and still be a warrior

On the Thread Between Sorrow and Beauty

Photo by Kathya Meza on Unsplash

It takes a lot to put one foot in front of the other in this world, at this time.

And yet: the line between sorrow and beauty is filament thin.

Our elders — my grandparents and yours, my teachers and yours, all the wise ones who came before us — would laugh and say Honey, you think it was any different years ago? You don’t even wanna know.

I come to the table of privilege as a white, middle class woman who grew up in Queens, New York in the 1970s; I had an excellent public school education, and good health care. I was given every book I asked for, and a library card when I was seven years old. I went to sleepaway camp for ten years. Music was extremely important in my family, and I learned to play guitar when I was four, piano when I was ten, clarinet when I was eleven. I played sports daily. When money was a problem (which it often was, with two parents whose idea of necessity was starkly, dangerously different) it was mostly kept from me, except for the odd weeks when we ate frozen blintzes five nights in a row. When it came time for me to apply to university, my parents were already divorced; my mother didn’t think my going to college was even necessary, and my father supported my wanting to go to school as far away as I could possibly get.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors. - Adrienne Rich

Woven in among the stories of music lessons and sporting wins, the dogs we lived with, the books I read, and the meals that my grandmother made every night for us were darker threads. My father kept the details of the Holocaust from me for as long as he could, until 1978, when the mini-series, Holocaust, came out, and at fourteen, I sat in my bedroom and watched the entire thing on my tiny color television with my mouth hanging open; nothing would ever be the same for me. It was impossible for me to fathom how people could do to each other what had been done to this massive population of Europeans less than fifty years earlier. When some of my school friends told me that their parents met in the camps, I didn’t realize that they were talking about Displaced Person’s Camps; when the wife of our local grocer pushed the sleeve of her sweater up while standing at the cash register, revealing tattooed numbers on her arm, my grandmother pulled me out of the store and said nothing. I was fifteen when I was told the story of my great-grandmother, a Ukrainian beet farmer, who, at eighty, was murdered in October 1942 by Einsatzgruppen, solely because of the way she prayed.

A year earlier, Alex Haley’s Roots revealed the hideous foundation beneath much of American history; at fourteen, many of my school friends were directly touched by the story, and had grandparents who had grown up the grandchildren of people born into slavery. Institutionalized racism and cleansing are horrifically common — we see them now every day — but as ethno-and-geopolitical constructs, they were taught to us in broad brush strokes. What we were never shown were the smaller, more personal stories of cruelty that defy human imagination. In the movie The Pianist, there is a scene where Nazi officers enter an apartment in Warsaw. Its residents are expected to stand, but one, an older man in a wheelchair, can’t. The officers pick up the chair with him in it, and throw it off the balcony. This kind of treatment, and worse, was frequent, with Nazi command giving permission to its soldiers to be as creatively, shockingly cruel as they could possibly be. In the American South, stories of the rape of young (and old) Black women and girls abound. Cruelty has been standardized, codified, weaponized. Cruelty is the point, wrote Adam Serwer in 2018, and as we can see, it is wildly effective as a political tool. Nesrine Malik writes, in Georgetown University’s Global Dialogues Forum,

Cruelty thrives in atomization and silos. And what is most striking about modernity is how we increasingly interface with each other not in physical spaces, but virtual ones, where our ability to make our own judgements and human connections is limited. The ease with which one can then dismiss and demonize others in these spaces becomes gamified, rendering cruelty almost akin to a competitive sport.

Historically, I have a very hard time seeing cruelty of any kind; I continue to be called overly-sensitive. I can read the papers and watch the news, but eventually they so undo me that I can’t move forward or backward. I can’t think straight. At its worst, I get shocky; my nervous system goes off-line, which is where it has been the last week or so. I forget to eat, forget to walk, forget to drink water, forget to go to bed, forget to get out of bed, forget that I am trying to maintain early sobriety (which is dodgy enough) as a way to take back control of my own health and my own spirit which, until last October, seemed to belong to someone else. In this state, I forget almost everything.

It’s impossible to untangle horror, to craft a pithy pseudo-spiritual narrative around it. Instead, I have been paralyzed with rage and sorrow, which are two sides of the same coin.

So I have to be honest with you; many of you have been subscribers to this newsletter since the very beginning, and I owe you the truth. The cruelty embedded in recent news has kept me away from my desk because I’ve been struggling to organize my thoughts; attempting to make meaning (much less, sense) during times like the ones we’re living in feels fruitless. It’s impossible to untangle horror, to craft a pithy pseudo-spiritual narrative around it. Instead, I have been paralyzed with rage and sorrow, which are two sides of the same coin. The tipping points for me were the fall of Graham Platner, and then, the cold-blooded murders of two hard-working young men of color, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, and Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. The two men were killed, it appears, in error. [In. Error.] The man responsible for killing Guerrero, it has been revealed, has a long history of violent behavior that includes throwing boiling water at his ex-wife while she was holding their child. On another occasion, according to a voicemail sent to the Associated Press, he told one of the women in his life that someone should slit her throat. His second ex-wife, who would only speak under condition of anonymity after filing multiple requests for orders of protection, wrote in one of the applications for protection that he suffered from depression and PTSD.

My heart goes out to anyone with those diagnoses; I know them well, and intimately.

Early on in his campaign, I made the statement to a friend in Maine that I thought Graham Platner’s tattoo was going to be a problem — right or wrong, even if it was somehow misinterpreted and meant nothing — among some Jewish voters in Maine. You would have thought that my words were the most incendiary she’d ever heard; they were, in fact, just an opinion, and there was no room for an opinion that didn’t align with hers. This surprised me because we liberals like to think of ourselves as open-minded and ready at any time for honest discussion. What I left out of my conversation with this person was the fact that, from the very beginning, I also got, shall we say, not-good vibes from the candidate, and so did many, many women with backgrounds like mine that involve sexual assault. (And I have no problem talking about this; it is not my shame to carry, a fact that I’ve finally come to at sixty-three.) But I chose to say nothing rather than be torn limb from limb by my own colleagues and friends who saw him as the candidate having the greatest possible chance of beating Republican Senator Susan Collins. It was suggested to me by the few I did tell that my lack of understanding about him was because I was from away — a Maine euphemism that can sometimes mean different things depending where you are in the state — and that I should mind my own business. (I suggested that perhaps Platner’s campaign should have rejected my — and all — out-of-state donations, if being from away was such a problem. And yes, I donated to his campaign early on, as well as his Democratic opponent’s, before any of the stories broke about him.)

What left me staggering, though, was not the insistence that this man with the highly questionable background, who was barely vetted, was progressive Maine’s greatest chance for effecting important and much-needed change; I could completely understand why he would appeal to people — myself included — who have become exhausted by politics-as-usual. What stunned me was the almost frenetic acceptance of a candidate repeatedly accused of the same thing that Brett Kavanaugh was accused of before Susan Collins tipped the scales and elected him a supreme court judge for life, which led directly to the overturning of Roe v Wade after fifty years of settled law.

The convenient thing about assault is that it knows no party lines, no color, no ethnicity, no religion. It is a historical weapon of power. It crosses political aisles. It knows no net worth, although it certainly seems that the rich are more likely to get away with it. It doesn’t care if a perpetrator or a victim has a PhD, an MD, or a GED, or no degree. The argument that I heard repeatedly was that Jenny Racicot somehow asked for it because she left her door open. Everyone in that part of Maine leaves their door open. When my wife and I stayed in midcoast at the home belonging to some friends, I asked for the key; they just laughed. But the thing that smashed my heart to pieces was this: most of the people in my life who argued that the assaulted woman was somehow asking for it, or was setting up the candidate despite his known and even admitted history, were women.

This is where the issue hits a little too close to home for me. My own experience involved a local teacher and pillar of the community where I was raised; he told me that no one would ever possibly believe me, which is a line straight from the standard assault script (think Cosby, Weinstein, Polanski, Allen). My mother, who was enraged when I finally told her, first asked me these two questions: What did you do to lure him, and Maybe he just thought you were pretty. I was eleven (and nine, and ten). Please: I tell this story not for pity, but because I want it to be very clear how deep the cultural belief that women — girls — ask for it runs.

We are the ones who are never believed. And we are the ones who have to explain the definition of No, again and again.

My mother was a product of her times who I am certain had the same experiences as a child. Still her words bounced around my brain until the day she died. In order for us to have a relationship, I had to bury them, to dig a hole and cover them with six feet of cement. I had to forget, to ignore, to forgive, to write her words off to profound mental illness. But when the Weinstein case was in every newspaper, my mother drank her morning coffee at my dining room table while reading the Times and said Don’t kid yourself. All those women wanted it. Her words made me physically ill; I put her in an Uber and sent her back to New York.

So many of us who saw the news this week, watched the continued violence unfolding in our streets, and spoke their truth about Platner and men like him — we are overloaded with sorrow, as though we’re carrying satchels crammed to bursting with an ancient anguish that feels impossible to metabolize, and this anguish feels as though it is being carried primarily by women: We are the ones who are expected to say nothing out of political expedience. We are the ones who risk our lives by picking up the phone and calling the authorities, praying to God that they will protect us. We are the ones who hope that our boyfriends and husbands don’t come home drunk, beat us, our children, and shoot our dogs. We are the ones who go to jail for protecting our families from violent, armed, severely mentally-ill partners who were easily able to acquire semi-automatic weapons and jobs as law enforcement. But we are also the ones who don’t expect other women to turn the other cheek, and throw us under the bus if we have the temerity to tell the truth that so many of us privately suspected, but decided was the lesser of two evils.

We are the ones who are never believed. And we are the ones who have to explain the definition of No, again and again.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors wrote Adrienne Rich, and so we weep until we have nothing left. But we don’t stop. We do not stop. We don’t stop caring for our aging parents and our babies and our neighbors and our ill partners. We hold down two and three jobs; we take our kids to the doctor and have no idea how the hell we’re going to pay for it; we drop them off at school and pray there are no shootings; we make public statements when our spouses are victims of mistaken identity by law enforcement, and then take our children shopping for funeral clothes. (Do they make them in 6-X? I don’t know. But I live in Newtown, Connecticut, so I suppose I should.)

But every single thing we do to care for those in our midst in the face of this world in which we’re living, stranger or not, is an act of beauty and bravery. Every single one. Every time we remember to take care of ourselves and our communities is an act of beauty and bravery. We plod ahead, creating our gardens, feeding our children, making our art, sustaining ourselves and those around us, forever weeping, forever warriors, no matter who we are, however angry or divided.

My silences had not protected me, wrote Audre Lorde. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

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