Another war?!?

Feeling numb or paralyzed? That's entirely fair.

Last Saturday, I was curled up on a couch in an AirBnB in Roanoke, VA when I read that we were at war with Iran. The sun was streaming in the windows, the birds were chirping on the power lines, and I was cozy in my jammies. Meanwhile, bombs were dropping half a world away, killing nearly 200 young girls and their teachers at a school in Minab. Roads out of Tehran were at a standstill, as a large fraction of the nearly 10 million innocent people there attempted to flee for their lives. The potential for hundreds of thousands of deaths across the region, maybe more, maybe even nuclear war, loomed large. But only on my phone.

It was a surreal moment.

War, for Americans, is often surreal in this way. Except for 9/11, we have been largely exempt since the Civil War from experiencing the horrors that we visit on other countries with increasing regularity. Even then we sometimes treated violence and war like entertainment. Families, along with politicians and journalists, came out to the edge the first battle, at Bull Run, to have picnics and watch the fighting.

Well into the 20th century, families also often came out to watch lynchings in the South. When I witness white folks getting in their feelings about discussions of racism, I always think, How would you respond if your family was only a generation or two from having your willful slaughter treated like a family fun day at the park?

I have to believe it is this desensitization to violence and distancing from the realities of war which allowed us to hand away our civil liberties via the Patriot Act so blithely after 9/11. That allowed us to authorize the reorganizing of immigration enforcement under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security and the creation of I.C.E. That inspired so many politicians (all except the courageous Barbara Lee) to believe George W. Bush’s lies about WMD’s and authorize the use of military force in Iraq.

The impunity that President Trump is claiming for himself to bomb Iran and Venezuela, to potentially attempt to overthrow Cuba, didn’t just come out of nowhere. Not only is Trump a monster of our own making, he has taken our removal from the realities of war to their utmost and inevitable conclusion.

None of the harm or destruction or slaughter has anything to do with us. It’s over there. It’s for those people to deal with.

At the same time, we’ve never been more inundated with real-time views into the demolition and carnage. If you look at Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, you can watch the whole thing play out in the palm of your hand 24 hours a day. Maybe our animal brains and hearts aren’t built to process the realities of war halfway around the world, but we’re not built to watch it in 2-5 minute increments all day long either.

If, like me, you feel like you’re whole system shuts down in the face of those options, it makes sense. Violence is visceral and very human, but we’ve excised our direct human experience of it to such a degree that we’ve dehumanized both our victims and ourselves. Who doesn’t numb out reflexively under the weight of it?

So, what to do?

Photo via Reuters

What I do is avoid the video rendering of war as much as I can. I track the headlines and dive deep to read sources I trust (and some I only trust a little. Hello, New York Times.) on a regular, sometimes daily, basis. Then I step away to actually do something in real time.

I don’t just consume and consume, growing ever more bloated with horror, outrage, and panic. I let the information move through me and out via my hands and voice.

I call my representatives in Congress. I email them when calling feels overwhelming or not possible. And I take steps to effect my own community in concrete ways.

This week I went to a city council meeting. My goal was two-fold— to support efforts to eliminate Flock surveillance cameras from our city, and to defend the rights of artists contracted by our local public art project to install a mural on city property. Their contracted task was to honor the Underground Railroad. They chose to connect that historical liberation struggle to the present day, featuring a call to free Gaza at the side of the mural.

Some members of our city council asserted they’d violated the contract. They wanted the message to free Gaza painted over.

In defense of the work, one of the artists talked about being the Black father of two young girls, of his pain in witnessing so many children just like his own being slaughtered in Gaza. He described how he could not, in good conscience, sanitize his art and leave the need for liberation comfortably in our past. He had to bring it into now, into today, into here.

Some community members rejected his call for us to sit with our discomfort and complicity in the slaughter of children. They insisted it made them feel unsafe, as if they themselves were being attacked. They got in the face of another one of the artists after she spoke. They insisted she was lying about the slaughter of innocents by the Israeli state.

Only people safely removed from the realities of war can say such things, can demand to be protected from any reminder of the deaths of tens of thousands.

Luckily, the effort to silence the artists didn’t succeed. The mural won’t be painted over. Our public art project will also, for the fourth year in a row, support projects celebrating the vibrancy of our Jewish community and neighbors. Because we don’t wish to exclusively assign villainy to anyone.

This was what I could do this week to push back against war and paralysis. It didn’t fix everything, didn’t even touch the war in Iran. But that doesn’t remove my obligation to keep going and do what I can. As the Talmud states, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

Sometimes, it’s true, what I choose to do ends up missing the moment in some way. During the first Trump administration, in the face of travel bans and family separations, I worried that we would need an Underground Railroad again, this time for undocumented immigrants. So, I welcomed an undocumented single mom and her son to move in with us, rent-free. They stayed for almost two years.

My fear didn’t materialize then, but it has now. Immigrants are hiding and being hidden from our government as we speak.

Being eight years early doesn’t make what I did wasted effort, though. That mom is now happily married to a U.S. citizen with legal status. Her son is in college, gets straight A’s, and plays in marching band. And my kids and I had a part in their story. How could that be any less than a triumph?

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So, how are you holding up, my friends? Are you feeling numb or paralyzed in the face of it all? Are you managing to push back against this endless wave of war and chaos? Maybe one on one day and then the other, back and forth?

Tell me how you are.

Sending so much love,

Asha