In Troubled Times: Being Allies

I first posted this in April 2023. True then, even more true now.

I started a blog series, “In Troubled Times” after the 2016 presidential election. Folks I trust said that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. That’s true now, too, so here’s the first in a renewed series.

Recently, I had a conversation with someone I love dearly who, like so many of us, belongs to overlapping groups that have been targeted by the current crop of hate-mongers. So many of the people and causes I support are at risk, it’s easy to feel battered by prejudice, overwhelmed, infuriated, and hopeless. But, in a moment of spontaneity, I found myself saying, “We can be good allies for one another.”

Let me break this down a bit. There is more than enough hatred to go around. There will never be a lack of worthy causes and people in need. No one of us can save everyone.

Thankfully, we are not all crazy (or desperate, or paralyzed by events) on the same day. Progress happens when we are actively pursuing it, but also when we allow ourselves to take a break, tend to our inner lives, and allow others to carry the load. The world does not rise or fall solely based on any one of us. This is why solidarity is essential. Insisting on being on the front lines all the time is an engraved invitation to exhaustion. If we look, we will always find those who, for this moment anyway, have energy and determination.

I think the secret to being a good ally is to realize that we can be that person for someone else.

This requires paying attention.

It is not helpful to do for someone what they can and should do for themselves. How then are we to discern when “helping” is arrogant interference? When is it a genuine offer and when does it result in telling the other person that they are inadequate and helpless to achieve their goal?

We ask. We listen. We give ourselves permission to appear clumsy and we forgive ourselves when we make mistakes.

Sometimes, the best thing we can ask is “How can I help?” and sometimes it is the worst, laying yet another burden on a person bowed down under them (“Oh god, I’ve got to think of something for her to do!”) Sometimes, saying, “Would you like me to help with that?” is the best, and sometimes it is the worst. Sometimes, “You are not alone” is a sanity-saver. Sometimes, it is a reminder of looming disaster. Sometimes, “I’m here and I care” is all the other person needs to hear, and sometimes it is worse than silence.

We listen. We ask. We pay attention.

The one thing we do not do is walk away. When I think of being an ally, I envision someone with whom I can be depressed, angry, volatile, and just plain wrong—and know that I will be held up by their unrelenting care for me. I can vent my frustration and they won’t abandon me. They will hear the pain and despair behind my words.

I want to be that ally for others. I want to be that safe person. I’m far from perfect at it, though. My feelings get hurt. I sop up the other person’s despair when I know better. I do my best to not walk away.

Listen. Forgive yourself. Take a break. Do what you can, when you can. Then pick yourself up and get back into the fight.

 

Up soon… “This too shall pass…”

In Troubled Times: Bystander Intervention Training

In January 2018, I attended a seminar entitled Stand! Speak! Act! A Community Bystander Intervention Training. The subheading suggested I would learn how to nonviolently support someone who was being harassed. The event was presented by the local chapter of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), the Muslim Solidarity Group, and the local rapid response team. The idea of becoming a nonviolent ally in directly ameliorating the harm from harassment greatly appealed to me. I found the seminar enlightening, although not always in ways I expected.

To begin with, although two of the event’s three sponsors were specifically Muslim solidarity groups, the techniques and strategies apply whenever a person is being targeted. Although hate crimes against Muslims have increased drastically (first after 9/11 and then ongoing since Trump's election), racism (anti-black, anti-Hispanic, anti-Asian) still accounts for the majority of incidents, and anti-LGBTQ violence continues. Most of my friends and relatives who have been harassed have been targeted because of race, sexual orientation, or gender identification, but by far the greatest number have been because of race. The principles of intervention remain the same, and if in the future some other group becomes a target for extremism and violence, allies will step forward.

The workshop drew its guidance and inspiration from the principles set out by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

• Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people
• Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding
• Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people
• Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform
• Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate
• Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.

It’s tempting to lash out when you or someone you observe is a target of violence, whether physical or verbal. We’ve all seen enough superhero movies to want to jump in, swirling our capes, and single-handedly take on the offender. Outrage at what we perceive to be hateful and wrong fuels our adrenaline. It’s hard to remain calm, to think clearly, and to act from principle instead of reactive emotion. That’s why practice is so important. Harassment can escalate very quickly, and unless we have some experience in how we are vulnerable to engagement, we can become swept up in the confrontation.

Bystander intervention isn’t about confronting the person spewing hatred, it’s about supporting the person being targeted.

Orlando Heavy on My Heart

“Where were you when you heard?” In my life, that question has referred to so many terrible events. The earliest one I remember was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I was in high school and was old enough to have vivid memories of walking down the corridor, not yet knowing what had happened but knowing it was something dreadful, the hushed voices, and most of all, the expression on the face of my favorite teacher as he told us the news. I recalled this while driving my younger daughter to her own high school and turning on the radio to hear, “The second tower is down!” To each generation, I thought. Columbine, Charleston, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, the Oklahoma City bombing, the list goes on.

My older daughter and I were returning from our college reunion when we stopped for lunch and I glanced at the newspaper rack and saw the news about the Orlando shooting. That same sense of surreal horror swept over me. Both of us had the thought that the world, our world anyway, would never be the same. In trying to grapple with events like this one or the others mentioned above, I find myself looking for events in my own life. That’s a thing we primates do, we put things into personal context.

I am intimately familiar with my own journey through the brutal murder of my mother, but that is not a good analogy. Her death, as devastating as it was, was an individual, one-on-one act of violence. Nobody blamed her or in any way implied she was somehow responsible for what happened to her. Closer emotionally are the stories my father used to tell of his boyhood in a small village in the Ukraine just after the Russian Revolution, when Cossacks would ride into town, line up all the Jewish boys, and shoot them. Today we find such acts heinous; nobody says the Jews deserved what they got at Auschwitz.

Yet that is exactly what some public figures have been saying about the young men and women who were having a night of dancing off the stress of their lives at Pulse. That is one of the ways in which this shooting stands apart from the others.

I found that as the days roll past, my distress at the Orlando shooting increased rather than diminishing. I kept having the thought, Except for not knowing many folks who go to night clubs, that could have been someone I love. That same daughter I was traveling with is part of the LGBT community. So are my other daughter and her wife. So is my sister and her partner. So are so many people I love.

That could have been my child or my sister or my brother or my best friend. That could have been me.

A Hero of Queer-Welcoming Fiction

Via Jim Hines's LiveJournal entry, Wicked Pretty Things and the Erasure of LGBTQ Characters, a story that makes me so angry and so sad, it's beyond words.

Last month, Jessica Verday withdrew her story from the Wicked Pretty Things anthology after receiving a note from the editor which stated that her story “would have to be published as a male/female story because a male/male story would not be acceptable to the publishers.”

The publisher apparently denied such a bias, and the editor apologized. Whose fault it was and where the misunderstanding (if such it was) occurred is not within the scope of this blogpost. What happened next is. A group of authors pulled their stories from this and other anthologies from that publisher. Now to the awesome part.