Unfamiliar Discomfort, By Choice
“It is at the crossroads of contradictions that strategies for change may best be found.”
My father used to love to tell the story of a young Jewish woman, a newlywed, who went to purchase a fresh chicken because her in-laws were coming to dinner. At the butcher's shop the chickens were plucked, trussed and laid out on a bed of ice. The young wife went from one to the next, picking up each carcass and sniffing between its legs. The butcher became exasperated. “Lady,” he said, “even you couldn’t pass that test.”
And, guess what? We can't pass it, either. But we have an interesting choice: the laughter that momentarily lets us off the hook also invites us to consider which tests, exactly, we fail.
As descendants of the colonial experiment, we are both its victims and its beneficiaries, to varying degrees and iterations, depending on where we find ourselves on that uncomfortable continuum. At the center of this dilemma are the policies and actions of our government that exacerbate polarization and hasten planetary extinction - and have been doing so for a very long time.
A few years ago, professor and author Rob Nixon coined the term slow violence. He writes, By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.. He speaks of the long dyings that are incremental and accretive and, often, exponential. For example, More than thirty years after the last spray run, Agent Orange continues to wreak havoc as, through biomagnification, dioxins build up in the fatty tissues of pivotal foods such as duck and fish and pass from the natural world into the cooking pot and from there to ensuing human generations.
We know, of course, that violence - fast and slow, is embedded in our government's policies, and, therefore, in our culture, often without our knowledge and usually without our consent. What we don't often see is the particular way this mindset becomes embedded in the underpinnings of our so-called national interest: In 1991, Lawrence Summers, then president of the World Bank, circulated the following confidential memo:
I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that... I've always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles... Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?
We call ourselves a democracy, but millions of people are prevented from voting, or running for office. Our constitution guarantees free speech, but many are voiceless, or silenced, and journalists lately are discredited and sometimes murdered. Corporations have been deemed to be people such that elections and legislation can be bought outright. The examples of hypocrisy proliferate faster than we can respond. They are what Edward Said has called the normalized quiet of unseen power.
I am overwhelmed by the ever-widening crack of polarization - and painfully aware that, as we dither, the window narrows for meaningful action on climate collapse. I am tired of feeling appalled and upset. Tired of meeting urgency with steady labor that seems to be losing ground.
Over the years I have considered the Wisdom of the Breakdown to be a reliable arrow that points to the solutions that elude us: in my experience, every dilemma contains the clues to its resolution. If it is a dilemma of unraveling, then the way that process unfolds will reveal crucial details as well as larger patterns, because they are reflections of each other. Until now, this lens has served me well. But, lately, I find myself at a loss. I ask myself how to respond to the morass we are facing now, and wonder, What is the terrain beyond the usual binary menu of either public participation (activism, voting, art) and a more private response (prayer, contemplation, writing)? I arrive, again, at what the I Ching calls the 'question of the question', the invitation to Find the border, the place where your desire melts into uncertainty. My desire is to contribute to a world restored. My uncertainty is how to go about this effectively. Specifically, I am wondering how not to participate in the toxic behavior of my government such that the toxic behavior becomes obsolete.
This is where it gets interesting, and Anne McClintock's suggestion bears repeating: It is at the crossroads of contradictions that strategies for change can best be found. The contradictions embedded in the behavior the United States, and western culture in general, are glaring. Incandescent. We know this. But, until now, I had not recognized contradiction as fertile ground for change. Too painful. Too complicated. Too much resistance. To be clear, I am speaking here of contradictions such as Guantanamo: If our system of justice is the best there is, worth killing and dying for, why don't we show the world how great it is by using it there? Contradictions such as the fact that we not only openly assassinate foreign leaders (and wonder why their people hate us later) but we allow our allies to blatantly carry out assassinations in the US, of US citizens. And so on.
How, then, to begin to untangle the mistaken beliefs we have acted upon - that admitting error is a sign of weakness; that expediency constitutes good governance; that lopsided advantage is desirable. That anything at all justifies cruelty, and progress requires destruction? I wonder whether we - I, have the courage to inhabit a different conceptual and temporal landscape. To recognize that my - our, predicament(s) are, in part, the result of our and our ancestors' postponed emergencies, and to ask whether we have the courage to turn and face those whirling propellers and begin to tell ourselves the truth about our policies, our actions, and how they have shaped us and the rest of the world.
In the wild, when a storm approaches, sometimes a herd of animals will turn and try to outrun it. This does not work. If it's a massive storm, the herd will exhaust itself and many will perish. Some, like buffaloes, move toward the storm and through it. The question I am holding tonight is how to invite a conversation - among ourselves and with our leaders, that names the painful, shameful storm of contradictions breaking all around us, and to move towards them, together, to harvest their wisdom.
