The Defiant Ones

I’ve been visiting my childhood bedroom on 83rd street in my mind’s eye. The year my sister went off to college when I was six, I inherited her room which I then lived in until I went away to school eleven years later. The room overlooked what was generously called the courtyard, an expanse filled with trashcans and inhabited by stray cats and rats. It was a dirty, nasty place to be avoided much like Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. In 1951 when I moved in, the bedroom was painted forest green. But at the dawn of the next decade, my mother had a change of heart and arranged for a makeover to café con leche walls with matching carpet. The whole room looked like a dish of coffee ice cream. Not sure but it might have been a trendy shade when Jackie was re-decorating the Eisenhower White House.

Photo by Lance Grandahl on Unsplash

The following year, I met a girl named Kathy in summer camp who painted large abstract canvases. She gifted me with an enormous painting that looked like a de Kooning. I wish I still had it or at least a photo of it, but all I have is the memory of the horrified expression on my mother’s face. Worth the price of admission as they say. Like many of you, I did a lot of things when I was sixteen that were ill-advised. It’s a wonder I survived. It wasn’t much as resistance goes, but it gave me a taste for it. For telling the people in charge to go fuck themselves. It strikes me that this is a piece of what people may be feeling now. A burning outrage. We don’t necessarily know what to do with it yet, but it’s bubbling up and it feels good to get in touch with that.

So much is happening all at once. Last week, I wrote about Waiting and Hoping. This week, I feel closer to the Rage. Consistency is the hobgoblin and so on…The mansion of my response to our new situation is a lot larger than my childhood bedroom. It has many levels and numerous hallways and tunnels connecting them. I’ll be visiting all of them: waiting and hoping, numbness, confusion, rage, grief and revulsion. The whole thing is like an enormous garbage dump with organic matter decomposing, oozing, and giving off noxious odors. There’s Musk and his cadre of young rodents over there with their pointy teeth climbing in and out of the filth dismantling things. One morning in the last two weeks, I stepped into a pile of the idea of people being forced to inform on one another the way they were under the Stasi in East Germany. I had heard something to that effect but it quickly disappeared into the river of discontent and I can’t remember the source or the particulars. When the people who are trying to commandeer our country think they can make us turn on each other, that’s when the real trouble starts. In 1951 when I was a big girl of six and got to have my own room, people were informing on their neighbors in front of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. We will not go back to that place.

In fact, the first thing we have to do is take care of each other. We have to double down on love. Love our dear ones extravagantly and lean in the direction of expanding our circles of empathy. We have to stick together the way superglue sticks to your fingers and we have to tell people how much we love them all the time. They will not get bored. They will feel more human. Part of what the regime is trying to do is dehumanize us so that we turn on one another or withdraw entirely. Don’t let them get away with it. Get in their faces with art, with writing, with performance. This is our reality now. As usual, everything is changing. Think back to January 19th when you didn’t think it could possibly be this bad.

In this overheated moment, we need to stay close and listen to wise counsel, to people who have been there. The best advice I’ve seen so far is don’t obey in advance. I first read this in Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny but have seen it elsewhere since. Wherever it originated, this is really important. Don’t turn down the gift of a visually assaultive abstract painting because you believe your mother won’t let you hang it. Push the envelope. Like many of you, I was actively disruptive during the Vietnam War but I’m old and rusty. I want to remember the defiant person I was on the steps of the Pentagon in 1968. The impulse to say NO lives on in my bloodstream. We may not be able to act on it in quite the same ways we did when we were young and we don’t know what form it will take in this crisis of conscience, but it’s very good to remember what it felt like then and to keep in mind our continued capacity to refuse to be compliant.

***********************************************************************************************************

Many Voices will now accept contributions from all subscribers. At this critical time, we need to hear what everyone has to say. Please let me know if you have work that you would like to send to seventysomething for our Many Voices feature. Make your voice heard.

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething and have access to the archives. Your ideas are always welcome.

*************************************************************************************************************

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.