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It’s hard to know why certain issues just strike you more than others. Why does issue A move you to tears or frustration or rage or pain or (often) all four while issue B just does not have the same effect, even as you know it really is just as important, impacts just as many people just as deeply?
Even as I write that, I find myself supposing it’s in a way a good thing: Caring about every issue, every problem, every reality, that deserves care to the degree such care is deserved would, I suspect, be emotionally paralyzing or worse. So we each need to devote most of our available energy to the issues that move us and trust in others to take up the slack on what parts of the rest move them.
My inability to do that lead me to a place where I couldn’t function politically. Every call to action was as urgent as every other call, every cry for aid was as important as every other cry for aid, every plea for my attention and time was as important as every other plea, and I suspect you know where this is going: I burned out. Totally. After I burned out of political action - twice, in fact, with the recovery from the second still in progress - I committed myself to the idea (which I now advise to others) that what matters is not how much you are doing, but are you doing what you can.
And yet I remain a little ashamed of my failure to do more on the causes I believe in. My whole purpose in being here is to try to accomplish at least a little of that “doing.”
Which is a very roundabout introduction to the rest of this blathering.
My housemate and I were on our way to have Christmas dinner with her family. They are MAGA, not so deep red that we can’t maintain family contact, but still, yeah. So there’s always a little bit of tension for us in such events. Usually, I think, more for me, in that I’m more intensely political than she is and she is so devoted to family that she can forgive almost anything. She can be angry, frustrated, irritated, and feel sorry for them - but still, in the end, forgiving.
But after a major and I expect rupturing blowout with a brother (who would not be at the dinner) who called me a “terrorist-loving anti-semite” for daring to suggest that Gaza was more complicated than his view of evil Palestinians all of who want to murder all Jews on the one side and thoroughly good Israelis on the other - with the label extended to her when she tried to express what I said even more gently than I already had - I’m sure her radar for conflict was already on high alert.
Anyway, on the way there I told her that for the sake of family peace I could let a lot of stuff go, including the anticipated gloating over the election, but there were two issues I could not, would not, let pass: the slaughter in Gaza and transgender rights.
So as it turned out, dinner went well with no gloating to speak of, it was about 9pm, people were chilling out, that somehow-a-classic Christmas movie “Die Hard” was on the TV, and someone said something about trans people. It (somewhat surprisingly) wasn’t hostile, but knowing how rapidly MAGA conversations can spin into wilder and wilder territory, my companion took advantage of the time to say “It’s getting late. We should get going.” Crisis averted, but I did have a real sense of relief when we got to her car.
Which just brings me around again to the start: Why those two issues? What makes them more important to me than other ones? Why did I know I couldn’t let either pass even at the cost of a family disruption? Why do they move me more than other issues, other crises?
After all, what about abortion rights? The rise of Christian nationalism? Poverty and economic inequality? Voter suppression? What about the fact that as of the day I write this, 16 wars are going on in the world which together have killed about 150,000 people since the start of 2024 - not including another 17 "low-intensity" conflicts with an additional nearly 10,000 killed.*
And, I mean, seriously, you could make a case that the single most important issue facing the world today is climate change. Unless emergency action is taken, climate change - global warming, whichever, it’s the same thing, to-may-to, to-mah-to as the old song has it - will cause deeper, longer-lasting, and more widespread damage to more people than anything else except for nuclear war, and while that’s an ever-present risk, short of a major, major, major miscalculation on Ukraine, the likelihood appears for now on the low side.
Meanwhile, climate change is real, is now, is every day and worsening and we face a clearly possible future of floods and fires, droughts and deluges, famines, more intense storms, areas becoming literally too hot for human survival, resource wars, unknowable numbers of climate refugees, rising seas, dramatically altered weather patterns, and more, all impacting literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of people.
I know all that. I can talk on an at least reasonably well-informed level on the science involved and in fact have in previous years on other forums posted a good number of times about just that. So it’s neither a matter of being unaware or unconcerned.
Butt it doesn’t bring me to tears. Trans rights does.** Gaza does. Why, I don’t know. I can come up with reasons they are important in general and important to me in particular, sure - but that doesn’t answer the question at hand. Being reminded of the Christmas dinner prompted me to wonder about that “why” to, frankly, no useful end and ultimately I had to say, well, they just do because that’s the way people are: different things touch us differently.
What matters now is that I find them so emotionally overwhelming that I have found it almost impossible to write about them here. Admittedly, I’ve not been particularly regular in posting, but even so, I don’t think I’ve posted about Gaza in just about a year and I think my only post about trans rights was as part of the “LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back” effort in early December.
And that lack violates why I’m even here at all.
In the first half of the ‘90s, I published a little newsletter consciously modeled on I. F. Stone’s Weekly (which by the time I became aware of it had become the Bi-Weekly and if you don’t know who Izzy Stone was, damn well look him up). In the first issue of my newsletter, which was called Lotus (of course it was), I tried to explain my intent by starting with a story of a friend who said she envied my comfort at giving speeches, to which I responded by saying I envied her gregariousness, which gave her skills at door-to-door petitioning. “I don’t think she believed me,” I wrote.
But, I noted, I meant it. We all have skills we can use in movements for justice and none are greater or “more important” than others and the issue isn’t what skills you have but are you using them.
Some, like my friend, are good at petitioning. I'm not. Some are good at fundraising. I'm not. I lack both the focused concentration necessary for large-scale organizing and the patience for phone-banking. The list of my inadequacies is embarrassingly long.Not long after, I received what was intended as a friendly critique saying I was limiting my audience by being so upfront with my opinions and, let it be said, judgments. I replied by saying that Lotus was built on advocacy.
My strength happens to be words. Advocacy. Writing. Giving speeches. And like that. So doing this is, simply, something I think I can contribute. My dream for Lotus is that it can be a voice of conscience and a tool in an on-going movement, something of use to the many who keep on keepin' on, something of value to those whose skills in other areas so greatly exceed mine. Something that helps.
Its audience is indeed those who in a broad and general way agree with its point of view. Its aim is to rouse and inspire, to provide background and analysis intended to put a context to ethical judgments and thereby spur action. In other words, “something that helps.”That has always been my goal in every forum in which I’ve engaged, whether blogging, YouTube, the platform formerly known as Twitter, public access TV, of late including Substack, or wherever else: to be of use to the overall struggle for justice.
And I perpetually wonder if I’m doing any good.
And at this point I don’t even know if there was a through-line, a coherent thread, in this meandering mess. I just know I have trouble forgiving myself for having contributed so little over this past year-plus to the causes that now mean the most to me and have to figure out how best to correct that. One possibility is to reframe my vision for what I publish from essay-length commentary with multiple data links (which I used to turn out on a reasonably-regular basis) back how it started, with a greater number of short but informational news items. We’ll see.
Because caring less is not an option.
*"Killed" here means "battle-related deaths (military and civilian) as well as civilians intentionally targeted" and so does not include deaths from such causes as lack of food or clean water or health care, which often account for three times (or more) as many dead as direct combat - meaning that 150,000 killed could be more like 600,000 (unless those others are somehow less dead) and maybe another 40,000 dead in those “low-intensity” wars.
**Do? Does? I think of it as a singular, as a group noun, so, yeah, “does.”
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