1.
Once I said I wasn’t good at funerals. Certainly, other things claim more shelf space in the cabinet of minor shames of my early 20s, but this one has made me cringe for some years now. The occasion was the death of a coworker, a security guard at the high-rise building where I worked, sweeter-tempered and sharper-looking in his navy jacket and gray pants than his colleagues, who largely disliked him for his odd blend of gullibility and guile. My boss asked if I wanted to go to the funeral. Affecting that I had any experience with funerals at all, I gave my excuse, stayed behind to watch the front desk, exempted myself from the awkwardness of strangers’ grief.
But who is good at funerals? Only, I suppose, those unfortunate enough to have gotten used to them. I was not willing, at 22, to start down that road. No one missed me there. But I hope I would behave better today.
2.
After our older dog died early this year, my wife began walking dogs at the city animal shelter in her free time. Although walking doesn’t quite cover it. She planned to run with them until she discovered that shelter-frazzled pit bulls have little aptitude for marathon training. Now I get texts with slobbery photographs from Saturday outings to state parks, with a stop at the Caribou Coffee drive-through for a little cup of whipped cream on the way.
She’d been doing this for a few months when she mentioned to me that she was going to spend the following afternoon with a dog who was scheduled to be euthanized, to give him one last wonderful day in the sunshine.
This news pulled sobs from my chest with a speed and urgency that startled both of us.
“I guess … I am not capable of knowing that,” I choked out finally, trying to collect myself.
But what was it that I had not known? Of course I knew that animals at the city shelter were sometimes euthanized. I was even familiar with the criticisms of shelters that tout a no-kill model—that they cannot and do not take every unclaimed pet, so aren’t they simply leaving the uncomfortable work of death dealing to other organizations?
This knowledge was tolerable in the abstract, but not in the concrete. (I don’t pretend this is a unique insight. Past childhood, most of us come to intuit that one untimely death is a tragedy while thousands are the way of the world.) Not when I could envision a particular dog joyriding in our particular car, unaware that he was soaking up the last bit of life rationed out to him.
I would have preferred not to envision it—to avoid not just the grief for a creature I’d never met, but the sudden sense of culpability. Our other dog is old, spooks easily and once scrapped with her sister to the point of drawing blood … but shouldn’t we, somehow, find a way to take in this dog, if the alternative was his death? Didn’t knowing about him somehow make him our particular problem now?
That dog was saved in the end by a rescue group. But the issue is far from settled. For as long as my wife volunteers at the shelter, there will always be more dogs passing into our life and possibly to their unjust deaths. The warm snout of the particular will keep pushing itself into our hands, nudging open our fists.
3.
Lately I suspect that most people in power view the distant subjects of their force as lacking not just humanity, but actual reality.
There is, for instance, the mechanics of ordering immediate evacuation of 1 million people from northern Gaza. There can be no pretense that such an order can effect its supposed aim, any more than leaning on the horn amid a traffic jam can conjure open road. The words are spoken so that they can say the words have been spoken: We told them to go or else, so now let’s get on with the “or else.”
There is the obsession, stateside, with prodding people to say the right words, as if Hamas were waiting with bated breath to learn what each critic of the Israeli government and American response thinks of them as well. No one believes this is so. I have a hard time buying that they can believe any of the false equivalences sprouting everywhere these past weeks like mushrooms after rain, like they did in the months after 9/11 when to question America’s actions was automatically pro-terror.
“We’re seeing a rising tide of antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric coming from extreme wings of the Democratic Party,” explained one organization I’d previously enthusiastically volunteered with. “We stand with the global community in both condemning the heinous acts of terrorism committed by Hamas and praying for all of the families who have been irrevocably hurt by this violence”—the semi-specific event of the first clause fading out into a hazy violence against unnamed families in the second, who may or may not include Palestinians. This type of speech does not even pretend to be communication. It is pure signaling to others who stand by to dutifully record that the signal was received.
If any form of speech ought to be weighed based on its consequences for real people, you’d think it’d be legislation. Yet in the past years Republican-controlled state legislatures have mounted a carnival of bills—against abortion, against trans people’s ability to manage their lives, against various kinds of speech in schools, against drag shows for god’s sake—that fall apart in court as unexpectedly as breakaway glass shatters onstage.
Sometimes Republicans will admit the unseriousness of their whole enterprise directly, as in a startling This American Life segment reported by Miki Meek on the impact of Idaho’s abortion ban—a trigger law that none of its sponsors ever expected to be triggered.
Said Senator Jim Guthrie: “You know, maybe there was some things overlooked, as far as what the consequences would be, because they weren't truly consequences yet. In your subconscious, you're thinking [Roe is] not going to be overturned, so this is one way you can make a statement.”
And yet after this admission, he goes on to tie himself in knots to justify his failure to consider that passing a law might have any effect on the people of the state he governs:
In the context of being pro-life and recognizing the importance of the unborn, I feel like that vote at that time, with what was in place as far as trying to push back against an embedded law, I think that was an appropriate vote at the time, even though once the Roe versus Wade was overturned is when the reality, I think, sunk in for all of us.
Guthrie is at least willing to acknowledge that the current reality—in which OB-GYNs are fleeing the state and the women Meek interviews must carry unviable pregnancies for many weeks and miles to receive care—might need remediation. Chipper, chilling Representative Julianne Young has a different take:
So what I hear you describing a lot seems like adjusting to a new situation. And undoubtedly, there's a little pain with every change. So we just don't live in a world where everything works out perfectly all the time. And so that—just because there's some inconvenience associated with making the policy change to protect life doesn't mean that it's not the right thing to do.
This perspective pretends to be worldly-wise—can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs; Israel must defend itself, mustn’t it—while rigorously protecting its ignorance of any specific consequences. There are no people in an apologia like Young’s: just a new situation, a little pain, a little inconvenience. The way of our abstractly imperfect world.
I dare to hope that none of these people are really as blithe as they sound. That they are relying on the principle of the thing to loft them up and away because they do feel the weight of other lives tugging on their own, and that this pains them more than they can admit. That they do things like enact bans on materials that suggest that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex” because they are perhaps especially vulnerable to the sense of culpability that knowledge of their nation’s history brings.
I hope this is this case because it would mean these seeming ghouls are not inhuman, only cowardly. And most of us are cowards sometimes. And we can creep out from our shelter of innocence (that mangled innocence achieved by force, severed from all the positive qualities of being truly new to the world: a genuine interest in people and experiences, an ability to be shocked and stirred by injustice). We can all struggle to become more capable of knowing.
Photo of damage from an Israeli airstrike by Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138775621.
Thanks for your writing! I appreciate your prose and flow.