ourobouros

Even as someone who’s been involved in lifelong social and political activism (from the ‘kids’ rights’ newsletter I drafted in elementary school on upward), it’s surreal being able to see the impact you have as an individual on national politics. I spent the last three days of the campaign on the ground in Indiana, and though there was a considerable amount of groundwork already laid, obviously (some of which I’d helped with), standing at that poll on Tuesday talking to one of the lawyers about how 86% of our precinct had voted had a very visceral, emotional impact on me. Yes, the country was headed in this direction; yes, it was a bad year for any GOP candidate (go read that Newsweek 7-part series about the election, by the way). The accidental intersection of time and space and personal whirlwinds is a very strange place indeed.

The other defining moment that will stick out to me from this past weekend is the afternoon I spent talking to a 41-year-old (black) man (one of my fellow canvassers) at length about his job (working the night shift at UPS) and how it plays into his sense of self and about his participation in politics (“This is the first election I’ve registered to vote in because this is the first time I feel like I’ve had a representative candidate to vote for”). His story is where the heart is for me. People who felt isolated/disenfranchised from and disengaged with civic action (for good reason) are becoming active – that is a huge, huge step in the right direction.

We live in a liminal country now. We have made history, but we also have a long way to go (after all, California passed Prop 8; it looks like the legal challenges have merit, which gives me some hope, but still). I will stubbornly never understand how the continuing struggle for human rights is not equally important in all cases, though I do understand choosing one’s battles.

A and I were talking today about process vs. product, the theme that (as many of you who have known me a long time) has ghosted so many of my moves and thoughts for the last fifteen or so years. Has capital so hollowed us out that we can only see ourselves in terms of what we can produce and how we relate to others?

I’ve been feeling like it’s time to revisit “Minima Moralia” for quite a while now; I’ve always meant to read it in tandem with Aristotle’s “Magna Moralia,” which it was written as a semi-response to.

For intellectuals, unswerving isolation is the only form in which they can vouchsafe a measure of solidarity. All of the playing along, all of the humanity of interaction and participation is the mere mask of the tacit acceptance of inhumanity. One should be united with the suffering of human beings: the smallest step to their joys is one towards the hardening of suffering.

let’s fool the meat to hassle the room

Even though I know there are important things going on elsewhere in the world and that nobody really needs to read my thoughts about the upcoming presidential election – I am a predictable leftist, I’ve known who I was voting for from the beginning, etc. – I’m about to go cast my (early) vote and I know I’ll be holding my breath until all the ballots are in on Tuesday. It’s chilly, dead leaves are chasing one another and we’re all rushing somewhere.

This is the first time in my (relatively short) lifetime that this process feels like a movement to me (so said R. yesterday, and she was right). She voted yesterday, and she said that families were hanging around in front of the polling place taking pictures of themselves with their ‘I Voted!’ stickers. I can’t remember such a feeling of community engagement with politics ever before – it was something I nostalgically always yearned for. Before my time, never coming back, gone with popular anarchist stump-speeches and union organizing from within and politics as everyday life, not as marginal act.

I’m glad to say I was wrong.

I wonder often if there might be a slight trending toward ideals of conservation, community, idealism, progressivism – but maybe that’s my wishful thinking turning its face toward the sun. I feel like such things are a natural response to the kind of socioeconomic and environmental crises that we’re facing.

Of course, I’m also older and cranky and fed up with the idea of lifestyle as an organizing concept.

plague of frogs

I have a new favorite political radio show: This is Hell.

Website has archives, headlines, podcast, so-on-and-so-forth.

propaganda songs

I saw one of the women who had been involved in Jane: Chicago speak today, and it broke my heart again and again. First, that women were ever in such a position: that one’s choices, upon being fertilized, were reduced to 1) possibly fatal danger or 2) motherhood (these and only these); second, that people in this world are doing their best to see that that binary choice returns; third, that that reality is a legislative slip of the tongue away (one Mississippi). And fourth, that women could overcome their personal differences to make a localized yet meaningful change in others’ lives: that ordinary people could see around and through the system to the skills they needed to acquire, that they did not let their fear stop them from doing what they believed was right.

Though there is no grand narrative, no pattern, no meaning save the arbitrary granted wish, I want to make the most of my time breathing in this body. I want to make this incredibly fucked-up world a tiny bit better for at least a couple of other people. I want to do what I can.

And I will not let my fear stop me from doing what I believe is right (though I am not THAT bull-headed and I will compromise. I have my ethics, though, and I will stand by them).

Sometimes, though, I get very sad and tired. One of the women in the Jane documentary said something that resonated with me: that doctors had some training in professional distancing, which is something she’d never learned to do, and that eventually seeing all that suffering (no matter whether she had a part in ending it or not) began to bruise her.

I can’t remember a time I haven’t known evil like that, that I haven’t seen suffering.

Sometimes I wish I was better at distancing. Sometimes I get very tired.

Nothing is really binary, not truly. All those shades of grey like car exhaust, toxic. Exhale, inhale: everything gives you cancer, but there’s always a chance you’ll be the lucky one this time. In hope, fear. In fear, hope.

Holy shit.

gates out of my hell

This guy is my personal hero. We all should think about community in such a way.