Fast and Still and Hopeless
One party digs the grave and the other plants flowers to beautify a bloody past.
Today the ravens croak overhead. Like little feathered clowns they plague the sky with silliness. I know they’re supposed to be a gothic bird adjacent to death, and maybe their black bodies criss-crossing the sky while I’m packing up the contents of a late relative’s home is some kind of synergy. But still, each time their laughter fills the valley I look up and join in.
If we cannot ignore the abuses going on around us, and we cannot directly challenge those in power who wield undeserved authority, then what is left to us is to maintain a constant vigilance and awareness of our own hearts. This is much more difficult than it first appears. To keep out ‘hate,’ as we are repeatedly admonished to do by depriving it of a home, seems quite simple. Put out yard signs, share uplifting videos. Love one another. But hate is stronger the more vague it remains. How can you know where hate lives if you do not know its name? Inside the zionist heart of a nation built atop genocide after genocide, for example, hate it very much at home. One party digs the grave and the other plants the flowers to beautify a bloody past.
Be honest about the bargain you’re making: that your safety is worth the suffering of others. And if it is too complicated to imagine the suffering of Palestinians and others we are bombing so far away, just look to the suffering happening right here on our borders. Both major candidates present a vision of an even more militarized border, asylum as a crime, a clamping down on sanctuary and further restriction of who can come here and benefit. More money poured into our police state and prison industrial system. More chemicals pumped into the earth to extract more resources, further winnowing the habitat available to humans and animals both. Looking at all we are ready to give away, fear has already won this election no matter who you vote for.
Security is not safety. I want the end of empire. I want the end of living with this cloud of destruction over my head. I want the end of borders. Truly, sincerely, and non-metaphorically, this is what I strive for.
“War disarms? War takes away hope and meaning, makes everything grey, and sucks life out of the city and the street, leaving nothing? What do you mean? War is a great help for us. It provides us with distraction from ourselves. It absolves us from seeing ourselves up close. It’s been some time now that we’ve been peeking into ourselves through war only.”
—Yevgenia Belorusets, Lucky Breaks
Hate is home here, but we do not have to live peacefully with it. We can scrutinize ourselves. It sounds like I sermonize. I don’t want to. I just want to be sincere. Like the ladybug I’m watching patrol the windowscreen. She crawls a random pattern, and I can’t tell if she finds what she’s looking for or gives up the search entirely before she spreads her wings and flies a few inches to the left in an arcing parabola that puts her back almost to where she started. This has gone on for hours, days, while I pack boxes around her, sort clothes and old letters. I think at night she must rest as I don’t hear the delicate cellophane flick of her wings when she repositions, but otherwise her journey is constant, fast and still over the same square foot of screen over and over again.
***
It’s three days later and I’m a completely different person. If I focus on hope, I end up finding it where there is none to be found. That’s a danger, not a positive. Hope is nostalgic for a time that never was. When I think about what I most want to do and accomplish, it comes up a blank slate. I have already done it. I need to dream anew, or else stop dreaming altogether. I try not to be nostalgic for ignorance, but all my dreams until very recently have been around careers and money. I don’t even know if I really think that’s bad. It brings a measure of security, but that’s a yardstick that keeps moving—the more money and prestige one has, the less secure one feels. And instead of bargaining for more security, instead of determining how many must suffer to ensure my safety, I’d like to examine more closely this feeling of unsafe.
“I hesitate to use the word hope because it is so discredited and used by liberal democracies to characterize the lives and desires of the peoples it excludes from its joys. I hate that word because why, why should I have it? We have to live in hopelessness.”
—Dionne Brand, Between the Covers interview
Phrases like “none of us are free/safe until all of us are free/safe” have taken a back seat recently to the banal drumming of neoliberal and conservative Harris boosters. But even that phrase—there is so much groundwork still to be done in order for that to be felt, taken in, and understood in a bone-deep way. Simply saying something doesn’t make it real. This is clear from the way we have forsaken one another, and ourselves. We leap over the hard work for the easy way out.
An example: the recent spate of popular science articles sounding the alarm over the ecological disaster wrought by AI, by calculating the bottles of water consumed by one ChatGPT email. Is this how far we’ve fallen? Where we’re supposed to care more about a bottle of water than a Congolese miner worked to death for a few grams of cobalt? The bottle of water is a meaningless metric. It is untested, it carries no symbolic weight, and yet it’s adopted willy nilly in a parroting that passes for journalism. It is not up to the task the journos think it is. There is so much more work to be done connecting water scarcity, ethics of internet use, electricity, consumption, and the privatization of public resources, not to mention education about how tech uses water to cool their servers. And yet, this is the comparison reached for—one so far outside the current realm of sympathy and understanding so as to inspire shares instead of action or guilt.
“How do we radically shift our personal and collective relationships to our immediate habitat?”
—Acorn, The Anarchist Review of Books
I’ve drifted. When our ideals fit on yard signs they are easily misconstrued. We need constraints, but not of imagination. We need to be asked the big things first. It must not be assumed we won’t care, and we must prove this by caring.
Lest you think I leave you devastated, here are a few resources in which I’ve found honest activism and thinking, lately:
Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, by Silky Shah
War on Gaza: What does campus 'unsafety' mean in the midst of a genocide? by Maura Finkelstein
Anarcho-Indigenism: Conversations on Land and Freedom
El Ghourabaa: A queer and trans collection of oddities, edited by Samia Marshy and Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch
Between the Covers Live: Dionne Brand and Adania Shibli
It’s not you, it’s the media, a new podcast from The Polis Project and Radical Books Collective
& last but not least, Rakesfall, the trippy new novel by Vajra Chandrasekera, from which the following quote is taken:
“Politicians may seem to be at odds, but they never truly betray each other: they are all patriots to the nation together. Their disagreements and conflicts are a play put on for ghosts and people; only we can be traitors.”