Navigating

A strange thing has been happening in the last month, maybe two months that I go back and forth on writing about. I think that right now, there's a great need to perform politics online that is, despite the fact of 2020, unprecedented. I mention this because -- and I really didn't think I could be surprised anymore -- The New York Times has recently fired veteran journalists, who have done astonishingly good work, for not-even-really-all-that-bad tweets that became the latest subject of outrage culture. Then Cade Metz, for the NYT, doxed the guy who runs Slate Star Codex - a blog that is known for antipolitical rationalism - for no apparent reason other than looking good politically. Carrying around an idea that it's actually possible that enough people have become so invested in political performance that in fact, the world has gone genuinely bonkers, isn't easy. It isn't easy because it's the trope in too much mediocre science fiction, because it's absurd, because it's lonely, because almost everyone around me all of the time seems to think it is obviously fine and normal. But it isn't. It really isn't.

When someone says trans rights aren't politics, for example, the answer should always be: all rights are politics. A "right" is a political term. Rights are not a natural occurrence. When someone says trans rights aren't politics, what they mean when they say "politics" is "stuff we can disagree on without it being a comment on your character." Whether or not you particularly like Game of Thrones is politics, because it's okay if you do and it's okay if you don't. Pineapple on pizza? politics. Foreign policy? A matter of character.

How did we get here? Should I write about this?

In the first place, it's not going to help. Even if the whole world read this blog post, it would be up against too big of a mass to make any headway. It might reach one or two people and those people will henceforth also being extremely uncomfortable. Not exactly a win. Also, it does need saying that this post itself is making claims in a similar tone to trans rights aren't politics. I am indignant, judgmental, and uninterested in space for another point of view.

But anyway, this thing -- I think we all know what I mean regardless of how we think about what it is -- has been happening for way more than two months and thus, is not the strang thing to which I referred above. Hell, at this point it aint even strange -- I don't know who's going to get fired next for not having views Twitter agrees with, but I know that it will be somebody. I'm getting used to the reality TV of life.

No, the strange thing I want to talk about is what I see when I meditate. I meditate a lot -- it used to be 20 minutes a day, now it's every few days for an hour or so, and also most nights in bed. I don't count my breaths because defying centuries of tradition, I have decided that counting my breaths is dumb. Instead, I put meditative music on and I pay attention to the feelings that I am currently experiencing. I lean into them and images float up.  The feeling is much the same as dreaming. Sometimes they're memories. Sometimes they're many fragments of memories one after another, all connected by something usually thematic or even literary. But sometimes they're images of what I think are things that I am aware of peripherally, though I may not remember ever seeing it directly. (When I write it out, it sounds so mystical -- but it really isn't. I am aware of thinking, and the awareness is unusual, and is meditation. But the actual process -- the images, the associations, etc -- I believe that is what most of us are doing most of the time. It's the popular concept of thinking, just what's bopping around in our heads at any given moment, to be distinguished from the intellectual concept of thought which is not relevant to this conversation.)

Lately, the images are: An overweight woman in her forties in a cubicle that has been decorated seasonally. She has been in her administrative position for years and everyone knows her. She's married with children and serves on the PTO board. She is the one tasked with organizing office celebrations and potlucks. She knows everyone's birthday.

Halloween trick or treating, school dances, a child losing a tooth.

Someone in a family has cancer, and neighbors are taking turns making meals.

The way the street light looks in the rain on the street out a living room window at night.

Fantasy novels for young girls.

the memory of the fall festival at the local arboretum that I went to with my family many years.

Bath and body works products and school lockers.

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You get the idea, maybe. Some of these images are memories, some of them aren't. What sticks out is that the emotion that swells in me and brings these images top of mind is grief.

There are many plausible explanations - the first is that for me, these images relate to the particular kind of home I had before my dad died. This is the first explanation any time grief is on the table.  In particular the security in the fat family lady, the neighbors bringing dinner, the warm friendship embodied in the picture of a Tamora Pierce novel, and so on, may be the security that I felt when my dad was around, because he was around.

This is an explanation I am inclined to believe, I think it's true. But I don't think it's the whole truth. I don't think my dad was the only source of that security.

There are two other things missing entirely from these images when they surface - The first is smartphones. There are no smartphones. The second is not a material thing, but a perception thing. There is no sense of a political self. These images don't have explicit association with myself as white, or Jewish, or a woman. Some of the images have struggles, but they're not political, they're deeply personal, they feel entirely outside of politics. Hurt feelings, because someone did or said something hurtful. Cancer, the disease and the people who love someone with it. There is something about that -- that lack of political awareness - that even as I type now stirs grief, deep grief, within me.

I know that if these words were to ever see the light of day, some articulate person on twitter would coin the term "White Grief," but until that happens, I get to sit in this moment and think about why these images resist politicization. I get to hold the thought that maybe, it isn't because of something someone else can tell just from looking at me.

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