In Minneapolis, we are in crisis. Much of what you read will be more worthy of your attention than this because witnessing is important for collective learning and accountability. The following is a short account of the various categories of relation people who are not targets have to the ICE occupation and what they mean about how people act.
By The Book: The most straightforward way of relating to it is to get your news from the same places you always do and have the same views your community does. To encounter a source from another perspective is at best an exercise in deconstructive intellectualization, to cleverly show how the facts are not facts. No amount of horror is able to overcome the loss of facts, and no amount of good intent or moral positioning makes up for the problem of being forced into a situation where your first priority is making sure you are towing the line. Emphasis on forced because you’ll notice I am not suggesting this is only a problem of one group, this is a condition that has saturated all formings of all publics here in the United States.
The primary and devastating effect is the removal of choice. Without a shared reality, one has to be supernaturally talented to make meaningful choices, because it requires simultaneously understanding multiple realities and their relationships to each other. Starting with occupy wall street and really mainstreaming during the riots at Ferguson, propagated cultural divides have led to deep anxiety which in turn has led to a country living in fear that if they and theirs cannot win the day, they will die. If you think the Dems propagated these divides, you’re right. If you think the GOP propagated them, you’re right. If you think the 1% propagated them, you’re right.
This accounts for enough of the country that it would be fair to say it is the way and not a way of relating to this crisis. Fair, but technically not true.
Here are two sources I think are relevant to distinguishing between social and/or moral anxiety, and choice, one centered in the loss of fact, and one centered in the loss of principle (which shortly follows the loss in fact).
How Could They? by Roger Berkowitz, The Hannah Arendt Center
Does Anyone Believe Anything Anymore? by Gabe Fleisher, Wake Up To PoliticsThe Angry Inch: An apparent inability to distinguish between the political and the personal, and if this is the first time anyone has suggested to you that they are not the same, then you’re probably a leftist reader who hasn’t conceived of the effects of such rhetoric yet. This is predominantly a phenomenon among people “with nothing to lose,” whose politics aren’t politics at all, but rather, resentment.
Often scuttling between the left and the right, the focus is on finding the right parties to blame for what has happened to them personally. I want to be clear here that often the things that happened to them were real and bad, that the victimhood itself is not false. Only the conflation with politics is false. If you encounter someone like this, do not not engage. There is an endless mine of examples in a country of millions for any given position, but in adulthood, there is nothing that excuses a failure to take responsibility for yourself, which I don’t say gladly; adulting sucks. Nonetheless, if you engage, you will find yourself arguing the details of this thing or that thing ad nauseum while you boggle at their inability to see what is starkly obvious: victimhood as a personality is a choice that victimizes anyone who would be or is in their support community, another propagation— and more victims.Control and Being: There is a phrase I recently came across, ontological resistance. I have been doing some theoretically unrelated research for my newest creative endeavor, which while being newest is still not new, and is informally called “The Impossible Project.” Here and there you will see someone argue for the decentralization of mattering. If you can’t do anything about it, it doesn’t matter. The way to resist institutional tyranny is to persist in pursuing a fulfilling life and not getting recruited into an endless culture war; also, to take and repurpose the tools of institutions for individual liberation and joy. In this model, there is not an absence of community, but it only consists of people you know and care about. Often this might involve what we would call “mutual aid,” and there may even be emphases on things like sustainability, environmentalism, community contribution, DIY, etc. What there is not is any obligation to anything other than you and yours. The justification has two parts: the first is a lack of control over anything that isn’t you and yours, and the second is a resistance, but in this case, a resistance to the entire relationship with the state that most of us consider the default, a particular kind of political one. Some obvious challenges arise. The first is that what one cannot control is not the same as what cannot be changed via collaboration over time with other people. A second challenge is that there’s only so much that can be done to resist. If they’re rounding up people like you, if they’re crashing the economy, if they’re declaring war, if they’re dismantling services you rely on, then your ability to persist in your resistance will disappear. That is, when push comes to shove, you are as obligated to the state as anyone else, you merely obfuscate that relationship. Thus, such a mode of relating may fall apart in extremis, but it does offer a profound critique on a By The Book approach to being.
In documenting these, you may wonder, aren’t all of these insufficient? Certainly they are. But none of them are entirely without merit. The first is the only one that addresses the political as such at all, which needs doing, the second calls for reflection on the role of personal experience in your judgments of what others deserve, and the third surfaces an entirely different and often unspoken form of resistance, which stands as a bulwark against the threat of losing oneself inside a political identity (or religious, for that matter).
Despite the rhetoric, I am convinced that this country is having a bipartisan, multi year, disordered panic response. Fear is healthy, being controlled by fear is bad for you, your body, and your country. We have the option of picking apart and reconstructing our individual relationships to political crisis and political identity, to our own experiences, and to being. The goal is not utopia, it is not even happiness, it’s simply choice.