Inadequacy is Inevitable

The first part of this might only resonate with people who’ve been recently exposed to some of the rhetoric I have. But I hope the second half is more broadly relevant.

It might be a me problem—my own feeds, my own (mis)perception—but it feels like the American Pro-Palestine movement¹ has hit a plateau. The campus encampments kept discouragement and outright hopelessness at bay but now the school year is over, the occupations brutally suppressed or otherwise dissolved, and the students graduated or facing battles to obtain the degrees they earned.² Not only is there no ceasefire in sight but the alleged red line of Rafah was crossed without consequence. The recent Nuseirat Massacre alone murdered 270 Palestinians and injured hundreds more. The money and weapons keep flowing, the politicians keep ignoring the people, the media keeps manufacturing consent, and the genocide goes on unabated.

It’s almost impossible not to be demoralized. So when I see posts from people who support Palestinian liberation excoriating (other) people who want a ceasefire on the grounds that 1) they aren’t radical enough and therefore 2) their tactics don’t work, I understand the pain behind it. These posts seem to provide solace to some by sounding that chord of frustration and fear, and in doing so perhaps make them feel less alone.

I don’t think the berating has a function beyond that, though. Undoubtedly there are those who call for ceasefire and yet think prisons are necessary, that communism is worse than capitalism, that establishment Democrats are decent, that America might one day be good—that it has the makings to be good. The pastor who can’t bring herself to speak harshly during a confrontation shouldn’t be expected to break windows or set a cop car on fire, but is her presence, her willingness to regularly show up and be arrested worth nothing? How does someone get radicalized if they’re scolded and abandoned? Surely these people should be invited onward instead of pushed off the wagon?

I’m familiar with and sympathetic to the view that protests are pointless or even harmful in that they risk giving participants the false impression that they’ve done something meaningful while eating up time, energy, and money. When I see a flyer about another big one planned, my first response is exasperation and incredulity. But I think rallies are beneficial to a limited degree³ and I’m not ready to dismiss everyone who goes to them as performative or hopelessly liberal. It does not stop the bombing to hold up bloody hands during Blinken’s testimony nor does interrupting Biden’s campaign speech force him to reckon with his bottomlessly foul behavior. But I think life would feel even worse without these eruptions.

I’m also not saying voting is the answer. Fuck voting. Fuck talking to anyone in office including their staffers, I think they’re almost all irredeemable and it’s a demeaning charade to pretend otherwise. But it’s weird to act like writing in Gaza or selecting uncommitted on a ballot precludes other forms of engagement,⁴ or that people who are still writing or calling their reps aren’t doing anything else. It is obvious that nothing so far has “worked.” Nobody who has made an effort toward opposing the genocide can think otherwise. So if someone is only voting or calling or signing petitions, it seems to me a reasonable guess that they’re open to doing more and just aren’t sure of what more to do. Again and again, in the comments on those excoriating posts, I see sincere people say as much. Yet they aren’t given any help.

My theory is that almost everyone is looking for guidance, especially those most eager to dispense it in the form of blanket criticism. I’m not sure how else to interpret castigation unaccompanied by direction to a superior alternative. And when I say “direction” I’m talking about true, specific instruction, not a vague gesture at direct action or an invocation of escalation. I cannot see how those are helpful, and I’ve grown increasingly intolerant of emotion-stoking influencers who smugly yank away people’s kickboards without teaching them to swim, who drop a carousel of self-righteous truth bombs and then ignore the often-contradictory comments that follow. (I’ve seen “start a group” listed in the same paragraph as “stop trying to lead.” I’ve seen people told to stay away from labor unions and NGOs,⁵ and I’ve seen “join the DSA” under posts deriding electoral politics as a dead end.) If sick people are drinking snake oil while you know the ingredients of an antidote, give them the recipe. If someone is scraping at the mortar of the prison wall with a spoon while you’ve got a shovel and the start of tunnel, call them over.

Mainly I wonder what makes this type of repetitive public communication more effective or useful than the actions it rejects. I also wonder, if something has not worked yet, are we to assume it will not work ever? Is it possible we regularly don’t taste the fruit of our work because the flowering is unrecognized or delayed past our patience (or our deaths)? Life is full of quiet, intentional interventions whose repercussions will never be known to the actor but it doesn’t mean those outcomes aren’t real.

Days after October 7th, I googled when the Vietnam War ended (1975) and when the major protests first began (1964).⁶  Oh God, I thought. I shuddered to think of the window we had to make any impact on what was happening in Gaza—if an impact was even possible. We do not have the numbers and we don’t have the time to amass them, so where does that leave us? Could there be a worse combination than powerlessness and urgency?

“Almost everything we try is remote from the outcome we hope for; everything is equally remote from that outcome,” said the priest Daniel Berrigan in 1972 after he got out of prison for destruction of government property in protest of American aggression in Vietnam. We are “struggling against a power that seems absolutely untouchable,” he said, and one “can’t keep up this level of energy indefinitely, organizing against a blank wall.” Yet the work that any serious resistance to the Vietnam War had to take on was the dismantling of empire: a task for multiple generations, many lifetimes, many bodies. More than anything else, it requires accumulation and endurance.

Now, I think, collapse feels very close, which fuels impatience—an unwise emotion to give rein since our country has only become more militarized, more bloodthirsty, more desperate, and, as ever, the state has no qualms about treating people domestically as it treats people abroad. (Or should that be the other way around?) The struggle is not easier now that disintegration has drawn near; the fist squeezes tighter as it feels sand slipping away.

Berrigan saw the influence of the imperial, military mindset in every aspect of American life, in almost every American. He believed we operate with a complete disregard for and denial of “the inherent modesty of life”, that we think too abstractly, as if human beings can keep pace with their technologies. “As the war goes on people are more and more obsessed by the necessity of delivering results, of efficiency,” he said. “To me, the imperative is debased…. I’m not interested in a body count. I’m interested in living as I perceive I am called on to live.”⁷  

In certain lights, the allure of violence is that it promises swiftness and totality, a promise people keep buying into even if it doesn’t deliver. Eliminate the apparent source of the problem and the problem goes away. This is, in fact, Israel’s explicit logic (and the Zionist mentality abroad) behind their slaughtering of children—it is the fundamental premise of genocide. I don’t think I’m a pacifist. I’m not opposed to actual self defense, so I’m not opposed to armed resistance against colonization, or any oppressed people protecting their families or themselves. But most invocations of unspecified escalation that I’ve seen, at least those made by Americans and/or addressed to an American audience, are issued by people who don’t seem to know what they’re doing. Indisputably, they have emotions, but if they have a vision or a plan, they are keeping it hidden. Given America’s long love affair with guns, murder, impulsivity, and convenience, I think we should at least be suspicious of the ease with which violence presents itself as our answer.⁸  

Here is how it seems to me: We must be able to act and think and plan within the reality that there is no fixing this. To be seduced by a simple solution is to put your faith in a mirage. This is human evil (pride, greed, and hatred, magnified exponentially by systems guaranteed to produce it) and it is a plague that never has been and never will be eradicated. Babies are dead, water poisoned, family lines erased; we cannot change that. So everything we do will feel inadequate before, during, and after doing it. Yes, even violence will feel and be inadequate! But inadequate is not the same as valueless.

Insisting on extremity and immediacy will, ironically, cost us more of the time we don’t have. And if the yardstick of judgement is immediate victory, our contributions are destined to be failures. So that yardstick needs to be replaced. I trust the people who say this even if I wish it weren’t so. The humble act is all we have, and we must cherish it. Patience (not apathy, not complacency, but true patience) does not preclude passion but it does prove commitment.

The times are not fixable but they are changeable, and changing. There was a world before America and there will be a world after. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s an inevitability. We can act toward and for the world that’s coming from within the facts of the world that’s here.

1  I mean no disrespect but I’m not sure it’s coherent or unified enough to be called a movement, and I think raising that uncertainty is worthwhile.

2  I’m not implying that students who’ve left campus aren’t still engaged nor that everything was wrapped up so neatly for them. I love and appreciate the students and their sacrifices.

3  My thinking is that they can connect people who go on to do future actions together; they create visibility, so that isolated like-minded individuals have a chance of seeing they’re not alone; and they give some indication of the prevalence of conviction that would otherwise be entirely ignored by the media, illustrating that there are (tens or hundreds of) thousands of people who care enough to march and shout about it. They also can be invigorating which I believe has value.

4  The people I pay attention do a bunch of things; the friends I admire the most have already been in the streets and the struggle for years, casting a wide net with diligence. They’re driving 8 hours to visit an incarcerated comrade who they haven’t met before, they’re working at Bluestockings, they’re making zines and organizing skill share sessions, they’re doing jail support and they’re getting arrested, they’re distributing masks and donating to gofundmes and yeah, sometimes they post a picture from a march. But they’re not there because they think authorities can be politely petitioned, or that peaceful protest solves the big problems. And they’re also not there because they want clout or whatever; their accounts are usually private and everyone in their lives already knows what they’re about.

5  I understand the critique of NGOs but also everything is an NGO. Animal rescues, abortion funds, prison outreach groups, helplines for domestic abuse survivors, harm reduction centers, trans housing projects. Autonomous collectives are better in many ways, but I think volunteering with a 501c3 can at least be an important start for some. Anything that opens one’s eyes to the workings and failures of the world around them is for the good.

6  I’m not equating the situation in Vietnam with the situation in Gaza. The Vietnam War had been on my mind because I’d been reading a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh’s earlier and more autobiographical writing.

7  To be very clear, “body count”does not mean the number of people killed; he’s talking about using numbers of followers or participants as indication of whether or not one’s efforts have value.

8  I’ve thought about this a lot in connection to the refrain about how climate criminals “have names and addresses,” which is floated online as the intimation of an obvious solution to our impending extinction. But what would happen if, say, every member of Exxon’s board was assassinated? Would Exxon crumble, shut down? Would every board member of BP or Shell quit in fear? There’s absolutely no chance. New people would fill the vacuum, new laws would be passed to protect them, and security firms would have their most profitable years yet.