, to stop clenching and unclenching my fists, or to even stop scream-whispering for long enough to look at the menu. The poor server must have come back four times before we figured it out.
Thank goodness for simple problems with simple solutions, like, “Which of these delicious foods should I eat?” I could have probably made a choice at random and been happy with the outcome. But the problems Lucy and I were talking about, the problems many of us in this country are talking about, are not simple.
Later, we drove down a road on a cliff with an amazing view of the ocean back to Lucy’s rental, where we got into the hot tub and looked out at the sky. I said, “Do you know what I thought when we were driving by the water? How much I wanted to walk out there, right to the edge, and just scream!” Lucy agreed and we laughed about it. We wondered out loud how many other people were feeling like us, and if someone hadn’t already started a business charging people for a space to scream their hearts out. I wondered if everyone born and raised in the U.S. has these capitalist, business-model thoughts about everyday life.
But the U.S. has more problems than just runaway capitalism at the moment: eroding democracy; disappearing human rights; catastrophic climate change and pandemics; massive and increasing inequality; systemic White supremacy; policy failures and failures of integrity. What do we do about all these issues?
I don’t have a single answer, not one.
I do the things I think I’m supposed to do, the things I’ve been told to do: I vote, I write my senators and representatives, I give money to reputable organizations that work to protect both my civil rights as an American and human rights more generally. But lately, my vote seems to matter less and less, I can’t get my reps to answer my questions, and paying other people to protect my rights feels…dystopian.
I’ve done work that I thought would help me address these problems directly, often in small ways, but important ways nonetheless. But I ended up feeling stuck, prevented from reaching my goals, in each situation. In college, I was part of a student group for women’s rights and sexual assault prevention. But fighting for women’s rights in a town and a state that seemed to hate women felt like trying to hold back a tidal wave with a spoon, and by the end of my time there, I felt like people’s attitudes had actually moved in the opposite direction.
After that, I tried research psychology, focusing first on gender bias, then later on inter-group bias more broadly (i.e. racism/sexism/all the -isms and how they work). Doing psychological research about problems like sexism and racism seemed like a great avenue to facilitate social change, but the culture of academia was just as full of these biases as the rest of the world, and just as unwilling to change. In addition, researchers seemed to publish more for other researchers than anything else. The journey from publication to policy was rough at best, even in a lab focused on policy, and pretty much non-existent in other labs where this kind of “applied” work was frowned upon. And ultimately, I realized that I am more of an advocate than a good scientist should be, and I would never be able to speak my mind in a professional setting.
Despite these private admissions, it took a pre-term birth and some major health problems for me to finally let research psychology go. That was about five years ago, and now that my child will be entering kindergarten in the fall and my health issues are under control, I am feeling a little lost. There is a void where my purpose used to be, and the threats we are facing as a nation feel unprecedented. What am I doing to demand equality/equity and basic human rights for all of us? To combat fear and misinformation? To preserve democracy and stop the slow, insidious encroachment of authoritarianism?
Again, I don’t have answers. I have words on a page on the internet because it is the only thing I can think of to do right now.
Well, not the only thing. Maybe I can find myself a little seaside cliff somewhere and just scream.
