A Dyke A Broad #48 The Evangelical Edition
This week--photos from the Loire valley, a Covid update, plus more thoughts on my growing allergy to the evangelism of urgency.
Hello from… the medieval seat of the Plantagenet dynasty!
This week The Girl and I are in this mid-sized, mostly university town at the edge of the Loire Valley, taking care of The Mom, and giving a break to The Bro who lives here. My favorite thing in the city—walks along the Marne river and spying on the neighbors to see if the hole in their roof has grown.
Good News
Now that the Macron admin, with the approval of the legislature, made vaccines mandatory for groups like healthcare workers, and instituted a pass sanitaire (proof of vaccine or negative test) for restaurants and many other public places, the vaccine rate in France has skyrocketed from a pathetic 49% to almost 80% of the over twelves. And the wave of Delta-induced Covid that we were facing is finally in retreat. If only mask-wearers in the Paris metro understood that Covid breeds in the nasal passage and sinus, not in the cleft of the chin. As for the rabid anti-maskers, they don’t worry me. For whatever reason—you can probably think of several—the demos are getting smaller.
A Growing Allergy to Urgency
So… last week one reader asked me why I did the sheepish mea culpa about a call to arms for the women of Afghanistan. Did I think that in emergencies, people should pause to reflect? Not get all fist-raisy and take immediate action?
Well, no, not exactly. It depends.
I was also informed by another reader that after the piece, she actually used a link to make a donation, and had started putting about feelers about what she could do— concretely— to help women refugees. In short, what I wrote wasn’t a self-indulgent waste.
Here’s somebody else doing some real things for Afghan women.
Even better, Afghan women doing it for themselves.
So it seems like more explanations are in order. Here’s the thing—I’m increasingly torn about how to respond to Terrible Things because I’m more and more mistrustful of the information+urgency+emotion+(social) media cocktail that we’re all force-fed. Why? Because I’m so easily manipulated by it. You have no idea. Sometimes I don’t even pause to do my own research, just leap in and thoughtlessly begin churning out words. Forget new analysis or new facts—sometimes I even spread fake ones. Who cares?! A Terrible Thing has happened and SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.
This is usually bad journalism and also bad activism. Hence the bout of self-loathing at my rush to gush which I’ve started to think has its roots in my American, incredibly evangelical Protestant background in which you don’t reason your way to salvation, or even get there with good works, you just feel—intensely. And I did, and I do.
I grew up Southern Baptist, and as a kid sat in a pew in Bethany Baptist Church where, after the preacher had preached, the piano player or organist would start softly playing a hymn, and the preacher would begin his final plea, begging the folks out there in the congregation to confess their sins. Turn their lives over to Jesus. Be saved. (Or face the consequences.)
By then I might have tears running down my face, convinced both of the weight of my sins and the wonders of salvation. Pretty regularly somebody would stagger down front where the preacher was waiting with his arms outstretched, and they’d weep, too, as they accepted Jesus as their lord and savior. You could almost see the weight of sin lift off of them. And if a few months, few years later that sensation didn’t last—that feeling of accomplishment, cleanness, lightness—you could always stagger back down front and rededicate your life to Christ.
Some did it over and over again. At least a couple times a year. I did occasionally.
Now, on social media you can proclaim your sin and your salvation every week, every day, every hour, and feel better, but without actually doing a thing except feeling very intensely.
So that’s the first thing. How we confuse the symbolic and the real—and how, by just reading these kinds of posts and articles, feeling the horror, then sharing it, we believe we’ve accomplished something. (I’m trying really hard to break myself of the habit— even though I’m demonstrably failing. This week alone I must have shared several dozen articles about the ruling in Texas effectively outlawing abortion there and unleashing anti-women vigilantes. Yeah, so many articles though only one had something useful to propose, outlining an effective strategy for Democrats—if they have the political will to do it.)
The second problem is that when we see too many horrors followed by vague calls to action—almost always the case—some people, including me, feel hopeless, helpless and outgunned unless something very specific is proposed. And we not only feel like we can’t do anything about that particular Terrible Thing, but about anything, and that spirals into the feeling that we’re shit humans for doing nothing. Because these days everybody is responsible for everything everywhere all the time. Information puts us under an obligation. We knew and did nothing. An omniscience without omnipotence, a burden too heavy to bear with the rapid dissemination of global news 24/7.
The result? By the time something comes along about which we can actually do something, we’re too demoralized to quit doom-scrolling and get off the couch. Or as I said before, we don’t recognize that something we do locally can have ripple effects.
Maybe the worst thing, though, is that when a situation arises—or chronically exists, like the Texas abortion case— in which an ordinary person could actually do something and make a difference, we may not even learn about it soon enough to take effective action because it gets lost in the noise.
So what’s better, adding to the noise—which occasionally does touch people and get them involved? Or trying to come at things from a different angle and see if there’s some slow, or repetitive methodical action we can take to get at the root of the problem?—Preferably something that we can incorporate into our lives. Because beyond specific questions, that’s the larger one no one ever talks about. What is sustainable for us to do if we care about being good people, but also living good lives that include a little happiness, a little joy, otherwise, why bother?
By the way, none of this is to say that a quick raised fist on social media isn’t sometimes the perfect response to a crisis. Like that time early in his administration when Trump issued an immigration ban on Muslims, and within minutes even citizens were being deported at airports. Right away, the ex-ACT-UP, ex-Avenger folks I knew on Facebook and Twitter were outraged about it. And within a couple hours they went to the airports to demonstrate, and shut things down long enough for the courts to get involved and press pause.
But let’s be clear about what happened.
Social media identified a problem of limited scope—Trump’s executive order which was leading to deportations at airports.
A simple, if temporary, solution was evident. Deportations could be stopped by nonviolently shutting down airports, and getting stays from judges.
The echo chamber that is social media for once touched a group that had the right activist skill set, and were in airport-rich New York and LA— literally the right people in the right place at the right time—to actually do this. So when the news hit their timelines, people didn’t just “like” or “share” heart-string tugging posts, some zipped to JFK and Newark, and others started doing legal paperwork.
Also crucial…the larger democratic structure, including a functioning, relatively unbiased, quick response legal system, worked largely as anticipated, so that activists could successfully shut down the airports (without getting killed en masse), and lawyers were successful in getting stays.
Social media and fist-raising is almost never that effective. Even the massive protests of the Arab Spring, in which social (and mainstream) media got so many so fast into the streets that regimes fell right and left, were mostly a long-term failure because the activists that inspired them didn’t have a follow-up plan, or even the skills to conceive of one. Because, seriously, how many ordinary people are equipped to understand how to replace all the moving parts of a corrupt and violent regime that governs everything from the courts to garbage collection? So, after not very long at all, the usual suspects dusted themselves off, giggling all the way to the torture chambers and the banks and the stuffed ballot boxes, and retook what they had lost.
There’s quick work and long work, and social media, all media, really, is in the category of the quick—tossing out information and emotion, and making problems visible. Which I admit has its place, an important place. In fact, it’s how most long work begins—with information. But by itself it’s not enough for lasting social and cultural change unless it’s part of a larger strategy.
So, yeah, that’s where I’m at. Pulled this way and that way. Trying to figure out how to think my own thoughts, not social media’s, how to be a good human, and act when I can. But also how to be me and not some knee-jerky puppet dyke. Argh. It’s harder than it looks.
What I’m Reading
Texas and the Supreme Court shadow docket. Jayzus! Who knew there was a “shadow docket”?
"[The Supreme Court] essentially managed not only to overrule Roe but do so with a law that lets that guy you knew in High School who’s always sharing right wing memes on Facebook sue your sister who drove you to the clinic for a $10,000 cash prize. In a way the antis and the Court have done abortion rights advocates a favor by creating a reality in Texas that exposes the hideousness of the Roe opponents’ aspirations: both shackling and predatory."
Rethinking our ideas around abortion. Why both sides are idiots. “The trouble is, pregnancy is not like anything else. If it was, the whole edifice of patriarchy wouldn’t exist. There would be no singling out and controlling of one half of the human race by the other, because we wouldn’t have something that couldn’t be replicated in any way.”
Is Biden any better than unilateral action loving, ally-hating Trump? “Washington consulted the Taliban, but informed the Allies. At least that’s how it seemed to us.”
Raising questions about violence. Anne Applebaum’s Liberal Democracy Is Worth a Fight: Not all battles can be won with language, arguments, conferences, or diplomacy.
Actions for Pranksters
Last & Half-Digested Thought
So, I saved the tweet below because I wanted to make some connection to my earlier point about feeling personally responsible for everything all the time. Which is kind of the whole, “The personal is political” thing flipped disastrously on its head. And while I think that individual action helps, and that we can help even global causes. It is not humanly possible for each of us to do something about everything everywhere all the time. And what does it mean that we think so? Also, are men more immune than most of the women I know, all thoroughly trained to be useful? And while we’re at it, who benefits from the resulting anguish and paralysis? But also what’s behind this idea that we can actually do something about everything—even if we know nothing more about it than a tweet? What a weird mix of hubris and perpetual guilt. This can’t end well.
That’s it for this time,
Chumpily yours,
Well said. You are articulating some of the things that I've been wrestling with as well, with the onslaught of overwhelming crises, both present and looming. Thank you.