I thought about just staying offline today — I misphrased something yesterday in a post that led to some neighbors’ online irritation with me (fully justified irritation, I think, given what they thought I was saying), so I’m feeling embarrassed and like I shouldn’t be let out on the internet until I learn how to speak more clearly.
I HATE feeling like I’ve messed up in public. My face gets hot, I get physical shivers of shame; it’s just an awful feeling, and it makes me want to run away and hide.
That impulse is, of course, sub-optimal. Hiding from this kind of potential pain tends to just increase anxiety and lead to silencing yourself. It’s usually better to keep trying to think well, speak well, and if I mess up, take my licks. Do better, hopefully, in the future.
In one of my local political groups, there’s a current furor around a candidate and things he’s said, and it’s all feeling far more heated than it normally would, I suspect, due to the larger political climate.
Part of me wants to say that those upset are absolutely right to be upset (although he and I agree on some political issues, I generally agree with their position on his candidacy). Given how many people in how many communities are currently in fear for their lives and livelihoods, now seems a particularly unreasonable time to ask folks to moderate their tone.
Still, part of me wants to remind the group that local elected offices are generally unpaid or very low paid positions, and most people don’t really understand the job they’ve signed up for until they’re actually doing it. I was SO ignorant about what was actually involved with library board when I ran for office. But I think I did a reasonably good job nonetheless, once I got past the steep learning curve.
So yes, make candidates be clear about where they currently stand, because how else can you decide whether to vote for them? But also, allow for change and growth once they’re in the job? Be a little patient with their ignorance?
I haven’t posted that in the group though, because I’m not sure it’s really a fair ask. Right now, when America’s political norms are in chaos, I’m not sure is the time to ask that people be nice to politicians. If we’re going to stick up our hands and volunteer to walk into the fire, we have to expect to get a little burned. And if we said or did something, even years ago, that people think is troubling and not what they’d want in their elected representatives — well, we should be held accountable for that too.
Maybe it starts at the local level. Maybe if we actually governed well there, the way we’re supposed to, we could take that up to the state level, the national level.
Four F/SF books I’ve read in the last year have, in different ways, raised the question of how we conduct government, and more specifically, asking if we should shift from incremental improvements to something more radically different. I think they’re all well-written and worth reading (I’m still partway through the last one, but I’m pretty confident of the rec.):
• Ruthanna Emrys Gordon, The Half-Built World
• August Clarke, Metal from Heaven
• Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
• Victoria Goddard, The Hands of the Emperor
I found Clarke’s the most disturbing, as it seems to be arguing that massive violence may simply be the price we need to pay to restructure the system (reminiscent of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth).
Gordon’s is less a prescription and more of a consideration of different approaches (and the dangers therein).
Samatar’s was the most personally challenging, because the incrementalist position is held by an academic, and the book deftly exposes the dangers of that approach (and the arrogance and assumptions of superiority it often holds.)
Goddard’s protagonist is closest to my own current practice at the start of the book — an incrementalist bureaucrat, trying to make what small changes they can to improve the system from within. Yet longing for a more radical shift, wondering if that’s possible.
I’m looking at the national landscape in America right now, and I wish I had more political science knowledge, because I just don’t know. I had a moment yesterday, reading about Elon Musk’s people getting into secured government servers, locking out appointed administrators, when I literally thought — “At what point do we say the checks and balances have failed, and call the military in, to prevent a literal coup?”
Before the last two weeks, I wouldn’t have had that thought.
But in these two weeks, we’ve seeing assaults on women, immigrants, trans and nonbinary folks, minorities, people with disabilities, seniors, children, the working class — every group that one might call marginalized. And the judges are working overtime to stop all the illegal orders, and there are some Congresspeople raising their voices, but not enough, I fear.
At what point do we declare America a failed state?
So no — I’m not going to be the voice calling for kindness to politicians right now. You don’t even have to be kind to me. I will point out if I think something being asked of a local elected is unfair or unreasonable. But right now, I think we all need clarity and bright lines from our political candidates.
Where do you stand? If you don’t know, because this issue has never come up before — well, time to figure it out.
Picture below from a job talk I was really impressed by on Monday — Prof. Eman Ghanayem. “Her research addresses the relationship between natives, settlers, and refugees in both “new” and “old” world contexts. Her first book project, Nations without Nationalisms: On Palestinian and American Indian Literary Imaginations, argues that indigeneity, as expressed in American Indian and Palestinian literatures, offers a necessary critique of (settler) nationalism as a product of the colonial west, as well as represents an alternative form of homemaking that is land-oriented, relational, and can function without a state.” – https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/eman-ghanayem
The picture depicts plants being grown in old grenade casings.
