Current events, constant values

After a few years away, I’ve started to revive this blog and some of my social media as a place to share writing and editing advice and publishing news. Perhaps I’ll also share some personal updates every now and then, but I view this space as mainly professional. I have other outlets for personal expression. I also have other outlets (including in-person action) for my political and social views and values. Rather than write my own account, I generally try to listen to more informed perspectives from experts and those directly affected. And then, there’s the worry about how if I commit to commenting on one matter, my silence on others becomes commentary in itself. I will always wind up being silent on something important, because there are so many vital and dire events happening in the world that to truly do them justice would require a 24/7 outpouring.

Yet you’ll notice this blot post continues from here.

Sometimes a topic is so significant that I can’t write well on it, certainly not in a timely fashion. On a personal scale: I’m not sure I’m ever going to write eloquently about my dad’s death ten years ago. Eerily similar feelings of helpless, shocked grief have left me unable to say much about the defunding of USAID and the hundreds of thousands of deaths it has led to over the past year. Except I can begin with this: every one of those hundreds of thousands of deaths has left grieving friends and family, virtually all of them in far more difficult and traumatic circumstances than I was in when Dad died (and my dad’s death was not un-traumatic, as a good therapist once pointed out). Every one of the people lost through that reckless decision had a name, a mother, and a favorite food. These were hundreds of thousands of individual, irreparable losses. And if aid is not resumed, the numbers will grow to millions. Many are children. One of them was seven-year-old Babagana Bukar Mohammed. One of hundreds of thousands.

I am not an expert to consult on current events. I try to keep informed. I listen more than I speak.

But I don’t think I need to be an expert to express some basic values. One of which is that each human life is precious and irreplaceable. (A far more eloquent voice than mine once observed, “whoever takes a life, it will be as if they killed all of humanity; and whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity.”) No human is worth more than another because of some fluke of birth or circumstances. If it’s unacceptable for something to happen to you or a member of your family or your favorite neighbor, it’s equally unacceptable if it happens to someone who looks different or lives farther away.

I’m also not a fan of lies, especially lies used to fuel hate campaigns.

I’m disgusted by the rapacious, inhuman cruelty shown to immigrants and refugees in the United States.

I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here, but in case it helps to say explicitly: I don’t think kidnapping and torturing people like Andry Hernandez and Neri Alvarado Borges and five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos makes me safer or my country “greater.”

Friends I know personally and strangers I admire are on the ground in the Twin Cities and other places across the country, protesting and legally observing these kidnappings. They’re acting in accordance with the same values I profess and hope I can live up to in my own actions.

Today, those values say ICE out (and Abolish the DHS while we’re at it. If you feel a qualm about this despite the atrocities, consider that it’s over a decade younger than me and any useful work it does, if any, could once again be managed by departments that are not atrocity machines).

On a historical tour of my hometown of Waukesha, I learned about our connections to the abolitionist movement. To this day, our local paper is The Freeman. In March 1854, Waukesha residents were part of the crowd rallied to free the imprisoned Joshua Glover, a man who had escaped slavery but was recaptured and held in the Milwaukee jail. The crowd succeeded and Glover made his way safely to Canada. Afterward, an abolitionist leader was prosecuted, but found not guilty by Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Abram Smith, who observed, “Let the federal government return to the exercise of the just powers conferred by the Constitution and few, very few, will be found to disturb the tranquillity of the nation.” In 1857, the state Legislature passed a law forbidding Wisconsin officials to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. (The Federal Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, whose name you may recognize from the infamous Dred Scott decision, was not a fan of this ruling and overturned it. The abolitionist was then himself broken out of jail and eventually received a presidential pardon.)

My point being: these values are timeless, though they’re lived out in different ways based on the needs of each day.

I believe diversity is a strength and we all benefit when we work (and play) together with people of different countries of origin, races, genders, and abilities, just to start the list. My clients and my friends come from many backgrounds, often different from mine, and I am glad of that. I have no patience with people who disagree on this point, who try to scrabble for some pride or security in claiming they are innately better or more worthy than anyone else.

I could tie these values to my career choice, observing how good writing (also good reading) requires attention to the truth and empathy for many experiences, including those vastly different from your own. But you hardly need to be a writer or editor to grasp these things. And you don’t need a lot of expertise or a particular emotional connection (for one narrow definition of “empathy”) to figure out that withholding lifesaving medicine from children or imprisoning people because of their race is a messed-up thing to do. (As a stylistic choice, I don’t swear much on this blog, even where I would in real life. Of course “messed up” was not the first term that came to mind.)

My concern in writing this post is not backlash or lost work opportunities. As I just said, I think most writers care about the truth and have empathy for other people. I would not particularly want to work with someone who didn’t (once I did turn down a prospective editing job because of the book’s smears against refugees). The source of the writer’s block I’ve had to fight through with every sentence today is the knowledge that I am not finding words that do justice to the moral urgency of this moment. To the horrors that people are being subjected to, and in my name as an American citizen. To the courage of the people who are helping and resisting.

So I’m going to have the guts and basic decency to risk saying it badly.