I don’t know how to start this newsletter because there are so many things I want to say. So many thoughts bouncing around in my head that I can’t quite string together to form a neat narrative. Yet life often doesn’t fit a neat narrative, as much as we might like it to. I’m realising that. What’s happening around the world: wars, genocides, unabashed corruption, gross inequality, collapsing ecosystems — there is no distinct beginning, middle and end to the absurdity. What do you do when it all feels like middle, with no end in sight?
This is a question I’ve been asking myself since I returned from Uzbekistan two weeks ago. While away, I was confronted by environmental degradation in a way I hadn’t before. It demanded my attention. It said: hey, don’t you dare look away too. Technically a foreigner staying in the country, there was little I could truly do. I didn’t know the laws, and being on a visa that could easily be revoked, I certainly didn’t feel like I had the legal right to kick up a fuss. The sense of grief would often get so much, I’d wince and look away or simply go numb, scrambling to the safe corners of my mind.
Flight and freeze are normal human reactions to fear. They are not the same as refusing to witness things or being in denial. An unfettered input of negative information can quickly overwhelm me to the point of dysfunction, which is not helpful for me or anyone else for that matter. Yet for things to change on a larger, collective scale, I know that my response to injustice needs to be one of fight, of resistance. As a result, I’ve figured out that if I engage with the source of despair laterally and/or in community, I can better activate my sense of fight and even sustain it.
I categorically don’t want to stop witnessing things around me, especially when thousands of people in Palestine and Israel are murdered due to violent settler colonialism. Or when hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives are cut short by Russia’s ruthless invasion of Ukraine. Or when people die in massacres most have never heard about because documentation tools are unavailable or suppressed.
The past is the present is the future. Whether we like it or not, we’re on a historical timeline. In a world riddled with lies, to bear witness to the murder of people who don’t want to be forgotten is an act of upholding the truth. To bear witness to the extinction of insects, animals and our shared habitats with them, as well as the preventable warming of our planet, is an act of upholding the truth. These things cannot be separated. They are one.
In Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit writes: “Lies gradually erode the capacity to know and to connect. In withholding or distorting knowledge or imparting falsehood, a liar deprives others of the information they need to participate in public and political life, to avoid dangers, to understand the world around them, to act on principle, to know themselves and others and the situation, to make good choices, and ultimately to be free.”
As soon as we give up the fight to uphold the truth, we give up our chance to be free.
What I read this week:
The Wall by John Lanchester: I got this book as a gift a few Christmases ago, and despite coming across some negative reviews, I thought it was an interesting bit of speculative fiction about climate change.
“We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other” - Jewish Currents