Contextualizing activism for improved mental health, or, This is not the beginning, nor is it the end.
Since The Election That Dare Not Speak Its Name, I have been steadily attempting to keep myself out of the pit of despair that yawns daily from my browser window. It is so easy to get turned inside out by the barrage of terrible decisions, regressive policies, cringeworthy tweets and general carnival of horrors that the administration of the 45th president continually generates. And this steaming shitpile, off of which the maggots and flies just keep on coming, keeps us distracted and hopping to the next mess so we can’t catch sight of the guy running around the next corner, hiking his pants up and laughing.
I’ve been ignoring Facebook some, which helps. I attended the livestream of a Black Lives Matter Boston event, about which more in another post. And I’ve started reading a book I was given years ago but which I never picked up until now: The Impossible Will Take A Little While, by Paul Rogat Loeb. Ignoring Facebook frees me from a lot of the echo chamber, keeps me from seeing much of the actual fake news, and stops the constant-refresh insanity of the endless news feed. Listening to local Black Lives Matter organizers speak put the struggle in a larger context: I was reminded, yet again, of how unsurprised people of color were by this development compared to white liberals, and how much this is just another moment in the ongoing struggle of Black folks since their ancestors were brought here hundreds of years ago. And the book, a 2004 compilation of pieces on “hope in a time of fear” featuring writers from Maya Angelou to Nelson Mandela to Sherman Alexie to Arundathi Roy, serves as a bracing, brilliant reminder that this struggle repeats itself, across time and nations.
The idea that the struggle is so old and keeps happening over and over may seem like a discouraging one, but I find that on the contrary, it gives me more hope and more perspective. When I read this book and realize that we survived George W. Bush; that Mandela survived political imprisonment and before that, apartheid; that Ariel Dorfman survived Pinochet, Vaclav Havel survived Soviet Czechoslovakia, that Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust — it tells me that we are not alone, right now. It’s not so much the surviving that gives me hope; surviving is something the human species is peculiarly good at, but not exactly grounds for great inspiration. What gives me hope is that although some things about our current situation are, as people keep insisting, unprecedented, they are not without previous historical modeling or context. That is: the players are new, but the playbook is familiar, and the moment we are in is only a regressive stop along a familiar cycle, not a new and outrageous catastrophe with no foreseeable solution. For those just waking up to the fact that it’s not fucking Morning in America, for those — like myself — who weren’t paying enough attention during Obama’s presidency to see that the struggle for justice was ongoing, and that the backlash was building, this is all very scary, but that’s just because we didn’t feel so directly affected before.
Don’t get me wrong, Trump is fucking awful. To build on the above: I have never felt this afraid for my country, for my family and friends, for the people who most need defending, indeed, for the world. But I’m not under the delusion that it’s new. Instead, I’m thinking of it as a moment in history that my generation is being called to rise to — a moment when, in the wake of eight years that lulled me to sleep in the trust that Obama had our backs as a nation, the backlash hit full force, and now we have to do something.
By “we,” by the way, I mostly mean white people. To return to Black Lives Matter for a moment, I was one of those attending a satellite Women’s March in Boston last month (which was, like, a hundred years ago, right?), who was discomfited by the relative lack of people of color. A sign I saw going around the Internet resonated.
Yes, I thought, yes, absolutely, sorry about that, yes. What was I doing, exactly, before this? And so while a major snowstorm had me laboring with my driveway that day instead of actually going to the event, I spent my shoveling time braced by the strong and clear voices of two young organizers on the YouTube stream, and thinking about the scope, the sweep, the immensity of the struggle. The voices of these young organizers were not weary, but neither were they speaking of anything new. They were, they are, calling upon us to wake up at last and see what is happening to our country — what has been happening to it for a long, long time. This presidency and its madness may be the worst thing that’s happened in my lifetime, but perhaps this can be considered an upside: we can no longer pretend that we don’t live in a country that was founded, built, and sustained on white supremacy.
All of this context, this historicity, gives me hope because it makes me feel part of something larger. Not something that I can control, or even significantly personally change. But it tells me that it is survivable, that it’s been done before, that moments like this are not all-consuming enders of Life As We Know It, but points along an arc that still, though it can be hard to believe it, is doing its slow bend toward justice. Trump is a reminder that all of us now need to get out and push as hard as we can if it’s not going to curve in the other direction.
Over the next days, I’m going to post quotations and brief thoughts about the essays in Loeb’s book, because of how often something in it has inspired me and made me think and feel and hope. You might want to go read it, too.
Meanwhile, I invite you to share things that are keeping your spirits up, your hope alive, and your head and hands and heart in the struggle. We all need all the help we can get.
