Confessions at holiday time
numbing out and finding hope in the work of that farmer I won't stop writing about
How do you find hope after scrolling through your phone?
First, you see an ad for an item that will make your chest look bigger, and right under it, a Palestinian child who lost her eyes and her family in an airstrike, and right under that the impossibly tiny Israeli hostage running to her father, and jarringly under that the beautiful ambassador of a brand reminding you that you must get this year’s limited glitter lipstick. And then there are memes about the lies of former Congressman George Santos. Somehow, you laugh.
This will most likely be after you have listened to your BBC podcast about a million-dollar lover, where a much younger man suspiciously falls in love with an aging, wealthy widow. You have started the podcast for the drama, but it is not ultimately a wild story. It is an old one, of how hurt people continue to hurt other people. You start scrolling while it plays before you turn the podcast off. It’s just too much, you think before you hop into a warm shower with zero fear of an airstrike.
You think about how many days left the girl without the eyes might have. Who will protect her? You wonder if your breasts are too small. Who decided that, you think with anger. You imagine how the free Israel hostage must be sleeping now. Does she wake up screaming? You think about the dead babies left in the Palestinian NICU. How long did they cry before they took their last breath? You think of your sweet Jewish classmate and her long walk home. You think of the boys in Keffiyehs who got shot in some state you cannot remember. And then you wonder if 45 dollars is too much to spend on lipstick you will wear for one month.
How are we supposed to go into the holiday season and hug each other and open gifts and live amid a million burning fires and the knowledge that a massive chunk of our comfortable lives is directly dependent on the suffering of others? I feel my own brain checking out when I think of colliding apocalypses. The reefs are dying. My country wants to re-elect a man who says he’d start his dictatorship on day one. We’re supporting colonizing war crimes with our taxes. And the world is going to burn faster than we originally thought. Then the useless guilt. Why am I still comfortable? Why are we here debating the merits of a homemade crust or a store-bought one? Which color embroidery on the napkins goes best with that candle?
If you are running around with the kind of guilt that makes you go numb or the kind of sadness that makes you want to give everything up, I would like to drag you and myself over to the words of the man of the land, an old guy named Wendell Berry who I am somewhat in love with. Or, I am in love with the way he sees things, how his words take our face in their hands and show us the power we’ve always had.
A little note, it is about how just one person belonging to their place can have the kind of knowledge and awareness that no power, wealth, or corporation could come against. To know something so well, to know the people around you truly, is a kind of inoculation to the dehumanization and diminishment that the worst things we’ve made rely on to keep running. You cannot save the whole world. But you can save the world inside you, the humanity that was given to you by something greater, and your own heart from disconnecting. It is in that place, that hope and grit and love can grow. And that love can undermine loyalty to what David Dark calls, the Death Party. It can stop whatever story within you that justifies human sacrifice.