longer.blue

I’ve tried and failed a dozen times to ~“say something”~ about the past month and all the evils and insanities that it has given us. Each attempt has quickly turned into writing about the past year, and then the past decade, because, well, how could it not? The horrors that we continue to wake up to every morning are simply the new and improved horrors of last week, last year, last century. We’ve been inventing new ways to increase human suffering for the sake of political, cultural, and financial gain for all of history, and America has taken a deep pride in being at the forefront of this innovation since its founding. To enumerate the examples from just my life so far would probably take until the end of it, so I’ll spare us both. Google is free. Anyone reading this could probably guess the things I’m angry about this week, and the things I was angry about last month, and things I’ve been angry about for over a decade. In a way, I hate that. I don’t like being angry. I don’t want to be angry. But at the same time, I’m proud of and thankful for my anger. I firmly believe anger is a totally understandable and, actually, appropriate response to *gestures broadly*. I believe it’s a real and normal and valid human emotion, given to us by God, as a tool and a guide, and a means of bearing His image. Humans doing evil angers God and it should anger us as well. I’m thankful for my anger because it’s proof that my God-given conscience correctly identifies evil and injustice as unacceptable. It’s proof that I care. And yet, in the face of evil, anger alone is not a productive or sustainable response. To quote the late Toni Morrison: “Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling—I don't think it's any of that—it's helpless ... it's absence of control—and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that—I have no use for it whatsoever.” I don’t wholeheartedly agree—evidenced by my second paragraph here—but the idea is worth wrestling with: what does anger actually do for me? Lately I’ve been reflecting on how much anger I carry, and how much I want to continue to carry, and how it’s helped and how it’s hurt me thus far. I came across a quote recently that, for some reason or another, struck me where I stood: “I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.” The quote is almost universally attributed to C.S. Lewis despite there being no evidence that he wrote or said it, but that is beside the point—it hit me like a cinderblock and set my mind on a path to realizing that anger and grief are two sides of the same coin. I realized that so much of my anger over the past decade has been grief in disguise. Grief for the loss of the world I was promised; for the world that I thought existed as I was growing up; for the people I thought my peers, friends, family, leaders, and elders were; for the ways the Church, the government, and every system of power has failed so many of us; for the lessons we should have learned from our ancestors’ failures, from our grandparents’ failures, from our parents’ failures; for the better lives and unrealized dreams and brighter futures and safer worlds that have been stolen from us and our children and their children. In the past month all of the anger and pain and disbelief and broken promises and crushed hopes of the past decade or so have come to a head and left me in a paralyzing state of despair, and in disbelief that a better world is possible. “Okay, cool—why share any of this?” To tell the truth, I don’t really know. I think partly it’s because I’ve been cursed with the need to overshare for my whole life. But also because I’ve found it incredibly encouraging to see other people who have existed in similar circles as me (mainly via the Church) wrestle with this stuff. There is such a deep, isolating pain that has made its way into my soul from seeing people from these circles continue to gleefully choke down (and spew out) the most vile, anti-human, anti-Christ-like rhetoric, policies, and actions that the oppressors of our day have to offer. It’s easy to feel like I’m going insane more days than not; to question if I belong to the places I once did, to question what I’m allowed to feel or be or say or do if I still want to belong, to question if I even want to belong at all anymore. So, I guess all of this is just to say: if you are angry, if you are grieving, if you feel hopeless, or paralyzed, or powerless, if you feel ways that are different from the feelings of friends or family or groups you once belonged to: You’re not alone. You’re not crazy. Your voice matters. I guess ideally I’d also haave some profound solution or response to my reflections on anger and grief. Sadly I don’t really have much other than this: anger and grief can’t be all we’ve got. Call me crazy, but I’m coming around to the idea that constantly looking at my phone and reading the news and sharing snarky quips to my Instagram story might not be the most productive approach to resisting tyranny and creating a better world. All of these things—grief, anger, discourse—have their place, and no healthy person or political movement can exist without some amount of each. But they can’t be the end. We can’t weave in and out of doomscroll-induced comas week after week and call it activism. We can’t rely on reactionary anger as fuel for the long haul. We can’t treat our personal joy and peace and purpose as some secondary mission or auxiliary reprieve after we’ve already exhausted ourselves. If we want to be effective citizens—and good, decent, healthy people in general—we must, as my friend Danté Stewart says, “stay bothered, and after having allowed yourself to feel… get on with living.” Lately I find myself often thinking of Lewis’s essay “On Living in an Atomic Age” where, facing the looming threat of all-out nuclear destruction in 1948, offered the following wisdom: “…the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies… but they need not dominate our minds.” A younger version of me has read these “sensible and human things” before and seen them as lofty, disengaged luxuries that only a privileged, apathetic solipsist would do in response to the world burning down around them. I’m starting to think they might be the very things that save us.