somewhere under the sky

despairwork

yesterday i woke up to the doomsday results of tuesday's midterm elections. even though the so-called options were between, in the words of Ani Difranco, tweedledumb and tweedledumber, unfortunately tweedledumbers won for both governor of Ohio and southeast Ohio's 6th district representative. so instead of just bad news, it was bad-er news. comments made by politicians who had won or lost ("America is the greatest nation in the history of the earth") made me want to run far away from this country. i've wanted to run away before, but knowing that my "representative" wants to cut the National Endowment for the Arts, really, truly, does make me want to run away. a politician in connecticut spent almost $50 million in her campaign, which she lost, and then partied for four hours by offering her republican supporters an open bar. she got half a million votes. $100 a person.

i walked out of my apartment thinking about one more aspect of how this democracy is a joke - elections are a game played mainly by millionaires and the only thing they care about is winning or losing. then i walked past a couple girls who were collecting money for Athens County Children Services. i gave a couple dollars, but instead of feeling warm and fuzzy, i just felt despair: "thanks," one of the girls said, "sometimes these are the only christmas presents the kids get."
maybe if someone spent $50 million on a political campaign and then funded a program for the entire state, in which every single child had food, shelter, clothing, and appropriate education, i wouldn't have so much of a problem. yeah, it's difficult. but i'm sick of bureaucratic and logistical excuses. there is no excuse that children go hungry. look into the eyes of a hungry child and say "well, i'm trying but really it's more important that we fund Israel's army to kill Palestinian civilians and we need to give them tanks so they can keep those people in a state of siege, so i'm sorry, you'll just have to stay hungry until we can figure this out."
and thus, yet another day began full of deep despair that the world is not how it should be, my refusal to accept the idea that maybe it's okay that it's not how it should be, and the feeling that it seems like most other people ARE accepting this idea.

the good news is, i stumbled upon something called "despairwork" in a book called "Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age" by Joanna Macy. here are some poignant ideas i have read so far: "We are not closed off from the world, but integral components of it, like cells in a larger body. When part of that body is traumatized, we sense that trauma too - in the sufferings of fellow-beings, in the pillage of our planet, and even in the violation of future generations. When the condition of the larger system falters, sickens, as is occurring in our present age of exploitation and nuclear technology, the disturbance we feel at a semi-conscious level is acute. Like the impulses of pain in any ailing organism they serve a positive purpose, these impulses of pain are warning signals...Yet we tend to repress that pain. We block it out because it hurts, because it is frightening, and most of all because we do not understand it and consider it to be a dysfunction, an aberration, a sign of personal weakness...As a society we are caught between a sense of impending apocalypse and the fear of acknowledging it. In this 'caught' place, our responses are blocked and confused..." so we all to some extent lead "double lives:" "One one level we maintain a more or less up-beat capacity to carry on as usual - getting up in the morning and remembering which shoe goes on which foot, getting the kids off to school...and all the while, underneath, there is this inchoate knowledge that our world could go at any moment." the author goes through the causes of repression, of this societal psychic numbing (fear of pain, of appearing morbid, of appearing stupid, of guilt, of causing distress, of provoking disaster, of sowing panic, of religious doubt, or of appearing too emotional), then the effects of repression (fragmentation and alienation, political passivity, destructive behaviors, psychological projection, diminished intellectual performance, burn-out, sense of powerlessness), then how despairwork came about (which was not at first a theory but simply people trying to deal with this world in a productive way and sow peace and healing), and then chapter two moves into theoretical foundations of it.

i have never felt so comforted that in fact i am not crazy, that really most people probably do feel a sense of pain for the world, it's just that we don't talk about it because it's overwhelming, we are afraid to show emotion, to cry in public, to appear unreasonable, we are passed off as idealists, as if what is Good couldn't also be what is Real. all this pain is repressed, and while "each days news brings fresh cause for grief" we still go about our day and our routines, etc. etc., and in my heart i carry a heavy burden for all the children who are dying, mothers who are suffering, men who are teased, war, famine, natural disasters, etc. tell me you don't carry this burden also? why can we not grieve together? and then do something about it? (the book offers methods and strategies to channel this sorrow into creative means).

today i woke up to reports of malnourished children in South Korea and i thought of the thousands of pounds of food "waste" generated in this country. "waste" that could not only feed children in South Korea but families in Appalachia who are hungry too. this really has nothing to do with socialism or any political belief. it is a simple belief: every life is valuable. not just rich people's lives, or white people's lives, or men's lives, or U.S. people's lives, but every fucking life. and when there is enough food, medicine, and technology to go around, then there is no excuse.
also today, i was tutoring a Chinese student in the library and i made a comment that some students near us were being loud. she looked over and then said to me, "black people," with a shake of her head. i said, "what does their being black have to do with it?"
she said, "oh, well i just said that because the other day there was a group of black people and they were being loud." WHAT??
i said, "well, white people are loud too, it has nothing to do with the fact that they are black."
"oh, okay," she said.
WHAT?? where on earth is this Chinese student, living in the U.S., getting her prejudices from?

everything is messed up and the world is complicated. but, my god, if we are afraid to speak out, to feel this pain, to grieve, to act, to cry, to heal, then this whole world is going to hell.
so, let's stop repressing it, let's weep together and let's learn strategies to act.

posted by leah v @ 8:00 PM