Dear ones,
It seems too easy, or maybe inappropriate or at least contrived, to tell you that when I was in the hospital this week I was thinking of the hospitals in Gaza. But it’s also true, and so I will tell you that on these regular visits to the Cleveland Clinic where P goes for cancer treatment and I go for fibroid care, that I can’t help but think of the building in pieces, can’t help but imagine cancer and fibroid care coming a distant second to tending shrapnel wounds and missing limbs. I read an article about malnourished pregnant women in Gaza who are too starved to nurse. Two days earlier, the young ob-gyn resident says like a script, “First off, we believe you and we’re going to get you relief.” I get a $1,200 bill after the appointment this week, none of which is covered by insurance, and think about the US government’s military budget.
I’ve written and deleted three different versions of this, feeling like both everyone and not enough of us are saying some version of “I am finding it difficult to live my daily life and also process an ongoing genocide.”
The thing about going from never being at the hospital to always being at the hospital is that you remember how devastatingly skillful we are at adapting to impossible conditions. I have said so many times that I could never have imagined a life with enough time for the number of appointments P and I now have, but that we simply make the time anyway. I know from so many videos and stories I read that somehow Palestinians are adapting to war. An impossible task to go through the grief of losing entire families, to go from a sturdy home to a tent, to go from the abundance of olives and dates and tahini to pale scraps of animal feed, to hear bombs instead of birds. It is too much to ask of a human heart…. But no one is asking.
When the weather goes from 67 degrees to a snowstorm one day to the next — which has been the case here in Ohio for the past few weeks — I get angry. “Stupid weather,” I grumble to P on a walk. P gently urges me to redirect my frustration. “The weather is just responding to what capitalism has done to it, it’s just trying to adjust. Of course it’s going to be a little erratic.” I soften immediately and apologize to the wind, the cool in the air. It doesn’t owe any of us a gentle transition; it’s allowed to remind us that the level of destruction it's endured will inevitably result in a violent response. That’s how trauma works.
Aaron Bushnell chose to adapt like the weather. Not easy, not without a fight, not without a message. Of course I am still thinking of Aaron, who was an anarchist and lived in Ohio for a bit and had a face that felt so familiar, a smile that was so big. I think about Aaron inviting in pain while I am at the hospital seeking relief from it. I read about Aaron and I cry: Aaron loved cats; Aaron listened to the Braiding Sweetgrass audiobook after his friend asked him to think differently about how he viewed plants; before he went to the embassy, Aaron deleted Signal to protect his friends. One friend lovingly described Aaron as being principled “to the point of being annoying,” which so many anarchists shared on social media, because we’ve been accused of being annoying too, or because we are in circles with the people who can get annoying.
It is annoying to be less adaptive to “what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” It is annoying when we say Biden is just as bad as Trump, when we beg for people to have a bigger imagination than the lesser of two evils. In the prison abolition class I’m teaching, I remind my students that abolitionists adopted the language from the movement to abolish slavery, which was also called impossible at one point. “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings,” goes the oft-quoted reminder from Ursula K. LeGuin. “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
I think it is our task to find ways to refuse to consent to the normalcy of genocide, of poverty, of racist police murders, of no money for healthcare and so much for war. I also believe, deeply, in insisting on livable lives for all of us in the midst of this. I am in so much heartbroken awe over Aaron’s act, but I don’t want more death. How do we adapt without complacency, how do we find ways to survive and find joy (and ease and relief) in impossible conditions while continuing to fight against them?
These are the questions I’m sitting with. I don’t have answers, but I know that some of it starts with more people taking seriously the possibility of other ways of being. The annoying but necessary demand that we consider that if we can’t get the state to stop funding a genocide (or killing Black people and poor people or denying care to trans people or pregnant people), then we have to stop the state.
That’s all for now. Lighter-hearted recommended reading/watching/listening links below. I love you. <3
love & solidarity,
raechel
Reading.
Four years ago Jamie Hood wrote an essay called “Fucking Like a Housewife” that many feminists and brainy sex-focused types (hello) loved for the sharp and graceful insight it offered into questions of desire and domesticity. Last month, The New Inquiry published a sequel of sorts, in which Hood updates her initial remarks and also reflects on her motivations behind the first piece. Hood is a simply stunning writer, and this vulnerable, perspicacious and illuminating piece is a clear showcase of her talent and intellect.
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