Dearest friend,
I write to you as I stare into my own eyes which stare back at me from set deep within my phone. The dark screen, which soon will grow darker from disuse, reflects my furrowed brow back at me, as if to say, “and what will you do about it?” The simple and mildly confrontational intimation of skepticism asks of me, as well, “why do you care?”
The simple answer is, I do not know. I don’t fully comprehend why the outright shunning of reason I see before me makes me want to abandon the thing I love. Because, dear friend, as you know, I, in words I’d hoped I’d never utter, love politics. I grew up in the nation’s capital, with parents whose working lives revolved around the decisions of people elected by lands I and they would never visit. “To hell with Tocqueville,” I would have said had I known his name, “let’s let my mom, Obama, and Jon Stewart make all the decisions forever, ‘Democracy’ be damned.”
In the ninth grade I suppose I first brushed with politics, printing 60-odd t-shirts emblazoned with the words “I CAN’T BREATHE” to sell at school and raise money for the family of Eric Garner. I received payment for less than half, and, with my parents picking up the balance, I raised zero dollars and zero cents. Perhaps consequently, through the eleventh grade I dreamed of being a physicist, about as far as possible from the worlds of policy, politics, and people I now seek out.
The next year, on the day a student killed ten at Santa Fe High School, plastic cuffs left a serial number imprinted in the flesh of my wrist, after I broke the law against obstructing the halls (literally) of Congress. My new friend James, whom I had never met before that day and have never seen in person since, posed a question as we threw my unlaced shoe back and forth across the concrete cell to pass the time. “So, what made you want to do this?”
I do not remember what I said that day, but I know now what the honest answer would have been: “because I can.” While this may come off the the boisterous response of someone justifying his actions, I mean this quite differently. I was able to take this step because, for me, it was not a big deal. I was far less likely than many of my peers to be seen as “resisting arrest” by the Capitol Police for shifting my shoulder from an uncomfortable position. I’d called my mom and received her blessing and support, which even James had failed to procure before entering the Longworth House Office Building. I was of an age where this would not go on my record, and am of a class where it would not have mattered even if it had. Thus, I did it, simply put, because I could.
When I walked out of “jail,” as my parents now generously refer to it (it was three cells in the back of the DC police’s Sixth District Station), I was not instantaneously a politico. But, as my views developed, as I volunteered for and worked on campaigns, as I was exposed to the people at this school and elsewhere who have shaped my political ideals, I developed a true love for what I believe politics can be.
I, in my seemingly endless gullibility, open Twitter or turn on the news everyday, hoping beyond hope to see whatever idealized version of politics I’ve propped up in my mind as ideal, a combination of direct action (see above for my one claim to authority on this subject) and good faith, evidence-based discourse (I’d assume from my upbringing as the child of two lawyers, sent to the rather discourse-heavy University of Chicago).
The beauty of a mirror is that what you see is not actually the mirror itself, but the light you project towards it. The beauty of my darkened phone screen is that it shows me what I myself project towards the dimmed Twitter feed or CNN home page: an expectation of a combination of nuance, civilization, and passion I know I know won’t come.
It pains me to admit this, but I do not know what to do about this. I do not foresee the problem getting better anytime soon, and I hope my expectations of what we can be never lessen.
As we inch forward through 2020, I wish you luck, my friend. Perhaps you see it differently than I do? If you do, I beg of you, please advise me of your techniques.
Sincerely yours,
Daniel Green
I need to do better. I begin this way to demonstrate that I know the fallibility of my own viewpoints and origins thereof on this issue, but I contend that regardless of these problems, it is an issue well worth examining. The issue I wish to raise today is that of nuance. Now, my rather cautious and, some might say, nuanced, introduction of this issue may seem ironic, but it is for good reason that I bring it up in this manner – the issue of nuance is nuanced.
This needs explanation, and perhaps some more background. I base this lecture not on a single incident of, as someone on Twitter put it, “a single BernieBro was mean to me online and now I’ve changed my entire political beliefs.” Rather, I sat down to write this because of the modern atmosphere that has ruined a thing I love. For reasons inexplicable in a lecture of this length, I went from caring about individual issues but rather apathetic about electoral politics to a Politico newsletter subscriber in about 18 months. Simply put, I love politics because of what it can be.
I will not sully my reputation by saying that politics is or should be just polite, civilized discourse; far from it. I developed my love for politics through passionate direct action – organizing and attending rallies and marches outside the Capitol, which sits mere miles from my childhood home, being arrested in House office buildings… Even before I turned 4, my parents took me to the March for Women’s Lives. Passion, dedication, and critique are the key building blocks of politics, along with nuance.
Here lies the problem. In early 2017, the Washington Post ran reports that Fireball sales had spiked in the DC area with the arrival of Trump staffers. As ridiculous as this may seem, I don’t doubt it. A cheap, easily-consumed way of getting drunk fast? To me, that sounds like a drink of choice for young Republicans just moving to town, as well as for the overwhelmingly Democratic population of DC, drinking to forget their woes. Since the election of 2016, we have seen, I’m sure you’ll agree, a total breakdown of nuanced political conversation in the Democratic Party, in the country at large, and in our own communities, accelerated by the Fireball craving-inducing time in which we live.
As I’ve mentioned. I believe in the necessity of passion and pointed critique for effective politics. These things convince people. But, when strangers, friends, or even family members routinely dismiss one another as “communists,” “imperialists,” “anti-semites,” “BernieBros,” or, my favorite pejorative, “dividers,” we get nowhere.
I know that I’m coming from a place of privilege – my race, gender, health, and religion mean that my political goals are not as urgent as others’. “Can’t we all just get along” isn’t the right question to pose, because the answer is no; some of these answers are truly life or death. But I know one thing. Name calling doesn’t work, and it may only serve to dissuade otherwise passionate allies from enthusiastically joining your cause.
Process Notes:
I think for the duration of this class, I’ve felt slightly self-conscious about my selected topic. My classmates have picked specific, tangible problems, while mine is far less impactful on everyday life. Thus, I wrote these pieces to explain, I guess, why I actually care about this. I set out to write this not knowing what would come out, and the letter above is a lightly edited stream-of-consciousness piece that I believe resembles what an actual letter (or email or text) I would write on this topic would look like. I wrote the letter first and the lecture second, which is the opposite order from the order in which I did the readings for this week, which made the process of transforming slightly different, but I focused on two things. First was tone and style. In the lecture, I made an effort to both transform the informal tone into a slightly more formal and intellectual one, while maintaining enough of a natural flow that it could be read aloud. Second was my rhetorical techniques. Rather than leaning on the anecdotal reasoning I have for caring in the letter, in the lecture I stick to more universal claims, with one more universally understandable anecdote thrown in in order to keep the audience’s attention. Finally, I attempt to end each with a sort of call to action, discouraged as I may be: in the letter I ask for advice on how to deal with this phenomenon (under the assumption that this was actually a letter, it additionally fulfills the suggestion of leaving a question to which the recipient can respond to continue conversation), and in the lecture I appeal to the public’s better nature, do eschew this brand of name-calling politics.