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Today, I read a wonderful essay by Anne Dunn that was emailed to me by the Center for Fiction. I put my email on their mailing list after I bought a few Lapham Quarterly's from them a few months ago.
This is the passage that struck me and I re-read twice, with tears in my eyes.
And HERE is the rest of the essay entitled Lines of Resistance - How to Handle a Failed Election.
It's raining. The sky looks like soiled socks and there's a dripping guttural sound as it hits and runs off gutters. My sciatic nerve on the right leg has also acted up again -- it does that in times of stress, so this may or may not get in the way of me marching tomorrow. I feel that I should though -- if only as a positive release of the rage that boils under the surface. I am avoiding the inaugration as much as possible -- because I don't want to feel the rage...Today, we moved offices and left work early as a result of our move from Midtown Manhattan back to Jamaica,Queens...far from the center of activity. Today, I was waited on at a grocery store by a very patient and kind woman from Pakistan or Bangladash, dressed in full Muslim garb - who aided me, while I irritably cursed a scanner machine that would most likely put her out of a job. I passed Orthodox Russian Jews who fled to this country ages ago for their religious freedom on the street and in the halls of my apartment building. I heard over twenty different languages, none of which I understood. Watched two boys dance inside the subway, flipping along the poles. Passed homeless men and women of all ages. And listened to lonely bagpipes of a man sitting on the floor of a subway passageway. This is NY and every day is a lesson in humility. I did not feel kind today. I was hungry and irritated on the way home, my leg aching, worried about my future, but around me...I saw I was not alone as I felt or often think I am, in this bustling city of contrasts, and hope.
This is the passage that struck me and I re-read twice, with tears in my eyes.
What is it they say about a house that is burning?
Our attachment to privilege, to believing we are owed something, is not hope. It’s as if we are all in the grips of an addiction in which it’s too painful to remember what the sunrise feels like. It is what limits our vision, what led us to fail Hillary Clinton and each other in this election.
This failure leaves us on a planet that is dying around us and doing nothing about it. Where hosing down a human being with cold water in the freezing night is permissible. Where a young black man bleeds out on a San Francisco street alone. Because you, not them. Because safety, not empathy. Because I, not we. Because if I can just survive that's enough.
But it's not enough. It's calcifying in the face of love.
I need to know about this America, not turn a blind eye to it, this America that I have forever been hesitant to love, have always in some untended chamber of my queer female heart feared would destroy me.
This was not an election about issues. This was not an election about good or evil either. It was an election about suffering. People are good, their souls are precious, their dreams are real and vital. This election illustrated for me how much and in what crushing amplitude people are suffering out there, and the way in which it is so easy when we are suffering to attach ourselves to and be motivated by hate. How hate creates a shell that eclipses our morality, our humanity, our joy, our dignity.
This election made me feel the need to protect people, and that breaks my heart pump.
James Baldwin said, If you can’t love anybody you are dangerous. You have no way to learn humility, no way to learn that other people suffer and to use your suffering and theirs to get from this place to that.
And so I challenge myself and all of us to push beyond our disappointment and heartbreak, beyond our attachment to power as a means of survival, beyond loving anybody to loving everybody. Listen, I am angry. And, yes, in many ways I have become a canvas of rage. But anger is different than hate. I will use my anger to activate, to demonstrate, to make phone calls, to learn to love harder and stronger.
And HERE is the rest of the essay entitled Lines of Resistance - How to Handle a Failed Election.
It's raining. The sky looks like soiled socks and there's a dripping guttural sound as it hits and runs off gutters. My sciatic nerve on the right leg has also acted up again -- it does that in times of stress, so this may or may not get in the way of me marching tomorrow. I feel that I should though -- if only as a positive release of the rage that boils under the surface. I am avoiding the inaugration as much as possible -- because I don't want to feel the rage...Today, we moved offices and left work early as a result of our move from Midtown Manhattan back to Jamaica,Queens...far from the center of activity. Today, I was waited on at a grocery store by a very patient and kind woman from Pakistan or Bangladash, dressed in full Muslim garb - who aided me, while I irritably cursed a scanner machine that would most likely put her out of a job. I passed Orthodox Russian Jews who fled to this country ages ago for their religious freedom on the street and in the halls of my apartment building. I heard over twenty different languages, none of which I understood. Watched two boys dance inside the subway, flipping along the poles. Passed homeless men and women of all ages. And listened to lonely bagpipes of a man sitting on the floor of a subway passageway. This is NY and every day is a lesson in humility. I did not feel kind today. I was hungry and irritated on the way home, my leg aching, worried about my future, but around me...I saw I was not alone as I felt or often think I am, in this bustling city of contrasts, and hope.