In Egipto--and some thoughts

[asakiyume]

Wakanomori got some pictures that capture the spirit of wanting better and trying hard that we could sense even standing just at the edge of Egipto.

Here is graffiti saying Egipto vive, right beside the church:



(click through to see it bigger)

And here is a shot up the hill that he got before we were warned away--you can't maybe tell, but on the right is a bright and hopeful mural, and straight ahead is a painting of a bird in flight.



... And those promised thoughts. This was a comment I left in the last entry. It was saying why it took me so long to post that last entry, how life can feel just generally. One of my friends suggest reposting it as an entry itself because, she said, it might resonate for people:

It's taken a long time to post this entry. I nearly didn't last night, either. I've been (like most people I know) oppressed by the news, had my mind in a vise that won't let me think about much else. There's a not insignificant amount of self-loathing that goes along with all that, as all the people saying "If you ever wondered what you'd do in Nazi Germany... now you know" have made me pretty aware that what I would have done is only slightly north of F-all. My stories from my trip feel stale in my head, are a product of privilege, and seem irrelevant and escapist.

But mental incapacity and self loathing, not to mention obsession, are pretty useless states, and some part of me believes it's not pointless to talk about people going out of their way to be thoughtful, even if (especially if? I don't know) it's people in a rough neighborhood being kind to clueless tourists.

... This is both an apology and an apologia for this post. I know you didn't ask for either; I just am latching onto your comment as an excuse to explain. Maybe this comment is what I should have posted, but then I wouldn't have had an excuse to put in photos.

--and look, I managed to slip some photos in all the same.

I guess if people in Egipto can paint "Egipto vive" and can protect the stranger, I can keep... doing my small, small thing.

Comments

[sovay]

Maybe this comment is what I should have posted, but then I wouldn't have had an excuse to put in photos.

I am glad you posted the comment, but I think the photos and the stories that went with them were and are important.

It's never pointless to talk people about going out of their way to be kind. It is not sugar-coating, rose-glassing, Panglossing: it is what's real. There is no point in trying to marshal resources to fight for a better world if you behave as though the better world is worthless.

I guess if people in Egipto can paint "Egipto vive" and can protect the stranger, I can keep... doing my small, small thing.

I think so.

In any case, the alternative to the small, small thing is nothing, and that is not better.

[asakiyume]

I suppose the thing my inner voices tell me is that the alternative is to do *more*. And the thing is, it is sometimes a possibility and pushing oneself to try a little harder is sometimes worthwhile.

And that's what torments me. But I think I have to just back away from the thought--or at least the mental trap it opens for me--and just say, "Yup, that's true; you probably could," and then just do my thing anyway, even if it is insufficient, even if I could be doing more. On any given occasion, there's a chance I will do more. Now and then I push myself. Many times I don't. Sometimes I think about it and then wimp out.

I'll say one thing: I'm not likely to end up smug and self-satisfied.

[sonia]

Yes, I resonate with all this thinking about what would I have done in Germany and I can't possibly be doing enough. And I keep coming back to, I'm doing what I'm doing. Bringing up my concerns with friends and on Dreamwidth is something. Doing everything I was already doing to try to make the world a better place is something. Occasional donations of money is something. Heartfelt, heartbroken empathy for the people being hurt is something. Maybe it's not nearly enough, but it is what it is.

Thank you for posting both your vacation photos and your thoughts about posting them.

also I think you meant mind in a vise, not vice

[asakiyume]

Haha, you are quite right! I did mean vise! Mind in a vice is a whole different sort of problem, LOL. I'll correct it in the stand-alone post; it's too late to correct it in the comment.

And yes, it is what it is, and *being* is something. We live in an age when there's a great desire for quantification and for cause-and-effect-action-leads-to-results, but actually the world works in all kinds of mysterious ways and not everything can be quantified.

[sovay]

We live in an age when there's a great desire for quantification and for cause-and-effect-action-leads-to-results, but actually the world works in all kinds of mysterious ways and not everything can be quantified.

And there is a great desire for immediate results, but that is not how resistance or even revolution works. This is long-haul. That's important to remember.

[asakiyume]

That's right. We don't plant an acorn and walk away in frustration because there's no oak tree the next day--or we shouldn't.

[kore]

Well, yeah, we could all do more. We could all sell our books and kitchenware and give up our apartments and cats and try to do nothing 24/7 other than protest outside of camps and prisons and courthouses, only that wouldn't actually be very sustainable, in either the long or the short run. We can all always do more. That doesn't mean that what people are doing now, no matter how small, is nothing. If it's not nothing it's something, and it's often actually hard to tell whether it's a big or a small something that can help start an avalanche of change.

....I kinda personally hate the "well now you know what you would do in Nazi Germany" thing because I don't think it's at all a 1:1 situation, but I don't know if that's me trying to feel better or what. I don't think the way people use it on Twitter (where I've seen it most) is particularly helpful, tho.

[asakiyume]

If it's not nothing it's something, and it's often actually hard to tell whether it's a big or a small something that can help start an avalanche of change.

Yeah, I think I agree with this. I think people draw straight-line connections and assume that X and Y and Z make change, and that 2X and 2Y and 2Z make twice as much, and so on, and I just don't think it really works that way. I think cause and effect whirl around in all kinds of strange ways and bump into stuff and get knocked into back eddies and oubliettes but then also feather-weight trigger stuff to happen... and you just can never know. People after the fact do post-hoc explanations, but the fact that we have revisionist histories and then revisions of those show how unclear we can be about stuff.

... I just need to keep this in mind.

And I agree with you about how the "well know you know..." thing. There's a lot of castigating that goes on which is kind of pointless.

[kore]

I think cause and effect whirl around in all kinds of strange ways and bump into stuff and get knocked into back eddies and oubliettes but then also feather-weight trigger stuff to happen... and you just can never know. People after the fact do post-hoc explanations, but the fact that we have revisionist histories and then revisions of those show how unclear we can be about stuff.

Yes! Exactly that. I try to kind of think of it as the Le Guin carrier bag theory of revolution. One hand reaching out to another in the dark. One soul. That counts. Maybe counts 'more' because it's the real basis of everything.

[amaebi]

I love this comment.

Perhaps some of this-- what you comment about-- comes out of the insistence on paradigms in which only one thing can be attended to And You Have To Specialize and Prioritize Strictly.

Which is pretty silly in a systems world.

[asakiyume]

I've been thinking that rather than focusing so much on Nazi Germany and how things fall apart, we ought to be looking at how places recover. No two situations are the same, and we might not be able to put into practice anything of what we see, but just for the sake of remembering. In that sense, being in Colombia--even Colombia that elected Duque--inspires me practically to tears. And not just Colombia, but, oh, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Timor-Leste, Cambodia, Vietnam ... or, less dramatically but maybe more relevantly for us, places like South Korea or Taiwan, which have become less authoritarian.

Not that all those places are paradises--by no means. No place is ever perfect, and you can get better in some ways and worse in others, but that's life in our becoming world, where things are always changing.

Anyway... I think we should focus on recovery.

[amaebi]

I am so with you.

[sovay]

....I kinda personally hate the "well now you know what you would do in Nazi Germany" thing because I don't think it's at all a 1:1 situation, but I don't know if that's me trying to feel better or what.

It assumes certain equivalencies between the position of the person now and the position of the person then. I myself would be behaving extremely differently in Nazi Germany, like I might be trying to get an exit visa, or I might be living in a forest, or I might be dead.

[asakiyume]

And--maybe this is just me--but the very focus on oneself and whether one is good or bad is maybe somehow irrelevant at best and a dangerous distraction at worst.** It's not about establishing your virtue or wallowing in shame but just finding things you can do and doing them.

**That said, the reality is that different spurs work for different people, and there may be people for whom that whole exercise is motivating and energizing. I have to remember a thing I'm often telling other people: not all messages are for all people. That one isn't for me, so I should just move along.

[sovay]

It's not about establishing your virtue or wallowing in shame but just finding things you can do and doing them.

That is certainly a more useful way to think about it. I do not mean that the past is no motivator for me. It's a huge one. But I am suspicious of people who want to prove their time-travel bona fides on the present. I want to make sure they are seeing what's really here.

I just ran into this post by David Schraub, "What We Put There Ourselves":

The problem with this appeal to what lies "deep down" is not that our essence is actually corrupt — I don't believe America is "essentially" (unavoidably, irretrievably) racist any more than I believe that we're "essentially" non-racist. The problem is that when we believe that something "deep down" is in fundamental tension with these sorts of practices, it suggests that there is some sort of natural arc that will resist them for us — absolving us from putting in the hard work of doing the resistance ourselves. Or worse: it seductively promises that these things can't be happening here because "that's not who we are." It becomes tautology that an act of the United States of America can't truly be racist precisely because "that's not who we are."

But it's wrong. It is who we are, right up until the moment that it isn't. There's nothing deep down inside us that prevents us from being a racist, bigoted, prejudiced nation. It is not destiny, or character, or essence that makes America what it is. It is our choices, our decisions, our behavior, our practices.

That is motivating for me. Justice is not like gravity. So bend the arc, just a little, because it will not happen on its own. Any weight is better than none.

[kore]

Wow, that's great.

[sovay]

Wow, that's great.

I like Schraub a lot. He is one of the people I read regularly on politics because even if the politics are depressing, I don't feel as though I've been whammed over the head with an injunction to be depressed even more. Also he's a lawyer and his opinions on all of the legal mishegos that has been flying around are consistently cogent.

[edit] From his latest, for example, "The Media Is Not Part of the Liberal Family":

And let's be clear: within the liberal "family", that sort of introspective consideration is valuable. We should be considering the thoughts that are hard or inconvenient for us, we should be forcing ourselves to contemplate arguments or positions that challenge our own (conservatives should do the same). And the journalists, whom (I strongly suspect) are generally left-of-center in their private commitments, think that's what they're doing. They're not going to waste time confirming what's already known -- that there are some psychopaths in the Republican caucus who are pretty much avowed White Supremacists, or that there is a growing right-wing endorsement of explicitly authoritarian language towards the media as "enemies of the American people", or that undocumented immigrants remain human beings and do not deserve to be caged up and torn from their families. That's easy. What's hard is the act of forcing other members of the "family" to deal with truly inconvenient, facts and perspectives, ones that don't come naturally.

But here's the thing: journalists are not part of the liberal family. Not professionally, anyway. In their professional capacity, their job isn't to uncover the facts and narratives that are inconvenient for themselves or their tribe. Or more aptly, their "tribe", so long as they're acting as journalists, is the entirety of the United States. Which means that, for much of their audience, it is quite "inconvenient" that Republican Congressman Steve King is a White Supremacist, and it's quite "inconvenient" that Republican Congressman Greg Gianforte physically assaulted a reporter, and it's quite "inconvenient" that the Trump administration's Muslim ban was explicitly based on racism and the Supreme Court has now decided that's okay. That these facts may seem too obvious, too much like conventional wisdom, to the journalist, or even to all the journalist's friends, is utterly immaterial. Because as it happens, they're apparently not obvious for large swaths of the country.

I have seen this same problem approached from the angle of virtue/vice signaling, but I find it much more useful to have it laid out in terms of the obvious and non-obvious. That might make people see it more, rather than getting hung up on whether their ethics are being challenged.

[asakiyume]

This one requires a little more processing on my part. If I'm understanding it, the point is that things that some audiences consider established information that goes without saying are, for other audiences, still news, and that therefore they bear saying, yes?

[sovay]

If I'm understanding it, the point is that things that some audiences consider established information that goes without saying are, for other audiences, still news, and that therefore they bear saying, yes?

Yes. I may not have included enough context. He's talking about the phenomenon where the media consistently underreports right-wing wrongdoing while paying disproportionate attention to the misdeeds of the left, as if these sets of behavior are (a) morally equivalent (b) equally newsworthy. Most arguments I've seen go for the first point. Schraub focuses his argument on the second, proceeding from the assumption that most journalists lean left themselves and therefore think of themselves as providing useful correctives to the tendency of any community to get complacent; unfortunately it is not the job of the media to serve as the conscience of the American political left, but as the conscience of the entire country, which means that they should be screaming from the rooftops about white supremacy and political corruption and breathtaking state-sponsored cruelty even if it means they miss a story about Democratic infighting, because whether you or I or the journalists like it or not, it is news to much of the country that stealing children from parents lawfully seeking asylum is bad. Otherwise, in the belief that they are providing fair and balanced coverage, they are unintentionally stacking the deck. They are treating conservative bad behavior as status quo while calling out liberal failure as the thing in need of correction. And that is not a good thing because it gives ammunition to the Republicans, but is also just a failure of an independent press.

[asakiyume]

That's excellent. "Deep down" is an illusion: it's like when you don't actually reach out to a person, but you're thinking of them. Unless the person is telepathic, your thinking about them does the person as much good as someone who hasn't given them even a moment's thought. Or as the saying goes, handsome is as handsome does. And yes, any weight is better than none.

[ivy]

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Keep doing good!

[asakiyume]

And good is good; got to keep remembering that.

[kore]

It's never pointless to talk people about going out of their way to be kind. It is not sugar-coating, rose-glassing, Panglossing: it is what's real. There is no point in trying to marshal resources to fight for a better world if you behave as though the better world is worthless.

That is a great way to put it.

I also personally think that now more than ever is a time when we need to be kind and to support kindness where we find it. I would still punch Mitch McConnell right in his fucking nuts if I ever got near him though ahem.

[asakiyume]

Edited (Mitch McConnell made me forget HTML, it's his fault) --LOL; he has the effect on people.

[kore]

My husband is the kind of guy who would stop and carefully rescue a cicada that was stuck upside down on a hot Iowa sidewalk (in gratitude, a bunch of them would sing right underneath our bedroom window all evening) and the stuff he says about McConnell....well.

[sovay]

(Mitch McConnell made me forget HTML, it's his fault)

Punch him in the nuts again!

[kore]

Peggy and Cap can take turns punching him too.

[amaebi]

*LAUGH*

Of course you have to go through Elaine Chao first-- extra pleasure!

[sonia]

not everything can be quantified.

That is an excellent and comforting point. Also I keep telling myself that other people are doing their part, and I can't do it all myself.

[kore]

Well, the stories and photos are beautiful, and there are people who care about you and want to see what you're doing, and people like me who can't go anywhere (agoraphobia) greatly enjoy them. Even the most badass of partisans and freedom fighters need breaks, and beauty and music and food and other non-fight things.

I guess if people in Egipto can paint "Egipto vive" and can protect the stranger, I can keep... doing my small, small thing.

I think that's pretty damn important.

[asakiyume]

I'm very glad to be able to give you a peek at the places we visited--it's the very least someone who's lucky enough to go traveling can do (hopefully in a non obnoxious way. ... When I was a kid I used to make new friends sit down with my family's photo albums and show them all the pictures, starting with my parents' wedding. Maybe not as interesting to non-family members as to you, younger self! ... Eventually I learned not to do that.)

[kore]

I LOVE travel pictures, of all kinds. And aww, I love other peoples' family photo albums too. They're fun. And the ones with stories are best.

[asakiyume]

Past me is just bouncing with with eagerness to sit you down with the photo albums (though past me was short on entertaining stories)

[sovay]

Even the most badass of partisans and freedom fighters need breaks, and beauty and music and food and other non-fight things.

*can sing some partisan songs, can confirm*

[kore]

OH HERE'S ONE OF MY FAVES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSpqj3V0s2E

I can't find the badass live version of that, though, damn.

[kore]

Oh, it's still on their website! Aww bless http://www.chumba.com/downloads.html

This one's neat too (bonus: hot violinist) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxFX8fyWpTM

[asakiyume]

Oooh, lots of goodies to listen to ♥ ♥ ♥

[minoanmiss]

Yes, indeed.

[asakiyume]

^_^