(Dis)Engage
Replace doom-scrolling with micro-learning. The sponsored post copy is snarky, as if it knows the ad has been nestled between two posts documenting horrors almost beyond comprehension at home as well as abroad. My feed is both shocking and predictable, and I’m not sure which is worse. The ad stares at me, and I stare back. I click don’t show me this again.
“I watch Penny Wong trying to placate her constituents with pitiful bothsideisms while a genocide in Palestine unfolds on our government’s watch.”
It’s hard to get to sleep. The news notifications keep me up, a mix of grating truths and propaganda to wade through. I watch videos of the New South Wales Police Commissioner cracking jokes about Taylor Swift as they try to delegitimise a double murder, a hate crime, perpetrated within their ranks. I watch Penny Wong trying to placate her constituents with pitiful bothsideisms while a genocide in Palestine unfolds on our government’s watch. My weather app informs me I lived through Perth’s hottest summer on record. My phone buzzes to reveal another notification for the ‘Destroy the Joint’ page, chronicling another femicide in Australia for this year, next to an article about trans bathroom bans. The pressure builds and builds. I hand my phone to my girlfriend, who dutifully puts it on charge for me. We lie in the dark, both pretending to be asleep, rinsing and repeating the next morning.
To do nothing seems unforgivable, particularly in the case of the unfolding genocidal crisis in Gaza, Palestine. I am disheartened by how little our representatives engage, how they do not speak for me. So, I write postcards to the parliamentary offices, sign open letters, and share them widely. I walk to the weekly protests down the road, and call my MPs and senators. I share and share and share. I watch and watch and watch. I have always been a mobiliser, a cut-twice-measure-never person. The only way I know how to process witnessing pain and cruelty is to act, to seek remedy. I’m quite handy with a first aid kit for this reason, always itching to dress the wound as soon as the skin is cut. On the day I hear about the murder of Palestinian academic Refaat Alareer, the poet, I am on the phone with my mother.
“It’s nauseating, it’s deeply terrible,” Mum says over the phone.
“I know,” I reply.
“What else can we do?” She asks.
“I don’t know.”
We’re silent, unable to find any words that can hold what we want to say.
The urge to distract, to change to a subject that seems more palatable, hangs over us, acting as if it is an equal alternative to bearing witness to undeniable terror. We resist. We keep talking, keep witnessing.
“Whenever I sense the urge to look away, I remember that even having the option is inherently steeped in privilege. ”
Alongside the stark images and sardonic ads, my feed periodically floods me with self-care infographics. Messages encouraging taking time for you and reminding me that you can’t pour from an empty cup speckle my timeline, as comforting as the sting of a grazed knee. Pastel-toned placidities do little to help, other than irritate me further. Using detachment as a salve does not soothe me. I find that the ability to recuse myself from the crises unfolding, both local and international, leaves me blinkered to our stark reality. I get the option to accept the out. For so many, the option does not exist at all. Whenever I sense the urge to look away, I remember that even having the option is inherently steeped in privilege.
I often think about how our brains are not designed for this, to digest information of this magnitude. Radio broadcasts are barely a hundred years old. I remember the day my family got the first iPhone; we got to go to school late. We are built to operate within our local community, not to comprehend the casualty and trauma on a global scale that we witness, much less instantaneously, and every waking hour. It pulls our attention, tugs on it, reefs at it. But feeling helpless to this does not serve me. Moral nihilism, in my opinion, is one of the great threats to resistance. We must resist the urge to disengage on the grounds that no single action will help any given cause. We have to keep believing we are bigger than the sum of our parts. The words ‘hope’ and ‘resist’ are sister terms, we need them to coexist. Asserting a moral high ground by stating that nothing matters will not stop the water from rising past your ankles.
“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take.”
On turning away, Palestinian-American academic Edward Said said that, “nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take.” The option to disengage is there, on every topic on every issue. On every tongue is the chance to form the words this is too complex an issue, or I’m not very political, or not my wheelhouse. Resisting abandonment of a cause takes work, it is where the allyship forms. I have to acknowledge how much we get caught up in the grey, in policing one another, instead of keeping our foot on the pedal.
Engaging politically and paying attention and holding ourselves accountable and bearing witness and speaking up feels more essential and harder than ever before. Hard to do consistently, hard to do right, hard to do ethically in a late-stage capitalist hellscape. Equally, navigating helplessness and futility creates a hopscotch of what to avoid and what to pay attention to. It is imperative that we keep trying, rejecting the hedonistic pull when it beckons. Refuting futility has never been more important. Our solidarity in resistance for Palestinians, for First Nations people, for queer and trans people, disabled people, for women, grows in acts of unity. I remember that engaging is resisting.
I reframe the question. What if I cannot change things? What if I can?