Before Ukraine
“Much like in settler colonialism… in capitalism we find mechanisms of attachment to objects of violence – objects whose production necessitates violence – and a continuous attachment to these objects even after this violence becomes apparent.”
Before Ukraine, we knew - but we found an empty compartment in our minds and another one in our hearts and filled them with the knowing we didn't want to know. Before Ukraine there was Myanmar, and Myanmar is happening still, but we’re on to the next crisis, so we have to put Myanmar somewhere out of reach. There is Brazil, where our lungs are turning to ash. Nicaragua, where revolutionaries have forgotten how to live without luxury and coercion. Congo being eaten alive by its neighbors addicted to violence.
The compartment-makers are working overtime. They want us to believe that our little boxes are pristine: no stains, no odors, no messy residue of complicity, no compromises and no history, especially our own. We can get our little mind-cubicles wholesale if we discount what we know and what we feel.
Oddly, the compartments that are most easily hidden are the big ones that slip from view when the headlines fade: our debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan; China’s gulping of Hong Kong and the looming uncertainty that hovers over Taiwan; the arms trade; American elections; police brutality. Oh, yes, and the climate. We can recite them in our sleep, in our insomnia, when the compartments overflow.
Each compartment holds a bite-size nugget of guilt and complicity we can almost live with. Over time, they become a unit in a tenement in a neighborhood in a city in a country in a world of larger injustices – deforestation, hate speech, extinctions, pollution, corruption, refugees, greed. Because we cannot reconcile our unintended violence with our sense of ourselves as good people who care, we look for ways to parse responsibility into (barely) acceptable (temporary, unavoidable) trade-offs, mostly some variation of “it’s already been cut/mined/manufactured/shipped” or, on a larger scale, “I voted/I refused to vote/I signed petitions and demonstrated against these things but they happened anyway.” In the meantime, we buy one more car, one more cellphone, and one more book from Amazon.
Until now, the compartments have been a coping mechanism essential to survive the dissonance of this culture: surely we feel the limbic resonance of distress as we murder Earth and each other. The truth, of course, is that we are simultaneously perpetrators, victims and beneficiaries of violence. The unspeakable must be spoken: violence is essential to our way of life and is, therefore, the bedrock of our identity. It’s time to stop coping, to stop protecting ourselves from ourselves, and begin the dismantling. It’s going to happen anyway so we might as well embrace it and, in the words of the I Ching, cooperate with the ongoing process of change.
When thinking about how exactly to face these things, I quail. How do we stop the harm? More truthfully, how do we relinquish the luxuries as well as the addictive madness of our murderous way of life – and crucially, how do we grow the political will to insist?
We cannot remain dry and safe along the shore. But the turbulence of a changing tide can help us. The waves are choppy. The undertow is fierce. And yet the waters are rich with nutrients. We can dive and float and let the current carry us. We can cry to each other and to Earth for help.
