“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” ~ Toni Cade Bambara
In the moments we are not scrambling for shelter or trying to duck bombs, as many are right now, it could seem like anything we do is meaningless. A spit in the rain, a single scream in a cacophonous maelstrom.
Those of us sensitive to the ills and aches of the world, who know in our bones another world is possible but languish in the gulf between possibility and reality, could feel like everything we do either perpetuates the forces harming life or are exercises in futility.
Same sh#t, different decade
I cannot help but feel we are watching the toxic culture-shaping power of media in real time, again. As a 21-year-old theatre college kid I watched the manipulative war machine spin up and leverage the fear and outrage caused by 9/11 into an excuse to decimate the people of Iraq, and then Afghanistan, while stripping our civil rights, drastically increasing civilian surveillance, and militarizing police departments here in the US.
Studying the roots of white supremacy to see how we might dismantle it, I’ve learned that the newspapers and pamphlets of the 17- and 1800s, prime-time media of the day, were instrumental in crafting and spreading the illusion of a “white” people as different from and better than black or indigenous people. To interfere with the class uprisings of enslaved Africans and poor or indentured European immigrants who were banding together against wealthy landowners, papers printed vile narratives about the inhumanity of Black people, often couched in scientific or religious rhetoric. At the same time the lower class European people were given the illusion of superiority, a lie of false belonging with other “white” people who had a wealthiness they were told they could advance to, if they worked hard enough and helped control the enslaved Africans.
I’ve seen cartoons about African people, Iraqi people, Afghani people, and Palestinian people I wish I could unsee. At one point or another we have all been called animals, terrorists, or something else dehumanizing by well-respected mainstream media outlets, to justify our exploitation and murder. And the vast majority of Americans have agreed with those sentiments, either through active hate crimes or quiet complicity.
Let me be very clear, I feel for the pain and fear of Jewish people in Israel and beyond. The legacy of antisemitism is long and fraught, and the need to feel safe somewhere in the world is understandable. But I cannot help but see the narrative-creating machine of the media spinning to exploit their intergenerational trauma to dehumanize an entire group of people and foment another wave of destruction.
Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard speaks to the fear of annihilation that arises in the people whose elders and recent ancestors endured the Holocaust, and how that has caused them to seek and justify genocide. The weight of that history needs to be tended and integrated.
In the face of this tide, we all get to learn and practice the skills of grief if our species is to survive.
Listening to the still, small voice
I’m writing this in the wee hours, after days of false starts and news analysis and grappling with my anger and grief that we keep playing out the same stories, finally given way to my commitment to just write, regardless of what answers I think I do or do not have.
The world is quiet at 4am, an expensive peace, a breath between commitments and headlines.
A moment to ask if I want to endure the waves and density of these times, and if so, how can I do it with my spirit intact. How we can remember ourselves as people in a vast, interconnected web. Where all people are *our* people. All children are our children. My quiet inner voice reminds me that war perpetuates itself by creating the illusion of enemies. But the jagged gift of this heavy sensitivity is the knowledge that there is no one on this planet untouched by what happens to everyone else.
In this moment I remember that we all have a place, we each have a role in shaping change and serving life. Part of the work of a lifetime is finding what that is and learning how to embody it fully.
We can all contact our representatives and ask them to seek deescalation, and those of us with means can donate to relief efforts. Some of us engage art practices to metabolize what would otherwise devour us. Some of us contribute stories told through words or images or movement or songs or packets of color and light. That document what is happening, to bear witness and make record. That draw on the power of radical imagination to awaken our collective envisioning of what might be possible.
How might you engage your art practice to take the next step, now?
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen... To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”~ Arundhati Roi
P.S. This video by struthless helped me snap out of the doomscroll