A Tale of Politics and a Teacup: The secret to a good life.

CW: Rape, homelessness, and other generally triggery stuff. Read at your own risk.

I received this… I presume well meaning bit of criticism regarding why I speak about politics. This person claimed to enjoy my posts up until now. I am powering through my tooth pain and more than a little bit of annoyance to put together my words cohesively about this. I hold degrees in English, history, and political science. Some of my most famous content is about the political power that certain individuals hold and how they wield it. My work has never been a break from politics, it has been a deep dive into humanity — which is often political.

Let me make something perfectly clear from the outset: no matter how “normal” I seem or how much I forward other parts of my personality, my existence remains political.

Governments have the ability to create a paper trail that can find me, and know I’m trans, regardless of how much I look or talk or act like anyone else in this world. I could, like this person, ignore what’s happening around the country and world and carefully shape mine but I cannot change my political geography: I’m in the path of something whether I want to be or not.

Let’s talk about the weather, then.

Politics, for me, is quite like the weather in that it is something out of my direct control but which still deeply affects my day to day life. If you live in a flood plain, you do not get to ignore weather reports forecasting rain. If you live in tornado alley, you do not have the luxury of ignoring tornado warnings and sirens. The safety of you and yours depends on knowing about volatile situations even if you choose to step outside with the camera when it’s going on.

My first thought, when reading this comment, was rage. “Must be nice,” I thought, “to have the luxury to dip out of the entire conversation knowing the storm isn’t coming for you.” The truth is, it is coming for this person, but never in a way that they will feel so directly as for it to be “politics.” It will be the price of ingredients, the insurance premiums rising, and other day to day happenings that this person will overlook — each being too small to be politics, which is big and scary.

One day the wind will set a broken teacup in this person’s yard and she will not know it arrived there by means of a tornado hundreds of miles away. She will not know about the family missing that teacup, because it reminds them of their sibling who died in that storm. She will discard that teacup and all its stories because she has space that leaves her with no idea ability to see those stories.

But in a way, aren’t we all this person?

Right now, I’m typing on this computer full of the stories of political disasters in far flung lands: governments failing to protect their workers and outright slavery. There are limits to what any of us can take in at once, the amount of problems we can think about and solve before we drive ourselves mad with hopelessness. We are, more than any generations before us, cursed with more stories than we can handle as people — paralyzed by the enormity of all that misery, joy, and humanity.

As I’m typing this, in all my righteous indignation, there’s a child dying in Palestine and I can truly do nothing to make that story go differently. Someone I met in Kenya might be dying right now from health conditions that me, with my limited scope, am blissfully unaware of even if I could actually help.

This person is, in some ways, correct. Protecting your peace can certainly be a luxury, but I wonder what struggles wash upon this person’s shore? When does it stop being politics and become practical matters? What does this person care about in her corner or the world? And will I receive a teacup from the storms in her lands one day, and never know about all the stories behind it because I protected my peace?

When I first read this person’s comment, I admit I was angry. Shit. I was angry when I started typing this. As is my usual, I stopped to think about what drove this person to tell me that I had broken through their ability to tune out the storms in my world.

Powerlessness.

In the face of powerlessness, the last thing humans have is their ability to choose. And we are, all of us, directly powerless in a giant ecosystem of events that would horrify, delight, or bore us.

I rely heavily on the work of Viktor Frankl in the work that I do. Not only did Viktor point out the human right to make choices about how we feel, he did so in conditions that were worse than anything I bet I could imagine: Nazi concentration camps.

Frankl’s work, to me, reminds me of why someone can find joy in risking their life to step outside and film a tornado that just scattered the homes of people they knew to the wind. They can literally watch it destroy lives, and in that moment their first thoughts are often to capture this moment and the awe they felt.

And the truth is, this woman and I share a certain amount of hopelessness. If I take a moment to calm myself and see the world more realistically, this individual choosing not to hear about the storms in my life and my sorrow about them has no impact on the storm coming for me.

My anger comes from feeling dehumanized not just by the politics but my feeling that my humanity, and my stories, are just things to this person to be ignored. And am I any better? How am I not just a theoretical idea to her the same way others are to me?

Is it a privilege to be able to look away from this massive hurricane bearing down on the USA and the rest of the world? Yes. Does it matter? Not really. Her listening to me doesn’t change my situation, or anyone else’s, unless she acts and her ability to act is essentially to vote in November. After looking at her page, I already feel confident about how she will vote.

When I started writing this, I thought I’d say something eloquent and rageful to change this person’s mind and the minds of others. I’d use my ability with words to craft the antidote to this indifference towards that’s coming for me and others. What would I change? Her vote? Her anger?

If I could control her, right now, I doubt I would change her intended actions about how she votes or doesn’t. Ultimately, she was always going to do what little she could do to help me. I don’t know what more I would expect of her. Would I inflict her with anger? No.

If I could change something, the truth is it wouldn’t be her politics. It would be how she treated *me* in that moment. I’m not hurt by her privilege. I’m hurt by her telling me that, to her, I’m as theoretical as reality TV. I’d love to preach about politics and activism here but it would be dishonest because a lot of work went into reducing her power to help me, but that really isn’t the problem is it?

It’s not about politics, is it?

This person, and all of us really, are now faced with a situation where we can interact with all the stories, all the misery, everywhere all at once. It hurts to feel subhuman, to feel like a concept, and in this moment I was reduced to one in her world — and she had no problem telling me so. I spoke about my human experience, and because Facebook and others have decided that humanity can be packaged, boxed, filtered, and tagged, saying “no” to my humanity is no harder for this person than saying “no” to an advertisement for a movie she doesn’t care for.

Is she different from me? You? In practice? Not really in most ways.

But I hope that she reads this through, and I hope she understands that even though I can empathize with the powerlessness and even the decision to protect yourself, I draw the line at stopping and taking to the time to tell people that their humanity means so little to you that you can turn it off. Those words did not need said, especially not to me or others who are worried about a storm coming our way, and the decision to say them was a cruelty that Donald Trump and the Republican party did not make her do.

That is what this is about, in the end. Viktor Frankl’s work is about making the choice for yourself about how you feel, yes. It’s about claiming your human power to protect yourself and keep some embers of your humanity alive in horrible situations. But I bet Viktor Frankl didn’t tell other victims of the holocaust that they were totally bumming him out and inconveniencing him.

We’ve been conditioned to see privilege as the fundamental toxin but we all hold varying degrees of privilege over others in a constantly changing matrix. Privilege isn’t the problem here: it’s how this person chose to make me aware that she had the power to reduce me to nothing, turn me off, and ignore me. That isn’t privilege, it’s cruelty and callousness.

When I read it, I remembered being raped. I remembered being homeless. And I remembered how I felt in those moments: small, useful, and like my only purpose was to appease others. For one small second, a wave of memory took me back to how it felt to have people ignore and seemingly dance on my suffering for their own pleasure.

In the end, so little will change because of this interaction. Eventually, I’ll forget it happened, too. But in this moment, I’ll never forget the time that someone took moments out of their day to tell me that my humanity had, like, totally bummed them out and they wish I wasn’t like that.

If the peace this person seeks is so fragile as to require that sort of action to defend, I doubt it’s truly any peace at all. I wish them well, genuinely, but this space and platform is where we make humanity big and examine it, not small and easy. This person is welcome back when they realize that treating others well is part of the peace they seek, and that today they have failed.

I was made small before with rapes and homelessness — I have worked too hard to allow anyone to make me small again. Protect your peace, by all means, but your peace will not be found in dehumanizing people. Sit with that.