Grappling with What is Important: The World or the Personal?
A few weeks ago I had to delay my car payment by a couple of days. Despite the (now) regular bi-monthly paycheck, I have some holes I dug myself in during the Summer of Disillusionment which need filling in with cash thus a bit of of financial balancing. On the app, the delay indicated a penalty of nearly double the payment owed and for five days it buzzed around my brain like a drone camera at a traffic stop with a young black driver.
This anomaly in my days was very important to me. No one else in the world (including CarMax) gave two shits about it. It was my thing, my trouble, my problem to solve. What wasn't important or pressing at the time was whether drag shows were grooming grade school children. Reading about Floridian Republicans frothing at the mouth to ban these sorts of bizarre shows (you have to admit that having a man dressed hyper-sexually as a cartoon woman teaching children to read is not quite the replacement to Sesame Street we envisioned) was a diversion but not a hill for me to die on. It was not an issue that connected as I don't have kids, haven't seen a drag show since Zombie Burlesque in Vegas two years ago (no kids present), and how was I going to afford a double car payment and still make the loan repayment to my friend?
Since the divorce, I've gained around fifteen pounds that stubbornly refuse to drop. Certain vests fit too tightly, my pants are a bit too snug, and, while I know exactly how to drop the weight, getting that very specific calorie in/calorie out ratio in practice has been challenging.
No one else on the entire planet cares if I drop fifteen pounds. No one. Anywhere. Joe Biden isn't holding court regarding Don Hall's waistline; no reporter on even the tiny Wichita television stations is mentioning it on the air on a Sunday evening. It is my issue to solve. You know what wasn't even a blip on my radar as I rationed the carbs vs protein and hit the gym? How to define the term 'woke.'
Over at the NYT, conservative columnist Ross Douthat attempts to define the term in the most generous terms:
"...all of this is necessarily a cultural and psychological project, which is why schools, media, pop culture and language itself are the essential battlegrounds. Yes, economic policy matters, but material arrangements are downstream of culture and psychology. The socialists have merely gentled capitalism, the environmentalists have merely regulated it. If you want to save the planet or end the rule of greed, you need a different kind of human being, not just a system that assumes racist patriarchal values and tries to put them on a leash.
You think this is too utopian? Consider a proof of concept, what we’ve already seen with gay rights. There the left overthrew a system of deep heteronormative oppression by establishing a new cultural consensus, in the academy and in pop culture and only at the end in politics and law, using argument but also shaming, social pressure and other “illiberal” means.
And look what we’ve learned: That once homophobia diminishes, millions upon millions of young people begin to define themselves as what they truly are, as some form of L.G.B.T.Q.+, slipping the shackles of heteronormativity at last. Which is why the backlash against the spread of transgender identification among kids must be defeated — because this is the beachhead, the proving ground for full emancipation.
If you find a lot of this narrative persuasive, even filtered through my conservative mind, then whatever “woke” describes, it probably describes you."
I describe myself as a classic liberal and find the extreme left to be fucking annoying but I do find his version of the narrative persuasive. Before I give too much of my attention to the utopian restructuring of society, how many calories does a boiled egg have?
The state of the climate with its ridiculous weather patterns and disastrous effects on everyone is a scud missile headed right now to destroy us all—not the planet but our continued ability to live upon it—but before I get into all that the tire light on my Prius is on and it's driving me nuts.
The government is dropping cash on too-big-to-fail banks like a drey horse on an all taco diet while ignoring the very needs of the working people scurrying around trying to afford their rent but hold that thought while I feel disempowered at work and I'm bathing in the addictive bath salts of self pity.
The generational divide in progressing society to a better place, in addressing the injustices of the world, is that when your mom still does your laundry and you haven't had enough life on this particular hellscape to feel genuinely cheated by the health insurance industry, the personal is pretty easy to ignore. Once some time has been served in the penitentiary of humanity, the personal becomes increasingly urgent like a bread crumb to a seagull.
College students and academics with tenure have all the time and mental space in the world focusing on the horrors of society. They get to coin phrases like 'systemic racism,' 'climate justice,' and 'the patriarchy' because the wait in line behind an old lady with a clutch full of coupons clipped from a newspaper slowly bleeding out has not become an existential crisis.
Who reasonably gives a fuck about disproportionate incarceration rates when someone smashed in their Honda window last night and stole their Duran Duran CDs and secret box of Newports they were hiding from their husband? Who has the bandwidth to spend five minutes on the dangers of algorithmic AI when they can't remember their Ticketmaster password? Who has the time to take their camera phone into a government building in order to get security to 'violate their rights' in order to put up a (hopefully) viral video of authoritarian overreach in the Omaha DMV but someone without a neighbor who lets his dog shit in their yard and, goddamnit, if I could only catch it in the act.
So pardon me if I wave off your impassioned cry that the Supreme Court has become a rightwing crossing guard because right now I'm dealing with the fact that I can't find the fob to my car and I'm late to pick up my dad who's getting out of dialysis in ten minutes and needs a ride home.
