Heather, you really missed the mark with this part:
...and the protesters tell us not that they’re learning to negotiate, to communicate, to feel more alive, to dare to dream bigger, but they are learning to hate.
If you'd bothered to look at the context of why they are happening, you'd realize the protests are an antidote to emotional divestment. They are an outpouring of communal grief over the endless barrage of dead children and grieving mothers that we're told to look away from. We're told to keep buying stuff, to detach from for the comfort of those who built this empire off the backs of those they perceive as lesser beings.
That isn't true. Hatred is a choice. It's not something that happens automatically or springs forth whole due to violent antagonism or cruel contexts.
Many people - I would even argue most people - do not choose hatred, even in response to violence.
I strongly recommend you read interviews with student protesters who were arrested, aired on NPR this morning. None of them are choosing or learning hate. Instead, it is exactly as you say you hope for - they are grieving,expressing the wholeness of emotion, speaking and negotiating passionately and empathetically for people they care about being subject to violence.
The people who have closed themselves off are the university administrators (among others, many congressional representatives included). They are the ones who refuse to engage honorably, who refuse to negotiate, who reject an outpouring of grief and empathy for Palestinian refugees and families by continually trying to frame them as something entirely different from what they are.
The student protests have been a great source of hope. In contrast to the divestment of empathy I've seen from many in the past four years - including lack of empathy for those suffering in Gaza, Yemen, and Syria (which is not new), suddenly, finally there is empathy. People en masse are finally seeing the reality and saying, "no!"
It's important to note that although Israel is a Jewish state, there are Israeli Muslims, Israeli Christians, Israeli Druze. And that of course not all Jews are Israeli, and many have little or none to do with the conflict in the middle east, nor is their individual security actively at risk with various policy changes.
One can easily make the claim that the protest movement with slogans like "The river to the sea" ( which would wipe Israel off the map), " We don't wan't no two states we want all of it" , and other all or nothing chants.. do not engender an ethos of care for all , including citizens of Israel.
Israeli's who have been active in the peace movements in Israel their entire lives have been not only told that they are explicitly not welcomed in the protest movements but many have been told that their very presence is not welcome in classes, after school sports and other activities on US college campuses.
I appreciate your point about how Israeli activists who work for peace and justice for those in Gaza are often ignored or excluded.
However, I would like to point out that though Israel is a diverse place, it is first and foremost an apartheid state since it is a settler colonial project via European imperial power and also essentially an ethnostate.
Lastly I will pose a question. If freedom for Palestine from the river to the sea, which necessitates freedom through drastic change from the river to the sea aka everywhere that is occupied (though probably not the death or displacement of the settlers there as the slogan comes from PEACE activists), also necessitates the destruction of Israel, what does that say about Israel?
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Antigone + the necessity of tragedy, and this is such a good reminder for why collective grieving is so essential to human experience. Thanks for writing this!
"Instead of slow, steady, face-to-face interactions with other humans, most of us are interrupted by phone alarms and alerts and besieged by rapid video-based media feeds, shorter blocks of text, shorter songs, movies that feel like a frenetic action-based montages, news analyses focused on headlines alone, TikTok summaries of current events (and celebrity beefs and skin products) replacing newspapers, Instagram posts replacing love letters, podcasts replacing books, mood boards replacing hobbies, zooms replacing meet ups, texts replacing phone calls, articles about ten signs of a narcissist replacing therapy, life hacks replacing feelings, ghosting replacing break ups."--This is the most perfect description of what social media--the most antisocial for of media, has done to us I have seen
“The student encampments create terror inside them..?” As someone who was at those student encampments witnessing what was actually happening versus the stories being told about it, I respectfully believe that while the pandemic did cause a kind of divestment from emotion, what we are seeing now, instead, is an ownership of it. Regarding issues of a decimated Gaza, there is much more happening here, I think, than a need to silence and enforce division. Speak to someone — including Jewish kids — who put their lives and educations on the line for a commitment to belief and yes, to emotion. What you will find is something to marvel at, and in some ways the solution, I think, to many of the issues you have outlined here.
Respecting that there are strong emotions in play for everyone in this picture isn't the same thing as disapproving of the protests. I doubt we disagree about much here, but I'll use this opportunity to link to a great piece by Elizabeth Spiers about the fact that the protestors deserve respect and not denigration:
One thing in the comments is starting to bother me. The hatred debate. Are children choosing hatred? I don’t believe so. Hatred is not a choice at birth. It is learned from experiences & taught by adults. I’m also sad that after reading this, instead of focusing on empathy & how to have more of it in our communities, the topics become more focused on hate. I live in southern Mississippi so I don’t need any lectures on how to live in a hate filled community that’s for sure. We’ve had over 400+ chattel slavery years to make sure hate remains here & that is as black & white as it gets, pardon my pun. IMO, people need led out of the hatred not back into it. In the words of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, change takes courage.
I love your writing so much. Thank you. And thank you for this article. But at the risk of sounding naive or missing a foundational subtext, when in history has it been better? Isn't this just new window dressing to the same old human bent? In fact, I think Gen Z is ushering in a new era in this respect and that gives this Gen Xer so much hope that I feel like crying happy tears (;-) A hundred years ago most people did not own a refrigerator. Now we take it for granted. Sometimes when the refrigerator is dying, it doesn't do a great job of keeping the food cold and sputters for a long time....it's a big investment and a hassle to move, but eventually you find a way to get a new refrigerator.
"Every time you dare to address your own shame, navigate a sticky conflict, or pursue true intimacy in the face of countless inconveniences and setbacks, you’re also committing to modeling courage and forgiveness." - really needed this line in particular, thank you. Rather than relying on others to meet us there, just working on turning up, facing the mess, not turning our backs.
Before I read your NYT article, I was definitely dismissive of tear-jerkers.
Now that I've read them, I'm feeling like tear-jerker movies are a(n acceptable, to me) means to get to better conversations about real life, like maybe they are good and important practice or a mid-point, rather than an end.
I think this is one of the most insightful, comprehensive pieces of writing about our times that I've read. Can you please please create a version of this piece for the NYT? (They'd probably want it shorter.) I think the title is perfect, and I think everyone would read this! (Loved the piece on tear-jerkers as well, but this piece just dumbfounded me.)
Interesting that you open this essay with phrases like "in the wake of the pandemic" and "during Covid", implying the pandemic and its horrors are a thing of the past - when the erasure of the ongoing pandemic and the public happily being shepherded into accepting widespread death, disability, and the breakdown of public health is perhaps the most macro, global example of people backing away from expressions of sadness, pain, and joy.
In the two years you flag as a turning point, we moved from calling healthcare workers heroes to healthcare workers refusing to mask for immunocompromised patients and denying Long Covid exists. The weight and grief of the pandemic are enormous and are still growing, just as the infections and their aftereffects are still piling up, but the emotional cost of facing that is so great - especially now that people have accepted repeat infections of themselves and their loved ones - that people back away from acknowledging it at all, and overcommit to living as "normal" instead of as they did "during Covid." Everyone is Bartlebying around preferring not to be responsible for each other in the most literal sense. I think this collective agreement to give up on the community responsibility we all agreed to in the first year of the pandemic was a major contributing factor to everything else you're talking about here. The collective discarding of Covid signifies a major crack in the social contract, which continues to crumble as people feel emboldened to find more ways to back away from caring about each other.
To be clear, I agree with your overall point. But I'm so frustrated with the way everyone from leaders to writers to friends can pick up on this cultural shift, but stubbornly refuses to engage with one of the most widespread and poignant examples of it, which also happens to be the one where that refusal to engage can have physical consequences, not just emotional ones.
"It makes simple sense, then, that no earnest effort by any individual to address the global despair they see on their phones around the clock is interpreted as springing from deeply-felt emotions." This is absolutely true, and I see this derision towards protestors, towards basically anyone who don't let themselves be frozen into apathy and try to do small things despite the world's overwhelming grief, as people who don't really care. "They're uneducated about the Middle East, they don't know what's really going on, they're jumping on a trend/bandwagon, they want to feel important and stroke their own egos" ESPECIALLY in regards to the student protestors. As if it's unfathomable that there's people who deeply love/care for their communities, who believe a better world is possible even if they won't see it, who want to connect with others through their grief at these encampments and build their capacity to organize, take care of others, to make a better world, or at least small spaces where emotions can unfold. As if it's impossible for someone to simply just care with their whole hearts. and do these huge, dangerous things because they have principles and values. Even stuff like fundraising is met with derision! Really shows how soulless a lot of people have become.
Thank god I can still cry, but it took much work to get there.
Heather, you describe the ugly uncivilized knot we've created this way: " Instead of underscoring which principles and boundaries might guide the public conversation forward, online analysis fixates on what each player did wrong — not in terms of honoring their ideals or serving the public, but in terms of their strategy, their publicity efforts, their carefully-worded statements." Humiliation and shame freezes out all further discussion, so how do we come back from that hell? Some of us do it ourselves because we feel we are nobody until we are somebody; the celebrity syndrome has us fooled and tricked out of enjoying the reality of who we are. Parents, see your children as they unfold. Be there with them, listen, stand strong with them as they respond to the world. We need a compassionate society.
"Saying anything is saying too much now. Language that’s specific enough to have meaning and emotional weight will be found inadequate or faulty"
Unfortunately, the online world nudges us to trade specific, rich emotional communication for mechanisms such as woefully inadequate emojis. Not only are they vague and arbitrary, but platforms seem unsure of what even to do with them (note the hesitant pace of introduction of "Like" (2009), "Love" (2016), "Care" (2020) on places such as Facebook).
Yet they've tragically become a default substitute for real sentimental expression. I suspect this has bled over into face-to-face interactions, where no one-click mechanisms exist for emotional manifestation.
According to Donald J. Robertson's Substack on "Stoicism: Philosophy as a Way of Life":
[Marcus Aurelius] Argued that Kindness is More Manly than Anger. See how far kindness gets you with this crowd (or any other overture in the interest of truth and understanding):
Sowell lied about a war that shaped everything you see today — and got off scot-free (as did both parties). Lemme save you some time: The first word that doesn't reflect someone seeking in-depth discussion — will be the last word I read. Thank you 🙏
What Happened to All This Jazz? Sowell & His Mindless Slogan Slingers
Heather, you really missed the mark with this part:
...and the protesters tell us not that they’re learning to negotiate, to communicate, to feel more alive, to dare to dream bigger, but they are learning to hate.
If you'd bothered to look at the context of why they are happening, you'd realize the protests are an antidote to emotional divestment. They are an outpouring of communal grief over the endless barrage of dead children and grieving mothers that we're told to look away from. We're told to keep buying stuff, to detach from for the comfort of those who built this empire off the backs of those they perceive as lesser beings.
I don’t disagree with a word of this. Hatred is what happens when you expel students for expressing their grief in public for good reasons.
That isn't true. Hatred is a choice. It's not something that happens automatically or springs forth whole due to violent antagonism or cruel contexts.
Many people - I would even argue most people - do not choose hatred, even in response to violence.
I strongly recommend you read interviews with student protesters who were arrested, aired on NPR this morning. None of them are choosing or learning hate. Instead, it is exactly as you say you hope for - they are grieving,expressing the wholeness of emotion, speaking and negotiating passionately and empathetically for people they care about being subject to violence.
The people who have closed themselves off are the university administrators (among others, many congressional representatives included). They are the ones who refuse to engage honorably, who refuse to negotiate, who reject an outpouring of grief and empathy for Palestinian refugees and families by continually trying to frame them as something entirely different from what they are.
The student protests have been a great source of hope. In contrast to the divestment of empathy I've seen from many in the past four years - including lack of empathy for those suffering in Gaza, Yemen, and Syria (which is not new), suddenly, finally there is empathy. People en masse are finally seeing the reality and saying, "no!"
I agree with you, I think my language was off. Edited to reflect my true position on this! Thanks for posting.
Agreed. Saying that they are ‘learning to hate’ also diminishes the fact that so many organizers are Jewish. It’s so strange.
Agree about the use of the word hatred. Edited! Thanks for your input.
It's important to note that although Israel is a Jewish state, there are Israeli Muslims, Israeli Christians, Israeli Druze. And that of course not all Jews are Israeli, and many have little or none to do with the conflict in the middle east, nor is their individual security actively at risk with various policy changes.
One can easily make the claim that the protest movement with slogans like "The river to the sea" ( which would wipe Israel off the map), " We don't wan't no two states we want all of it" , and other all or nothing chants.. do not engender an ethos of care for all , including citizens of Israel.
Israeli's who have been active in the peace movements in Israel their entire lives have been not only told that they are explicitly not welcomed in the protest movements but many have been told that their very presence is not welcome in classes, after school sports and other activities on US college campuses.
I appreciate your point about how Israeli activists who work for peace and justice for those in Gaza are often ignored or excluded.
However, I would like to point out that though Israel is a diverse place, it is first and foremost an apartheid state since it is a settler colonial project via European imperial power and also essentially an ethnostate.
Lastly I will pose a question. If freedom for Palestine from the river to the sea, which necessitates freedom through drastic change from the river to the sea aka everywhere that is occupied (though probably not the death or displacement of the settlers there as the slogan comes from PEACE activists), also necessitates the destruction of Israel, what does that say about Israel?
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Antigone + the necessity of tragedy, and this is such a good reminder for why collective grieving is so essential to human experience. Thanks for writing this!
"Instead of slow, steady, face-to-face interactions with other humans, most of us are interrupted by phone alarms and alerts and besieged by rapid video-based media feeds, shorter blocks of text, shorter songs, movies that feel like a frenetic action-based montages, news analyses focused on headlines alone, TikTok summaries of current events (and celebrity beefs and skin products) replacing newspapers, Instagram posts replacing love letters, podcasts replacing books, mood boards replacing hobbies, zooms replacing meet ups, texts replacing phone calls, articles about ten signs of a narcissist replacing therapy, life hacks replacing feelings, ghosting replacing break ups."--This is the most perfect description of what social media--the most antisocial for of media, has done to us I have seen
“The student encampments create terror inside them..?” As someone who was at those student encampments witnessing what was actually happening versus the stories being told about it, I respectfully believe that while the pandemic did cause a kind of divestment from emotion, what we are seeing now, instead, is an ownership of it. Regarding issues of a decimated Gaza, there is much more happening here, I think, than a need to silence and enforce division. Speak to someone — including Jewish kids — who put their lives and educations on the line for a commitment to belief and yes, to emotion. What you will find is something to marvel at, and in some ways the solution, I think, to many of the issues you have outlined here.
Respecting that there are strong emotions in play for everyone in this picture isn't the same thing as disapproving of the protests. I doubt we disagree about much here, but I'll use this opportunity to link to a great piece by Elizabeth Spiers about the fact that the protestors deserve respect and not denigration:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/17/opinion/student-protesters-gaza-hillary-clinton.html
One thing in the comments is starting to bother me. The hatred debate. Are children choosing hatred? I don’t believe so. Hatred is not a choice at birth. It is learned from experiences & taught by adults. I’m also sad that after reading this, instead of focusing on empathy & how to have more of it in our communities, the topics become more focused on hate. I live in southern Mississippi so I don’t need any lectures on how to live in a hate filled community that’s for sure. We’ve had over 400+ chattel slavery years to make sure hate remains here & that is as black & white as it gets, pardon my pun. IMO, people need led out of the hatred not back into it. In the words of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, change takes courage.
I love your writing so much. Thank you. And thank you for this article. But at the risk of sounding naive or missing a foundational subtext, when in history has it been better? Isn't this just new window dressing to the same old human bent? In fact, I think Gen Z is ushering in a new era in this respect and that gives this Gen Xer so much hope that I feel like crying happy tears (;-) A hundred years ago most people did not own a refrigerator. Now we take it for granted. Sometimes when the refrigerator is dying, it doesn't do a great job of keeping the food cold and sputters for a long time....it's a big investment and a hassle to move, but eventually you find a way to get a new refrigerator.
"Every time you dare to address your own shame, navigate a sticky conflict, or pursue true intimacy in the face of countless inconveniences and setbacks, you’re also committing to modeling courage and forgiveness." - really needed this line in particular, thank you. Rather than relying on others to meet us there, just working on turning up, facing the mess, not turning our backs.
Before I read your NYT article, I was definitely dismissive of tear-jerkers.
Now that I've read them, I'm feeling like tear-jerker movies are a(n acceptable, to me) means to get to better conversations about real life, like maybe they are good and important practice or a mid-point, rather than an end.
WOW bullseye articulation of the zeitgeist.
Congrats on NYT!!
I think this is one of the most insightful, comprehensive pieces of writing about our times that I've read. Can you please please create a version of this piece for the NYT? (They'd probably want it shorter.) I think the title is perfect, and I think everyone would read this! (Loved the piece on tear-jerkers as well, but this piece just dumbfounded me.)
Interesting that you open this essay with phrases like "in the wake of the pandemic" and "during Covid", implying the pandemic and its horrors are a thing of the past - when the erasure of the ongoing pandemic and the public happily being shepherded into accepting widespread death, disability, and the breakdown of public health is perhaps the most macro, global example of people backing away from expressions of sadness, pain, and joy.
In the two years you flag as a turning point, we moved from calling healthcare workers heroes to healthcare workers refusing to mask for immunocompromised patients and denying Long Covid exists. The weight and grief of the pandemic are enormous and are still growing, just as the infections and their aftereffects are still piling up, but the emotional cost of facing that is so great - especially now that people have accepted repeat infections of themselves and their loved ones - that people back away from acknowledging it at all, and overcommit to living as "normal" instead of as they did "during Covid." Everyone is Bartlebying around preferring not to be responsible for each other in the most literal sense. I think this collective agreement to give up on the community responsibility we all agreed to in the first year of the pandemic was a major contributing factor to everything else you're talking about here. The collective discarding of Covid signifies a major crack in the social contract, which continues to crumble as people feel emboldened to find more ways to back away from caring about each other.
To be clear, I agree with your overall point. But I'm so frustrated with the way everyone from leaders to writers to friends can pick up on this cultural shift, but stubbornly refuses to engage with one of the most widespread and poignant examples of it, which also happens to be the one where that refusal to engage can have physical consequences, not just emotional ones.
Loved this.. find hope and keep your heart open in this wounding world
"It makes simple sense, then, that no earnest effort by any individual to address the global despair they see on their phones around the clock is interpreted as springing from deeply-felt emotions." This is absolutely true, and I see this derision towards protestors, towards basically anyone who don't let themselves be frozen into apathy and try to do small things despite the world's overwhelming grief, as people who don't really care. "They're uneducated about the Middle East, they don't know what's really going on, they're jumping on a trend/bandwagon, they want to feel important and stroke their own egos" ESPECIALLY in regards to the student protestors. As if it's unfathomable that there's people who deeply love/care for their communities, who believe a better world is possible even if they won't see it, who want to connect with others through their grief at these encampments and build their capacity to organize, take care of others, to make a better world, or at least small spaces where emotions can unfold. As if it's impossible for someone to simply just care with their whole hearts. and do these huge, dangerous things because they have principles and values. Even stuff like fundraising is met with derision! Really shows how soulless a lot of people have become.
Thank god I can still cry, but it took much work to get there.
Heather, you describe the ugly uncivilized knot we've created this way: " Instead of underscoring which principles and boundaries might guide the public conversation forward, online analysis fixates on what each player did wrong — not in terms of honoring their ideals or serving the public, but in terms of their strategy, their publicity efforts, their carefully-worded statements." Humiliation and shame freezes out all further discussion, so how do we come back from that hell? Some of us do it ourselves because we feel we are nobody until we are somebody; the celebrity syndrome has us fooled and tricked out of enjoying the reality of who we are. Parents, see your children as they unfold. Be there with them, listen, stand strong with them as they respond to the world. We need a compassionate society.
An response to your great NYTimes opinion piece : Cinema Paradiso!
I need to rewatch that…
"Saying anything is saying too much now. Language that’s specific enough to have meaning and emotional weight will be found inadequate or faulty"
Unfortunately, the online world nudges us to trade specific, rich emotional communication for mechanisms such as woefully inadequate emojis. Not only are they vague and arbitrary, but platforms seem unsure of what even to do with them (note the hesitant pace of introduction of "Like" (2009), "Love" (2016), "Care" (2020) on places such as Facebook).
Yet they've tragically become a default substitute for real sentimental expression. I suspect this has bled over into face-to-face interactions, where no one-click mechanisms exist for emotional manifestation.
According to Donald J. Robertson's Substack on "Stoicism: Philosophy as a Way of Life":
[Marcus Aurelius] Argued that Kindness is More Manly than Anger. See how far kindness gets you with this crowd (or any other overture in the interest of truth and understanding):
Sowell lied about a war that shaped everything you see today — and got off scot-free (as did both parties). Lemme save you some time: The first word that doesn't reflect someone seeking in-depth discussion — will be the last word I read. Thank you 🙏
What Happened to All This Jazz? Sowell & His Mindless Slogan Slingers
https://onevoicebecametwo.life/2024/05/21/what-happened-to-all-this-jazz-sowell-his-mindless-slogan-slingers/