Debts so appalling

I took my youngest daughter to the library today. I didn’t plan to. A bunch of my holds had come in so I had to go and she wanted to come along so I brought her with.

We wore masks. I feel uncomfortable continuing to wear a mask given the shifts in policy and attitude on mask wearing but I feel less comfortable going unmasked given the risks, especially since my kids are unvaccinated.

I have begun to resent new aspects of the Biden years. In the Trump years I could feel somewhat proximate to liberal friends and colleagues in a shared dislike of some things even if we arrived at that dislike differently. Now under Biden, as depoliticizing and looking away are becoming more the norm, I am back to feeling on the outs like I did under Obama, pulled between pretending to be someone I’m not in various ways - smiling and nodding, mostly - or being more honest and getting looks and watching people’s faces say they want out of the conversation.

This is particularly frustrating in the context of the pandemic given how high stakes and personal it all feels. I find myself regularly furious and despondent at the russian dolls of nested failures around the pandemic, and thinking often of a line from a Propagandhi song - “how can one man ever repay a debt so appalling? Can’t gouge ten thousand eyes from a single head.” I can feel the pressure on my imagination to reduce my belief in the possibility of a genuinely better society to thinking about what the odds are on a bet future collective revenge.

We sat in the grass outside waiting for the librarians to bring out our books and my daughter wanted to give me a high five which she followed with a fist bump and a hug and then a kiss. She cracked up after the kiss because of us both wearing masks, so then she did it another five or six times, laughing the whole time. That was fun. It was nice to have the mask wearing have a positive quality instead of just risk mitigation and the recent sense of being on the outs for still wearing masks.

Our library branch has a sign on the side of the building in foot high metal letters. My daughter likes to look at the letters and talk about what words might include that letter. She gets especially excited when one is the first letter of the name of someone she knows. We walked home after the librarian brought out the books - the librarian said “I can’t believe how big you are now!” It’s been so long since we went to an in-person story time, my kids used to love those. It’s nice that we can at least say hello on the curbside pick up. It was nice to hold hands on our walk.

We took our masks off for our walk home. She just held my hand and didn’t talk. When we got home she gave me a big hug. The state of the world is bad, and work is so hectic and stupid, that it’s easy to not appreciate these small quiet things, and not to prioritize having them in the first place.

From that thought my mind leapt to how these things aren’t valued by anyone in power: your joys? Irrelevant. Your loved ones? Raw material, at best. As a friend summarized the pandemic response a year ago - shut up and get into the wood chipper, peasant.

I thought about death. Three old friends I wasn’t in frequent enough contact with died over the last year, one from covid, which has reminded me of other friends who have died over the years. People have a last walk, a last handhold, a last cup of coffee. A lot of people don’t know the last is the last. This is, I assume, just an unavoidable human reality, part of being finite life forms. It’s all the more outrageous then that so many people’s lasts are socially produced massively early - like the avoidable covid deaths! - and worse yet that these serve no meaningful purpose whatsoever.

Another old friend I’m not in regular touch with anymore once said what he hated most about capitalism was little plastic spiders, the kind made for cheap halloween decorations and costume rings. They’re not interesting or fun or worthwhile, just landfill fodder the making of which generates pollution and unsafe workplaces. The costs are so big while the product is just garbage only made because it puts some money in some asshole’s pocket. It seems to me most social activity is little more than little plastic spider manufacturing really, and it’s awful that people might lose their small quiet moments like my walk with my daughter at all but especially so over such garbage. And the people in positions of official power tie a further bow of insult around those injuries by denying this is what they’re doing, with their ritual invocations of individual responsibility and claims that anyone who wants the vaccine can get it (as if no one vaccinated is immunocompromed: “still vulnerable? just die,” says the subtext they don’t even have the decency and courage of their convictions to voice) and crocodile tears gestures of “aw shucks, it’s out of my hands” and “I. Hear. You.” That’s gaslighting, with even less respect than the child bully’s “why are you hitting yourself?” which at least acknowledges that some act of violence is occurring.

I read some of our books to set aside this anger - the Hildafolk comics are beautiful in story and in artwork, highly recommended, examples of the best sort of genuinely more or less all ages art - and thought about some Brecht lines. “Even the hatred of squalor / Distorts one’s features. Even anger against injustice / Makes the voice grow hoarse.” Those of us on the far left wish to, or wish someone else would, “lay the foundations for gentleness” and in the outrage at the brutality that exists absent such foundations often find that we “Could not ourselves be gentle.” It’s all a lot of work, and - since with each rung up the ladder a person becomes that much more morally broken (people become what they do, at first cabining off their moral concerns into a private place, where those concerns slowly lose their voices and so people’s ability to hear those voices come to atrophy) - the people up top don’t even realize they impose it on us. So many debts so appalling.