I was in Tiergarten, in Berlin, having slipped some colleagues to have a bit of the day to myself. It was less than a week after Uvalde. I had what I termed the Forbidden Thought: we could move here. German's not an impossible language to learn, my job would probably sponsor me, and the complaints of Berlin residents sounded suspiciously like people from my hometown who spoke of "bad areas you don't want to go to at night" in that city of 40,000 which was not-unrecently among the top ten in US per capita income, i.e. not a serious complaint to take seriously. We did not move for a variety of reasons, but it's an impulse I understood very well: whatever might be wrong in Germany, I would not have to contend with the idea my kids might be murdered in school.
I also live in the south, and have since 2004. To live in the American south is A Thing people have a lot of feelings about. I have had plenty of opportunities to be embarrassed by the state I live in, the region in general, the whole drift of southern politics and life since the 1960s, to say nothing of what it was like before that. When the moment requires it, I can conjure a passing North Carolina accent. I've spent enough time in religious and conservative political communities to move in and out of them without anyone noticing I don't agree with much of what they have to say.
I used to try to tell people it's not really Like That here, where I am. And the thing is, no one is prepared to believe me. I have someone in my family who sent their kid to Duke in the 90s and is convinced that Durham is a dead industrial town rife with crime [read, in northern American-ese: non-white people]. I remind people that I saw more confederate flags in Michigan than I do now and am told that the Research Triangle 'doesn't count' as part of the south because there are so many transplants here. Even people who live here and should know better often don't: I was once told approvingly that someone used to live in Durham but moved when their kid turned 5 because [left unspoken: because Durham has poorer and blacker people, must move to a richer, whiter town where the schools are better]. "Durham" is just as often as not a cover for saying "near black people". I never felt like a Millennial until older people started complaining about them; I love Durham and all the more from dealing with people who really seem to hate it without knowing anything about it. I think it's a pretty good place that I live, and I don't mind trying to make it better.
All of which is to say I get the impetus and both impulses behind this newsletter. Part of my old job was assisting on relocations: even when they're easy, with a job and a visa sponsorship system as rigorously bureaucratic as Germany's [complimentary], they're hard. The dream of moving involves ignoring everything difficult about living in a place and actually being a part of it. If you manage to be somewhat realistic about it, you'll still miss a lot. (The height of my personal philo-Germanness included the very clear reality that I would be swapping out one kind of racism for another, and Prenzlauer Berg is the only place I've ever seen people walking down the street proudly displaying Iron Crosses and other banned Nazi signifiers.)
So when we get to this:
For things to get better, they must first become less bad. Hence, the idea that “no one is doing anything” is ludicrous. Ordinary people are putting their lives on the line for others every day. They are confronting ICE and protecting their neighbors. They are peacefully occupying their schools in protest of genocide, despite the threat of losing their degrees, or worse, deportation. They are speaking out to journalists and organizing their workplaces. They are out in the streets and watching the courts. For this, I respect them. I do not think their efforts are worthless or a form of self-sacrifice at the alter of an impossible ideal. They believe, rightly, that nothing is inevitable until it is. No one has won until they have finally, truly won. Many who leave are honest with themselves and have made their peace with their choice. But just as many have wrongly accepted that the worst is inevitable. In fact, they’re fine with that, just as they are fine ceding ground by omission to those who deserve to be losers. All it does is justify that same decision, the decision to walk away.
I think "well yes, politics is the strong and slow boring of hard boards; yes, it does need both passion and perspective", but there's a lot of work and history that go into that for me. I have a place that I love and deep roots there--as deep as anyone has these days; I have a latent, longstanding interest in dissident movements and human rights crises, which gives some valuable perspective; I long ago traded ideal theory for nonideal in the great nonideal political theory wars of 2009-2010. Mostly, I have a deep feeling that it's the other people who suck and they should be the ones who have to change.
[I went, after all, from never thinking about trans issues to the American libertarianish default of "why the fuck do you care so much about what someone else does with their lives? they're not hurting anybody and you can certainly find a better use for your time"; you're the one who sucks, you change]
But I also get that this set of beliefs is not the default for everyone, that a lot of people would be perfectly fine doing nothing. And I do get it--by the time they'd come for me everything else would have long ago burned down, and if you were ambivalent or not sure which side you want to be on or just exhausted, doing nothing is an option.
But also, you know, as Hannah Arendt quoted, initium ut esset homo creatus est. Decay fights against the powerful impulse to grow and build and defend, and those are all human feelings too. I said to my wife and say again periodically: there's only one thing to do, which is the same as it's always been: stay wise to the world [drop Erykah Badu line here], raise our kids to be good people, make the world around us safe. There might one day be more to do, more urgently, but we build one brick at a time, and attend to our own work first of all.
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