Showing up in public during political crises
responding to the violence in the Middle East while staying human
This newsletter covers some pretty heavy shit. If you also need some lightness today, give the latest How To! episode a listen. It’s me, the wonderful Carvell Wallace, and a soulful professional organizer discussing how to archive our kids’ lives and declutter their rooms. Cameos of both Maya and Stella’s voices in there!
Since the most recent explosion of violence in the Middle East, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we—meaning, I suppose, Americans without strong personal ties to the issue or people in the region—show up in public in moments like this. Here’s how I’ve been showing up in public:
First, not at all. I was overwhelmed with caretaking, traveling, and work responsibilities and didn’t have time to properly read about and process what was going on, so I said nothing on social media. I worried a bit about how this might appear to others. Silence is violence, no? But isn’t uninformed posting its own kind of psychic violence in a world where we are struggling to focus on the most important things and get accurate information? I resolved to wait to post anything until I could actually take in what was happening with care. As Dalia Lithwick puts it: “Just as online technology has encouraged a hyperpolarized political world, it has also contributed to an acute splitting of self—a conviction both that we are the sum of what we post and that our failures to reflect and refract everything that hurts everyone else makes us ethically deficient. Let’s try not to mistake the inability to perform boundless public compassion with the inability to feel it.”
When I got home, about a week after the first attacks, I took a hike alone and listened to a couple of podcasts that I knew would help me understand the latest. I cried while trudging up a big hill. I thought about conversations I’ve had over the years with dear friends with closer ties to the region or whose professional work focuses on it. I texted them, even as I knew it was inadequate. I posted a link to one of the podcasts.
This is an older woman who shows up in public by consistently, year after year, doing small acts to keep this hill hike-able and safe from fire. As far as I know, she has no social media account documenting her steadfast acts or big opinions about everything. I started hearing from friends who run nonprofit organizations — their funders are asking them not to post support for Palestine (and apparently this is rampant), reminding me of my own experience of slamming into Middle East politics. About a decade ago, I wrote of Rachel Corrie, an American activist, who was murdered while standing in front of a Palestinian home by an Israeli military bulldozer. I was disinvited from speaking gigs following the release of that book because of that profile, which importantly, was less about the conflict in the Middle East and more about how people choose to put their bodies on the line as accomplices. I try to support the friends who are wrestling with these power dynamics with consequences far bigger than mine; they have to make payroll.
When we’re sharing our peaks and pits at the dinner table, my husband, John, says one of his pits is the increasing violence in the Middle East. I concur. We talk to our daughters—7 and 9—about what is happening, scaffolding up on conversations we’ve already had with them about Ukraine and Russia, police violence, Trump’s xenophobic policies, crime in Oakland, gun violence, and so much more. They roll with it easily. Too easily. They are so young and already so familiar with the depravity of adult behavior and the weaponization of generational harm. On the podcast I’m newly hosting we discuss doing a show on how to talk to kids about the Middle East. I say I’m not inclined to do it; that it’s actually not that hard to talk to our kids about this because we do it so much now. I feel cynical and sick, and I’m reminded of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s important piece on this topic: “If your circuits are overwhelmed there’s a reason and the reason isn’t because you are heartless, it’s because there is not a human heart on this planet that can bear all of what is happening right now.”
I start noticing that some people have been prefacing their emails to me with one-liners like “what a terrible time” and then go on to ask about the status of a project. I wonder if I should also be adding these clauses to signal to the world that I am not a self-promotional monster and understand people are being held hostage and dying, but also, will you still post about my new podcast? Ugh.
I ask John if he thinks I shouldn’t sent out a newsletter about climate change. Is it tone deaf? He says no, that me not talking about climate change is not going to de-escalate violence in the Middle East.
Why am I sharing this mundane shit from my life? I think there’s something deeper going on here, and I’m guessing so many of you are riding similar waves of self-doubt and sadness. It feels like we are living through a moment where the confluence of global crises, news coverage, and social media are producing a lot of profoundly unwise reactions (performance, bullying, posturing etc.) from people all over the ideological spectrum and many of us are looking for a different way. It’s unreasonable to expect each of us to be our own little mini-publication—weighing the pros and cons of posting certain links, sentiments, and calls to action at the “right” times, especially when it’s on an issue we aren’t steeped in.
What do we want? We want, as the Pope himself said, “not to become accustomed to war.” I think we want to stay informed, while acknowledging that we are not experts. I think we want to stay awake and empathic, while understanding we are a million miles away literally and metaphorically. And I think we want to be part of the collective moral force that rises up in moments like this and says, “Not on our watch or in our name.”
So what is a wise approach to moving towards those desires? Here’s something to try on:
HEAD: There is a growing academic discipline called “intellectual humility.” At it’s most basic, it’s the idea that you have an accurate sense of how much you know in a given situation or on a given topic compared to others and then, given that, take up the right sized amount of space. Meaning if you know a tremendous amount about the history of the conflict in the Middle East, this is a moment to speak up, offer what you know, make the rest of us smarter. If you don’t, it’s a moment to read, listen, and start to build up your knowledge.
HEART: Care ethicist Nel Noddings wrote a groundbreaking book called Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, in which she defines two types of care— “caring for” and “caring about” (shout out to Elissa Strauss for teaching me about this in her forthcoming book, When You Care.) We care for our loved ones, our friends, our neighbors, our community. This is time-consuming and direct care; it consumes much of our days, depending on what stage of life we are in. We care about people by giving their lives and struggles our attention, but understanding that we don’t have direct access to them. I know it might sound incredibly basic, but being reminded of this calmed my nervous system. I can care about those facing tragic violence in the Middle East right now, but I am not directly connected to them. I have to remind myself of this and, in a strange way, it frees me up to learn and mourn and pray in ways that feel more in integrity with reality. I will not be saving anyone from the rubble. I can’t. I find it strangely necessary to remind my heart of that.
SPIRIT: Which brings me to spirit. My moral response to this crisis is both internal and external. Crying about it on my hike was important because it was a moment for my spirit to actually answer the call that my mind might otherwise shut down in the midst of a busy life; people are suffering and I want and need to respond to that. Even directing loving energy towards all the victims of violence right now for a few pure moments makes me feel less fried and absent and terrible. The spirit of action is also strong in me. Posting on social media is not unimportant, as we’ve seen in so many social movements of the recent past, but it’s fairly anemic in the face of such profound violence and such longstanding conflict. These moments also call us to ask: Where can my body go? Is there a vigil or a protest that feels in line with my spirit? I think our bodies crave real communion around these crises while our minds are burned the fuck out.
The bottom line is this: I don’t want to pretend to know more than I do or care less than I do. I want to live in this world awake, gentle, fierce, thoughtful, realistic, other-oriented, intentional, standing up for the least structurally and materially powerful. I don’t want to be pressured into performance or assuaged by box checking. I want to learn and feel and pray and mobilize on an honest, humane timeline, a timeline that acknowledges the limitations of my knowing and time and body.
And yet! And yet, there is urgency here, as there so often is, as there always is? So I hold that paradox close — I will not do nothing. What I do will be imperfect. Let it be both strategic and human, smart and tender, personal and collective. Let it over and over again, as small as a prayer or as big as taking to the streets with thousands of others, reinforce that I am not accustomed to war and plan to die that way.
This is a work in progress! Tell me - how have you learned to respond in moments like this? What questions are you still holding? Also if this post was helpful to you, please share it with others who might be flailing.
Thanks for this, Courtney. This is very humane and balanced and loving and realistic. We could all use more of that these days, about this war and every crisis confronting us right now.
I did choose to write about the war last week, which scared the crap out of me. I wrote about my own struggles around responding to violence as someone who grew up as a pacifist and still aspires to claim that position. Though I don't always manage it, and sitting with the discomfort of that reality helps me maintain some humility and loving openness to everyone in this moment.
Late the night I published I saw a FB message come in from a friend of mine who proudly claims the position of Zionist and I found myself afraid to open it, practicing all the ways in which I could protect my own righteousness and walk away from any conversation with my current perspective unchanged. And then, lying there in the dark, I had to witness my own bullshit and say to myself, Really, Asha? You literally wrote about keeping your heart open less than 8 hours ago. How's that going for you?
I opened the message. She thanked me for my attempts to be measured and careful in my communication. She didn't say anything that I was afraid she would say-- about Palestinians, about me, or anything else. She told me she was hurting and scared. I told her it made sense she felt that way and sent her so much love. She said thank you, and that was the end. What else, person to person, was there to do? Not much, I don't think.
Thank you for this. Thank you for questioning instead of opining, and for holding the gray area instead of picking a side. The woman on the hill says everything.