Do not go gentle

I went to an interfaith rally at the local ICE headquarters a few months ago, right at the height of fury over family separations at the border.  Leaders from several faiths spoke, including a young Buddhist.  During his emotional speech about his abhorrence of the situation, he said, “You might be surprised at how angry I sound, because I am a Buddhist teacher.  But let me remind you, the samurai were Buddhists.  And I am here today to be a samurai.”  He adapted Dylan Thomas and urged us to, “in the face of fear and hopelessness, rage against the dying of the light.”

Rage is all the rage right now.  This Op Ed nails it.  At the end, after identifying the power of the fury burning across American women right now, she says:

But then the world will come and tell you that you shouldn’t get mad again, because you were kind of nuts and you never cooked dinner and you yelled at the TV and weren’t so pretty and life will be easier when you get fun again. And it will be awfully tempting to put away the pictures of yourself in your pussy hat, to stuff your protest signs in the attic, and to slink back, away from the raw bite of fury, to ease back into whatever new reality is made, and maybe you’ll still cry angry tears at your desk and laugh with sharp satisfaction in front of late-night television, but you won’t yell anymore.

I have felt that.  I remember feeling like my rage got me nowhere, and I put it the urge to express it back into the box and filed it away.  When the announcement came out that the police officer that murdered Tamir Rice would not be indicted, I wanted to run into the street.  But instead I went online to buy a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt because in that moment of my life I was more comfortable with the power of my money than my voice.   I attended meetings with my friends after the women's rally, writing letters and discussing issues and trying to turn the rage into productivity.  But we all got busy, and time passed, and we stopped keeping it alive.

In the 1960’s, feminist women would participate in “consciousness raisings,” where they would just sit together and intentionally share their experiences of oppression, of their interactions with misogyny.  That is happening in the wake of the Kavanaugh hearings, unintentionally.  It was nearly impossible to watch the spectacle without connecting it to your own experiences, and its clear to so many of us that Brett Kavanaugh was just another toxic, rich, white, misogynist bro that felt entitled to women’s time, attention, bodies.  He’s one of millions, and we’ve all met at least one Brett Kavanaugh before.  We’ve been disgusted by a Brett Kavanaugh.  Watching this play out with the stakes so high is creating solidarity because it’s creating dialogue.  

These conversations are so important, because they align rage with solidarity.  It’s like going to a protest - you stand together with people equally furious, and you know that you are not alone.  Your rage is right. It must be, if this assortment of individuals echoes you.  

And sometimes when you show up, you don’t feel angry.  You feel safer and stronger.