In Detroit, corporations are people. Their worth is unquestioned because it is measured in dollars. The worth of the residents of Detroit is measured in utility, and so their utilities are denied.
War on Poverty
Human rights may be guaranteed by law, but one’s humanity is never a given. The U.S. was built on the labor of slaves considered three-fifths of a person. Today, one’s relative humanity—and the rights that accompany it—is shaped by race, class, gender, and geography. Citizens may be subject to the same written laws, but they are not equally subject to the same punishments and practices. Water is a litmus test of how much of a “person” you are considered to be.
For decades, marginalized peoples of the United States have struggled with lack of access to water. Today nearly 40 percent of the 173,000 Navajo, the largest Native American tribe, do not have a tap or a toilet at home. The people of Appalachia, a historically impoverished region of the U.S., were a focal point of the 1960s War on Poverty after their lack of basic public services was publicized.
“This legislation marks the end of an era of partisan cynicism toward human want and misery,” President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed in 1965. “Wherever we have our commitments, whether to the old and the strong or to the young and the weak, we shall match our words with deeds.”
In January 2014, Freedom Industries, a chemical and mining company, dumped a toxic chemical into the Elk River, poisoning the water for up to 300,000 residents of West Virginia. Hundreds were hospitalized. Locals were shocked, but not surprised, by the horror that ensued. It was West Virginia’s fifth major industrial accident in eight years.
“Charleston’s nickname is Chemical Valley, and our life expectancy rates reflect this, even in the diaspora,” wrote West Virginia writer Cheyenna Layne Weber of the state’s capital. “Environmental injustice and trauma become part of your veins and cells, enamel and marrow, and it permeates the economies which underpin our existence. I have tried, but you can’t outrun a system.”
When the water crisis hit West Virginia, many were horrified, but others mocked the impoverished state—including Detroit journalist Zlati Meyer, unaware her city was next. President Johnson’s War on Poverty long ago turned into a war on the poor, and residents of both places have been blamed for their own plight. They elect bad leaders and support corrupt companies, people said of West Virginia. They should have paid their bills, people say of Detroit.
Which leads to the question: So what? Then they should not drink or bathe? They should swallow poison or roam the streets in search of water fountains? Their children, who have no stake in this battle, are supposed to suffer, and their parents are supposed to watch? Is that the lesson we are passing on—that poor children are inherently undeserving of a basic provision in one of the richest countries in the world?
A Third World Problem?
U.S. citizens denied clean water often compare their situation with that of distant, disenfranchised lands.
“It’s frightening, because you think this is something that only happens somewhere like Africa,” a mother in Detroit told the LA Times. “It’s like we’re living in a Third World country,” a West Virginian told The New Yorker.
The circumstances differ, but the outcome is the same. Water is a right, and denial of water is a form of social control.
In Ukraine, water and electricity were cut off in certain regions following the Russian incursion. In Syria, multiple political groups manipulated the water supply at different times, leaving roughly one million people without access to clean water or sanitation.
In Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lack water, including those living in hospitals and refugee camps. On July 15, citizens of Detroit held a rally in solidarity, holding signs that said, “Water for all, from Detroit to Palestine.” A basic resource has become a distant dream, a longing for a transformation of politics aimed at ending suffering instead of extending it.
Water is a legal right ignored in places where law is selectively enforced. To merit the protection of the law one must be acknowledged fully as a human being. What the water crisis shows is who is considered human—and who is considered disposable.
—Originally published July 23, 2014
The Telegenically Dead
In the beginning, they were the “telegenically killed.” That is what Charles Krauthammer, in his July 17 Washington Post column, “Moral Clarity in Gaza,” called the victims of Israeli airstrikes. Children shelled while playing on the beach, a father holding a plastic bag of his two-year-old son’s remains: To Krauthammer, Palestinians are not people but production values. War does not destroy families; it “produces dead Palestinians for international television.”
Three days later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed the Palestinians “telegenically dead,” lifting Krauthammer’s language in one example of the U.S. media–Israeli government echo chamber that has been reverberating all summer. “You forfeit your right to be called civilians,” a Wall Street Journal columnist told Gazans on July 21, stating that children of Hamas supporters are fair game. “There is no such thing as ‘innocent civilians,’” proclaimed Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, on August 5.
Unthinkable sentiment has become sanctioned, commonplace. You begin to have nostalgia for disappointment, because at least that means you had expectations.
Who are the telegenically dead? The telegenically dead are the dead, plain and simple. That we see them is the novelty, that we grieve them is human, and to be human, today, is a hostile act. To grieve is to acknowledge loss, to acknowledge loss is to affirm life, to affirm life is to contemplate how it was taken.
A child is not a shield or a lawn to be mowed. “Telegenic” means you see a body where you were supposed to see an abstraction.
Inconvenient Death
In 1960, Elie Wiesel published Night, a memoir of the Holocaust that portrayed, in intimate and graphic detail, Nazi cruelty and public complicity.
“Was I still alive? Was I awake?” Wiesel wrote, describing Nazis throwing Jewish babies into a bonfire. “I could not believe it. How could it be possible for them to burn people, children, and for the world to keep silent? No, none of this could be true.”
In July 2014, Wiesel took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to support Israel in what he termed “a battle of civilization versus barbarism.” As Palestinians stored corpses of babies killed by Israeli strikes in ice cream freezers, Wiesel proclaimed that “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas’ turn.” He condemned the “terrorists who have taken away all choice from the Palestinian children of Gaza.”
He is right. The Palestinian children of Gaza do not have a choice. But Israel does.
Hamas is a violent organization that commits reprehensible acts. But it was not Hamas who killed Palestinian children playing on the beach. It was not Hamas who killed children sleeping in UN shelters. To argue, as many U.S. and Israeli authors have, that merely being in the proximity of Hamas renders one a legitimate target is terrorist logic—particularly in Gaza, where there is nowhere else to go. In what other “hostage situation” are the hostages targeted—and their deaths justified by stripping away their civilian status, their innocence, their humanity?
A baby killed by soldiers is a baby killed by soldiers. It is not a shield and not a pawn. The death of any child is a tragedy regardless of that child’s race, religion, or parentage. That this is debated is its own tragedy.
In 1941, Nazi official Joseph Goebbels complained that Jewish children captivated too much public sympathy: “One suddenly has the impression that the Berlin Jewish population consists only of little babies whose childish helplessness might move us, or else fragile old ladies. The Jews send out the pitiable.”
Three years later, the Nazis sent the teenage Wiesel to a concentration camp.
Let me be clear: what is happening in Gaza is in no way comparable to the Holocaust in scope, scale, organization, or in
tent. Yet similar rhetoric portraying dead children as complicit or inconvenient emerges—rhetoric not unique to the Middle East, but used all over the world, all throughout history, to mitigate or justify the slaughter of innocents. One would hope that those who so vividly documented the killing of children would protest it being practiced. That hope seems in vain.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana famously said. Those who can, repeat it, too.
Who Is Human?
Social media has been described as “humanizing” the Palestinian victims. Television may be decried by politicians and pundits, but the Internet is where Gaza’s story is told firsthand by its residents, where graphic images of the grieved are shared.
If you are being “humanized,” you are already losing. To be “humanized” implies that your humanity is never assumed, but something you have to prove.
“What am I supposed to do/be to be qualified as a human?” Maisam Abumorr, a writer and student in Gaza, asks. “As far as I can tell, I live like normal humans do. I love, I hate, I cry, I laugh, I make mistakes, I learn, I dream, I hurt, I get hurt … I still have not figured out what crime I have committed to endure this kind of wretchedness. I wonder what being human feels like.”
For every group that uses media to affirm its humanity, there is another group proclaiming that humanity as irrelevant, or inconvenient, or a lie. One can see this not only in the Middle East conflict, but in movements like Nigeria’s “Bring Back Our Girls,” which represents victims frequently proclaimed as “forgotten” due to their so-called “nameless and faceless” status. But the girls were never nameless and faceless to the Nigerians who fought, and continue to fight, for their survival. They have names that few learned, faces from which many turned away. The people who refuse to forget are the ones the West has now forgotten.
In all documentation of violence, from memoirs to social media, lies a plea to not forget. There is a reason Netanyahu fears the “telegenically dead.” They haunt the world like ghosts—a reminder of what we have done, what we are capable of doing, and the lengths gone to justify it.
Those dehumanized in life become humanized in death. With this realization you mourn not only the dead. You mourn the living too.
—Originally published August 14, 2014
Coda
In Defense of Complaining
In 2006, the Reverend Will Bowen launched a movement called A Complaint Free World. The goal of the movement was to get people to stop expressing “pain, grief, or discontent.”
The best way to stop expressing pain, grief, or discontent was to buy Bowen’s book and purple bracelets from his website. The bracelets serve as a sartorial censor for those compelled to discuss their problems. Every time you complain, you must switch the bracelet to the other wrist. If you go twenty-one consecutive days without complaining or switching the bracelets, you are rewarded with a Certificate of Happiness.
“Our words indicate our thoughts,” the certificate says. “Our thoughts create our world.”
In an America built on the reinvention of reality, critical words make people uneasy—and so do those who speak them. In 1996, Alan Greenspan famously chided the financial community for “irrational exuberance.” They ignored him, and America became a bubble economy—housing, credit, technology, higher education. Those who warned of collapse were derided and dismissed: they were only complaining.
When the bubbles popped, and the jobs disappeared, and the debt soared, and the desperation hit, Americans were told to stay positive. Stop complaining—things will not be like this forever. Stop complaining—this is the way things have always been. Complainers suffer the cruel imperatives of optimism: lighten up, suck it up, chin up, buck up. In other words: shut up.
The surest way to keep a problem from being solved is to deny that problem exists. Telling people not to complain is a way of keeping social issues from being addressed. It trivializes the grievances of the vulnerable, making the burdened feel like burdens. Telling people not to complain is an act of power, a way of asserting that one’s position is more important than another one’s pain. People who say “stop complaining” always have the right to stop listening. But those who complain have often been denied the right to speak.
The condemnation of complaining is not unique to America. Dictatorships around the world are famous for self-reported statistics of sky-high happiness. In Uzbekistan, a state run on surveillance, corruption, and torture, 95 percent of the country is said to be content. Last August, one of the openly unhappy 5 percent, a seventy-three-year-old man, filed a complaint about police brutality with neighborhood officials. They arrested him for violating a ban on filing complaints.
The absence of complaining should be taken as a sign that something is rotting in a society. Complaining is beautiful. Complaining should be encouraged. Complaining means you have a chance.
Excuses, Excuses
All social movements are dismissed at some point as complaining. Over time, they are recognized as speaking truth to power.
Last month, I attended the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual conference that gives the people who challenge repressive regimes a platform to speak. This year’s conference featured well-known writers and activists from China, Syria, Bahrain, and other autocratic states. They were there to complain—but it is not thought of as complaining when a prominent advocate speaks about oppression to a crowd. Then it becomes the impartation of knowledge, but no one starts from that. It is a long road from whiner to witness.
* * *
The surest way to keep a problem from being solved is to deny that problem exists.
* * *
Complaint is often perceived as an alternative to action. Those who complain are criticized as “just complaining,” instead of “actually doing something.” But for marginalized and stigmatized groups—racial and religious minorities, women, the poor, people who lack civic rights—complaining is the first step in removing the shame from a lifetime of being told one’s problems are unimportant, nonexistent, or even a cause for gratitude. Complaining alerts the world that the problem is a problem.
In May, President Obama told an audience of African-American graduates at Morehouse, a historically black college in Atlanta, that “there’s no longer any room for excuses.” He chided young black men for seeing their race as an obstacle, because “whatever hardships you may experience because of your race … pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured—and overcame.”
He told them this in a month when many black public schools were shut down, a black girl was prosecuted for a science project gone awry, rates of black unemployment climbed, and black student loan debt soared. Massive racial inequality was slightly less massive than before, though, so best to ignore structural problems and focus on individual goals.
“No room for excuses” is the cousin of “stop complaining.”
It’s Always Been Like That!
Another common response to complaining is that the respondent has heard it all before. “That problem has been around forever,” this person will say, as if this itself did not attest to the severity of the problem. Long-term complaining indicates that a problem is serious and structural, not that it is hopeless and should continue to be ignored.
Complaints long discounted often grow louder over time. We see this today in the slowly growing movement against labor exploitation in America, a movement that includes everyone from fast food workers to adjunct professors. As the American economy lurches into permanent contingency, everyone is told it is their own fault.
“How can you complain when you didn’t get an education?” they tell the striking McDonald’s worker. “You thought all that education would get you a job?” they sneer at the striking adjunct.
Complaining creates common ground. In complaints, people find that their problems are not so far apart. Those who dismiss complaints display their own discomfort, the fear that they could be next. When it happens�
�and it will happen—seek comfort in complaint.
It Could Always Be Worse!
Another common response to complaining is to delegitimize misery by portraying it as a competition. “You’re privileged, you have an education,” they tell the white-collar unemployed. “You’re privileged, you live in America,” they tell the poor. “You’re privileged, you got out,” they tell the exile. “You’re privileged, you have food and shelter,” they tell the subject of the dictator.
It could always be worse, they say. They don’t like to say that it could always be better, because that would require redress.
Ranking complaints is a way to make people feel guilty for their own struggle, instead of empowered to take action through a collective expression of shared concerns. It stratifies suffering into a hierarchy, creating what writer C. Z. Nnaemeka called an “unexotic underclass” whose problems go ignored. Categorizing the complainers breeds hypocrisy in wealthy nations—where debt-burdened graduates work unpaid internships for NGO’s claiming to promote fairness—and the dehumanization of people in poorer countries, who are treated as charity cases without minds of their own.
People hate complaining because they do not like to listen. When you listen to someone complaining, you are forced to acknowledge them as a human being instead of a category. You are forced to witness how social systems are borne out in personal experience, to recognize that hardship hurts, that solutions are not as simple as they seem.
You are forced to trust, and you are forced to care. In complaint lies a path to compassion.
—Originally published June 15, 2013
Epilogue
On January 18, 2017, two days before leaving the White House, Barack Obama addressed America as its president for the last time: “We’re going to be okay,” he promised citizens anxious not only about Trump’s unexpected win, but about the autocratic policies he promised to pass and the extremist cabinet he had assembled.
The View from Flyover Country Page 15