Hi, guys. We’re stripping the schedule down a bit today. Moved some goofier stuff out, added an open thread for noon. I thought about pushing out “How To Tell If You’re In a Maeve Binchy Novel,” but I personally find Maeve Binchy VERY comforting, so you’ll have that at 1pm, ideally with tea and toast.
Here is what we know about Beirut, here is what we know about Paris. I hope all of your friends and family are well, and accounted-for. Please share what you’re reading and thinking about in the comments. I’d request you not share gross stuff to point out how gross it is. People will always take the worst opportunities to show their asses, we can talk about it later.
I stepped away from social media on Friday (not as A Big Statement Thing, just for a little personal break to be more present in my actual life and IRL relationships during a time I had nothing to contribute to Twitter that would make the world or me better) and I have not yet returned, and I can heartily recommend it to any of you who have a similar urge at this time. I can also recommend Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson’s most autobiographical novel. What are you reading? And what do you re-read when the wrongness of the world presses more heavily upon you than usual?
Roxane wrote something really nuanced and lovely about safe spaces:
All good ideas can be exploited. There are some extreme, ill-advised and simply absurd manifestations of the idea of safe space. And there are and should be limits to the boundaries of safe space. Safe space is not a place where dissent is discouraged, where dissent is seen as harmful. And yet. I understand where safe space extremism comes from. When you are marginalized and always unsafe, your skin thins, leaving your blood and bone exposed. You live at the breaking point. In such circumstances, of course you might be inclined to fiercely protect yourself, at any cost. Of course you might become intolerant. Of course you might perceive dissent as danger.
There is also this. Those who mock the idea of safe space are most likely the same people who are able to take safety for granted. That’s what makes discussions of safety and safe spaces so difficult. We are also talking about privilege. As with everything else in life, there is no equality when it comes to safety.
RH Reality Check has a good primer on the (terrifying, awful) Texas anti-abortion bill headed to the Supreme Court:
If the Roberts Court rules against abortion providers and their patients, it could leave Texas with only ten clinics, forcing more than 75 percent of the clinics in the state to close. Mississippi will lose its only clinic, and anti-abortion lawmakers in states that have not yet passed similar requirements will no doubt be emboldened to push for them.
Abortion access nationwide quite literally hangs in the balance.
Our collective vision of the bad cop in America is chilling, sobering and totally driven by Hollywood. The bad cop takes bribes from the mob in “The Departed” or is part of some conspiracy like in “Better Call Saul.” In the worst case scenario he’s Denzel from “Training Day”, some diabolical gangster with a badge.
But what former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw is accused of wouldn’t dare be shown in a neighborhood theatre.
Those tiny little Bronte books!
Less than three months before the kickoff Iowa caucuses, there is growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them.
Party leaders and donors fear that nominating either man would have negative ramifications for the GOP ticket up and down the ballot, virtually ensuring a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency and increasing the odds that the Senate falls into Democratic hands.
The party establishment is paralyzed. Big money is still on the sidelines. No consensus alternative to the outsiders has emerged from the pack of governors and senators running, and there is disagreement about how to prosecute the case against them. Recent focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire commissioned by rival campaigns revealed no silver bullet.
Kent Blake is one of the LGBT Mormons reacting with sorrow and hurt to the church’s new policies surrounding the kids of gay parents (#sufferthechildren is collecting a lot of similar stories, from people impacted, from people making the decision to leave):
I devoted two years of my life to telling people about Mormonism as a missionary. And for all my doctrinal qualms, I find myself drawn into the Latter-day Saint community at Stanford because of the insightful, compassionate, and giving people that I find there. I come to church because, despite all its issues, it’s my home.
Ironically, I find myself in the borderlands of Mormonism in part because I believe what it taught me about families. I agree that “it is not good that the man [or woman] should be alone” (Genesis 2:18), that in the long-term relationship of marriage we can learn how to love unconditionally, serve and nurture others, and grow into better versions of ourselves. That’s part of the reason I hope to settle down and build a life with a husband to whom I am wonderfully attracted and committed and who I can learn to love fully as God loves me. After my own personal contemplation and prayer and wrestling with this issue, I believe that this is the right path for me.
On a related note, that assclown judge reversed his decision and gave the lesbian couple back the foster baby in their care.
Ella and Caroline on their friendship and the spanner that John’s cancer threw into the works, and how we serve each other and our human frailties:
But, then, this is what no one talks about: how cancer affects everything else, and the weird third-hand emotions that happen as a result. Like, we became closer than I had ever dreamt possible – I never imagined a situation where I would be sitting in your kitchen at 8am on a Tuesday morning, trying to make you eat Marmite toast. And you can’t eat the Marmite toast, but you know I won’t leave until you do, and you don’t want to make me late for work. So, we’re just sat there, glowering at one another and loving one another, and wondering how the fuck we got here.
Speaking of John, his most recent piece includes a very welcome, full-throated defense of the NHS, and his refusal to be used as a talking point to ward off the potential for strikes:
As a patient who will most likely be directly affected by the industrial action planned for next month, I think it’s worth really nailing my colours to the mast. I fully support whatever action the BMA feels justified in taking in the face of this, the latest and most shameless in a series of capricious, underhand attacks on the majesty of the welfare state. What’s more, I think it’s extremely telling that the first junior doctors’ strike in our history will likely take place during the first months of the first Conservative government in 18 years. Like the National Minimum Wage, like tax credits, like the institution of the fucking weekend, the NHS is an achievement to which the Tories can lay absolutely no claim – as with all policies designed to support the many rather than the few, it is the exclusive work of the labour, and Labour, movement.
So when that festering zealot Jeremy Hunt has the gall, the absolute fucking brass neck to suggest that the proposed strikes will erode patients’ faith in the NHS and its dedicated, underappreciated workforce, I would like to respond thus: not in my name, you conniving fucking hypocritical management consultancy ideologue cunt. And if the incredible men and women in this hospital manage to cure me before you’ve driven them all overseas or out of the public sector, I will never forget that they did it against a backdrop of constant abuse and misrepresentation from your department. The continuing efficacy of the NHS in these trying times is a testament to its superhuman staff; your willingness to attack it in pursuit of short-sighted savings and the prospect of a political legacy is your lasting shame. Get fucked.
Take care of yourselves.
I guess I’m just having trouble getting my head around this weekend.
you and me both.
GM, Toast! Things that got me through the wkd: 1) marathoning Jane the Virgin which is DELIGHTFUL and I have a lot of thoughts about the Michael/Rafael situation, ultimately coming down to Jane, you are 23 and too young for all this drama. Its ok to be single! Just go to grad school and write your book and co-parent, and; 2) PROCURING A LE CREUSET 9 QUART DUTCH OVEN AT TJM FOR 1/3 OF THE RETAIL PRICE and then making a delicious butternut squash cream sauce to go over pasta AND SEPARATELY a really complex yellow dal!
So yeah, Netlix & Chill >The World @ Large
Blah on both Michael and Rafael. I hate having to root for the less-bad option when there’s the obvious choice, like you say, of neither of them.
But at least there’s Rogelio.
Rogelio is The Greatest! #MoreRogelio
#RogeliomyBrogelio
I want it somehow to be revealed the Rogelio is the narrator.
My friend has a theory that Rogelio is in fact the narrator, because the whole show is a script that Jane wrote and Rogelio helped her get produced.
I’m hoping we find out that the narrator is future Mateo
If that were true, it would be sad that Jane’s idea of her father is a (charmingly!) narcissistic manbaby, because the narrator is much more self-effacing.
I think I like Michael more than Rafael, but I have also wished more than once that for at least a season they’d let Jane just choose to be single. She’s young, she just had a baby she didn’t plan for, she’s going to graduate school… she doesn’t need this stress! Plus the love triangle is really wearing on me. Especially the constant back-and-forth over it.
Agreed… I would also love a plotline where Jane says nope to both of them, and then the boys bond over their heartbreak. Their newfound friendship can make Jane feel kinda awkward. Still amusing! Not a love triangle! Plus, the plots to be mined in grad school…. endless.
Right? Jane needs to be like: “Look, I just had a BABY. I’m in GRAD SCHOOL. I am helping my grandmother become a citizen. I have too much on my plate and the two of you need to stop fighting and pushing me to make a decision. I CHOOSE ME. The end.”
YEP. And oh, the tears that I will shed when Alba becomes a citizen…
I kind of think that’s where they’re going this season, actually. Which I love! Plus, Adam Rodriguez (from Magic Mike) is going to be in it later this season, which, THAT needs to happen, Jane.
I don’t like either of them at all, so I side with Rafael because he’s richer and hotter.
Personality is a wash! Might as well get what you can get!
This crystallizes my opinion perfectly.
AAAHHHHH Jane the Virgin is a bright & happy DELIGHT & I’ve been trying to get everyone around me to start watching it since the 2nd episode! I wasn’t as put out about the Michael v Rafael situ in the 1st season (come on, Michael is totally skeevy ew), but with how it’s playing out in this 2nd season I really want Jane to back away & own singledom for a while & chill with her mom & abuela.
Totally agree on Michael, yet on the special features for the first season, all of the actors said they were team Michael. : /
I’d be interred in hearing more about the yellow dal!
Gladly! It was a combo of savory and sweet spices, so the basic onion/garlic/ thyme/ curry/ tumeric/ red pepper + a pinch of cardaman/ 2 whole star anise/ bay leaf + a few diced yams + veggie broth. It sounds like a lot of ingredients, but after chopping and stirring for a bit you just let it simmer on the stove for about 80 mins while binge watching tv and then eat happily in a bowl from the couch. A+, would simmer pretty lentils again.
My thoughts on the Michael/Rafael situation are almost 100% meta at this point, like I know fiction is always manipulative to some degree but I feel like the show just blatantly switches tracks between the two and if they don’t want you to like Michael this week or Rafael the next week, that’s just that. I mean, Michael and Jane were engaged, and together for two years, and the first time we see any real hint of a rapport or easiness between the two of them is basically after their engagement is long over and her subsequent relationship with Rafael has also gone up in flames. I love how crazy the show is in general, but the love triangle is exhausting and I hope (but don’t really hold out hope) that it’ll be shelved for a little while.
I’m reading the second of Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Story of a New Name. It has been a long, long time since I’ve been so engrossed in a book, in the characters and the setting. I identify so much with Elena, and I recognize so many of the ugly and beautiful feelings that arise in close friendships like the one between her & Lila. I never want these books to end.
I’m on the third right now! I had drifted away, this book has been on my nightstand for a while, but this weekend it was so great to just get pulled deep into something that was not the real world.
I’m reading it too, and so happy to commune with other Toasties (as it were) over books. I identify so much with Elena as well. I’ve had several Lilas in my life, and always ached at how dull and plain and mundane I was next to their bright bright star. It brings me a lot of comfort to read about this other world, itself brimming with violence, but neatly contained between the book covers. What other relationships in the books are you most involved in?
Honestly, it’s also very, very comforting to have Toasties to chat to about books I love! Cheering me up today. <3
I’ve just finished the entire series, and I’ve been hoping to talk about them with someone! By the end, I was actually most interested in the parent/child relationships — maybe that’s more fleshed out in book four, though? The Elena/Lila relationship is so deeply real and ugly and nuanced — have known some Lilas as well. I’ve also tried moving on to Days of Abandonment, which contains a lot of similar themes re: grief/violence/female ugliness/etc., but it’s so much in such a short time, it’s been harder for me to get through.
I pretty much binge-read the whole series this summer and it was amazing and the best thing I think I have ever read about female friendship? I’ve never found anything else that captured all the complicated nuances. I was so invested in even the smallest characters and was devastated when I finished the books. I wanted them to go on forever!! I’m now delving into Ferrante’s other books, which are also good, but not as epic/perfect.
Reading Light A Penny Candle! Thanks Nicole for the tip. Yesterday I read the Oral History of MST3K (Joel forever), and I am here for any gifs or pics or clips of Bill Hader, whom I now have solidified my crush on after watching Trainwreck. Oh, and watched that adorable and funny John Mulaney show on ‘flix. Recommend all of the above.
sorry but #teammike
Sorry I gave you both thumbs up because I love them both
Joel can get it.
Also, hmmm, Zalien from Other Space…..
I’ve been reading Cold Comfort Farm, which is an interesting tone to adapt to… but kind of this comfy cozy, very British-y book that I feel like I should always read while sipping tea? It’s comforting, I guess. I’m having a very stressful week (with all the sad world news/stress on top of it), so it’s nice.
(Although I’m gonna have to put it down if I don’t finish it today, so I can speed-read the first Toastie book club book.)
Ooo I read that in the spring for a literature seminar! My classmates really disliked it, but I thought it was overall a goofy and fun read — a nice break compared to other heavy hitters we had been reading.
ALSO: Toastie book club? How can I get in on that?
email me! unless you already have? hawthorncrataegus (at) gmx (dot) com
My kids and I still spontaneously shout “There’s no butter in hell!” during rants/discussions of religion and US politics, it helps to lighten the mood. Most recently, the week before last’s election.
My family and I have been doing this for at least 15 years. A+ parenting!
“Something nasty in the woodshed” is a good, all-purpose description for many things, including US politics.
What has also never gotten enough attention regarding this book is the main character’s best friend having an encyclopedic collection of brassieres.
If you have not seen the film/TV Movie, I highly recommend it. It has Eileen Atkins, Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry, Kate Beckinsale, and a ton of other great cast members.
We have a Toastie book club? That sounds great! How can I join??
I didn’t start it, and I am a mess today and cannot remember the username of the Toastie who started the whole idea. However we’ve been communicating by email (the first “meeting” is gonna be a chat this Saturday to discuss the first book), and the person currently ‘running’ it (or running this meeting?) who linked us all up in an email chain can be emailed at hawthorncrataegus(at)gmx.com. I hope they don’t mind me giving that out, it was in a link roundup (I think) a couple weeks ago.
thanks for sharing this, I wasn’t on the toast much yesterday!
My book club book still hasn’t come in from the library! I’m so sad.
I read Cold Comfort Farm after Nicole posted about it at the Hairpin (I think?) and laughed all the way through it, then scolded my mom for not telling me about it. (“Oh, that’s one of my favorites!” she exclaimed. Well gee, mom, it’s one of mine now too!)
I also move in a “comfy, cozy, British-y” direction when I feel overwhelmed, particularly Wodehouse. Here is a nice quote from Stephen Fry that sums up why, I think:
“It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind. He [Wodehouse] mocked himself sometimes because he knew that a great proportion of his readers came from prisons and hospitals. At the risk of being sententious, isn’t it true that we are all of us, for a great part of our lives, sick or imprisoned, all of us in need of this remarkable healing spirit, this balm for hurt minds?”
For a reminder of the good and beautiful things that humans are capable of, even in the face of absolute horrors, I always recommend Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell.
Making Light has wisely reposted Mike Ford’s advice on stress, originally posted in the wake of Katrina, and it may be useful to anyone feeling overwhelmed by recent world events.
He also wrote poetry.
Against Entropy
The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days—
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.
To make this a proper poetry thread:
Adam Zagajewski, trans. Clare Cavanaugh, Try to Praise the Mutilated World (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/247934), published in The New Yorker in September 2001
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Thank you both for this. I’ve been picking through Wilfred Owens and Carolyn Forche and Mahmoud Darwish this weekend, hoping to keep my mouth closed but my eyes open. More, more, more.
I think I’ve linked this here before, but it is always a comfort in times like these.
W.S. Merwin, “Living With The News”
Can I get used to it day after day
a little at a time while the tide keeps
coming in faster the waves get bigger
building on each other breaking records
this is not the world that I remember
then comes the day when I open the box
that I remember packing with such care
and there is the face that I had known well
in little pieces staring up at me
it is not mentioned on the front pages
but somewhere far back near the real estate
among the things that happen every day
to someone who now happens to be me
and what can I do and who can tell me
then there is what the doctor comes to say
endless patience will never be enough
the only hope is to be the daylight
( http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/28/livi…
Suddenly we
are in a place
beyond sadness
A city built
by an handful
of the mad
built
around us
as we slept
We are shaken
awake by sirens
and weeping
stunned by
the unfamiliar
familiar
We do not
recognize
our old street
in its new
coat of
history.
Here’s another!
from An Atlas of the Difficult World
Adrienne Rich
XIII (Dedications)
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
Devastating. Thank you for sharing this.
I really like this poem. Thank you for posting it.
I think this poem describes dealing with grief both personal and global very aptly.
Jack Gilbert, “Michiko Dead”
He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.
Jack Gilbert writing about Michiko is my insta-sob button.
Poetry thread!
Poem
BY MURIEL RUKEYSER
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
(Apologies for having also posted this down below, before I saw the poetry chain up here).
God, I love this poem. It’s still so completely true, and still so devastating. “I lived in the first century of these wars.”
Oh man, someone posts this every time it’s needed, and every time I am dumbstruck with yes and tears. Thank you.
So beautiful, all. Soul-healing. Adding this excerpt which I just found today:
“If not now, when?
Here is the Phoenix airfield,
I see the cones of volcanic mountains
And I think of all I have not said,
About the words to suffer and sufferance
and how one can bear a lot
By training anger until it gets tired and gives up
Here is the island of Kauai, an emerald set among white clouds,
Warm wind in the palm leaves, and I think of snow
In my distant province where things happened
That belong to another, inconceivable life.
The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness
And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,
And as for me, now as then, it is too much.
There is too much world.”
-Czeslaw Milosz, from “The Separate Notebooks”
A poem by Francisco X. Alarcón:
L.A. Prayer
April 1992
something
was wrong
when buses
didn’t come
streets
were
no longer
streets
how easy
hands
became
weapons
blows
gunfire
rupturing
the night
the more
we run
the more
we burn
o god
show us
the way
lead us
spare us
from ever
turning into
walking
matches
amidst
so much
gasoline
I have been waiting for this link roundup because nothing else in the media has really had anything to help me process this. II was not personally affected by these attacks, and my heart is breaking for everyone who was.
My main feeling about the whole event is a fear that this is just going to lead to a cycle of violence. Sure, it’s possible that this may be the beginning of the end for ISIS, who have gone too far by attacking a western country (a fact that is in itself a global issue – our lack of empathy for the other, for those we deem too different to care much about). Maybe this means we will all finally unite, finish off ISIS, and restore some sort of order in a way that is led by regional leaders and respects the culture and context in which they are working.
But I’m afraid as hell that this is just going to re-start the horrible cycle that began with 9/11, which began with a good-faith effort to “get the bad guys” (always more complicated than we would like to believe) and turned into two long wars which harmed us and countless (indeed, often uncounted) innocent civilians in the name of such noble goals as safety, democracy, and human rights.
But we might’ve learned, right? Right?
I agree, and I’m trying to figure out a way to frame this for my students when we meet on Tuesday — that a lot of the works we’re reading and watching (my class is on dystopia as a genre) seem to critique the use of violence as a response to violence. Argh.
That’s what I’m wondering too. It’s great that people are supportive, that’s what every disaster deserves (human-made or not), but why is the support so… nationalistic? When the US, Britain and other EU members project the French flag onto every national monument, that’s not just being supportive of the dead and their families. Several of these countries, including France itself, are huge military powers already involved in the Syria war. They have bombing campaigns!
And for years, every country in Europe has been trying to wiggle out of having to accept that Syrian refugees want to move to Europe. The EU had already banded together to keep refugees out as per the Dublin agreement, and the last few weeks, even the more “welcoming” countries have tightened up border control. Europeans were already feeling incredibly sorry for themselves, honestly, because we have to marginally care about the war in Syria.
People are already saying that one of the terrorists may have been a refugee.
In this context, what does it mean when the large Western military powers and the member states of the European Union say that they support France?
We’re still in the same cycle – ISIS exists because the American forces in the Iraq war finished al-Queda in Iraq. If Western forces defeat ISIS something even more monstrous will grow in its place, like the head of a hydra.
Um, sorry. I’m not great at hope.
Its actually even worse, America created IS (Well they trained and armed young men, who then went on to form IS) to fight al-Queda.
Who ever they bomb in the process of ‘defeating’ IS will then get sick of it and mobilize to create a group to fight against the western invasions in their country.
Basically, but I sometimes think that this reading of things is a little too simplistic and sort of…infantilizes IS a bit? Or turns them into these great freedom fighters that they’re not. It’s a religious fundamentalist organization, that has been greatly empowered by the US/West fucking around in their area and leaving a power vacuum, but “we” manage to produce fundamentalists ourselves.
America created IS in the sense that they first destabilised the region with a war (not that Saddam was great, but…) and then left a huge power vacuum and a civil war in its wake. Hussein’s regime was a Sunni minority ruling a Shia majority. The US overthrew it, disbanded the army and put Shias in charge. So then you get a bunch of pissed off ex-military Sunnis who remember the glory days when they used to run everything, and also the usual number of scared and angry civilians who have no one to protect them in the civil war except their clans. Cue hundreds of tiny armed groups fighting each other.
Now, salafism happens to be an extremist version of Sunni islam (except that many of today’s IS recruits apparently can barely find their way around a Quran, according to what I’ve read), and rich people in Saudi Arabia keeps pumping money into it. They can recruit, and they have resources. A rich Sunni extremist cult of violence is going to speak to a certain number of people in this situation, and even the less religious guys need to affiliate themselves with someone just to survive. Any port in a storm. And you can get your dignity back, if you feel that way.
And then Syria happened (note: I know even less about Syria than about Iraq), and they had the opposite problem, I think – I believe that Shias have been in charge which created a lot of oppressed Sunnis who might be seduced by the chance to have power, IIRC. Not that Sunnis and Shias have to hate each other! But people polarise when times are bad.
Note: I misremembered – Assad and his people are actually Alawite which is only kind of Shia. But they’re not Sunni, at any rate, though most Syrians are. IS was one of several groups opposing the Assad regime during the Arab spring, and they came out of top among the revolutionaries. They’re good at scary violence. And now it’s like the Iraqi IS and the Syria IS are melding.
I think I read somewhere that IS is just one of many guerrillas and armed clans that sprang up in the area, but they managed to make their mark on society and melt many mini-guerrillas together, so now they’re a big network and kind of run things. In some parts, they’re the strongest option around. If you can’t beat them, join them. Bonus: they tell you you’re an awesome person who will definitely go to heaven! And I’d guess they have no mercy if you decide you don’t like them anymore, because they built their fame (infamy) on not showing mercy. My impression is that this is a fierce, take-no-prisoners type of war.
So, yes, the fundamentalism wasn’t exactly put there by the US (if anything, blame Saudi) except possibly by provocation, but it’s not the fundamentalism (or freedom) that’s really driving people either. If an ugly civil war is happening right in your front yard, you can’t opt out. Unless you try to run away to the nearest safe countries, which would be Europe, and, welp.
I’ve read the opposite – that ISIS is very, explicitly, we-are-doing-everything-in-the-Koran-directly fundamentalist. Hence the need to have territory and the wording they use. This is why they’ve been somewhat successful about recruiting in the “West,” because they do offer a comforting black-and-white view of the world where you can tell exactly what is wrong or right. And they at least claim to live by it (although of course on the ground things might be different). Now obviously most Muslims don’t agree with this kind of interpretation, but denying the fundamentalist Islam aspect kind of underestimates their zeal and also focuses the attention of their fighting on “the West” when it’s just as much about people who disagree with their interpretation (and attempting to provoke “the West” into Islamophobic actions, which “shows” other Muslims that they’re the only way).
I think neuroromanticism is just referring to the recruits, many of whom don’t actually seem to have known much about the Koran or Muslim faiths beforehand.
From http://www.ibtimes.com/isis-recruiting-westerners…
“The vast majority of Westerners joining up with ISIS are extraordinarily ignorant when it comes to religion,” said Max Abrahms, a Northeastern University professor who studies jihadist groups.”
I’m not sure that this underestimates their zeal. There are extremists in many religions, but those extremists are empowered by political dynamics. It is clear that both radical Islam and western imperialism have combined to create this mess.
Totally, I completely and 100% agree with that last statement. I just think that sometimes people downplay the fundamentalist aspect of it- and the power of that kind of fundamentalist, emotionally pure, “we know the actual Word of God” kind of thinking. They might not know much religion themselves but trust their leaders who are saying that they do. It is the same kind of fundamentalism the US has, really.
I’ve been thinking about this and I’m wondering if we have different perspectives based on media sources and environment.
Unless I seek out alternative media, I tend to hear/read people talk about Islamic fundamentalism as if it is totally divorced from political and economic determinants of conflict. I know many people who perceive culture, and only culture, as the main cause of conflict in the Middle East. Hence the popularity of Samuel Huntington and his friends. This misunderstanding strikes me as the root of most contemporary Islamophobia. Islam has been hammered home as the sole cause of terrorism to the point that many, many people can’t even separate one from the other.
It took me a long time to realize that American religious fundamentalists also exist within a political context because the connection between religious movements and the politics behind them is so often obscured. Our interpretation of the ‘word of God’ and our vulnerability to those who wield it are usually dependent on political and social conditions. American fundamentalism is powerful because it too serves political needs.
I think it’s not so much the Islamic part, but the fundamentalist part. In the US right-wing context people get hung up on the “Islamic other” aspect, while obviously not examining the very real danger of US fundamentalism, but sometimes in left-wing contexts I see a downplaying of the fundamentalist aspect of Daesh and what that offers people. Which is I think important when understanding how it’s being reacted to- as we see in the US, fundamentalists convinced of their rightness and moral purity do things that maybe “we” don’t think we would do.
I’m not focusing on the West at all. My comment is entirely about Syria and Iraq.
People versed in Islam theology say that these guys aren’t good at theology. Any fundamentalist can cherry-pick quotes, and educated fundamentalists will wear you down with arguments about those quotes. But from what I’ve read, they don’t hold up academically. It’s like how the Westboro Baptist Church are right that it does say in the Bible that you can’t be gay (or something that can be interpreted to mean that you can’t be gay), but it’s bonkers to pick THAT as the main message of the Bible, and it definitely doesn’t say anywhere “thou shalt oppress the gays any way thou can and picket the hell out of their funerals”. If you’re a fundamentalist, you can decide that this is the hill you want to die on and argue until you’re blue in the face about Sodom and Gomorrah, but no one who knows anything about Christian theology would agree that “fight the gays” is the main take-home message of the Bible.
There was a good article in The Nation the other day that said that most of the captured Iraqi IS guys have an 8th grade education and barely know anything about the Quran except what their cell leaders tell them. Sure, fundamentalists come in all shapes and sizes, but the bottom feeders are mostly fighting for their families. They’re acting in the framework of fundamentalism, but family security is everything.
People get swept up in the trend – if you WANT to be a fundamentalist and you’re a Sunni man, now is a good time, because you can just throw yourself into salafism. You get to feel like you’re part of something, like you’re the future. You’re cool and scary and holy. That motivates some people. My impression is that this is what drives the recruits from the West and other external countries. But the local boys have actual stakes in the game. They need to be armed anyway, because there’s a war right on their doorstep. If they feel stepped upon and they’re Sunni, why not run with the scary Sunni IS? They seem to be doing well, after all.
Basically, does being recruited to a fundamentalist force make you a fundamentalist no matter why you sign up, or do you need to be an actual fanatic to count as a real fundamentalist?
I just think that downplaying the fundamentalism aspect – and the seductive nature of moral purity in a world that is frightening and collapsing around your ears – leaves out something important to the story. And to be honest, it’s that fundamentalism coming up against US/western fundamentalism, the kind that we like to downplay but is pretty entrenched (especially in the US military), that scares me.
I’m really not downplaying it, I’m trying to put it in context. I think there may be some miscommunication here? I’m not an American. I think American Christian fundamentalism is legitimately scary and alien, and I don’t know of any other Western country where religious fundamentalism is widely accepted. It does NOT come off as normal, familiar or innocent to me. I actually remember slowly understanding that American politics can mix Christianity with military action. I think I started to get it because of something George W Bush said, and it was absolutely terrifying to realise that he may have started actual wars in the Middle East partly because he was influenced by his religion. That’s medieval to me, literally medieval. I didn’t think that kind of morality still existed in Western cultures.
So, in my context, it’s important to emphasise that the IS/Daesh have motivations besides religion, because lots of people around me will readily accept that a strong dose of (any) religion just drives people crazy. I’m not denying islamophobia, just noting that fervent Christians are also regarded as suspicious. In the US, you probably have to be more sure to point out that there’s nothing wrong specifically with Islam, and that Muslims have real faith just like Christians. Is that what you’re trying to explain to me? 🙂
I think it’s just, to me, framing it all as “oh that’s just crazy/evil” without understanding what fundamentalism really means and offers. To American fundamentalist Christians, Orthodox Jewish fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists, etc. I see a lot of people I encounter downplaying that power, I guess, and I think it’s important to actually take it into consideration alongside the other parts – and when talking about things like what’s inspiring US military action, too! We want both actors to be more rational/self-centered because that seems less frightening.
You seem to be talking about fundamentalism in general now, is that right? You started out by responding to what I said, which made it seem like you thought I was downplaying faith, so that’s what I was responding to, and I didn’t say anything like “they’re just crazy/evil”. I just want to make sure that you don’t think I believe that, or that I didn’t say anything that came off like I believed that. Ugh, this is getting super confusing, because I think we’re trying to make the same point, using arguments that aren’t translating very well.
I’m pointing out the context to underline that they’re not simply irrationally crazy or evil, that there are reasons for joining fundamentalist militias, reasons for developing fanatical faith, etc. When you direct the conversation towards fundamentalism, it sounds to me like you believe that they’re randomly crazy, because that’s what people usually mean when they say “they’re fundamentalists”. Comparing them to Christian fundamentalists doesn’t make it sound like you want them to feel more relatable, because Christian fundamentalists or any kind of super intense faith is not part of my culture at all. Basically, I hear that you’re trying to say that they have actual motivations such as faith, but the arguments you’re using are confusing unless the reader already knows religious fanatics that they find relatable, which I don’t think is very common in the West except in the US.
I’m aware that people can be deeply religious and still have their own motivations for their actions, and I’m aware that religion can be motivating. I get that they aren’t acting randomly, because that’s what I was saying in the first place.
I also think it’s important to say that being a very religious Muslim isn’t enough on its own to make people kill (which it sounds like when somebody mentions faith as a major reason), because Islam isn’t brainwashing and there’s an important social context (a huge war) influencing people’s decisions. Faith can make you fearless, self-righteous and enthusiastic, which can help you kill if you decide for many reasons that’s what you should do. But without some kind of social context, like a war to fight, faith alone won’t turn you into a killer. Even fanatics have reasons.
I think we’re kind of saying the same thing, just that I’m putting it pretty shittily (this is a super hard and complex topic, so I’m not surprised I’m messing it up). I guess what I’m trying to get at is that it’s not that they’re evil and crazy, but that they think they’re doing the right or even the good thing, in the context of all the chaos of this massive war. There’s a real power and comfort in feeling that you’re actually doing the right thing for the world, or that you and your group are the only real moral purity out there. And that they do have something to back up this sense, even though their interpretation of the text is wildly away from the majority of other people’s interpretation of the text. Trying to say that they don’t think they’re doing the right thing by their beliefs, or that they’re not interpreting the text at all, doesn’t help us. I actually think this is something people don’t talk enough about in regards to fundamentalism in general – that it’s not about fundamentalists being evil and crazy but it’s about belief in the rightness of yourself/your group and the wrongness of all others. That’s why Beirut is attacked as well as Paris. But having said all that and tied myself up so much, I’m not sure exactly what thinking of things that way accomplishes. I don’t know how to argue against it properly. I don’t know anything, to be honest.
This comment is the best, most clear-eyed statement I’ve read on the turn of events since it happened. Very glad to have this community to talk all this over. Thank you.
All of this. I feel for France. When the news first started unfolding, it felt terrifying and unreal.
But now the rhetoric is scaring me, too. I (naively, I guess) thought France was above conducting a war on terror, but that really sounds like what they’ve started doing. And I’m worried for the refugees, too. The attacks have ramped up the anti-refugee talk, and I sort of wonder whether that was the point? Like, ISIS saw all their potential recruits fleeing the country and being granted asylum elsewhere, and how better to prevent that from happening than to perpetrate a large-scale terrorist attack against a country that is giving asylum? Because of course the politicians are going to ignore the fact that a good number of the attackers were French (or Belgian?) nationals.
I’m worried things are going to get worse for refugees too. It’s only recently got large scale media attention, but the police in Calais have been attacking the refugee camps there and destroying people’s possessions for years. (*) It’s not a new thing. It seemed like recently, with all the media coverage, there was at least some potential for change? But there’s so much racism and Islamophobia in Europe, and France has quite a large far-right movement. I’m worried it’s just going to get worse.
( * There’s information about police repression in Calais here: https://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/)
The current fear here in France (you know, other than the fear for our physical safety) is that the Front National (SUPER right-wing political group) is going to use this weekend’s events to gain an edge in upcoming elections, and the results could be disastrous. French Toasties, please vote! I can’t. 🙁 These jerks need to look at the number of victims with Muslim names (both in Paris and in Beirut) and then shut the hell up with their xenophobic rants.
This is what I’m trying not to think about because it is so depressing.
Like, everyone is talking about destroying ISIS – which, like, no military action in history ever took place without collateral damage, which is always going to be awful, but I can’t say ISIS does not need to be destroyed.
But… like, is anyone talking about what comes after that? Is anyone talking about what kind of structure to build to replace it? How to avoid replacing it with a power vacuum that will be filled by a basically similar organization? Is anyone thinking about that, at all? Because I really don’t see how that’s possible, and it seems like most of the conversations right now just end at “blow some shit up”. And if violence is our only strategy I honestly don’t see where that ever ends except with a horrifying amount of depth. It seems like a basically unsolvable problem and I keep thinking about it and there just doesn’t seem like there’s any way out.
I think it’s helpful to understand this in terms of gang violence: It isn’t about anything except a lethal lack of hope. It’s about being so angry and deprived and knowing only violence and pain–whether from their own state dictatorships or extremist groups or foreign states–that violence comes first, the reasons come second. And giving credence to the fundamentalism or trying to academicize the violence only gives oxygen to the fire. Can you imagine what it must feel like to sincerely believe that day to day existence is worse than being suicide bomber? To want to die in the name of making the rest of the world as bad as you’ve had it? How much trauma must a person endure to feel that way? And responding in a way that legitimizes the “reasons” for the attacks only breeds more of it.
I’m personally speaking from a family of 9/11-survivors, and I recognize that not every family feels this way. It gave us so much pain to see our names dragged through the news to justify causing the pain we were enduring elsewhere in the world–getting the “bad guy” only meant a nephew growing up without an uncle, and a foreign power who took a loved one away. We were in so much pain as a family, city, and country, that it was emotionally traumatic to see that same violence continue in any capacity. I feel no gap in time or cause between 9/11 and today.
I’m not a social scientist, but my heart tells me that this weekend in the West is the daily experience of a Syrian child who has been radicalized. We have to own the acts our armies & governments have perpetrated in the name of its citizens. Our acts of violence over the course of 15-plus years, in part, created/incubated trauma, fear, anger, rage, Othering, and lethal theology. When we look through the viewfinder of retaliation, I see a reflection, not an enemy. As citizens, I feel that we need to do something really, really hard, and not just pray for victims and refugees and ourselves–we need to pray for those who are committing these crimes against humanity, and recognize ourselves and societies in them.
I work closely with the BMA and see groups of junior doctors regularly, and I am fascinated by the difference between the media reports of the proposal to strike and what I hear on the ground. I can’t really talk about it too much because of my job, but I would be super-interested to hear form any UK Toasties what you think about the strike, what you think doctors are striking about and what you think will happen.
I’m well up for them striking, but then I’m a socialist and I’m always well up for people striking. In any case, what they’re striking about: the fact that the new junior doctor contract will lead to increased hours and less pay (my understanding with the pay thing is that they’ll only receive wage increases when they get a new job title, when the reality of medical hierarchies is that you’re a junior doctor for many years). Now you’ve mentioned it though, I’m not entirely sure what will happen. I know that when essential service staff strike, it’s usually done in such a way as to not endanger anyone, but I’m not sure how that will work here.
I’m definitely not your average person in the street, this is the kind of thing I specifically take an interest in so… I have no idea what general levels of support/opposition are. At the big protest here in Manchester against the Tory party conference, the junior doctors were heroes. When a couple of them spoke at the rally at the end, I have never heard so much support, cheering, applause – it was the most intense show of solidarity I’ve ever seen. Much as they were people particularly interested in that kind of stuff as well, it was the biggest protest I’ve seen in years.
It’s all very interesting anyway.
What will probably happen is that any elective procedures will be cancelled (if the strike goes ahead – what will be interesting is whether they’ll get cancelled in expectation of a strike, and who just warns people that their surgery or procedure may be cancelled and re-booked if the strike goes ahead. Meanwhile, all ongoing and emergency care will be done by senior doctors, so consultants, specialty doctors and associate specialists. Apparently this is what happens at the beginning of August every year when all the junior doctors rotate and nearly all of them have to attend inductions, so it’s not quite as unheard of as it sounds. So massive disruption, a huge headache for HR, but there shouldn’t be anyone endangered.
(This is me guessing, based on knowing how medical care works, not specialist information from my job!)
Thanks for answering!
I am very firmly on the side of the doctors. And I haven’t heard anyone on the side of the Tories (apart from the Tories)
I probably don’t know as much as I should and I don’t follow it very closely but frankly I’m horrified and shocked by the blatant arrogance of the government to say that 8-10 Monday to Saturday are ‘Regular working hours’. FUCK THAT.
The NHS is amazing and the government are deliberately trying to make it seem ‘un-feasible’ and badly run so that they can justify privatizing healthcare and selling it off to their friends.
I feel like we’re at a tipping point now with Tory actions. It’s been a slow creep (from ‘scroungers’ to those ‘hard working families’ we hear so much about), but now with tax credits and the junior doctors’ contract, people of all stripes seem to have woken up to how unnecessarily destructive this government is. There’s no way you can pretty up £1300 being taken away from families. Even most Tories oppose the tax credit cuts, and I think you’re right that it’s the same for the junior doctors. Hopefully we’ll see a swing to the left, as with Spain and Greece, for the next election.
I think its pretty obvious that the Tories aren’t holding back anymore or even trying to pretend that what they’re doing is good for regular people. Their spin and PR is pretty condescending these days.
Its like they won the election and thought ‘Right, now we can do whatever we want’.
I do think that Labour will be able to grow in popularity now that they’ve re-gained their Left position(I mean anything is better than the toothless ‘Tory-lite’ they’ve been for the last 10 years) and there will be a swing to the left; but I fear what the world will look like after 5 more years of a Tory government, Its only been a few months and they’re already attacking the NHS, its quite possible that even if we do get a Labour government in the next election, the NHS will already be beyond saving from privatization, if not obliterated completely.
The junior doctors contract stuff actually all happened last year before the election: whatever the LibDems were doing, they weren’t stopping it. Talks were suspended earlier in the year, and August/September was the deadline for returning to the negotiations, and the junior doctors representatives voted “hell no” for returning to talks and favour of balloting for strike action. So although this seems like a response to the end of the Coalition and the Tories working alone, it was going on way before the election.
Yeah, I agree with you about the “defund, destroy trust, privatise” agenda. I am so scared they are going to succeed. And so baffled by the idiotic fuckers who don’t want the NHS privatised but who voted the Tories in anyway.
Another British Toastie here saying yes, let them strike!
Caveat: I come from a family including a grandfather who was an NHS hospital administrator and a father who worked his whole life as a biomedical scientist in an NHS hospital, and have myself worked in admin in my dad’s department, so the ‘don’t you fucking dare dismantle the NHS’ thing is sort of in my blood.
Hey, Parisian lurker here.
My loved ones are all safe and sound, and I know I’m extremely lucky. Yet today it was hard to get out of bed, it’s hard to focus at work, and I think it will be a while until I enjoy sitting at a terrace without freaking out at the sound of an ambulance. I am so privileged to live in a place where what happened is out of the ordinary. I’ve also been a bit embarrassed about the international show of solidarity for Paris, forgetting what happened in Beirut (unsurprinsigly, not on The Toast !).
After the attacks in January, I bought my first Terry Pratchett. It made me laugh and forget, I think I’m going to buy another one. I also read The Toast when I am sad and need comfort. I don’t have a monopoly on grief, but don’t hold out on the lighthearted pieces for me. Thank you, smart and funny people !
Very glad you and your loved ones are safe and sound! I think Terry Pratchett’s a pretty excellent choice for cheer and comfort. <3
Thank you ! <3
Agreed, and I think this will be my evening entertainment.
Yay for Pratchett! The Port-Royal library has tons of his stuff (mostly in French, but the translator, Patrick Couton, is amazing).
Thanks for the recommandation ! So far I’ve only read him in English, but if the translator is good, I’ll give it a try.
I read about your Friday night on the open thread, I’m glad you and the other Toasties made it home OK.
So glad you checked in, even as a lurker! We’re so glad to hear from you and that you and your loved ones are okay. Please take care of yourself as you and so many others deal with the trauma. It’s no small thing.
Thanks for checking in.
For a spirits-boosting read, I find Pratchett’s Wee Free Men a real winner.
Another Parisian here, safe and sound. There’s a pub on Canal Saint-Martin called the Cork and Cavan that has an English book exchange and they sometimes have Terry Pratchett books, (as well as a decent selection of books in general–the idea is bring a book, take a book, but the shelves are so crammed now that nobody will care if you only take one) in case you’re interested. I think my friend Bob and I are probably responsible for most of the Pratchett books in the pub. 🙂
100% agreed on the need for humor. It’s what gets a lot of us through the day. Although, I guess some won’t feel the same way. I was born into a family that’s always done the whole graveyard humor thing. (For example, I was amused–and then felt immediately guilty for said amusement–when a friend sent me a message saying she “hoped I was alight” instead of ‘alright.’) I was at a concert in the area on Friday night, and while they ultimately opted to cancel the last act, the music did play on for a while, and I think it helped.
I started a Terry Pratchett novel the day after 9/11. It helped!
My wife’s maternity leave has ended, and today is her first day back at work, so it’s also the first day this daggone baby that we’ve got spends the day without either of his (it’s his grandmother for the next few weeks until daycare starts).
Because she was stressed, I remained calm and unworried, since this is my response to being around people who are stressed. Now she is at work though, and I am by myself, and I am riven by anxiety.
Have you installed any interesting updates on this baby? Can it talk yet?
It doesn’t talk, exactly, but it does do this kind of “aayaaah uugggh ahhh thhbbbttt” thing that looks like a primitive form of communication? Very difficult to tell precisely what it means by that.
anyway, here is a picture of him, in case seeing a picture of a reasonably good baby is the kind of thing that is going to help people in their time of troubles.
please notice the matching monster shoes
Reasonably good? That is clearly a most excellent baby, only improved by a monster themed outfit. Babies are always helpful <3
Look at those chubby arms! He’s so cute you almost can’t tell he’s completely illiterate!
He is, though.
What do you even find to talk to him about?
The Class Struggle, mostly.
This is an excellent baby. You’ve picked a good model (or, he probably picked you). Also, he’s clearly fashion-forward, and I am envious of his delightful monster shoes.
I have been there with the maternity leave and anxiety-riddled feelings it causes. It will be okay. It helps that there’s a grandparent/other relative for the transition between parental units and daycare, but he’ll be fine, and so will you and your wife. <3
You can see the gears turning behind those eyes. That is a baby who will grow extremely interesting with age, like a fine wine.
This is one adorable monster-clad baby.
The Braakling appears more intelligent than most of that age group. Clearly you have been doing the appropriate yelling at babies as instructed by The Toast’s parenting manuals. Try not to worry overmuch, you have done a good job preparing your child for The Real World.
Yeah, he gets real into yelling about Foucault, but i was trying to read him Italo Calvino the other day and I don’t think he was paying attention, so there’s still a lot of question about how he’s going to turn out.
Were you reading it in Italian, or was it in translation?
If in translation, try the original.
If the original Italian, try something in French instead (may I recommend Roland Barthes?). Some children are Italian-blind for longer than others, can’t be helped. You just have to love them until it passes. Or at least tolerate them.
Excellent baby. I have been seeking out pictures of friends’ babies all weekend, and A+ baby fashion.
Excellent chin cleft in that baby.
That is a fair pass at a baby. Worry yew not about daycare, for it is a glorious thing that teaches your child to say “please” and “thank you” when you haven’t considered manners because you have mostly been focused on preventing your child from accidental suicide via misadventure, (eg all the chokable objects they will find and place in their mouth.)
yeah, I also heard that peer-pressure in daycare also makes toilet training comparatively easy, so I’m pretty well looking forward to that.
You and the lady wife seem to have made good choices regarding the combination of your genetic codes. Well done, sir.
I’m going back to work in exactly two weeks and am already riven by anxiety! (excellent phrasing by the way) I can’t imagine how much worse it is in reality than in imagination to leave my little baby dragon (that’s pretty much what we call her always due to the interesting dragon/pterodactyl noises she makes)
It turns out that, in reality, it is fine. Living in the age of smartphones is a pretty good balm; my mom keeps texting me pictures of the baby, he looks fine.
Maybe a little *too* fine?
I read Pema Chodron and Thich Nhat Hanh when I’m feeling really down.
“Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness–life’s painful aspect–softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose–you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.”
― Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living
A copy of Practicing Peace in Times of War magically appeared on my desk (probably not that magically…I do work in a library) but you have inspired me to pick it up.
I’m going to be honest – and I don’t feel like I could say this anywhere else – I’m not really feeling… anything much about the attacks in Paris. Obviously it’s terrible and I’m sorry so many people lost their lives. But I was kind of surprised by the gut reaction of grief that so many people I know have had. It’s closer to home than other, similar events (I live in the UK), and so I think part of it is fear it’s going to happen here soon. Lots of people have gone through the difference to us in the West of something happening ‘here’ rather than ‘over there’ and the difference in media coverage and so on. But for me, it’s just been another one of those terrible things that you hear about and you’re sorry it’s happened but if you allowed yourself to really feel the impact of it you wouldn’t be able to get through your day. Most of my ‘consistent low level worrying about the world’ capacity is taken up by climate change in any case.
I did have that ‘what if it happened here’ response, but more in a hypothetical way. I live in Manchester, and there have been several foiled terrorist plots to blow up the Arndale – a massive horrible shopping centre – so my thought was that if there really is a threat, I’ll just (gladly) avoid the Arndale. I don’t know, I suppose maybe I’m answering my own question as to why people are more shaken up by this: it was random, it was people just out having a drink. I don’t know.
Anyway, I’m not saying the grief is a bad reaction, I’m definitely 100% not out to scold anyone in some stupid way, I just wanted to know if anyone else feels the same because right now it feels odd to be on the outside of that.
I feel the same (right down to the climate anxieties) with an admixture of, “Shit, people/governments are already using this as an excuse to perpretrate MORE violence at both the individual and the state level and will probably do it more, and in the long run the same people will get hurt who usually get hurt.”
And like you, I acknowledge that for people who feel grief and fear here, those responses are real and theirs.
Yeah, the fact this has kicked off even more state violence already with France increasing air strikes on Syria is the only thing that’s really got me. It’s just the worst (and most expected) response.
I’m not trying to be combative, I promise, but I’m curious about what response you (and anyone else worrying about escalating back-and-forth violence on this thread) would like to see.
Because I am pretty convinced at this point that there is no good answer – not-bombing does not exactly lead to peace and prosperity in Syria either, you know?
I would be happy with a 1-2 week moratorium on any responsive action, so that when something is done, it is considered and thought-out, and not an emotional retaliation.
As do I (again, even down to the climate anxieties). I don’t really want to talk about it much, but I did want to let you know you’re not alone and thank you for making me feel less alone in my inability to feel grief about something terrible.
I totally understand this. It’s very upsetting and scary… but to me, in the same general way that any world tragedy is upsetting and sad and scary. I echo the comment upthread that I’m really afraid this will be the start of a chain of back and forth violence. Someone I love is going to be in Paris soon, and I’m also worried for them (I know this isn’t rational, but what can you do). But the level of emotion and grief I saw among Americans – I’m American – surprised me. Maybe because it’s the West, like you said? Or because they’ve been to Paris? I don’t know.
I thought he same thing. I wonder if it’s because Paris is close by and popular and romantic, while Beirut and Nairobi are not? I feel bad that it happened, and I feel bad for my French coworker, but ultimately I feel pretty disconnected from the mass grieving that everyone in North America seems to be having.
Paris is close by and popular and romantic
I think it’s this, and I also suspect there’s a racial aspect to it. Paris in reality is an incredibly multicultural city, but Paris in a lot of people’s minds is lily-white and there’s always more sympathy from the West when the people suffering a tragedy are white.
I dunno. I’m very pessimistic about what this is likely to engender.
Paris is a city that a lot of people in Europe and North America have visited, lived in, and love dearly.
Americans who have been to Paris, which is a huge percentage of Americans who have been anywhere in Europe, are well aware that it is not an all-white city. Moreover, the popular non-specialist, non-historian American imagination of Paris is heavily bound up with the romantic (though, as they say, “problematic”) myth of Paris as a place where black American intellectuals and entertainers (James Baldwin, Josephine Baker probably foremost) could go and live freely and be respected when America was much more of a hellhole. Most people who are not specially interested in the country or the topic are not very aware of French racism and think of France as a place of racial tolerance and Paris specifically as a place of multicultural hospitality.
That is the stereotype, not some imaginary imagined “lily-white” image, and that is one reason among very many why Paris is beloved.
Yes – I had lunch with a friend who stayed around the 2nd arrondissement, and when I said that there were a lot of muslims in Paris she was surprised, because you don’t see them around the tourist areas or in the central areas. Paris is multicultural, yes, but it is not integrated, it is almost ghettoised, with certain places for certain places and the contrast between the idealised Paris and the Paris of colour, so to speak, is vast.
I mean… the grande mosquée de Paris is in the 5e arrondissement in the very center of Paris right by the Sorbonne etc. and it’s a lovely touristy place to sit in a café and drink mint tea. I don’t think Paris is more ghettoized than the US; in fact I think it is much less so. That is why the Fox News episode about immigrant “no-go zones” in Paris was so hilarious, because it picked places like the Pere Lachaise cemetery and Belleville, one of the hippest neighborhoods in the city.
I think what your friend saw might have been more about her own (unconscious, cultural, not-her-fault) conditioning and not about Paris itself; what she says rings very false to my own experience of Paris (having lived there). I’m not saying it is perfect. It’s not a multicultural utopia, but it is definitely not ghettoized as in this description. I also think of the fact that L’arabe du futur // The Arab of the Future by Rian Sattouf is a bestseller and what *everybody* in Paris is reading right now. Also, diversity in Paris is not always visible on the skin the way it is in the US — many Moroccans and Tunisians look perfectly French, and why wouldn’t they, these geographic areas have been exchanging populations since Roman times.
By the way, people reading here would probably really like Rian Sattouf’s book too. It’s a graphic novel, and he is a cartoonist who used to work for Charlie Hebdo but changed jobs before the massacre happened.
Eh, no, that wasn’t the case with my friend.
And whilst the Mosque is in the 5th, it’s not a negation of the whiteness of the majority of the touristy places in Paris. And I also lived in Paris! I lived in the Fox New described no-go zone, amusingly. I’m not from the US, nor have I lived there, so I can’t speak to how it compares to the US, but I look at it from a more European perspective, and the way France approaches racial integration and accommodation of culture is quite different to how it’s done in the UK and Germany, for instance, and that has recently created problems.
I guess I just don’t see how religion can be read upon the face of strangers passing in the street. And “whiteness” — it is a bit ridiculous when we are talking about a city full of North Africans who are also “white.”
I agree, France is not perfect. But I wouldn’t take Germany as a fine model either — it is much less integrated! (I think of the glee of Turkish shopowners in my old neighborhood being open semi-legally on German national holidays, and the incredible nasty outpourings when a German-Turkish person was elected to city office in Berlin). I really don’t see why you would compare the UK or Germany positively to France and dump on Paris.
Because I’ve lived in all three places and love and dislike parts of each of them, and seen the political rhetoric and calls to integration in them. And in Paris I found it really shocking how disparate the neighbourhoods are, and how the government, national and regional, dealt with the issue of integration. And I’m not dumping on Paris, I’m relaying what I saw, and what was discussed with others there. There are huge disparities in wealth and social mobility in Paris, and those disparities are along visibly racial lines.
Kanye West seems to love Paris too, if my reading of celebrity gossip magazines is to be believed (and why wouldn’t it be). So that mythology lives on.
Is France generally perceived to be racist by Americans?
Half-French person and french resident here, asking out of genuine curiosity. Some of my friends from other European countries (including Germany, Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe) have remarked upon visiting me about how integrated France seems to be compared to where they live – to quote verbatim “You see so many black people in business attire here”.
(Am obviously not denying that we do have a race problem!).
Not sure about general perception, but I’m pretty confident you won’t hear us talk about racism in France much, mainly because those of us with any awareness of France’s race issues probably don’t labor under the illusion that the U.S. is any better and are therefore unlikely to cast stones.
The rest of us either don’t understand racism well enough to acknowledge it within our own country (much less any other), or we perceive France as not racist enough (even if we’re in denial about it).
I agree with this completely. And anyone who’s spent time in Paris would know immediately, seeing the list of areas hit, that they were by no means the richest or whitest parts of the city.
Also, it’s important to bear in mind that the sheer number of people on Facebook and Twitter, and the sheer number of contacts most of us have, can skew our sense of the percentages involved. Doing something – like performing grief – is visible. Not doing it is invisible. When the numbers are so huge, even a relatively small percentage can look like everyone.
Speaking just for myself, I did see my Facebook feed explode with concern and well-wishing directed toward the French, but when I looked more closely I saw that most of my friends who were posting were people who I had studied abroad or taught abroad with, who I knew felt a connection to France. I also, as I posted elsewhere, know a lot of people who don’t have a personal emotional reaction to Paris and don’t feel any need to pretend to. I can’t speak for everyone, and of course there are people out there who do perform grief for public consumption, but I wonder if the nature of social media is making them seem more numerous than they really are.
Also, I know that my personal reasons for feeling upset about Paris are not everyone’s reasons, and I don’t think any good can come of challenging people’s right to be shocked and grieved and compassionate. As so many people have said, Paris is a familiar city. We know it, if not from visits, then from movies, from songs, from the literature of our own country. It’s that ability to place and picture tragedy that makes it get under our skin, that makes us react personally rather than intellectually. I know that white people do tend respond more to tragedies that involve white people, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I think this is simpler than that. More of us know Paris than know Beirut, and it’s our nature to react more strongly when bad things happen to people and places that we know.
I like (“like”) this reasoning on why Paris but why not Beirut etc from Dear Coquette. http://dearcoquette.com/on-paris-beirut-and-baghd…
It’s maybe a little too blunt but yeah…
THIS. Always, unfortunately, this. I should be doing more.
This is exactly what Mr Inkwashed and I were talking about this weekend.
Toasties. We have so much revolutionary “hearts and minds” work to do in our communities. So. Much.
I think there’s some amount of Beirut and Baghdad being thought of, on some level, (and generally covered major news outlets) as places where bombings are “normal,” whereas the Paris attack is repeatedly being covered as the most devastating attack in the city since World War II. Especially because American pop history/cultural history tends to place such a huge emphasis on World War II in general, and the association with France, IME, is very much the Resistance and not Vichy.
I’m not saying those feelings individually are necessarily awful, but I do think there are a lot of associations like that all happening at once.
it’s exhausting to take on everyone’s grief, and there has been a lot of grief in this world. It’s certainly understandable to do so. Everyone needs a break now and then.
I’m pretty much there, myself. It’s really sad and I am compassionate for the people, and I’m saddened that this happened. I’m wish it weren’t so. I wish it weren’t so.
but I don’t have the energy, focus, or really, any part of me left to grieve for anyone right now.
I grieve more for what this’ll do to the world than for the people, if that makes sense? The atmosphere where I am (the Netherlands) has been getting increasingly grim, and now I get colleagues making remarks about how of course there are terrorists among the fugitives and (half-jokingly, but not really) that we should just drop a bomb on the middle east. I grieve because this’ll mean increased popularity for the islamophobes, increased discrimination against brown people, and then as a result of that more radicalization on both sides.
I wish I had something to add, but I just want to thank you for posting this view. [Oops, guess I do have something to add…] It is a lot like this in America, too. Europe seems kind of like a pressure cooker for racism, xenophobia, etc. right now–well, for awhile now–with the geographical proximity to poor and chaotic non-white nations whose people also need security and decent lives. And with the political and military and economic actions by European nations causing or exacerbating unlivable conditions in those nations…the situation is so terrible, for immigrants and POC primarily of course, but I also empathize with being not one being Other-ed but being surrounded by a society and individuals who are Othering. Makes me feel kind of cowardly? I don’t know how to talk about these things without being abrasive and probably alienating. That’s not an excuse though.
Yes, I’m sad for the people, but I’m also very worried about the reaction. Canada is just at a place where we’re prepping to bring in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in the next few months, but last night someone burned down a mosque in a quiet little town I used to live in and I’m worried that Canada might not be so safe a place for those refugees anymore.
Oh no, are you talking about the mosque in Peterborough? I just heard about that, I’m so sorry. Honestly, what goes through people’s minds?? (Don’t tell me I don’t actually want to know.)
I’m kinda the same–I have a sense that if I let myself be overcome with the horribleness of it all, I wouldn’t be able to cope. Obviously, obviously, it’s all a horrific mess, but I don’t really know how to internalize and respond emotionally to it, so I don’t.
I have feelings about what happened, but I am also a complete cynic when it comes to large displays of grief or solidarity on social media; so the response we are seeing may not reflect peoples actual feelings.
I also think that this event is just another in a long cycle of violence and retaliation that’s been going for years, and whatever strategy the Western governments employ to ‘defeat’ IS will just create another ‘enemy’ group to give them an excuse to maintain military presence in the Middle East. And they will use this event as an excuse to increase surveillance, remove even more of our privacy, and legislate Islamophobia, as well as perpetrating horrific acts of violence on innocent people (What happened in Paris is horrific and barbaric, but its not the first time IS has done something like this, and the US/West aren’t innocent of similar acts)
And the internet will forget about this in a week. There’ll be another more important hashtag that everyone wants to be seen to be supporting.
Yes I am a pessimist when it comes to humanity
I have this theory that Paris is super important to Westerners’ cultural identity, and that that’s part of why people react more than usual (I didn’t see the same reactions when the right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik killed 66 social democrats in Norway a few years ago, but I had really bad internet access that summer so maybe that’s why I didn’t see anything).
Maybe Brits get less nostalgic about Paris than other people because you have London, but Paris goes way back as a center for culture, arts, fun, romance, debauchery, adventure and youth. It’s more than just a city, it’s a symbol.
That’s where they struck, too. They hit the late-night cafés, a soccer stadium and a music venue. Not the Metro at rush hour, not a shopping mall at Saturday noon, but the Parisian nightlife. That’s bound to hurt.
But yes I’m worried because of how emotional lots of people are getting. I’m worried that we might be headed down a dangerous path.
Hm, I am more cynical about why Breivik didn’t get people the same way. Far right white supremacists haven’t been built up as A THREAT TO OUR WAY OF LIFE AND EVERYTHING WE HOLD DEAR the way that Islamist extremism has.
True, but in Scandinavian countries, social democracy and youth organisations is our way of life and everything we hold dear. So this was even worse than a school shooting of the same size would have been. The boogeyman didn’t look very scary, but he really did hit us where it hurt the most, right in the symbol of what we are. I guess that may not be obvious from the outside, though. (I mean, I’m not even Norwegian, but we were wrecked)
Oh gosh, I’m sorry, I worded that really badly if that’s what you thought I meant! I definitely didn’t mean to imply that Breivik’s attack wasn’t horrific, or wasn’t an attack on the Norwegian/Scandinavian way of life: it absolutely was. What I meant was that the way it was treated / talked about in the rest of Europe differs from how attacks inspired by fundamentalist Islam are treated. Breivik was treated as one lone individual, probably mentally ill, his crimes an aberration. There was no sense that Breivik was a representative of a wider movement, or that other Breiviks stood behind him, ready to attack, or that his ideology represented a true, wider threat to European values or European citizenship. The same way white shooters are treated in the US. This may have been different in Norway and Scandinavia, but here in the UK, there is still no sense that white power, far-right or fascist groups are a danger to “us”.
What still amazes me is the way the murder of Lee Rigby was treated here in the UK. Two men, inspired by Islamist ideology, went out and killed a soldier with a machete. One person – Lee Rigby – died. Of course that death was awful, for him and his family, but the response was astonishing. The Prime Minister convened a meeting of COBRA, which is what happens when there are severe threats to the UK. The attack took very little coordination, very little preparation or planning, no smuggled weapons, no detailed knowledge of security systems or insider knowledge: it was just two blokes and a very big knife, standing outside an army barracks waiting for an off-duty soldier. But because Islam was involved, and because the target was a member of the British army, it was treated as an attack on British values, a threat to us all, meetings were held at the highest levels, new levels of terror alert and so on.
Last year, a man claiming to be avenging Lee Rigby attacked and seriously injured an Asian man. It has had hardly any coverage because obviously that isn’t an attack on “us” by one of “them”.
It’s the disproportionate response of what represents “us” and what represents “a greater threat” that upsets me. I think that’s why the much bigger response to Paris than Breivik: the “we” who the media represents (which is not the same as the whole people of Europe) have been primed to see ourselves as potential victims of Islamist violence, but not of far-right violence.
No, I agreed with you! Breivik didn’t seem like an “other” ethnically and culturally, and in international media he was indeed covered similarly to how the media covers school shooters. But that doesn’t mean that right-wing violence isn’t viewed as a thing here. Leftist movements go way back in this part of the world, and neo-nazis and their ilk have been dangerous in the past. I mean, we have super low violent crime rates, but right-wing extremists do attack leftist organisers sometimes. In the 90’s and 00’s when I grew up, there were some very nasty murders. Last year, a feminist march was attacked by neo-nazis and a young man was stabbed almost to death. They interrupted another demonstration violently. Etc. It happens. It’s rare, but it’s real.
I can see the neo-nazi fingerprints all over Breivik’s ideology. He did act completely alone and doesn’t think of himself as a nazi, but his entire manifesto was about how the Norwegian government had been corrupted by feminist and leftist values causing the government to allow muslims to move there, and that’s what’s wrong with Europe today, and righteous crusaders should put a stop to that by killing all those disgusting leftists. And “leftists” doesn’t mean “the three last communists plotting revolution in a basement somewhere” or “a few people on Tumblr”. It means the labour movement, community organisations, feminists, activist youth and everything that mentions equality. This is a huge part of our societies.
It’s mindboggling to me that the patterns here aren’t obvious to everyone. But that does explain why international news media treated it like a random tragedy, so thanks for explaining!
Wow. I think this thread is (very politely) teaching a lot of people just how many differences there are even between cultures that look very very similar. That’s why I love the Toast!
I agree about the symbolic/imagined Paris aspect–and in the US, I think a lot of the framing of it as “the worst since World War II” is adding to it, because American popular history (either what people remember, or the stuff that gets made into big movies, etc) always has a lot of emphasis on World War II.
I will admit I was feeling the same way until I heard an interview on BBC 5 Live from a man who survived Bataclan with his girlfriend. His description of throwing himself on top of his girlfriend to keep her safe from bullets, staying down until the police came, then waiting until they were both completely safe before calling his mom to let her know what happened just hit me. THEN he talked about how going through all this had changed his perspectives on Islamophobia & how the people who perpetrate this level of violence don’t truly represent a cause or idea, that vilifying an entire culture was wrong, did reduce me to tears.
If anyone wants to listen to the interview, it’s online at the BBC website here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0383wgl but it’s pretty emotional & has some graphic descriptions.
I feel really similarly, and I feel bad for not feeling bad enough. Honestly, I think it might have to do with being raised on military bases post 9/11, & being told, as just a lil kid, that a terrorist attack on our homes was — if not probable– not out of the question. It just felt like another inevitable horrible world event.
Like everyone else commenting on here, I am concerned about the kind of reactions/retaliation that is already starting to brew. ALSO– Facebook had a thing that allowed people in Paris to check-in, sending a notification to all their friends. It was really comforting to see French Exchange students & a young lady who went to an arts summer camp I worked at check in as safe. It was also really disconcerting that this feature was apparently ready to go really soon after the attacks.
That feature’s actually been around for a while now – I think it was introduced in the wake of a natural disaster, though I can’t remember off the top of my head which one.
I didn’t realize! Also, now I can see that my comment sounds like I’m suspicious of facebook or something. I just meant that it upset me to get a reminder that the world we live in requires this kind of feature!
They’ve only had the feature for a year, and it’s only been used for a handful of natural disasters, starting with the earthquake in Nepal in April. I read an article from before the Paris attacks where Zuckerberg said that they were going to start deploying the feature to help with natural disasters and then eventually include other types of events too, but I can’t find the link right now. Here’s a Buzzfeed post about it: http://www.buzzfeed.com/brendanklinkenberg/starts…
I loved that feature too. It’s the first time it’s popped up for me, so it was a pleasant and comforting surprise to hear that one of my friends (who moved there a couple years ago) was safe. I didn’t even have time to worry about her before the notification came up on my iPhone screen and I was incredibly grateful for that.
Thanks for this comment, 30Litresof; I’ve been feeling weird all weekend because I am not feeling the grief, and I was wondering if I am some sort of heartless sociopath.
I do feel constant underlying anxiety about the state of the world, both climate change (especially after a lecture on peak phosphorus and food security) and the damage that ISIS are doing (and the damage that was done to the people that formed ISIS in the first place… turns out bombing countries back to the middle ages does *exactly that* to the survivors.)
But I’ve had to avoid Facebook because all the French flag temporary profile pics just leave me bewildered. I cannot understand how putting anything on Facebook would make me feel better about things.
>>turns out bombing countries back to the middle ages does *exactly that* to the survivors.)
Not to pick on you Hark2melody, but I find this a problematic phrasing. ISIS and Al Qa’eda and Boko Haram aren’t “medieval” or anything to do with the European Middle Ages: they are very modern responses to very modern phenomena. Calling them “medieval” suggests that they are behind the West, as if civilisation is something that happens in stages along a European model, and it also relies on a fantasy that extreme, highly visible and barbaric violence was something that Europe stopped doing after the Middle Ages, which is not at all true. Colonialism, for a start, was built on exactly that kind of violence.
Also, you will hurt the Two Monks’ feelings. They wouldn’t DREAM of bombing anyone. Well, Monk #1 wouldn’t.
Interesting response msbias!
I was specificially thinking of the beheadings, which are not a common assassination method these days, and also that if you bomb out the infrastructure, then you end up with clans and warlords, and a fight for survival, and the hard suppression of women and minorities- all in all, a setup that we become aware of from the middle ages, because of increased literacy of the time and the greater dissemination of information.
I’m not sure why you are putting a western perspective on my comment, maybe because you are Western?
Iraq was a lovely, sophisticated cultured country, when I was young. The state of it now is absolutely heartbreaking.
Yeah. I felt less true grief and more concern for friends who were missing loved ones. Once everyone had been accounted for, I decided that since I couldn’t do anything active, I might as well just go through the weekend as planned.
These days, I often lean toward “oh, more violent attacks, here we go again” and I hate that I do feel that unfeeling way… but there it is. And then I think perhaps I am terrible for not having any grief.
Oh btw I’m a total hypocrite because I really did feel “OMG the entire world is ending, The War is here, literally Everything is different now” for maybe half an hour before I got my brain back and realised that this is pretty standard for a major terrorist attack. It’s just (“just”) that major terrorist attacks are horribly awful, and we sometimes catastrophise when we’re in stress.
My social media accounts were overwhelmed with people who weren’t in France and didn’t know anyone in Paris, but were affected because they felt that this meant that the world is spiraling into Hell. Everyone was broadcasting loads and loads of upset emotions, sending out shockwaves of dark assumptions, grief, dejected thoughts, collapsing in despair that this will not only set off a war but WWIII, etc. The extreme negativitity about the future in social media was worse than watching the news, actually. And these feelings didn’t come from war refugees, but from safe people in safe countries who didn’t know any of the victims.
It’s important to me to not dismiss other people’s emotions, but I really felt that the outpouring of sad emotions could hurt more than it helped. I didn’t say anything though. I don’t know, I still haven’t decided what I think about it. Obviously I don’t think people should be robots or repress themselves, but maybe not all emotions, or not every amount of emotion, should be expressed? I don’t want to police anyone, but the pressure valve myth about emotions is pervasive and unhelpful. Emotions don’t need to be let out, per se (and especially not as if you’re literally a pressure cooker), they just need to be accepted and processed.
‘maybe not all emotions, or not every amount of emotion, should be expressed?’ I think I agree with that.
Yeah, I kind of phrased it in a way that’s almost impossible to disagree with, because this is a really delicate issue. I mean, I hate emotion policing, I hate it when people tell each other what they’re allowed to feel or that others are bad for not managing to handle their emotions better.
What I’m trying to say is that some people have been taught that it’s inevitable that you can’t control emotions, or that your only choices are repression or explosion, or that having a strong emotion you’re not demonstrating is dangerous, so just get all those emotions out right now before you burst! And that’s not correct. If someone is very emotional because they’ve been taught those things, then I think it’s good if they try to control their emotions more. It will probably be helpful to them! Life will be less stressful! But if they’re doing their best and the emotions are running wild despite their attempts to rein in the feelings and get back in the saddle, then I don’t blame them. Everybody fails sometimes, there’s no point in kicking someone who’s down.
I am mostly furious and upset about the Islamophobic backlash that friends and colleagues and Muslims everywhere are going to have to experience. I haven’t really chosen to engage with any individual stories about the Paris massacres, and it’s usually in hearing the individual stories that the horror strikes: hence the power of the image of Alan Kurdi a few weeks ago.
(Also, thinking about it, I have a small daughter and anything about children being hurt or killed gets me much, much more emotionally and viscerally than adults being killed at the moment. That’s not an absolute statement, just a statement about where I am at the moment. I would probably have found it much more horrifying and harder to ignore if they’d struck a primary school.)
I am upset about this too. It seems very likely that at least one Muslim was killed or wounded in the attacks, plus many more who had loved ones in harm’s way. The radicals are harming everyone, not just “infidels,” and that really should be proof enough that this is not about religion anymore. It’s been said in articles linked from the Toast and by commenters here as well that a great deal of the “entry-level” ISIS members don’t have a well-rounded concept of Islam, just what their leaders feed them (which is, obviously, radicalized past the point of recognizable Islam).
I was looking through all the posts and updates on the Paris situation on NY Mag’s website earlier today, and one of the posts was what the GOP nominees here in the U.S. had to say about the Paris attacks. I opened up the tab, looked at the headline again, and closed it without reading it – I’ve heard it all before and none of them are going to say anything that will make me feel one smidge better about any of this.
Thanks for posting this. My husband and I were talking about how we felt this way as well. Part of it is the feeling that by concentrating on Paris and ignoring Beirut and other places where horrible things are happening the western world is holding back empathy from people who aren’t “like them.” I also automatically thought of the refugees who now will have an even harder time, and all the death that will come from this… it’s very overwhelming.
I think with the constant stream of ‘hot takes’ on Paris, or how to do something, we lose the importance of just taking time to contemplate, to grieve without necessarily doing something. I used to live very near where the attacks happened, and on the night I was so overwhelmed with sadness and emotion, but there’s something about putting that out publicly that jars with me. I suppose I think that unless it happened to you it should be private. And a lot of the public grief I’ve seen has been an excuse to post pictures of when x was in Paris, and it feels like inserting into a grief and tragedy.
But people obviously find it helpful, or meaningful, or they wouldn’t do it. I guess I worry that people feel like changing a picture is doing something in the face of something that they can’t do anything about, and it gives them a kind of power and expression. I don’t know. I have no hot takes.
I’m one of those people who posted pictures of myself in France (not Paris, but identifiably France) as a response, and I’ll explain why. I was in France for most of last year, and I was there for Charlie Hebdo. And what I saw, among my French friends, was how very important it was to them to show solidarity. Not political or nationalist solidarity, but just a sort of collective checking-in, a “Hi, I’m here, a fellow human being, and I care.” I never really understood or trusted the idea of a totally peaceful, totally apolitical demonstration until I saw people thronging the streets of my city just to stand there, without political signs, without flags, without extravagant displays of grief, without any apparent agenda at all except to be there together. So while a part of me was saying, “Who am I to push myself forward and claim a special right to grieve for Paris,” I knew that it really would mean something to my French friends if I posted something, however small, to show I was thinking of them. But every time I thought about using the flag overlay, I remembered that Charlie Hebdo demonstration, and how in that crowd of thousands I only saw two flags. And I remembered the shocked whispers that ran through the crowd when the first flag appeared, and the looks on the faces of my French friends – looks that said that nothing could have been more out of place, at this moment of collective mourning, than a patriotic symbol. So though I knew my friends would take the flag as it was meant – as a token of support rather than a push toward nationalism – I couldn’t bring myself to use it.
So I gave it a day, and thought about how best to convey that spirit of “I am here,” without any kind of political implications at all, and I decided that the best way would be to change my profile picture to a photo of myself in France, and to post another picture of myself with my French roommates. And the reason I’ve explained this at such length is that it bothers me a lot to think that my carefully thought-out show of support comes across as bragging – “Hey, I’ve been to France.” But I realize that’s a risk. There’s no good, clear, defined rule for how to use social media to convey that kind of message, and yet social media is what we’ve got, and it does matter to many people that we try. So we’re stuck with this imperfect method of communication and all we can do is try to give each other the benefit of the doubt.
When I first learned about the attacks I had a conversation with a few friends where we said “what a terrible, terrible thing to have happened.”
And then I hung out on Twitter for the rest of the evening and got the full brunt of “share the hashtag!” “no, if you share the hashtag you are PREVENTING PEOPLE FROM GETTING HELP, you’re bad” and “share this picture!” “no, the picture is fake, you’re bad” and then of course the usual “if you are tweeting about anything besides Paris right now, you are not a good person and should not consider yourself my friend.”
And then, the next morning, all those same feeds were filled with “if you were a white person tweeting about Paris, and not one of your tweets mentioned Beirut, YOU ARE A RACIST and you’re bad.”
And I was just all “I do not want to get involved in this performative emotion,” and I kind of checked out.
Performative emotion is the best word for it. It’s as if there’s one and only one perfect way to respond – and that’s never ever true.
Thank you for this term. The social media response of tone-policing everyone who’s not responding in the “right” way stresses me out. Like the French flag option for profile pictures on Facebook–I feel like people in my feeds are either adding the flag overlay (including me, although I fretted about why I was doing it), or stating why they are NOT doing it as a way of passive-aggressively scolding the ones who do. I think I need to check out, too.
“Performative emotion” is exactly right. Because it’s about expressing the ‘right’ sentiment in order to compete for status within ones’ social subgroup, while the frothing mob snaps at your heels with cries of ‘[ISLAMOPHOBIC NONSENSE REDACTED]’ and ‘[UNBELIEVABLY RACIST STUFF]’ and ‘Your feelings are WRONG if you don’t also/instead XYZ’. It’s worse than an echo chamber, it’s like a chaos chamber in which there’s never time or space for pause.
This is such a helpful way of putting this — I was talking about it with friends last night but couldn’t find a way to properly articulate the sense of exhaustion from watching the same cycles of public grieving and critical responses, over and over again. Or, conversely, public celebration in response to political victories (rainbow profile pictures, etc.) — the first to grieve and celebrate always seem to be torn down. Isn’t it hard enough just to be human in times like these?
Yes. It’s so exhausting. I lived in Paris, was just there recently, and have close friends who live in various neighborhoods of Paris, so the events themselves already had me freaked out. (Luckily, my friends were all quick to check in that they were okay.) By the time I posted a photo with a short sentence to show solidarity with my friends there, a lot of my internet-activist-uber-liberal friends were already all over Facebook condemning people for caring about Paris (making me worry that they were judging me while I also resented that I had to worry about that) while my not-activist American friends were posting endless statuses about how sad they were about Paris. It was a new layer of emotional exhaustion on top of the actual tragedy. I kept thinking, can’t we operate from a base understanding that people will be human? Can’t we discuss why some tragedies get ignored here while trying to understand/empathize with why many people feel particularly touched by this one?
This sounds very similar to my FB feed. There are Quebecois friends worried about their friends in France, relatives/coworkers with zero connection to France who are more moved by a terrorist attack in France than say, racist violence at home, and radicals policing everyone’s selective grief in very tacky ways.
There’s also this trend that I am very uncomfortable with wherein white people announce that ‘if I see anyone posting Islamophobic shit I will unfriend you’. It’s not my place to critique POC who make that their status because it has a totally different meaning for them, but when white people do it it seems like nothing more than a rote performance of anti-racism. Announcing to ALL of my friends that I will not tolerate Islamophobia seems like a sanctimonious way of telling them that I expect it from them, like I’m some embattled anti-racist authority figure. Why not wait until someone actually posts something Islamophobic? And even then, is unfriending the only option?
White anti-racists often have the ability to engage with white people saying racist stuff in a productive way that might help prevent those people from saying racist shit to POC in the future.
Yes yes yes. I had pretty much exactly the same experience. I just kind of try to operate from the point of view of “I know I have valid reason to feel upset by this – I have lived there, I know people there – so I’m just going to assume that other people’s emotions are equally valid.” Why do people feel such a need to police each other’s emotional reactions to tragedy?
Performative emotion! That’s EXACTLY what’s happening. Thank you!
I dislike it so much. I resent the implied duty to display to everyone what’s inside me at all times. As if everyone should just be able to open you up and have a look? People don’t have a right to know! I get to have thoughts and feelings that are mine without having to share! I don’t even need a special reason for it! I’ll display what I want, thank you very much. Absence of evidence (of sympathy, empathy, insight or whatever) is not evidence of absence.
Performative emotion! this is everything I feel in a phrase, thank you!
Yuuuuuup. I tend to disengage from social media in times like this, because I have trouble dealing with the pressure to perform Caring About Tragedy, and I tend to find everyone else’s Public Caring super overwhelming in the aggregate. It’s hardest to take when I have a connection to the event–after a shooting in the town where I live became national news earlier this year, I basically checked out for days because I couldn’t handle the Internet. My dissertation is France-related, and I lived right around the corner from the site of one of the recent attacks when I was doing research in Paris a couple years ago, so I feel like I ought to be expressing Profound Emotions on Facebook and changing my profile picture, etc., to Show That I Care, but that pressure just makes me want to flee the Internet instead.
You just captured perfectly why I stay away from Twitter except for the swiftest of glances.
Nthing how perfect that phrase is. My instinct is almost always to stay quiet unless I feel like I have something useful to say. I’m fairly disengaged from social media, but I get anxious just thinking about how the weird social pressure to demonstrable “prove” you are grieving/aware, and then to do it “right,” for whatever your group is, and it just gets noisier and noisier.
I feel like part of it has to do with the feeling of owing them one after 9/11–in that France was vocal and demonstrative in its support of the US in a way that was a little surprising and even touching. So now a lot of people have a sense of duty–and maybe a genuine tenderness–to show them the same level of acknowledgement?
Ironically, I think it comes out of a need to be seen remembering how they were there for us and not wanting to be accused of being all American about it: “see?? we’re not so self-absorbed that we can’t sympathize with you!” (and yet, like we’ve noted, when it’s Beirut…)
I’ve gotta be honest, the lingering emotion for me is fear that this happening in London is long overdue, and although I did my regular commute this morning and it didn’t cross my mind, if I allow myself to think about it I could get all kinds of freaked out.
I kind of had the opposite experience. I live in Alaska, where most people haven’t spent much time in Europe because just leaving the state is expensive and time-consuming, and most of the people around me don’t seem particularly upset by Paris. They’re sad about it, but in the detached way you react to disasters that are very distant from you, and they don’t feel compelled to talk about it. I didn’t find out until hours after the attacks, because I don’t have internet at my house. I went to school and went to a reading group meeting, and everyone talked very intensely about Mizzou and Yale, and then at the end someone mentioned, off-hand, the terrorist attack in Paris, and I was like, WHAT? And pulled out my phone and saw that the 10th, where I have friends, had been hit, and so had the street in the 11th where I used to live, and I spent the weekend in a Bermuda Triangle of New York Times, The Guardian and Facebook. But everyone else I knew was just watching football like usual.
I feel very similar to you. It is a horrible thing, and I am concerned about the ramifications, but I don’t feel any particular grief – there are so many horrible things going on (everything I read about the refugee crisis makes me feel worse and worse), and this just feels like one more manifestation of things going to shit in a long line of them.
(It has made me worry a bit more about similar attacks in London, where I live, but I already knew they could happen, and I already knew the likelihood of getting caught up in one is both unlikely and not something I can really control, so I just try not to think about it.)
I feel similarly. With shootings happening all the time, and bombings around the world, and bajillions of refugees (both the war refugees from Syria, but ones from natural disasters and such too), this didn’t hit me on some special level above and beyond all those other things. I know Paris is important to a lot of people and contains special memories and such. If Florence (where I spent a year in college) was hit in a similar way, I know I would freak out.
As it is, I have this sort of low level guilt that I’m not feeling enough in comparison to everyone else, but also not because (as many have been pointing out) the response to Paris is so disproportionate to the responses to violence that happens on a similar scale in countries that are less white. So, I don’t know, empathy is complicated and my numbness at this just speaks to how shitty the world is all around. Depressing thoughts.
My digital copy of The Secret Loves of Geek Girls came from the Kickstarter campaign this weekend and so far it is great. I have also been promised that some time this week I get my Dirty Diamonds digital copies. Yay!
I got my digital copy too! I can’t wait to read it, and neither can my daughter (The Secret Loves of Geek Girls, I mean).
Hey, wait! I didn’t get mine. Do you think they’re sending them in batches for some reason, or something along those lines?
ETA: Never mind, found it.
I’ve been reading a lot of manga lately as a way to unwind — working my way through One Piece
I’ve been escaping the world and just reading 00Q fic. Not my best move, but good in the end for my mental health.
ME TOO! Red Queen to Overwatch is getting me through it today.
I’ve never read that one!!! I’ll have to check it out. I’ve been powering through Slow Dancing in a Burning Room. So good.
I spent yesterday evening reading 00Q fic until my husband started reading it out loud over my shoulder in a deliberately terrible British accent.
“Q was gratified that James hadn’t forgotten how much he enjoyed –”
“OH MY GOD SHUT UP”
*giggle* ok, but that IS kinda funny
Seriously, tho, any good recs? (PLEASE no Sherlock crossovers)
But there’s SUCH a good fic where it’s hinted that Sherlock and Mycroft have a younger brother who is Q! (John and the Red Room on ao3) It’s also an Avengers crossover and John is a doctor version of the winter soldier. It’s silly and great.
Sorry, hard pass. Awhile back it felt like almost every 00Q fic was also a Sherlock crossover, so I kinda peaced out because while it seems to be a thing for a lot of people, it’s not really what I’m looking for.
I reread the same three Hartwin stories over and over all weekend.
Yes to that, I have been escaping into Johnlock casefic and it has been the perfect distraction from all of the racist crap spewing out of my parents’ TV (Fox news, playing constantly while they are home). It makes me so sick to watch them just sitting there consuming all of this hate that’s being fed to them, watching while they turn into the worst version of themselves.
If it’s good for your mental health it’s your ABSOLUTE BEST move.
Also it’s 100% the reason I want to see Spectre.
When Things Are Bad, I like to reread Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburnt Country. The scene in the tourist center with the bags never fails to raise my spirits.
Pretty much one of my favorite books of all time. The scene with him crawling through the woman’s garden and attempting to explain about the dogs that were ~following them~ makes me laugh every damn time.
Oh god I love that one!
Also a friend shared this, and I have it in an open tab to read hopefully soon: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21674…
my school is full of angry social justice warriors so we have been discussing this at length.
I guess my friend’s tweet sums up how I’m feeling right now:
“them: why don’t you lie down and get some rest, you’ll feel better
me: ok but consider this: I literally can’t sit down or shut up.”
I spent the weekend hugging Julie Andrews The Cat until she squirmed away, and doing homework for that course I’ll probably decided to drop. Those seemed like the only things I actually could do, after making sure that my French friends were safe.
Unrelated: There’s an interview with Mallory over on slate, but I refuse to shell out for Slate Plus.
I’m just overwhelmed by how… arbitrary? the world is. You leave your apartment one evening expecting to have a nice dinner out with your friends, or to enjoy a concert, and some lunatic opens fire on the restaurant or blows himself up two yards from where you’re standing. We have no control over anything at all.
If you’ll let me be self-absorbed for a minute – we’ll be in Germany and Switzerland over Christmas, and I’m just filled with this simmering dread that Something Bad will happen. My husband (who is unfortunately experienced at talking me out of these anxiety spirals) keeps saying that the risk of anything happening to us is so low as to be non-existent. But I can’t help thinking that everyone who died in Paris on Friday assumed the same thing when they got out of bed that morning.
(One of my friends from college moved to Paris last month, and Friday was her fucking birthday, can you even imagine?)
I lived in Germany for four years and couldn’t have felt safer.
I dont know if that’s comforting, so Im just stating a fact.
On the first part of your post, have you ever seen the X-Files episode Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose? It’s about that very thing–the seemingly random chance that leads to the most crucial parts of our lives.
I haven’t updated on Hamburglar in awhile, so here I shall: he’s out of his cone and starting to explore our home more. It is still A Very Scary Place and he Often Hides Under The Bed A Lot but last night he slept on our couch with me while I played Fallout which seems like a lot of progress!! Bad news: HE HAS FLEAS. Good news: he got a flea bath and it went way way way better than partner or I expected. Medicine arrives in the mail next week and hopefully afterwards we’ll be done with them. UGH.
Make sure you do the house as well – when mine had visitors (which I assume I brought home from feral cats we have at the horses, since mine are house cats) I treated them with the stuff from the vets, vacuumed the entire house, emptied the vacuum immediately, sprayed everything that is even slightly soft with flea killing spray (including bedding, curtains, sofa, chairs etc), put a flea collar in the vacuum bag to get any hatching eggs from next time I vacuumed, and then did it all again three weeks later to break the life cycle and get the new generation before they laid eggs.
UGH YES. I spent all weekend vacuuming, boraxing, and then vacuuming our only carpeted room, and then fully cleaning and disassembling my vacuum. I’m going to have to invest in some flea spray for the couch, but thankfully everything else is tile so ***knock on wood*** we should be okay. But yeahhh. they really are the worst. Thankfully I think we caught it kind of early? at least the infestation isn’t as bad as it **could** be
Everywhere bar the kitchen is carpeted in my house so it was a big old job! I was hoovering every other day in the time between the first blitz and the second round to mop up the hatchlings, I got so paranoid every time I saw a speck of anything black, thinking it was flea dirt!
A friend recently pointed me toward “Anger in a Black Landscape” (“Black” does not refer to people here) by Angela Carter, who I’d previously known and loved as a writer of fiction–the essay’s at the bottom of the page–and its rage is sustaining for me, right now (not about Beirut and Paris per se, just about … everything): https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/carter-shak…
I’m reading A Canticle for Leibowitz! And speeding through The Black Tapes Podcast and Criminal Minds. Needless to say, I had nightmares last night. Maybe not the best coping media.
How far are you in Criminal Minds? My friends don’t watch, my husband scorns it and I need to discuss the Jennifer Love Hewitt season with someone. Along the lines of: Is she a bad actress? A bad fit? Poorly written character?
I’m only in season 2 (and just discovered that I won’t have much Mandy Patinkin left, sigh). we’ll see if I make it all the way to JLH.
A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ
*ahem* yes, basically I love that book SO MUCH. But yes, it’s *tough*.
Are there any other Minneapolis Toasties here? I’m just catching up with what happened this weekend.
Yes, it’s so awful. I left a comment below with information about how to donate to the protestors, if you would like that.
I was at a lovely “camp” this weekend, so I have been distracted from the news by discussing how to make the world better with science. But we were in the car on the way there when the news first hit and it was all we could talk about for hours, especially since one of my best friend’s fiancee is French and emigrating here this past weekend and I couldn’t remember if he was flying out of Paris or not (he’s fine, he was in Provence with his family). But mostly, I’m kind of numb and obsessing over my schedule and my work right now and just pushing it all out of my mind.
Another unarmed black person was murdered by the police, this time in Minneapolis, over the weekend. His name was Jamar Clark. At least a dozen witnesses say he was not resisting arrest and was in handcuffs when the police shot him. The police say he was fighting them and not handcuffed.
Black Lives Matter Minneapolis is occupying the closest police station until their demands for a release of footage and the arrest of the officer are met. You can donate to their bail fund here: http://www.payit2.com/collect-page/56349 and learn more at their facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/BlackLivesMatterMinneapo…
Thank you so much for sharing this!
Self-care for me: don’t read or listen to too much bad news.
I worked in my garden, and we planted a fig tree and a lot of bulbs. I reread “I Capture the Castle” and started a new book that I’m liking very much, “The Half Made World” by Felix Gilman.
Sunday I worked in my studio, making Christmas stockings for gifts. Making things is very soothing.
Feeling grateful because my friends and coworkers in Paris are unhurt, and feeling guilty for that feeling.
I agree. I was following the news closely for a while, especially france info and france24, and then I had to stop, and then I saw an article in the NY Times titled: “The Terror Attacks Minute by Minute” and I thought — that is just insane. None of us need it minute-by-minute. That is feeding some kind of bad urge/addiction that a lot of people have and I am going to consciously not read that article.
I guess it is a substitute for not being able to do anything about it, nor solve it, nor find out any more? But it is not a very healthy substitute. Wish I had a garden. I’ve been giving love to all my little apartment plants and pet rabbit. Have you read Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden? It is very life-affirming, including on bravery in hard times (though a different kind of hard times).
I also hopped off social media on Friday night, because the reaction I was (and am) having was…pretty self-centered, and that doesn’t really belong on people’s feeds during this kinda moment. I’m hoping Toasties will forgive me for putting it here.
When I was 15 I was living in the Paris suburbs and attending an international school, where I made a lot of friends who were much cooler than me. One of the things I did with my cool friends was go to my FIRST CONCERT EVER! I was a little emo teen, so I wanted to go see Taking Back Sunday, my favorite band at the time, and I REALLY did not want to have to bring one of my parents. So I BEGGED and BEGGED and BEGGED, and convinced two of my cool friends to go with me, and finally my parents relented and said we could go sans parents after we scouted out the metro line and made sure the neighborhood was OK. And so I got to go see my favorite band, and meet the drummer, and get a taste of independence, and be a girl out and about in Paris, and I did it at the Bataclan. I got kicked in the face by a crowdsurfer and some dude put out his lit cigarette on my shirt and it was the best night ever. And it’s so, so easy for me to imagine other kids who were so excited last Friday to go out, and other parents who might have been worried like mine were, and it makes me want to throw up.
My reaction was pretty self-centered too, so I basically just told it to my mom. Friday night I went to see Chvrches at a famous venue in Amsterdam, and got back home and read the news and what was happening and it was just…that was just what I was doing. I was just at a sold-out concert of a popular band at a well-known venue of about 1500 in a European capital city. It could have been us.
You don’t need forgiveness for this. I also had a seriously strong reaction; I studied abroad in Paris, 3 years ago now, and it was a really important time in my life. The city will always be important and symbolic for me in a lot of ways–as the beginning point of some of my most dear friendships, the home of a romantic relationship that meant a lot to me, a turning point where I really started to let go of some of the negative self-esteem feedback loops that were holding me back and to grow into the person that I am now. The things that people died doing–enjoying dinner or wine or music or just walking around the city on a Friday night–are part of what forms my memory of that time. I have been to a show at the Bataclan as well; remembering what it was like to be in that space, it was so easy to imagine what the horror could have been like. Luckily everyone that I know there is safe, but fucking hell.
Hugs to you if you want them.
Same here. I studied abroad in Paris when I was nineteen, and I lived on the Rue de Charonne, a couple blocks from the site of one of the attacks. It was the first time in my life when I really felt like an adult, the first time I felt like I was genuinely part of a wonderful group of friends. It was a absolutely a turning point in my life, and as you say, a lot of it was lingering over dinner and wine with friends, or going to a concert, or just walking around the city. I was in France for most of the past year, and whenever I went to Paris I would stay in the 20th and walk the length of the Rue de Charonne into the city, because I still love that area of Paris so much. So one of my first reactions – after concern for my friends – was OMG my street!
I have also been struggling with trying to figure out whether that reaction is selfish or not, and how much I can share it with other people. What popped into my head almost as soon as I heard the news was a little scrap of dialogue from Casablanca – Conrad Veidt asking Bogart “Are you one of those people who cannot bear to think of the Germans in your beloved Paris?” and Bogart saying drily, “It’s not particularly *my* beloved Paris.” That line kept echoing in my head all day, and I kept worrying that I was being self-aggrandizing and laying claim to Paris in a way I had no right to.
But here’s my horribly selfish response that I haven’t been able to really admit to anyone yet: I kind of wish I were there right now. Not to be cooler, or because I think being scared for your life is fun, or anything like that, but just because I spent long enough in France last year to start feeling like I belonged there, and now I feel very cut off from everyone because they’re going through something that I’m safely out of.
Basically, I’m having all kinds of selfish reactions to the news right now, and I’m ashamed of myself but am also really glad of the chance to talk about this with all of you.
I agree with actualmeg below–it’s totally normal and natural to look at world events through the lens of our own experience, AND totally understandable that you’d want to be in a place that you love with people you care about when something bad has happened there. I think the best thing to do in that situation is reach out to other people who are in a similar position to you–I group texted some of my American friends who lived there at the same time as me once I had processed what was going on, and that really helped.
I don’t think your reaction was self-centered. It’s natural that human beings have a stronger gut reaction to things they experienced first-hand.
My reaction was very similar. We spend the last fortnight going to six different concerts. We’re concert fiends, we love live music. We also live in a very well-known European capital. I can’t help but think: it could have been us…
I did refrain from putting the colors of the French flag on my fb profile. I think it’s a bit disingenuous. I am not French, and I can quietly mourn and pray for all the lives lost, all the pain and fear everybody else experienced without putting colors over my fb profile.
I don’t like any of that performative grief, personally. I put very little about my reactions to these things on social media.
In this case, though, I think a lot of people have Facebook friends who are French and are reaching out to them. I wouldn’t assume the flag is performative grief; it can easily be just a symbol of sympathy directed at people that you don’t happen to know.
yes, the weird nationalism-as-mourning on Facebook with the French flag has been bothering me too. Or performative grief.
I also had an immediate reaction of “but I’ve been to a concert at the Bataclan too!”, original poster, though it wasn’t a moment as important to my inner life/biography as yours. It’s ok, it’s just where the mind goes first, and then there’s time to reflect more broadly.
As someone who did take FB’s offer to apply the flag filter…this is not a personal defense or attack on anyone who didn’t do the FB colors, just offering a different perspective:
I understood it was a token, but also as a digital version of hanging a flag out of one’s actual window, if people still did that (with less expense and trouble). It was just my way of saying “Paris is on my mind, with all who died and are hospitalized and are feeling the trauma.” It’s small, insufficient, ultimately insignificant, sure. But I liked seeing the colors on other people’s pictures, and I wanted to express the sentiment, as it meant to me.
And yes, there should have been a Beirut version, though I hate the idea of a “competition” that might arise, and then we’re back at the discussion of performative grief.
I think we all tend to filter our reactions to giant, far-reaching events through the lens of our own experience, and I think that’s okay. Sure, it’s a good idea to seek out other perspectives and make an effort to better understand the many, many ways in which an event like this impacts other people (particularly people coming from a different place than you are), but at the same time your gut reaction is going to be what it is, and I can’t see how it’s productive to beat yourself up over it. In this case, it seems like your personal experience may actually be increasing your capacity to empathize with the victims and their families, so…that’s another thing to think about.
Tamora Pierce 4 self care 4 ever.
This article was just brought to my attention & it’s sickeningly fascinating! A huge investigation of mandatory student athletics fees in US universities: http://chronicle.com/interactives/ncaa-subsidies-…
I read James Herriot’s “All Creatures Great and Small” series when things like this happen. A rosy view of the past, animals, small town country living, and sharp/funny/heartwarming writing. It puts me in a place of comfort and always makes me feel like I’m 9 years old again sitting in the big rocking chair in front of the fireplace on a snow day- nothing can be wrong with the world when you feel like that.
Last night I finished “The Boy with Two Heads” by Andy Mulligan. Exactly what it says on the tin (a boy grows an extra head in response to personal upheaval; the new head has its own (angry, anarchic) personality.) If you are also a grown adult who can’t stop reading YA, I recommend it.
Here are some things for when one (I) is (am) overwhelmed, in general:
-EM Forster’s A Room with a View
“”Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. “Courage and love.”
She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.”
-Auden’s poetry, because right now I keep thinking about Spain, which is about calm, normal life being changed by war, and how odd it is that the places where you lived or went on vacation are suddenly ripped apart:
Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.
-If everything is beyond coping with, I suggest lying in bed and listening to Welcome To Night Vale while trying not to think about anything else, but if you are at that point I also suggest calling your doctor or your therapist.
-If little things briefly feel too overwhelming, I suggest this short video of Nigella Lawson teaching you how to make chocolate chip cookies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwPdq3MBSOE
-In general, if it ever gets cold where you are, I recommend buying a hot water bottle
-If you need something comforting to eat, make some dal: 2 cups of yellow lentils, rinsed, and put in a pan with a lot of water and salt. When it boils, skim any scum off the top of the water, then add 4 coin-sized slices of ginger, 4 bruised whole cloves or garlic, and 4 hot peppers, whole but pierced down the side (or whatever amount of all of those you would like). Boil for 30 minutes, then 2-ish cups of crushed tomato, the juice of half a lemon, and some coriander leaf stems. Boil for 15 more minutes, and then serve in bowls with coriander leaves, yogurt, lemon, fresh spinach and/or a poached egg. OR get Thai food delivered.
Oooh, I also loved Room with a View. There are some amazing quotes in it. And yes, I also find WTNV strangely comforting when it comes to dealing with the awful banality of RL.
That recipe intrigues me!
I love all of Forster, but Room with a View is the most comforting (I’d say the least is Howard’s End, but I have some strange opinions).
The recipe is GREAT. I really like Indian food, and I was ordering it 3x a week and that is not healthy or cheap, so I had to learn to cook it. The dal is just gentle and comforting and lovely, and I have never made a bad batch, and it you want it to be more luxurious you could add as much butter as you felt comfortable with at the end.
I have not read anything else by Forster, but I will see what my library has on audiobook! (Which is the only way I get to read anything these days.)
I also love Indian food, oh man.
Agree about Auden, definitely. I usually like A Room with a View better than Howard’s End, but even if it is overused, I still find “only connect!” to be pretty comforting.
Me too! And I love that it’s so succinct when written like that, but Forster’s novels are all about how HARD that is and how much effort it takes. He knows it’s not easy, because of class or race or sexuality, and sometimes his characters try and fail, but it is also a comfort to see it written so simply.
Any suggestions for folks who would like to start reading some of Auden’s poetry, but don’t know where to begin? Much appreciated <3
OH MAN YES. I was going to write a whole thing about different phases of his life and what he wrote about in each one, but I changed my mind (you don’t need that to love what he wrote, that is interesting after), so here are some links.
https://sites.google.com/a/upr.edu/modernpoetry/S…
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/september-1-1…
This is my favorite of his poems, I think: http://members.wizzards.net/~mlworden/atyp/auden….
http://allpoetry.com/Fish-in-the-Unruffled-Lakes
http://allpoetry.com/poem/8492933-The-Wanderer-by…
http://allpoetry.com/poem/8493075-Lullaby-by-W-H-…
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/taller-to-day/
Tell me what you think when you read them!
This is a difficult story, but I did want to learn more about Beirut and Jordan, when I can about a hero who saved many lives in the attacks there. http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-13/fathers-spl…
Also, I am so annoyed at jackasses in my community who decided Saturday was a great time to protest at a local mosque against our community accepting Syrian refugees. So I plan on donating to the mosque, which will not solve Islamophobia, but hopefully they can do good things with the money.
Maeve Binchy is a great retreat when the world pushes too close. “Circle of Friends” and “The Glass Lake” are my favorites.
I feel so much dread right now. Dread that the cycle of war and disaster is speeding up again, dread because I’ll be in Paris next month and it’s a very rare big vacation that I’ve been saving up for and now it just feels… sad? Dread because there was a military dude holding the biggest rifle I’ve ever seen outside my metro station this morning. I’m also feeling sort of paranoid, and guilty about it because depending on your POV I’m either succumbing to hysteria or Letting the Terrorists Win. But I’m in DC after a lifetime spent in places that international crime networks don’t give a shit about, and the sudden realization that if our country came under attack I would be living at the center of it is not great for my anxiety.
I channeled my fear and rage and sadness into making something.
I had my loom most of the way set up to do dish towels (in weaving, it takes a few hours to get the yarn on the loom before you can start the process of weaving) so I finished threading and tying on my yarn. Weaving (like knitting or crocheting or any other craft, I’m sure) is so methodical it’s almost impossible to focus on anything else. The pattern I was weaving required me to switch back and forth between two yarns, which is a bit of a dance. For a few blissful hours I was able to forget everything outside of what treadles my feet needed to hit and in what order, which yarn I needed to use, throwing my shuttle of yarn across the loom and catching it, and making sure I followed the pattern correctly. For a few hours nothing existed except for my loom, the cloth, and myself.
I’m sure other Toasties channeled their energy into creativity. What did you all make?
Cakes for friends! I was giving out cakes like a cake santa on saturday.
Your thing sounds lovely though.
Hurrah for cakes! What a wonderful way to create a bit of happiness for your friends on Saturday!
I love your description of how you lost yourself in your hobby for a few hours.
I knit a lot and I can definitely relate. Give me a few uninterrupted hours, a cup of hot tea and a sufficiently engaging pattern, and I am lost to the world.
I also read somewhere that the repetitive motions and feelings of mental “flow-states” you experience while pursuing such tasks have measurably calming and relaxing effects.
Baby booties for the high school band director, with the notes for “every inch of you is perfect, from the bottom to the top” embroidered on them. My daughter helped with embroidery, she is way better than I am. I am long past baby-times and way far away from grandma time. Watching my daughter squeal in glee at the teeny tininess of baby booties was so cool.
What a wonderful description of weaving! Thank you for sharing it.
I didn’t make much besides some pieces of digital art for my graphic design class, a smidgen of writing, and food for the week. But that last thing is really valuable, of course. Especially the dish of hummus.
I finished a quilt that is a Christmas present for my brother, but he’s getting it next week so I don’t have to ship it halfway across the country
A cake.
A shepherd’s pie.
I worked on a painting, though I did not resolve it.
I went on a big walk.
Also, just affirming: as someone with a lot of textile-craft experience, including weaving, your description just made me want to weave for the first time in years. 🙂
I just wanted to let you know your comment made my day. 🙂 Thank you!
This is kind of like 9/11 in that, even though I am a white raised-Christian Midwesterner, on a visceral level I don’t get why I am being encouraged to feel especially terrible over this when things like this, and worse, happen to people the world over, and often on a greater scale, every day. Like how many people in the world died from malnutrition or lack of medical care on 9/11? People who mattered just as much as the people at the WTC? And the same type of terrorists kill hundreds in non-Western countries, and there’s no ribbon on my Google home page.
The 2015 attacks you probably know nothing about…
Also apropos, I was a freshman at one of the most liberal colleges in the US on the morning 9/11. We spoke about our reactions in class. I said I was afraid of what our government was going to do in response to this–of more people dying–and my peers told me it was the wrong time to bring that up. Why should I care more about people dying here than there? People matter everywhere in the world. That seems pretty obvious to me. (Yeah, and guess who killed hundreds of thousands in “response” to the 3,000 killed in the towers…. right. I thought my fellow students would have been aware of what the U.S. government has done and can do?)
Echoing others to say I do not mean that someone upset and grieving over the violence and death in Paris is not having a “correct” reaction. And I do think it ismtragic and feel sad, moved, etc. over it. All of these things can co-exist. I’m just sharing my individual reaction from where I sit, and critiquing a cultural problem–not anyone else’s individual reaction.
things like this, and worse, happen to people the world over, and often on a greater scale, every day.
I said I was afraid of what our government was going to do in response to this–of more people dying–
These two quotes really sum up how I feel about this. I’m worried what the consequences will be–what will happen to the refugees who are trying to leave Syria, what will happen to the refugees who have already left and who might not find themselves welcome in their new countries, what will happen to the people still in Syria as France starts doing more bombing runs…
i don’t disagree with you, necessarily, but i’ll repeat the lesson my father gave me when i asked why Hitler is perceived as more evil when Stalin killed more people: Ideology matters. there are fates worse than death, and one of them is pervasive, flourishing, toxic ideology. and with 9/11, and our response to 9/11 (which i would say was Bad, immoral, and unjustified), and this weekend, and the selective grief over ISIS-enacted terror, we’re not grieving death itself or loss of life or injuries, but the motivation behind all of it. TBH, my cynicism says that the scale of violence in Paris is diminutive compared to daily gun violence in America, but the bonding ideology behind 130 deaths is the actual evil scary part that people are mourning and praying for, rather than the loss of life itself. And I think “pray for paris” et al is a way of praying for the response to not lead to more deaths (for some of us, at least).
This weekend has left me really shaken. I’m in the UK, at uni in the Midlands and originally from London, and my sister just moved to the other side of the country and it occured to me the other day that from back home, and maybe from here as well, its both quicker and cheaper to get to Paris than it is to get to her. I have family around Paris (all fine), and my mum speaks fluent french and used to work in a french school in London, so I’ve spent a lot of time in Paris, and it just seems to weird to me that something like this can happen in a place so familiar. I was there in April, and I stayed on a street where one of the restaurants which was attacked was. It feels so very close – I stayed up all night friday waiting to here from my mum who was part of a phone call chain checking to see that all my family was fine (my mum is one of nine, so we’re a massive family, with about seven people in France), and translating the news in my GCSE-level french for my flatmates. There’s a massive french presence in my uni as well, so I went to the one minute silence today and sang along to La Marsailles afterwards. I just feel completely numb to the whole thing at the moment – I just don’t have much feeling left to feel, you know? It probably doesn’t help that the whole of the british media is full of you-can-bet-it’ll-be-london-next, which is where my parents are. I keep on telling them to stay inside – luckily they have much less anxiety than me, and so they’ll probably keep level headed.
But, on the plus side, I now have thoroughly tested my university support networks, and they all came through, so thats a plus?
I was feeling a bit weird this morning coming to work (in what is probably a primary terrorist target in London), but actually I feel much better this afternoon, just being out and about doing normal stuff. Don’t worry about your mum and dad. If you were here, you’d feel normal about London again really quickly.
Re: The GOP Panic. Their candidates are bad, and they should feel bad.
Right? This is the result of your messaging for the last 40 years. Chickens come home to roost.
yet they don’t! OMG, have you heard the absolutely unreal things coming out of these human garbage piles? You’re still supporting them?! (I unfriended a cousin this weekend over his devout Islamophobia and right-wing nonsense and I feel pretty damn good about it)
What makes you think *I* am supporting them? They’re all insane.
Sorry, it came out wrong! I meant “you” in the general “you relatives of mine WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU” way! I know Toasties don’t lean that way.
I was designated to preach at my church this weekend. I had been mulling what I wanted to say for a month (when I knew I was scheduled) but Paris was very much on my mind as I wrote the final product. I told my congregation that while others may turn towards hatred, they must instead show love to the world, even when they are afraid and it is difficult. Wars and rumors of wars are no excuse; we must love one another. They received it well. I hope they go out feeling a little more heartened and a little less afraid this week.
My choir director, before we started rehearsing yesterday morning, told us the story of Leonard Bernstein’s choice of Mahler’s 2nd as a commemoration to JFK:
“But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
Very much agreed. Thanks for sharing.
Oh that is lovely. Gave me chills reading it.
And fortunately, our anthem (in which we sang that “through all the tumult and the strife/I hear the music ringing/it finds an echo in my life/how can I keep from singing”) went off beautifully.
Hi, everyone. I love you.
My husband’s mom’s family is Lebanese (he’s third-gen American, though), and we have been talking a lot over the past few days about the contrast in reactions between the attacks in Beirut and Paris. Our own reactions, I mean. Paris had a far bigger impact on us in part because of the media outpouring of information and sympathy, even though D’s family is Lebanese and still very connected to their heritage if not their relatives in Lebanon. I’m not going to express this very well, partly because I’m still thinking about it, but one of the things we’ve been discussing over the past few days is how living in the U.S. means that we care most about and connect with what we’re told to care about and connect with. Even for people like me or people like my husband who do have these other cultural connections that should maybe operate as some kind of counter to Western media bias. It doesn’t, not really — being here it’s hard not to end up with a skewed vision of who “the people like you” are, the people you’re supposed to empathize with.
I finished the first season (on Netflix) of The Great British Baking Show this weekend, which is excellent self-care. I am also rereading Lord of the Rings with my husband, and that is a good thing to do in such dark times, with Frodo asking “Why me? Why must we live in such a time?” and Gandalf responding that we have to do the best we can, and that pretty much everybody asks the same thing.
Love to all Toasties with special connections to Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad. It hurts when horrible things happen in places you love, even if they didn’t directly affect you.
I heartily approve of your self-care choices this weekend! God, LOTR is so good. As are Sue and Mel.
Sue and Mel make the show! Constant giggling at all their wacky British double-entendres seriously makes life better.
This is the first time I’ve done a complete read-through of LOTR in at least 5 years (including poetry!), and it is full of wonderment. It is much better, more glorious, and more weird than I even remembered.
I know what you mean…wtf, Tom Bombadil.
I just finally started The Great British Baking Show this weekend too! I am desperately in love with Sue, and the whole show is like a big fluffy blanket.
I hadn’t even connected it consciously with exhaustion & anxiety from this weekend, but that makes so much sense to me. Like “hmm why did I suddenly feel like it was a good time for something gentle and sweet?”
also that quote from Gandalf is The Best.
“the whole show is like a big fluffy blanket. ”
That is just the perfect description. I am trying so hard to get my parents on board, because I want them to share in the joy, but they have a healthy skepticism of reality shows (ugh, American ones), plus my step-dad has specific story demands for what he watches EVEN THOUGH he’s literally watching something 365 nights in a year, it won’t kill him to spend a few nights giving this a chance.
On Saturday I took an embarrassing spill on the sidewalk due in part to an asshole bicyclist who should not have been riding there and could at the very least have warned me of his approach. So I was forced into self-care mode even before the enormity of current events had a chance to nudge me there. Read Anansi Boys ( liked, didn’t love it) and a ton of stuff for work, and didn’t engage with the laptop for almost the whole weekend…so I was surprised last night to find something I wrote for Broadly was already up & I’d been blowing my chance to promote it. I’ll pass on a link in the open thread.
Just finished reading Banana Yoshimoto’s “Kitchen”, which deals with mourning, rituals of love and comfort, and kitchens/cooking in this really lovely blunt and honest and even occasionally humorous way. It was a great thing to be reading this weekend.
Yoshimoto is a fantastic resource in times of grief. My very favorite is “Shirakawa Yofune.” I actually have three copies–one hardback that lives on my nightstand, one little paperback that goes in my suitcase wherever I travel, and one on Kindle just in case.
This is one of my favourite books to read at times like this!
For you today, if you don’t follow Mallory on Twitter
Oh, now that’s just unfair. I refuse to accept that level of adorable.
i’m about halfway through the age of innocence and it is tooooo much. it’s so good and/but it’s hitting so close to home, it’s taking me longer to read than usual because i keep putting the book down and going mentally, “whyyyyyy hahahaughhh”
I had the same response to The House of Mirth. I actually never finished The House of Mirth because I was feeling very bad at the time about the realisation that actually, I might never find a life partner (or any kind of partner). I don’t feel bad about that now, but I still don’t think I can read that book.
i just bought a copy of the house of mirth for a dollar at a library sale this weekend, and reading the back made me a little hesitant for the same reasons.
A precis: this woman is very beautiful and intelligent, men are generally shit and she does not want to settle. Eventually, she dies alone and miserable. There are many other complicating factors, but that’s what gets ya.
OOOHHH. I suddenly have a deep need to read Edith Wharton, finally.
(and also realizing that I will probably be Unable To Deal for all those same reasons.)
I think I may have discovered this article from the comment section, but I’m going to reshare it here anyway because it is a great example of stepping back from internet and media. Jeanette Winterson’s take on not just stepping back from the internet but also from artificial lighting for a couple nights to reconnect with one’s own thoughts and rhythms. I could normally never do this but I’m in a phase of living by myself right now, so I am totally going to try it next week for several days. The writing is lovely and descriptive and restful even if you don’t actually want to try this.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/…
It’s a nice thought, but “allowing natural rhythms to take over” for me means I would literally sleep through literally 2/3 of half of the year. Even laying aside hubbub and stress and the internet, my circadian rhythm is SO tied to when daylight comes and goes that if I expect to be functional at basic life tasks in the wintertime, I need a certain amount of scheduled light beyond the natural daytime at my latitude.
Poem
BY MURIEL RUKEYSER
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
In rough times, I tend to reach for music rather than books: Andrew Bird (esp. Armchair Apocrypha, esp. esp. “Simple X”: before your neurons declare a crisis / before your trace serotonin rises / before you’re reading your list of vices / perform the simplest exercises) for when I want to be calm, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot when I want to stop feeling numb.
But when I do reach for books, it doesn’t get better than Stephen King’s On Writing.
Also I gladly took to my bed this weekend with the 24-hour classical station and plenty of novel-length Dragon Age fanfiction, and that was good too.
I am re-reading Return of the Native for oh, the gazillionth time, and pretending I live on a remote moor in a time when the worst thing that could happen to you is being jilted at the altar and maybe be accused of being a witch.
I am taking my grad school comps in two weeks and just started a fellowship and I am having trouble finding space for it all around the dread and year that are filling me up right now.
Self care for me is rewatching Pushing Daisies. I can’t count how many times I’ve watched that delightful show. It is my happy place. Bollywood helps, too. I’ve watched a lot of both this weekend.
Self care for me was watching With Bob & David on Netflix this weekend. That and the NFL yesterday. Although the Seahawks let me down so hard while playing AT HOME!!!!!!!!
I’ve been poking around a lot with the Aeneid again (haven’t read it as a whole since high school).
It’s not really a distraction. It’s a violent, dark, grim, imperialist poem about pointless wars and destruction and bloodshed- but it’s where my mind is at.
So, it is what it is.
In addition to the worldwide tragedies, I’ve been dealing with car trouble this weekend which causes me a lot of anxiety. I also feel guilty for feeling bad about relatively minor problems in my life when there is so much hurting in the big world.
I watched a lot of Steven Universe this weekend and rewatched Ham4Ham videos on youtube. I recommend both of these for coping when everything seems to much.
Than you to Nicole for being sensitive to Toasties’ needs and providing us the separate forums for our little community to function in full today. A + WEBSITE-ING
Re: non-military and actually effective responses to terrorism, oppression, poverty
This is an excellent book. It’s not woo–it includes serious content and endorsements by experienced military people and peacekeepers, as well as a wide range of others. It gives me true hope, it really does.
I called out yesterday to hang out with the family and read Jenny Lawson’s Furiously Happy, which is of course delightful. It’s a bit more disjointed than Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, but I still stayed up too late snorting in bed next to sleeping Mr Ipomoea, and it’s pretty great self-care. I put cabbage rolls in the slow cooker before work today and plan to go home and watch Master of None and ignore the world.
That was such a well-crafted piece about safe space. I’ve always been leery of allegedly safe spaces because I think there’s something arrogant about announcing that a particular space is safe for everyone. I’ve observed multiple safe spaces where too much emphasis on identity and not enough focus on HOW we interact with one another led to exhausting battles between women, queers etc. I consistently feel torn between what I perceive to be sketchy visions of safe space and then flat-out reactionary, often misogynist and racist interpretations of the concept from people who’ve never felt unsafe in public.
I would never be so bold as to call it a safe space, but The Toast is pretty great for me because I have generally found, with few exceptions, that when people disagree with me they will be friendly and offer me the benefit of the doubt and aren’t simply trying to pick fights or score political points.
Yes! I’m so spoiled by The Toast Dot Net that when I thoughtlessly/accidentally open the comments section on, say, NPR.org or something, I am completely shocked by the vitriol and nastiness that emerges immediately. I think: hello, over at TheToast we have amazing conversations where people learn and understand better! (thanks of course to the brilliant deletion skillz of our editorial friends) This is my “internet safe place”, too.
It turns out that, in reality, it is fine. Living in the age of smartphones is a pretty good balm; my mom keeps texting me pictures of the baby, he looks fine.Maybe a little *too* fine?
I am a graduate student, so I got a referral from the university Wellness Center for therapists that take the student insurance. The person they gave me actually wasn't taking new patients, though, so I went through the intake person at the practice and specifically requested someone who could do CBT. I assume most places would do a free consult kind of thing so you can get a sense of whether the person's a good fit and ask them about using the book. Good luck!!
My thoughts on the Michael/Rafael situation are almost 100% meta at this point, like I know fiction is always manipulative to some degree but I feel like the show just blatantly switches tracks between the two and if they don't want you to like Michael this week or Rafael the next week, that's just that. I mean, Michael and Jane were engaged, and together for two years, and the first time we see any real hint of a rapport or easiness between the two of them is basically after their engagement is long over and her subsequent relationship with Rafael has also gone up in flames. I love how crazy the show is in general, but the love triangle is exhausting and I hope (but don't really hold out hope) that it'll be shelved for a little while.