What do we believe

Background, history built by fragments.  Belief systems.

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
― Audre Lorde

Every day, you get up. You drink coffee. You arrange getting ready so that you meet a train when it arrives at the station. You cross streets without being hit by cars. You read emails, make sense of them, and answer in the tone – fake – and with the information – generally pointless – that they require.

Hours pass. You go outside. It’s hot. Another homeless person goes by. Some days they are draped in a blanket, with a staring expression that is both frightening and familiar. Some days it is a wiry man in a donated tracksuit, with sneakers that are too large. This athletically dressed person, unlike the blanket draped person, has an expression closer to the normal others who pass by. Closed off, typical expressions. Stony faced. Mostly just numb. A college student white girl with new sandals laughs with their friends, and it’s too loud, too brittle. Other people walk by in the background, like the extras in a play. Clothes are similar, sneakers, polo shirts, short cotton dresses. Everyone copies each other. Are there any thoughts moving with them through the tarred paths between the patches of tired grass? The man with the blanket definitely has them, his blanket and his eyes a cloak of the royalty of madness, the divine gift of seeing the insane in the everyday. The man in the track suit has them, planning a way out. The three girls in mini clothes, as though cloth had been digitally attached to their bodies while they laughed, and looked at their phones, they must have thoughts. Mustn’t they?

Back inside, more emails await. Meetings that had been confirmed must now be changed. People are not available. More people want meetings. The boss says yes to everything, but barely finds time to say hello, I’m off to my next meeting she calls gaily as she passes by. 

She sends birthday emails, that feel like form letters. She likes birthdays, you know this from when she asked you to try to obtain everyone’s birthday. Except that you didn’t have the clearance for that. That’s info for the level that she is at. I can see age, which already feels like an intrusion. Box tick rewrapped with used paper. “Thanks for all you do! Have a great day!”

Truly, it’s no wonder AI is here to stay. The love of homogeneity was already here. Now we’ve asked this starving spectator to move in. Now, we aren’t sure if it’s a ravenous teenager, gobbling up our fast food normality, or colonizing invader, pillaging and copying our words and thoughts and reactions, under the guise of learning. The bits of circuit humans put together learned quickly how vapid we are, how we watch news, see disaster, and then look at recipes. We celebrate freedom, and separate parents from children, and build concentration camps. The talking heads on the TV tell us that protest works. Sure. Everything works, once you have the money to survive. 

When they take thinking away, where will we be. The people who want to keep their billions and their power over the everyday masses are replacing knowledge with belief. Start with the people who believe in immaculate conception and white dominance. Erase the rest.

Leaving work is not like going in reverse, although obviously it is. The train stations go this way now. People get off at the two big stations, and then it is quieter. There are trees. Compared to the brutalist ugliness of the city, with its concrete factories, overpasses and windowed buildings, neon and plastic at the corners of old cobblestoned streets and brick townhouses saved to hold on to history, to beauty, at a price, even the inlets by the giant factory that works on munitions seem purer. The ocean is off there in the near distance, offering escape. The city is only an endless reminder of hierarchies and dulling routines. The people working in the corner stores can’t afford the beautiful brick buildings. I work on a higher floor, and I can’t afford them either. Even if I work with a computer, and a view out the window that I can see if a boss leaves a door open to their office, or if I go to the floor that has a lounge with windows. I can stare out over urban pathways, count gravestones, buses, buildings. At least I can watch clouds go by, slowed down by the heat emanating from the roads filled with cars and buses. 

And all this is the backdrop to protest, and the celebration of a country caught in the rip tide of fascism. Closing hospitals, building concentration camps. Taking away books and food from children, comfort from the elderly, assistance to veterans. A military group marches through a park, scaring children. A parade of white separatists through a city in Kentucky. They are not monitored.

Celebrate. Celebrate what.

I read a short essay by E.B. White called “Freedom”, published first in Harper’s Magazine in 1940. Once upon a time, E.B. White was considered the epitome of clear expression. Now, when paragraphs are one sentence, filled with half-thoughts using short words to make attention spans feel fooled into thinking that they are listening to speech, and the compression of time immobilizing us, maybe his style is old fashioned. He brought us philosophical spiders and hopeful pigs, young girls who fought for the creatures who the adults thought did not speak or think. He brought us humanity.

But like any fashion, fascism has come back into style. So his words, written at a time I never thought would return, responding to the threats he saw around him, embodied in Americans who didn’t see the harm in the Nazis, remind me of what happened in the not so long ago. Time travel. 

He writes:

I confess to a disturbed stomach. I feel sick when I find anyone adjusting his mind to the new tyranny which is succeeding abroad. Because of its fundamental strictures, fascism does not seem to me to admit of any compromise or any rationalization, and I resent the patronizing air of persons who find in my plain belief in freedom a sign of immaturity. If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free, then I’ll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up.

But what has happened? Have we all wished this into reality?  Did enough people jump up and down and wish for a return to the past, as in some children’s book? They thought they were being sold protection. Did they forget about disease and war and cruelty and slavery, or was that the outline of the plan all along?

I’m also reading Octavia Butler’s book Kindred. A terrible echoing surrounds me when I read about a woman whose present rests, as it does for us , upon all our history, history that she now must live instead of read about. A primary source of the highest caliber, with her life in the balance. All her convictions and beliefs dissolve before the reality of a people forced to work for others, denied education. Families torn apart. Adaptation. Needless suffering and evil. In the ground you can walk on when you return to the present time.

Between these two writings, I’m starting to ask myself what other outcomes could have happened in a country built on cruelty. I don’t want to ask that question. I want to believe in the possibility of goodness. Despite the horrors of WWII, or the assassinations in the 1960s, for a while people believed we were overcoming the stupid prejudices and evils of the past. Or perhaps that is the wrong question. Maybe the question that needs to be asked is how, when after so much turmoil and cruelty, we find ourselves back in a world with enslavers and concentration camps, no vaccines, no weather information. Children dying in floods, in airplane crashes. How do the greedy keep people from questioning? The same way they did then – through violence, fear, lack of education, and a belief system that seems monolithic.

These are cruel people, selfish and greedy, who think their success well-deserved, while everyone else’s failure is equally merited. Supremacy, eugenics – a belief system. This is where their god comes into play. Choosing a few lines of scripture, or more likely, just thanking god as box-ticking exercise, they proclaim faith while rebuilding concentration camps. They proclaim the tragedies they created as being the will of god.

Reading Kindred, I’m reminded of my childhood. My father was from the south. He rejected an entire world. I didn’t realize what it meant at the time. My mother was from the city. Her background was mixed. I heard stories from both sides, and ate shad roe and scrambled eggs with pepper, along with corned beef and pastrami and pizza. I watched tragedy from the wings and learned to be silent.

I read about the Underground Railroad, and thought nothing could be more courageous. Harriet Tubman’s story thrilled me more than galloping silversmith Paul Revere. I grew up in the midst of turmoil, without much in the way of stability at home. But there were artists, and musicians and revolutionaries on the streets. I watched the news on the TV with my father.

Kindred goes back and forth in time, but I feel like I am moving through times and eras as well. My neighbors here in the suburbs are mostly placid people, many of whom voted for the current government. They mow their lawns, and trim their hedges. Men drive around in black trucks or trucks with New Hampshire license plates, and tailgate and grimace. A house nearby flies a LGBTQ+ flag – but they stand out.

My ancestors were called witches and threatened. The newspapers tell me that savings will be made from cutting care for children and the sick and the elderly as though that were a good thing. I might as well be living in a cottage on the edge of a field, where the elders of the churches warn children away from me. Perhaps someone like me did that, and used the isolation to make it easier to be a stop on the Underground Railway. 

Some of my ancestors were early adopters. They left persecution early. 

Am I a stop on the railway, or am I using the railway? Or am I another pawn, a piece in a game the way the billionaires think of life as a video game, with heroes and minor characters. Someone I know doesn’t want to share articles in case they are seen on the phone. Silence is golden. And very easy to do.

And now that bill has passed, because enough spineless people thought a little evil wouldn’t be so bad really, and then they could keep their healthcare, and their success, and their house, and vacation, and big SUV and car, and having people treat them in a certain way, and the power, and the money, and always the power. A belief system is being sold to us. It’s up to us to notice what we are being asked to accept. Soldiers in parks. Concentration camps built in a week on protected lands.

My cottage is an apartment, and it’s not at the edge of a field, it’s near a small main road with trucks and cars and noise. 

I am disturbed. The juxtaposition of “Freedom” and Kindred reminds me that the past is always here with us. I walk on it and around it and I don’t know how to jump out of this bad storyline. I have little faith that enough people see progress as understanding, as intelligence, as care for the planet and all its inhabitants.

So my protest is to notice what we are being sold. To remember the past. To silently dream of a different future. Maybe we are our own signs of protest.