Breaking Points and Biodiversity
Some years ago, I spent a few emotionally rocky weeks in a city in which I used to live. There to get care in the wake of a traumatic event, I was in sore need of soothing. So, I switched on the television and tuned into the cable access station to watch the semi-weekly city council meeting, as I used to do assiduously when I lived there, knowing that hearing familiar voices drone on about zoning permits would make my hotel room feel like home.
On that day, a local group was petitioning the city to divest from Israel in order not to fund ongoing violence against the people of Palestine. So far, so normal: That sort of thing is very common in that city. But one of the men in the group was behaving in a strange and almost deranged manner that undercut any sympathy the council or viewers of the cable access show were likely to have for his cause. He paraded back and forth before the camera with scrawled signs, rudely distracting viewers from other community members who had come to address the council about equally legitimate issues. When it was his turn to speak, he ranted almost incoherently, accusing the council of killing babies, as if they personally had ordered soldiers to aggress refuge camps.
From my vantage point, I could easily think of an argument much more likely to achieve the stated aims: The city ought to divest in order not to seem to be taking sides in an international conflict about which the local community is divided. But such moderation was clearly beyond the capacity of this man at that time.
“He’s passed some sort of breaking point,” I said out loud, even though there was nobody there to hear.
Later, I found out that was true. When I mentioned the council meeting to a politically active friend in that city, she told me that the man in question had recently returned from one of those tours of Palestine through which Americans are able to actually see the impact of Israeli policies supported and in part funded by the United States. He’d been unhinged ever since, engaging in erratically aggressive protest tactics by which he vented his own feelings of anger and frustration but, unfortunately, tended to hinder rather than help his own cause.
I’ve noticed the same dynamic many times in many activist movements. I remember one person with AIDS who worked with an ACTUP chapter with which I also worked. He’d had a hard-knock life even before contracting HIV and was so relentlessly angry that he could not have a conversation about any AIDS-related issue without eventually starting to shout. He was, consequently, great at giving fiery speeches but not the person to send into a delicate negotiation.
Some animal advocates have had so much literally hands-on experience with human-engendered animal suffering — holding broken animals in their arms over and over and over again — that they simply cannot countenance any of the usual excuses people give for their participation in animal exploitation. I witnessed one such activist, otherwise brilliant, blow the opportunity to get good coverage of a protest because she simply could not stop trying to pressure a reporter into personally going vegan. Instead of feeding the initially friendly reporter juicy facts and quotes that might have influenced many people to think about going vegan, she became increasingly incensed, eventually starting to shout.
I’m thinking about this today because somebody posted a comment critiquing a recent post for being less compassionate than s/he has come to expect from this blog. In thinking about that, I realized that whatever patience I had with Barack Obama is currently out of commission due to the one-two punch of Gaza and Pakistan.
My patience had been frayed by the post-election announcements of Obama’s cabinet picks (more right than left and overwhelmingly male) and then snapped on Inauguration Day, at the moment Barack Obama spoke these words:
We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
Leaving aside the fact that “our way of life” has wrecked the worldwide economy and pushed the planet to the brink of environmental catastrophe, Israel was — at that moment, with weapons supplied by the USA — advancing its aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents in Gaza, in the midst of a massacre against which Obama had not and still has not spoken a single discouraging word. Since then, Obama has kept his promise to lob bombs into Pakistan despite the protests of its government, thereby advancing his own aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents.
I find myself no less sickened by this maneuver — committing or supporting terrorism while self-righteously scolding “terrorists” — now that Obama rather than Bush is its perpetrator.
I wish it were otherwise. But I find that Obama’s tepid steps in the right direction on some issues do not mitigate my heartsickness at still living in a country that so shamelessly terrorizes others while claiming the moral high ground. I simply cannot feel charitable toward this man while Pakistan explodes. As a Pakistani friend just wrote me, that country is increasingly (and frighteningly) unstable. Anybody with sense and a modicum of modesty can see that more meddling from afar — especially in the form of incendiary devices certain to sometimes go astray — will only literally inflame an already dangerous situation.
Whoa — before this post gets any longer, let me step back from the brink of a rant about hubris and duplicity to say: You see what I mean? I’m just not able, at present, to be dispassionate and patient about the actions of our newly-elected president. And so, if there is some work to be done (and there is quite a bit, I think) that requires such dispassionate patience, somebody ought to do it, but, as Bob Dylan said, “It ain’t me, babe.”
All of which brings us back to one of my persistent themes: Movement biodiversity. There are so many different kinds of work to be done on so many interrelated issues that there’s no need for everybody to try to do everything and certainly no cause for anybody to try to undertake tasks for which they are constitutionally or situationally unsuited. No, I’m probably not the person to write a moderately phrased editorial complimenting Obama on his virtues and gently suggesting that he rethink Pakistan. Somebody else can write that one. I’ll write the fierce piece that makes the moderate piece look even more moderate in comparison. Together, we’ll show that a diversity of voices are calling for a deescalation in American-sponsored aggression, not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Palestine too.
March 19th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
In reference to my last comment: I was too harsh on you. Of course we need a variety of voices to speak (or shout, as is the case today) from the Left. But I also feel protective, probably over, because of the invidious and irrelevant criticism lobbed on President Obama daily from the conservative Right. I also worry how criticism—not critique—from White Neoliberals, Inc. affects the many nonwhite citizens who voted for Obama.
Although he must be taken to task for his role in, as you mentioned, homophobia, sexism, classism, and jingoistic war aspirations, I believe we must take care not to delegitimize the hope that Obama, as an African-American, the first African-American president in point of fact, engenders in many of the poorest and most oppressed in the US. I myself am looking for ways to balancing both concerns, so I know it is not easy.
But criticism alone is not going to cut it. We need a plan of action. Posturing and bloviating only makes us seem like intractable radicals on the fringes of society, with nothing substantive to offer. And I guess that was my point. I didn’t mean to imply the best critique is florid and toothless, but words alone won’t change a nation.
In response to this post: I’m personally divided on the issue of Pakistan, not because I think the US should be involved, but because while the government publically decries the increased mobilization of US-led forces, it secretly worships at the altar of American intervention.
And that is to say nothing of President Zardari, who, taking his cues from former “Prime Minister” Musharraf, openly flouts the rule of law and ruthlessly oppresses dissent through physical intimidation and legal maneuvering.
Thus, while we may argue the US should withdrawal all forces from Pakistan, I think it is a dangerous idea to imply we somehow support the Pakistani government in its lawlessness. And continually—and gleefully—inserting the epithet “Let’s Bomb Pakistan” in President Obama’s name is not only glib, it smacks of self-satisfied condescension.
But I absolutely agree that, as you’ve mentioned, it is vital the Left be allowed and stay motivated to keep critiquing the current situation, to prevent Pakistan, and our own government, from floating off into Right-Wing oblivion. For that to be possible, we need to strength of all liberals to anchor this administration in reality.
Wow. That was long. Sorry.
March 20th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Lennon, you don’t seem as pissed off about Pakistan as some of us - perhaps as regards this topic you are one of the people who who might act effectively, giving us the ‘movement biodiversity’ mentioned in the post.
Let the rest of us blow off some steam