The future is an infinite succession of presents– Howard Zinn
Ever come across an article and think that the author perfectly captured what you have been feeling (but didn’t know how to put into words)? The estimable Dahlia Lithwick has done that for me, and not for the first time.
I met Dahlia exactly one time, at a Netroots Nation event at least 12 years ago. I was meeting a friend of mine for dinner, and when I walked up to the table, he was sitting with a few other folks I didn’t know, including her. Ever since, I’ve been enamored by her brain, wit, charm, and turn of a word. I’ve followed her writings (especially at Slate.com where she is a senior editor) and her appearances on MSNBC, especially with Rachel Maddow. Heck, we’re even “friends” on Facebook.
The title of this diary is an amalgam of the headline of Dahlia’s latest article in Slate, and what shows up on your Facebook feed when you share that article with your friends. And how often have we been both broken and engaged? Exhausted but inspired? That’s kind of what her article is about.
I am going to post some of my favorite, most salient, parts of her article here, but I truly encourage you to read the whole piece. [side note: I’m aware of TeacherKen’s diaries that are recommendations of articles to read, but I am BayAreaKen, and all of us Ken’s stick together in our daily reading suggestions. Trust us! LOL]
Click here to read the article.
Her essay begins thusly, and if you’re not hooked, then I’d like to hear from you on how you have survived the past 6 years!
At the start of the pandemic, I began searching around for a complicated word that would express the idea that I was basically fine but also utterly shattered…. that sense that you can personally be surviving but also that nothing is actually OK. This is all separate and apart from the language of “privilege” or “languishing” or “behavioral activating.”
What I meant, looking back, is that I knew the feeling that I was “OK” was tenuous. The world around me could get worse, but at the same time I also couldn’t imagine things devolving any further.
Then everything got worse.
She then pivots to a wonderful summary line of what has been happening, in front of our eyes for the past several years:
In any march toward authoritarianism, fostering a broad sense of public hopelessness is very much the point. …. once a majority of any population has fundamentally given up on politics, on institutions, on voting and education and protest, you’re in pretty good shape to be rolled by the next wave of Trumpism.
And now the word we’ve been looking for, to describe our current situation, for those of us who care, and certainly those of us who read Daily Kos, well, daily, we do. We care and therefore we may feel exactly this way:
Out of nowhere, [a friend] swooped down and offered up what I’d been searching for: a Yiddish word (of course), tzebrokhnkayt, which means, she explained, “the quality of brokenheartedness that gives strength in healing.”….at its essence it means that “we each carry our shattered pieces with us.”… Tzebrokhnkayt is not something in need of quick fixing; it is instead honored. It means that we are obligated to gather up, tend to, and honor the pain, but also to take up the work of healing. ... And [another] friend turned the word into a prescription: “Let’s not be OK. Let’s find power in not being OK. Let’s honor our brokenness—and the brokenness of our country—by finding the collective strength to fight for change.”
It’s the broken heartedness that gives us strength. I know when I am down low and in the midst of despair, I want so desperately to rise above it. I didn’t think that feeling itself was the source of my power. But truly it is. This is when we rise. We have to.
Now we are told, frequently, not to “politicize” horrific news events (like school shootings), but isn’t that all we can do? Dahlia continues:
Amid all the shattering brokenness, in politics lay the seeds of repair.
…
These acts of repair, of holding the pain of others and refusing to be told how and when to put that pain down, are politics. At times like these, politics are all we have left, and that is enough.
I know I’ve stretched fair use (there really is a lot I’ve left out!), but this essay ends magnificently, imploring us to both feel/experience our emotions and to be engaged.
It turns out, we do not, in fact, require a complicated German or Yiddish word or a complex philosophical descriptor to explain the wearying condition of being ripped apart, heartsick and furious, stabilized to the point of near-sanity, before launching back into the fight, shattered but still awake and still committed. This is just what life is now. We take care of one another and ourselves to go on to do the work. We can bike, read, plant our gardens, organize, vote, march, donate, and be kind. We can call it “pain” or “politics” or “self-care,” or tzebrokhnkayt. But the fact remains that the future depends on this “infinite succession of presents.” Finding ways to marry the brokenness to the work is a part of the work itself.