I didn’t want to talk about what happened at UVA. I don’t mean I don’t want to hear about it, because I never want the conversation to stop about what just happened. Every generation must continue to talk about this. I mean I thought the discussion didn’t need to be started by people like me whose opinions are still informed by the fact that we could still turn our heads and look away if we wanted to. We’re the people who can still say, “I can’t deal with this today”. We can still say, “It’s a one-time thing,” because the thousand other small ways this happens in a single day across our country do not happen in the lives of white people and in our newspapers. We’re the only ones who are acting shocked and surprised, and I don’t know if there’s time for that attitude anymore.
When I got the news about the white pride march I was literally staring across the road at a section of the Berlin Wall, one of the great symbols of division and fear and violence. The panic of some people in power was so great that the Iron Curtain had to cut through the heart of this city, lest anyone make the choice not to be part of their regime. On one side was a pressure to conform to an ideal form, of society and the individual, enforced by violence and spread by paranoia. We are a certain way, we have a certain history and a certain destiny, and all must fall in line: it’s not just for us it’s for you too. Neighbors couldn’t trust neighbors not to report them to the bullies who were empowered by this system. It echoes in all the frantic attempts by the twitterverse to identify and excommunicate all those who could be identified at the march. I don’t completely know how to feel about that right now, but I’ve always been in favor of knowing who are the assholes in our society, who marches on the side of fear and bullying.
What’s striking in Berlin is the lessons of history are very stark, as are some of the reminders that they will be ignored. There’s a Topology of Terror museum about the Nazi era, the beginnings, the consolidation of power, and then then how the war and the Holocaust that spread across Europe affected Berlin. All of this is in the shadow of a section of the Berlin Wall. At the biggest memorial to the Wall itself, there’s history of how this affected individual people and even buildings, as those who lived directly on the border found their houses to be first a gateway, and later taken away from them so they could be demolished or bricked up. Many people didn’t go right away, thinking it would all blow over and the Soviet & GDR posturing against their former western allies couldn’t last. The people who’d lived through National Socialism, the distortion and rewriting of history and religion, and even the extermination of an entire people still sort of believed a wall couldn’t happen. This is how it starts. Later I went to the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a title that pulls no punches in its place in history, a haunting space, and found shouting tourists with dogs and selfie sticks and bubble gum who held nothing sacred… you can stand in the tombs of those who were burned anonymously and still feel nothing holy, feel no weight of history. The beginnings of a historical moment insignificant compared to the clamoring needs of the day, the ends hazy and belonging to yesterday.
In the past I have deplored hysteria, and I think every president has had nothing stories blown into cause for national alarm when some reporter who hadn’t had anything printed in a while realized they could create a story by taking taking a few words, removing them from context and blowing them up to epic proportions. Does the president’s mumbled remark at a grocery store photo op signal a sea change in foreign policy or that his declining mental faculties have been hidden from the public?? No, probably not. That used to drive me nuts, but right now the minimization of what’s happening actually scares me the most. We’ve called so many people Nazis who didn’t actually deserve it (although some may have deserved a few other nasty names) that we’ve removed the power from it when the real ones show up. If most so-called Nazis turn out to be garden variety idiots, the focusing and highlighting power of that comparison is gone. I would like to believe that only a few idiots, the ones we’ll never get rid of, showed up to shout Nazi slogans like, “Blood and soil!” I’d like to believe they’re like the skinheads at a punk concert: they’re the people who will always show up and act like they own the place even though everybody hates their guts. But the real Nazis also started with just a few idiots who everybody ignored or tried to give the benefit of the doubt.
The minimization also takes the form of equivocation. When we have a family argument, within a community that’s built on trust and familiarity, we often forgo justice. They started it, mediators will admit, but then again, your response didn’t help. Everybody tries to give a little, and by lowering ourselves and by giving, we remember we’re all family, or community, and that’s more important than a thorough accounting of who did what to who with appropriate consequences. Everything may become equal, as it all contributes to the rift. You’re still an asshole but I will sacrifice this peace offering of words and possibly cake to you, because you’re MY asshole friend or sister or collaborator.
This doesn’t work when we don’t care about the rift more than we care about the hurt. I don’t particularly care if I’m disliked and not accepted by the kind of people who march with torches in support of white pride and white fear. Maybe I should, and I hope someday to build bridges with those who can be reached, to hope they can see the world and the people around me more as I do, and I can see how it is they grew so fearful and angry, to see what spark of truth, what experience, fanned into such an awful flame. I would meet them halfway, if they wanted to heal the rift as well. But what happens instead is lowering yourself to somebody who wants to feel higher, giving to someone who feels they’re entitled to take more. They march and threaten because they want people afraid, of their guns and their fists and their trucks, but then when counter-protesters refuse to be intimidated, refuse to be moved, they say, “They made us afraid with their counter protest, they contributed to the rift, everyone is equally guilty, it doesn’t matter who started it, it doesn’t matter who did the killing, it only matters that we speak and you have to listen in silence lest we become afraid again.” When I marched with Black Lives Matter I felt like nobody was angry because they were afraid, or angry about what was being taken from them, they were marching for injustice that made everyone very angry but somehow also hopeful that it could be recognized.
There was a time when we had presidents who said there was nothing to fear but fear itself. There was a time when we had presidents who said every citizen of the free world was a citizen of Berlin. There was a time when we even had a postmaster general who said we must hang together or we shall surely hang separately. Now we’re told to be afraid of the violent left. We’re told to be afraid of Mexicans. We’re told to be afraid of everyone (except for Russia), and that we need to start a third war in Asia (we had a president who warned about that too). Our leadership is truly failing us, and nobody will step into that void, stop talking about everyone we need to be afraid of (including President Trump), and find any message that makes us back into builders of a nation and not soldiers in the service of ideology.
The two craziest things I’ve seen so far in the comments about this event are the inevitable rush to blame President Obama for wanting a divided country (without specifying how), and the immediate “But what about white women? Who’s thinking about us?” I read this and I almost feel like I can’t do anything to help white women anymore, not right now, but that’s a whole other conversation. So I’m thinking today about the women of color in my life, and I’m thinking about parents of brown boys they need to send out into this world, and I’m thinking about how far away I feel from all of you in this divided society and the divisions and biases and fears in my own heart and mind. And today I’m feeling very white, under the gross approval of these men in Virginia, an experience that has almost never made me feel closer to anyone in our whiteness.
Writing from Berlin, and feeling a very long way from home.
Coq au Vin 