The Empathy at the End of Diversity

Yesterday, Heather Knight reported about the latest absurdity perpetrated by the San Francisco Unified School District board:

A gay dad volunteers for one of eight open slots on a parent committee that advises the school board. All of the 10 current members are straight moms. Three are white. Three are Latina. Two are Black. One is Tongan. They all want the dad to join them.

The seven school board members talk for two hours about whether the dad brings enough diversity. Yes, he’d be the only man. And the only LGBTQ representative. But he’d be the fourth white person in a district where 15% of students are white.

The gay dad never utters a single word. The board members do not ask the dad a single question before declining to approve him for the committee. They say they’ll consider allowing him to volunteer if he comes back with a slate of more diverse candidates, ideally including an Arab parent, a Native American parent, a Vietnamese parent and a Chinese parent who doesn’t speak English.

This display of idiocy–complete with two hours of discussing Seth Brenzel’s “lack of diversity” while he sits before them in complete silence–is just the latest antic in the Board’s record of breathtaking performative incompetence, one of the previous episodes of which was the ridiculous quest to rename 44 of San Francisco’s closed schools based on their semiliterate understanding of history through Wikipedia.

Much has been said about these people’s incompetence and recurrence to woke theater in lieu of (what a wacky suggestion) actually helping the district’s children by charting the reopening of schools, but one particular point has caught my eye. The sole commissioner to defend Brenzel–Commissioner Jenny Lam–chose to do so by arguing that, as a gay man, he does bring diversity to the Board:

By denying him the position, we are failing SFUSD’s core values— the promise to value diversity, and to build inclusive school environments for our students and families.  Parents and families deserve utmost respect and dignity.  We also know the challenges faced by LGBTQ students in our schools from bullying to lack of school connectedness and sense of belonging.  

For decades, the LGBTQ community has fought hard for the right to be recognized as parents. As a board we missed an opportunity to reaffirm the humanity of one of our dads.  Seth deserves a fair opportunity— I will work to advance his appointment.

While it is critical to have diversity we must not pit communities against one another. We often say we must remain vigilant fighting against discrimination and hate. I will continue that commitment.

It seems like the only rhetorical currency available to San Francisco officials and pundits is diversity; Brenzel’s defense, as well as his humiliation, uses the same linguistic tropes. Indulge me, then, in a little thought experiment: let’s assume, just for a moment, that the Board had declined the application of a <gasp!> cis straight white man for lack of diversity. And let’s also remember, for a brief moment, that this coveted position is volunteer work on behalf of children. It does not grant anyone monetary benefits, fame, or status; all it means is a burden on a parent’s already-scarce free time amidst a pandemic.

Now, think: How often do you see fathers–any fathers–volunteer for educational leadership? How much have you seen fathers (as opposed to mothers) losing productivity to the pandemic? How many men in your immediate surroundings have made the choice (or accepted the lack of choice) to leave their jobs and tend to their children’s needs and education while their wives kept their positions? Can you think why, in order to appeal to people, a humongous effort needs to be put into imbuing school volunteering with any sort of status, and whether this might possibly relate somehow to the fact that parent volunteers tend to be women? Against this backdrop, wouldn’t it be a positive–even, perhaps, progressive–move to say to a man, any man, of any sexuality, ethnicity, or nationality, applying for one of multiple vacant volunteer positions advancing the wellbeing of the community’s children: “Welcome! When can you start?”

Here was an opportunity to understand that a motivated, good-willed person, does not give of his free time to the community to abuse and belittle other people’s children. Here was an opportunity to drive home the crucially important message that we advance as a community when all our kids advance, and that all parents, of all colors and sexualities, should be invested in the advancement of all children, of all colors and sexualities. Instead, judging from the furious comments of the scores of parents of all colors who responded to the decision, what happened here was exactly what happens when people receive mandatory diversity training: resentment, derision, disengagement. When has bullying, humiliating, and excoriating people who want to help ever worked as effective motivation to continue “doing the work,” so to speak? What, exactly, was the goal here, and how was it accomplished?

I don’t think our diversity aspirations should be more modest. Au contraire, I think they should be bolder. So bold, in fact, that diversity itself should not be a goal. Treating it as such is shortsighted. Diversity is a path that takes us toward a brighter future–one in which everyone can enjoy self-fulfillment and thrive. This takes the understanding of two entwined but distinct truths, which have come to obscure each other in our shrill, shallow narratives: the one progressives get–that people of different backgrounds experience the world in unique and unequal ways because of their identities–and the one they don’t get, namely, that empathy is a human superpower that transcends differences because, at the ember of lived experiences, we all know what it’s like to be disregarded, lonely, misunderstood, dehumanized. A quest for diversity is worthy and important when it advances the cause of empathy, and a caricature of performative wokeness when it stands in the way of empathy, which is what happened here.

Hooked on Trump: Impeachment, Extremism, and Addiction to Drama

This morning, House Managers are presenting the prosecution’s case at the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Much has been said, and will be said today, about the legal strategy they have adopted: laying out a broad narrative of Trump’s elaborate scheme to persuade wide swaths of the American public of his baseless claim that (1) the election was stolen, (2) something must be done to “stop the steal,” and (3) the way to do so is to “fight like hell.” This narrative is designed to address the predicted defense strategy, which will try to undermine the causal link between Trump’s January 6th comments and the pre-planned actions of his supporters.

The prosecution’s case uses videos and screen captures of tweets, complete with a trigger warning for violence and language. I’ve been taken aback by the visceral reaction I’m having to the evidence, and a quick check-in with friends and colleagues reveals that many people feel this way this morning.

The visceral pain is especially acute whenever Trump himself is depicted. His voice is difficult to hear and reading his tweets onscreen is generating somatic upheaval. The distress I am feeling whenever I am exposed to his image or utterances is palpable.

One mindfulness technique especially useful for working with difficult emotions is R.A.I.N. This technique requires recognizing the difficult emotion, allowing it to exist (accepting that it is there, rather than pretending that all is well), gently investigating its quality, and then nourishing oneself with self compassion. Having recognized the visceral pain I feel, I move on to accept that my reality today includes and encompasses this pain. This has important implications for how my day will unfold, as I resolve not to ignore these feelings, but rather to allow myself to sit with them.

When I turn to investigate my emotion, I realize how much it resembles, in quality, the sense of being in the throes of a powerful addiction. Not because we enjoyed our Trump exposure, but because our panic, dread, and horror at the wickedness, corruption, and cruelty that he wrought on a daily basis made us uniquely attuned to his moods. For four years, our circadian rhythms revolved around his whims, tweets, and outrages; we were blown to and fro by the winds of his capricious hires and firings; we woke up with a jolt every morning, steeling ourselves to act, protest, comment, explain, and arrange our lives in a way that protected us and our loved ones as best we could.

In short, we were hooked on Trump.

Thinking about the way in which even those of us who raged and fought against Trump were addicted to the dramatic media cycle he generated goes a long way toward explaining why so many people are not yet feeling the relief they expected to feel after his exit from the scene. Consider what happens when a powerful stimulant/intoxicant is removed from your system. Initially, one experiences deep withdrawal. The sensation of high alert and the compulsion to be attuned to the presence of the powerful substance are hard to shake, and like collective survivors of profound abuse, we are still easily jolted, looking behind our shoulder with suspicion to see if our tormentor will reemerge.

Listen to your sensations, to your fight-or-flight instinct still potent within you. They are telling you that you have been deeply wounded, repeatedly, daily, for years, and that the healing the election brought was superficial. It will take years–maybe decades–to process and heal the trauma.

Also, observe the light your own feelings are shedding on the sensations and motivations of the insurrectionists. They were on the opposite side to yours. If you were yanked by Trump’s chain hour after hour for four years, imagine this powerful sensation of addiction magnified among his lackeys and supporters. Imagine the powerful withdrawal sensations, palpable and plainly on display in the videos depicting their rage during the attack. Imagine what the Twitter deprivation, living without him constantly feeding their life force, is doing to their insides on a daily basis. Consider how much longer the social media ban on him must continue to wean people from such a powerful drug. And consider how this visceral, somatic deprivation played into the insurrection itself. Consider what the way you embody this withdrawal and trauma today teaches you about the sensed reality of the angry, violent people you saw on video. Consider also how this trauma is experienced today by the people whom whose presidency hurt the most.

Now, introduce self compassion into your examination. It is understandable that you feel this way. You and everything that is dear to you has been abused, and your whole reality revolved around protection from the abuse, for a long time. You can tell yourself, “it’s okay; he’s gone.” You can consider whether a cup of tea or a walk might help. You can commit to checking in with other people who may feel this way today.

Take good care of yourselves today. This will take decades to process, but accepting your feelings as they are is an important step.

Policing and Experience: Why We Should Teach Mindfulness to New Cops

This morning brings an interesting story by Megan Cassidy of the Chronicle. The story compares two recent cases in which San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin brought charges against officers in shooting cases, suggesting that the officers’ inexperience may have played a role in both cases:

The charges against the two men raise questions about whether new officers are being sent into situations they’re not ready to handle and whether different training, more education or older recruits would produce better outcomes. How juries might weigh the officers’ inexperience is an open question.

On Nov. 23, Boudin announced that he had filed manslaughter and other charges against Samayoa, who fatally shot a carjack suspect, Keita O’Neil, during a chase in the Bayview in 2017. The decision marked the first time a San Francisco prosecutor filed homicide charges against an on-duty officer in modern history.

On Dec. 7, Boudin announced that a grand jury had indicted both Flores and the man he shot, Jamaica Hampton, on assault charges after an encounter in the Mission District last December.

“Both cases involved officers who were new to the job, who were relatively inexperienced, behaving in a way that is a stark contrast from the way that other officers on scene with more experience behaved,” Boudin said in a recent interview. “In any profession, including policing, I think when people are new to the job they’re more prone to make mistakes.”

I wonder whether the relationship between experience and police professionalism is truly linear, and my suspicion is that experience and use of force correlate in a different way.

Here’s what makes me think of this: Seventeen years ago I conducted fieldwork in the Israeli military justice system, where I got to interview dozens of prosecutors about charging and prosecuting AWOL cases. Lots of interesting stuff didn’t make it to the eventual pieces, including a typology of the folks I interviewed by seniority. My impressions at the time were of a u-shaped curve in prosecutorial approaches:

When I interviewed very young prosecutors, they tended to espouse a pretty cynical approach about the AWOL cases. They were likely to discount people’s personal problems and socioeconomic situations and ascribe their absence from service to a manipulative personality and free choice. Accordingly, they tended to ask for harsh sentences.

Folks with more experience–say, in the 5-to-15-years range of experience, were more lenient. They tended to have a more holistic view of the person’s circumstances and expressed more mature approaches toward the solutions–some of them saying that without a comprehensive socioeconomic overhaul the problem of AWOL in the army will not resolve itself. But higher up in the seniority ladder, the high-command folks with 20-25 years of experience expressed sort of a return to the punitive approaches of the young ones–not in the same gung-ho manner, but rather as a bird’s-eye view of what the office policy toward these cases should be.

It wouldn’t surprise me if we saw a similar u-shaped curve correlating seniority/experience with the likelihood of use of force among police officers. Let’s think back of William Muir’s terrific book about police officer personalities. Muir posited four types of police officers’ approaches to their jobs, based on where they are located along two perpendicular axes: interventionist-versus-reactive and professional-versus-personal.

Styles of policing. | Download Scientific Diagram

The most salient and critiqued problems with U.S. policing lie in the top left quadrant: folks who are interventionist and see things personally (“enforcers”) excessively relying on use of force (as an aside, I’ll propose that “reciprocators” or “avoiders” – the folks in the bottom left quadrant–can put lives in serious danger, too, but this problem is obscured by the shallow way in which we talk about policing.) But let’s take this a step forward. Could it be that these personality types are not innate, but rather stages in the development of one’s career? Let’s hypothesize:

Why young police officers, who might’ve joined the police force in part looking forward to the power that comes hand in hand with the job, may be more likely to use force is pretty obvious. They are younger (like most of the people they police), whatever deescalation training they’ve received requires maturity, and they are more likely to relent to peer pressure, be less thoughtful about future consequences, or respond intuitively to disrespect.

For many police officers, this might mellow out mid-career; their experiences on the streets might lead them to adopt a “tragic” rather than “cynical” approach toward the human experience (to use Muir’s terminology.) Then, for officers with lots of experience and high seniority, signaling toughness through support for violence would be an important way to appeal to the perceived demand of constituents that they “protect and serve.” Just like with the prosecutors, I expect the penchant for violence to be more intuitive/personal in the early stages of one’s career and more systemic/strategic in the later stages.

I don’t know if this is true, but I do know that, while the most senior folks are typically in management roles, the younger and mid-career folks are on the streets. Moreover, officers with less seniority get the less desirable positions and beats, and nonetheless express more enthusiasm for the job–which might imply that we’re putting people with more enthusiasm for violence and a lesser ability to consider consequences in the toughest places.

If that’s the case, how do we make lessons about deescalation “stick” once the officer is out of police academy? Every year, one of the first cases my criminal procedure students read is City of San Francisco v. Sheehan. I’ve written about this case here and here, and in the latter post I quote this paragraph from the decision:

San Francisco trains its officers when dealing with the mentally ill to “ensure that sufficient resources are brought to the scene,” “contain the subject” and “respect the suspect’s “comfort zone,” “use time to their advantage,” and “employ non-threatening verbal communication and open-ended questions to facilitate the subject’s participation in communication.” Likewise, San Francisco’s policy is “‘to use hostage negotiators’” when dealing with “‘a suspect [who] resists arrest by barricading himself.’”

Even if an officer acts contrary to her training, however, (and here, given the generality of that training, it is not at all clear that Reynolds and Holder did so), that does not itself negate qualified immunity where it would otherwise be warranted. Rather, so long as “a reasonable officer could have believed that his conduct was justified,” a plaintiff cannot “avoi[d] summary judgment by simply producing an expert’s report that an officer’s conduct leading up to a deadly confrontation was imprudent, inappropriate, or even reckless.” Considering the specific situation confronting Reynolds and Holder, they had sufficient reason to believe that their conduct was justified.

Let’s set aside the qualified immunity problem. What I want to know is: what makes a violent reaction more innate than the nonviolent, deescalating one? And more importantly, how to we engrain the ability to make space for a different choice in what is often a split-second decision?

In mindfulness meditation, we train the mind to identify moments and circumstances in which we are “hooked” and the mind takes us to a knee-jerk response. Tibetan Buddhists call this moment “shenpa.” Pema Chödrön, one of the people I most respect and admire, says this about the need to make space to choose a different reaction:

If we started to think about and talk about and make an in-depth exploration of the various wars around the world, we would probably get very churned up. Thinking about wars can indeed get us really worked up. If we did that, we would have plenty of emotional reactivity to work with, because despite all the teachings we may have heard and all the practice we may have done, our knee-jerk reaction is to get highly activated. Before long, we start focusing on those people who caused the whole thing. We get ourselves going and then at some irrational level, we start wanting to settle the score, to get the bad guy and make him pay. But what if we could think of all of those wars and do something that would really cause peace to be the result? Where communication from the heart would be the result? Where the outcome would be more together rather than more split apart?

In a way, that would really be settling the score. That would really be getting even. But settling the score doesn’t usually mean that. It means I want my side to win and the other side to lose. They deserve to lose because of what they’ve done. The side that I want to lose can be an individual in my life or a government. It can be a type or group of people. It can be anything or anyone I point the finger at. I get quite enraged thinking about how they’re responsible for everything, so of course I want to settle the score. It’s only natural.

We all do this. But in so doing we become mired in what the Buddhist teachings refer to as samsara. We use a method to relate to our pain. We use a method to relate to the underlying groundlessness and feelings of insecurity. We feel that things are out of control, that they are definitely not going the way we want them to go. But our method to heal the anguish of things not going the way we want them to is what Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche calls pouring kerosene on the fire to put it out.

We bite the hook and escalate the emotional reactivity. We speak out and we act out. The terrorists blow up the bus and then the army comes in to settle the score. It might be better to pause and reflect on how the terrorists got to the place where they were so full of hatred that they wanted to blow up a bus of innocent people. Is the score really settled? Or is the very thing that caused the bus to be blown up in the first place now escalating? Look at this cycle in your own life and in your own experience. See if it is happening: Are you trying to settle the score?

Acting out of this knee-jerk place of “settling the score” is not unique to cops, of course, but you can see how someone young and inexperienced might have a difficult time making space in their own mind to make a different choice. And indeed, there are already people doing this work and seeing positive results, not only in decreasing burnout and stress but in inviting compassion and a “tragic” rather than “cynical” worldview. This can relate directly to the tendency to use violence. As Jill Suttie explains here, “A stressed-out police officer will be more likely to resort to intimidation or aggression when confronted with ambiguous situations, which can lead to inappropriate or even violent actions.” She cites Oregon police officer Richard Goerling, who leads the training, and who explains this very well:

“Mindfulness opens up the space in which we make decisions—we’re not so linearly focused or so stressed because we are under threat,” he says. “We may still be under threat, but because I’m regulating my stress response and my emotions—anger, fear, and ego, which is a huge problem in our culture—I’m more aware of my options.”

How this relates to career stage is evident from this passage:

Goerling believes that police need this kind of training in emotional health, because they too often get the wrong message about their job and the way emotions play a role in it. Instead of understanding the impacts of stress, anger, or fear, they try to tamp down those emotions or ignore them, which keeps them from understanding the effect of emotion on performance.

“It’s classic compartmentalizing, saying, ‘I don’t let my emotions get in the way,’” says Goerling. “Yeah, right. But what happens if those emotions spike up out of the little box and get in the way, creating problems in the encounter with others?”

Another problem, says Goerling, is that stuffing down emotions can make one more jaded with time, leading to a sense of being inauthentic, emotionally cut off from other people, and depressed. Though originally he rejected the concept of training officers in self-compassion—a mindfulness practice of directing love toward oneself—he later realized how important it was for keeping officers whole, not to mention the positive interpersonal benefits.

“This whole notion of self-compassion is huge,” he says. “It doesn’t take long in this business before you pretty much dislike everyone around you, and then you begin to dislike yourself, and then you wonder why the grizzled police officer seems to have no affect and seems to be the classic asshole cop.”

“Being tough means investing in ourselves, in actually loving people and wanting to serve them, and in feeling all of our emotions—being able to say that I’m angry, I’m disgusted, I’m sad, I’m joyous,” Moir [El Cerrito’s Chief of Police] says. “What’s remarkable to me is that my officers are seeing it: Between stimulus and response there lies choice.”

The cops in Suttie’s story were nearing retirement, and while this stuff is useful to anyone at any age, I really hope that these skills become a key part of training new police officers at the academy. There’s nothing to say that younger, newer officers can’t learn these skills–children as young as 3 can be taught to meditate (my 3-year-old son can do a 10-minute body scan before he falls asleep.) Mindfulness training for police officers should focus not only on formal meditation, but also on go-to instantaneous practices–even something as mundane as feeling your toes inside your shoes for a brief fraction of a second can bring one back into the body and offer a choice out of the whirlwind of the mind. And, teaching these skills as part of police academy gives people tools for life that they can later use throughout their career, and which can help with their personal lives as well.

Noblesse Oblige and the “Dr.” Controversy

On my second day of law school, in 1992, Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer, one of the most admired and respected civil rights academic heroes in Israel, came to our first-ever criminal law class, and said to the 300 first-year students in the lecture hall, “please call me ‘Mota'”. I thought to myself, there is no way on Earth I would ever bring myself to call you ‘Mota’ and you know it, and proceeded, in the few occasions that I summoned the courage to talk to him, to linguistically pretzel around the need to call him anything. Last year I sent him an email supporting his activism. It was the first time I referred to him by his first name. I was already a tenured professor with a named chair, and even so, I hesitated and reworded the email five times.

Like pretty much every sensible person, I was disgusted and reviled by Joseph Epstein’s condescending, ignorant opinion piece in the WSJ asking Dr. Biden to stop referring to herself as “Dr.” because he found it fraudulent, or in bad taste, or whatever (no need to read that drivel; for takedowns, see here, here, here, and here.)

Given the awfulness of the COVID crisis, I’m surprised how something this trite has rankled me so much, but I can’t get it out of my system, so here goes. Lots has already been said about this, most of which I fervently agree with, so just one comment, if you please, about one of the less explored aspects of this. Consider this fantastic poem by Susan Harlan:

Image may contain: text that says 'SUSAN HARLAN MY FIRST NAME No, you can't call me By my first name, And yes, I know that A male professor Told you that titles Are silly Because a certain genre Of man Is always dying To performatively Divest himself Of his easily won Authority.'

I’m a member of the Law and Society Association, the American Society of Criminology, the Western Society of Criminology, the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, and an occasional attendee at a bunch of gatherings of other professional associations, and I see this “certain genre of man” and this sort of dynamic all the time at every professional meeting I attend. I don’t need to name names, because if you’re an academic, whatever field you’re in, you’ve seen this, too: The young folks, the folks of color, the younger womenfolk, and especially our colleagues who spent a fortune flying to the conference from places like Brazil or South Korea show up in formal, elegant outfits, with a flawless deck of PowerPoint slides and deliver meticulously prepared remarks to a room with three audience members. The guy who is a distinguished professor at Amherst College or Yale or Berkeley or Stanford and considered a luminary in the field shows up in wrinkled dockers, his sockless feet in crocs or Birkenstocks, maybe even a quirky hat perched at a rakish angle, ad-libbing without slides at the well-attended plenary about some idea he had last night.

I submit to you that the folksy, humble, down-to-earthsy, modest, approachable spiel of the dude who has been elevated to knighthood is just as performative as the bowtie, suit, call-me-doctor spiel of those who have not. I don’t mean it’s disingenuous or calculated (many of these shabby dudes are truly lovely people); I merely mean it is a self-presentation of class within class. The person who floats above and beyond the need to hustle, impress, and–most importantly–be taken seriously, signals it by dressing and behaving in a way that signals, “no matter what disheveled personal appearance or casual demeanor I dish out, I am an inalienable member of the oligarchy of the profession.” This sort of guy is above snickering at the well-dressed folks who are trying to hustle, because noblesse oblige, right? He might not even notice them hustle, or he’s a genuinely good guy who has compassion for where they are in the food chain (perhaps remembering his past, hustling self), in which case he’ll offer them a forgiving smile for their faux pas of “trying too hard.” It’s the folks a bit lower on the totem pole who do the snickering. This, by the way, tells you why the snarky takedown could only come from some poser like Epstein: The folks who are the real deal–the folks Epstein respects–are way above dishing out such garbage.

The reason women, people of color, young people, or people from the global south, appear shrill and overly self important when they dress formally or insist on being called by the title they earned, is that they know they have to hustle to be taken seriously, and if they don’t insist on the respect they are owed, they are going to be ignored, patronized, and ridiculed. I think I’ve mostly crossed the age/seniority threshold where being taken seriously is an uphill battle, but it was only last year that I stood behind the podium, prepping my slides for the first session in my own classroom (what could be a more obvious indication that I was the professor?) when an adjunct, who mistook my classroom for his, stepped in, handed me his flash drive, and asked me to pop up his slides and do something about the lighting. This, and far worse, happens every day to academics who are women or other members of disadvantaged groups. And when it happens, they try to calm their breath, swallow hard, feel their heartbeats quicken and their palms sweating, and then, in a voice that sounds ragged and shaky to their own ears and thinly masks the rage, state their honorifics, incurring the scorn of those whose position in life allows them to view this kind of hustle as crass or gauche.

I would happily have us all live in a society of equals, where each of us gets respect for their expertise wearing whatever they want and being called by their first name. Unfortunately, I don’t live in that world and neither do you. So, when you insist on being called Doctor, you are doing it to open the door a bit wider and extend a broader welcome to all your colleagues with doctorates.

When Ya Gotta Go, Ya Gotta Go: Bodily Functions as a Gateway to Compassion

Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find the toilet paper container empty. Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass.

Charles Bukowski

Hello, my name is Hadar and I’m a quality-of-life offender.

<Hi, Hadar>

Last week I took our family car to Burlingame for a repair. While the mechanics were working, I took off on a stroll in the town’s beautiful shopping and dining avenue. I had a couple of beverages and some food, and still had some time to kill when I felt the urge to go to the bathroom. Cafés and stores closed their bathrooms to the public, on account of the pandemic, and I was left with no recourse. I walked to the train station, hid in the gravel behind the tracks, and peed. I then walked over to the public park. While there, I needed badly to go again. My experience with San Francisco parks was that they invariably shut down their toilets. I assumed the same was true for this one, so I hid behind a big tree, taking care to be out of sight of the other park visitors, and peed again. Within a few moments, Officer S. Vega of the Burlingame Police called me over, reprimanded me, and became even more upset when I started laughing (“Lady, I don’t understand what’s funny. Children could’ve seen you.”) Turns out there was a bathroom in the park, even though Officer Vega could have understood why anyone would assume there wasn’t one if he were in a more charitable moood (unavailable toilets are the norm, not the exception.) I couldn’t stop laughing–because, really, what more can 2020 throw at you?–as I got photographed, signed paperwork, reported my cellphone number, and was handed a citation without a fine listed (“you’ll be receiving mail from our traffic court.”) My citation reads: Urinating or defecating in a public place. Somehow, that feels unfair: absurdly, I feel outraged at the grouping of urinators with defecators, as if I occupy a more rarified moral sphere than the folks that have to do a number 2, and moreover, I resent the confluence of all public places. Is not a natural spot behind a tree more reasonable than a sidewalk? But that, of course, raises deeper questions.

The issue of public urination remains one of the most insidious aspects of how COVID-19 has reshaped our environment. We have spent our pandemic times in San Francisco County, which exhibited a high level of compliance with pandemic prevention measures. As a consequence, we were full-time workers and full-time parents to our toddler for many months, and the way we coped with this difficult challenge was by spending a lot of time in nature. Park trail bathrooms and water coolers were shut down, and so we did our business in nature.

As stores, cafés, and restaurants have begun to reopen, they have almost invariably shifted to an outdoor service model, offering either only pick-up orders or outdoor dining. Only a handful have opened their restrooms to the public. San Francisco’s public parks, which still feature closed playgrounds (while twentysomethings work out to their hearts’ content in outdoor gyms!) have similarly kept their restrooms closed. This puts people in incredibly difficult situations that have not been discussed at all by politicians and media outlets. It is assumed that bathrooms are dangerous, plague-harboring places. And yet, the inevitable fact remains that people do need to go when they need to go.

Having to cope with this incredible (and silenced) difficulty has been a profoundly educational and humbling experience for me. I’m turning 46 next month and have begun dancing with perimenopause. Consequently, my “holding it in” skills are not what they were, and even when I was more spry I was never a particularly successful camel. On top of that, I’m parenting a young child who hasn’t yet perfected his “holding it in” skills and who sometimes needs to go fairly quickly, so a public restroom with a long line is not an option for either of us, even if such were more widely available. The lack of access to public bathrooms, and even more so, the lack of certainty whether public bathrooms will be available on a particular outing, hampers our lives and our movement in public space in serious ways, and surely we’re not the only ones facing this. I’ve decided to talk about this openly in the hopes that it starts a conversation about the availability of public toilets.

What’s even more remarkable about this challenge is that, while for me and my ilk this is a worsening life condition, for some of my friends and neighbors here in San Francisco this is a living reality–and these humiliating experiences are an opportunity to open a small window of empathy and compassion into the ocean of difficulties that they brave on a daily basis. Much of the reporting about the rising housing crisis in the Bay Area has focused on the horrifying, humiliating solutions that people have to recur to. Two years ago, long before the pandemic was even on the horizon, Heather Knight published this piece, which looked at one neighborhood’s struggle with the realities of dehumanizing existence. The pièce de résistance, if you will, in Knight’s story, was a suitcase full of human excrement found in the neighborhood. Knight quoted one of the residents: “Nobody should have to poop in a suitcase, and nobody should have to find a suitcase full of poop.” But what is one to do when there is no reasonable place to go? How can one toe the line between avoiding legal fines (which, despite the existence of the Community Justice Center, inexplicably end up in traffic court!!!), avoiding health complications from holding it in (there are plenty of people my age and older on the streets), and keeping one’s dignity?

I think about this also in the context of protests. My parents are only two of hundreds of thousands of people who are rising up in Israel and protesting against corrupt premier Netanyahu, Israel’s “Crime Minister” as he’s now known, demanding his resignation. My folks are in their early seventies; actively participating in the protests, complete with travel to and from the location, can take hours. It’s still very hot in Israel and people need to drink water, and that means they need to pee. The protesters take special care in cleaning up after themselves (and Netanyahu’s neighbors, who understandably loathe him, actually support and welcome them.) When talking about protests and public action, we tend to forget about these hidden but important sacrifices that people make in giving up their comfort and their health to be heard. Can we have a moment of empathy with protesters who are in a public place and really, really gotta go?

Bathroom Battlegrounds by Alexander K. Davis

Alternatively, consider how restrooms became the front line of our gender battles. Alexander Davis’ terrific new book Bathroom Battlegrounds offers a rich political and cultural history of the gender, race, and class segregation that goes into the architecture of places for people to pee, culminating, of course, in litigation over laws like North Carolina’s infamous “bathroom bill”. Regardless of your personal gnosis about predetermination and social construction in gender, can we all agree on the fact that making bathrooms–the place where you confront the lowest and most urgent rung in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs–the battle front on trans rights in dehumanizing and horrible? Can we set values and politics aside and just put ourselves in the shoes of a fellow human being–any human being, be they rich, poor, cis, trans, young, old–who desperately needs to pee and can’t find a safe place to do it? Next time you face these indignities, because of COVID-19 or for any other reasons, can you leap on this as an opportunity to find kinship with others who really, really gotta go in an environment that is hostile to their basic bodily functions?

One of the brightest spots in our urban environment has been the emergence of pit stops on our streets. Pit stops are safe, clean, convenient bathrooms, which also offer opportunities to dispose of dog waste and needles, available to anyone for free. They are maintained and supervised by the amazing people at Urban Alchemy, an organization for which I have enormous admiration and affection. Many of the people who work at Urban Alchemy are formerly incarcerated, and much of their people skills, pacifying, conflict deescalation, and problem solving skills were developed on prison yards. They understand where down-and-out folks come from and what they need, and they find ways to provide it with dignity and respect. They’ve been effectively and peacefully running the Safe Sleeping sites, keeping the area around my workplace friendly and safe, saving lives through the use of Naloxone on a weekly basis, and doing all this without recurring to violence or putting anyone at risk. I cannot begin to tell you what a relief my small-bladdered self feels when I see one of these kind, capable people taking care of a public bathroom and keeping it safe and clean for everyone. We all deserve to go to the bathroom with dignity, and my only wish is that we have a Pit Stop on every San Francisco block.

Who Threatens Academic Freedom? Adventures in Cancel Culture

Renowned Buddhist scholar and teacher Pema Chödrön tells of her correspondence with Jarvis Jay Masters, a Buddhist scholar on Death Row. In one of his letters, Masters describes watching angry protesters on TV with the sound off and being unable to determine whether they were from the right or from the left. Similarly, in this terrific series of videos by sociologist Ilana Redstone, she recounts experiments in which people were shown a protest on screen and were much more likely to assess the protests as nonviolent when told that the protest aligned with their own political views.

I bring up these examples because of the prolonged, heated argument on social media over the existence and direction of “cancel culture.” Right wingers argue it’s a left-wing problem; left wingers argue that all the canceling is coming from the right.

I’d like to offer a more complicated perspective, rooted in my own experiences. Having been in American academia for twenty years, experienced my fair share of bigotries, threats, and ugliness, and heard plenty of stories from people I know personally, I think that no one has cornered the market on weaponizing social media. Plenty of academics across the political spectrum go to work every day feeling like they’re walking on eggshells. They spend inordinate amounts of mental, emotional, and pedagogical energy tiptoeing around minefields–especially when they are, like most people in academia now, adjuncts or untenured folks. Who they fret about largely depends on which institution they’re in, what the student body is like, what they teach, and what kind of public speaking (if any) they do.

My personal cocktail of bracing and trepidation is a consequence of the fact that I teach and work in a politically complicated space. I talk about issues of high political and emotional valence–criminal justice, civil rights and politics–in a state that has very blue and very red counties. I teach in a very progressive institution, in which our student body is among the most progressive in the country. This has complicated implications for my pedagogy, similar perhaps to the ones that a colleague teaching in a predominantly conservative institution might take: I have to craft what I say to protect the few centrists, moderates, and conservatives in class, who often have good points to make and make them eloquently and politely because being in a largely progressive space has made them stronger, as well as to prod the vast majority of progressives in class out of intellectual laziness and into developing the kind of resilience to upset and disagreement that they will need in their professional lives. But we can talk about all that some other time: Today, hatred is on the menu.

Here is a quick-and-dirty typology of the kinds of blowback, negative feedback, threats, hatred, etc etc., that I have received so far: From the right–nastygrams and screeds via email, often poorly spelled, ranging from garden-variety insults to specific death threats. From the left–anonymous complaints taking my words out of context and ad-hominems that focus on my Israeliness.

Which is more frightening? Hard to say. The right-wing death threats were a constant thing (ironically, often coming from folks who support the death penalty for homicide) and I hadn’t taken them too seriously until the 2016 election, when they became more vicious and started including a time and place for my demise. I especially remember the one that came in shortly after I spoke on KQED about the havoc that Prop. 66 was going to wreak on litigation on behalf of wrongfully convicted people. That one I even reported to the police. In addition to the email vitriol, there are radio callers, and occasionally co-interviewees, on TV and on the radio who can be hostile and difficult; one particular example is the right-wing politico who bloviated about the “liberal professor” and the “liberal media.” People near and dear to me, like my colleague Dorit Reiss who does world-improving work on vaccine advocacy, or my colleague Veena Dubal who advocates for labor rights, experience concerted efforts aimed at them, professionally and personally, by political opponents.

The left wing stuff has been frightening in a different way, because it threatens my job security. One of the biggest frights in this department came in 2011, when I taught torture and spoke of the Israel Supreme Court decision to abolish it. To show that the decision was not followed, I showed the Human rights org B’Tzelem report, which included a diagram of a man being tortured, drawn based on his later testimony. Result: An anonymous complaint to the Dean, strategically sent three weeks before my tenure vote, accusing me of “trivializing Palestinian suffering with a cartoon.” Later, in 2019, an editorial board member of a law review to which I submitted a paper asked me to erase my relevant professional experience (as a public defender in the Israeli army) from my CV so that he could “sell” my paper more effectively to his friends. Stuff like this terrifies me, because I know personally of several people who were more careful and diplomatic than me and had their lives wrecked by a few folks who misunderstood them and took their grievances to twitter (it’s telling that these folks want to keep their fears confidential, but there’s certainly the cases of Greg Patton, Erika Christakis, Laura Kipniss and others, which have been made public.)

I’ve also received cancel efforts from both directions in the form of two 1-star reviews on my books (reviewed with 5 stars by everyone else). In both cases, these were calculated to trash me and hurt sales, but the difference in style was instructive. The right-wing review, sent first to my email inbox, was a lengthy, insult-filled screed misinterpreting my book and calling it “rat droppings.” The left-wing review was headlined, “Israeli militarist on the loose!” and full of ad-hominem insults that had nothing to do with the book (which was not about Israel) or my actual opinions/biography.

As I review my experiences being on the receiving end of ugliness, I notice the following insight: When right-wingers have attacked me, they attacked my opinions (misconstrued and insult-filled.) When left-wingers have attacked me, they attacked my Israeliness. Which was the worse experience? Again, hard to say. Both of these essentially consist of efforts to box me into a hated stereotypical category that’s not quite cut to my size and shape.

Here’s why this matters: the public conversation about who is getting “cancelled” and who is doing the “cancelling” ignores the importance of milieus of reference. Yes, it’s true: nationwide, the threat to science and academic freedom is greater from science-denying administrations, who are cutting funds, reducing opportunities, hindering scientific integrity, and vilifying higher education. But people don’t live and work only in “the nation.” They also live and work in their local communities and academic institutions, where their ability to freely present ideas and pursue research agendas is impacted at least as much by their students’ evaluations, colleagues’ opinions, and administration’s preference, than by the Trumpian kakistocracy. This can explain the wide variation of opinions on what the bigger “cancellation” threat is: people simply do not experience the same threats because they are not exposed to the same milieu. An environmental science professor teaching at a rural college in a red county, with students who are staunch climate deniers ready to complain about religious oppression, faces a very different set of concerns than a law professor teaching race and politics in an urban school in a blue county with students who came from liberal arts colleges ready to perceive slights and take offense at trivial faux pas.

Having the unique experience of absorbing both left and right critiques makes me sympathetic to the concerns of lots of different people; I believe all of these concerns are valid. Who threatens you and who you’re afraid of in academia depends on where you stand. Because of this, I wish we were less resolute and vitriolic in the debate about who “really” instigates cancel culture and who “really” suffers from it.

And why is it that we’re at each other’s throat arguing about who is victimized and who is doing the victimizing? As I explained elsewhere, I suspect a lot of this has to do with the primacy that victimization has taken in American society as a precursor to having a public voice. Years of punitivism (which, in itself, has done very little for victims, as Leigh Goodmark, Aya Gruber, and Justin Marceau have explained in their respective books) have acclimated Americans of all political persuasions to the notion that they will not be listened to unless then can claim victimization. I really wish we could listen to ideas without this extra prism because it primes us to marinate in the uncomfortable, scary place of being a victim for far longer than is good for us.

Unfortunately, unbridled hatred abounds, as well as channels to deploy it. I’ve often thought about the fact that, while stories of academic careers destroyed over misunderstandings and misconstructions have always been around, the role of social media as an amplifier of grievances has greatly increased the risk of wrecking people’s reputations and prospects because of political contention. Working like this is not only upsetting, but unsafe–and when I say “unsafe”, I mean genuinely threatened in terms of one’s livelihood, not “unsafe” as in “upset over something disagreeable that someone said.” I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I do know that both sides of this debate might do well to accept the possibility that their enemies have not cornered the market on stifling academic freedom and scaring others into silence.

Uncomfortable Telling your Child that Meat Comes from Animals? Don’t Eat Animals

I try to be patient with the travails of parenting. Trust me, I have plenty of my own. But massive hypocrisies get my last nerve. See this parenting column from Slate:

Our sweet, funny, VERY sensitive just-turned 4-year-old daughter loves animals—and is right on the verge of figuring out where the meat we eat comes from. To be clear, we have never deliberately hidden this from her, but she has never expressly asked about it, and there’s no good way to randomly segue into “By the way, your dinner used to be alive.” She avoids eating chicken and turkey, and we’ve realized this might be because they’re called “chicken” and “turkey.” She does eat (with great joy) meats that don’t have the same name as their source animals, such as bacon, steak, and pot roast, but it’s clear from her comments that she doesn’t have a lock on what they’re made of. (“Dad, wouldn’t it be funny if bacon came from a pig like the ones that oink?!”) At some point soon, the jig will surely be up, and it is not unlikely there will be a lot of tears, some deep existential horror, and feelings of betrayal directed at us. If that’s the case, she’s also going to feel sad and mad about her conflicting feelings about whether to eat some of her favorite foods or not. How can we address this honestly while minimizing her distress? It seems like we should be preemptive about it, but how do we bring it up? For the record, we will tell her about vegetarianism and would be happy to stop feeding her meat if she asked (while ensuring that she gets enough protein and other nutrients, of course). We also do make an effort to purchase cruelty-free meat whenever possible, but I’m not sure that “Hey, the pig had a pretty nice life until someone killed it so we could have it for breakfast” is going to impress her.

And see the “great” advice to facilitate the hypocrisy:

I know I don’t have to tell you not to dismiss her feelings when she discovers the truth about her meals. I do urge you to be truthful with her about how you feel about eating meat. I think being honest with our kids, always, is foundational to being good parents.

The bottom line, though, is that you can’t really minimize her distress, and, as much as we want to protect our children from pain and sorrow and conflict, we shouldn’t protect them from all pain and sorrow and conflict. If we do, they’ll never learn the coping skills all people must develop to deal with these feelings. The best thing you can do is sympathize with her and be supportive. If she tells you she is going to be a vegetarian from now on, talk to her about how you’ll have to make sure her nutritional needs are met by finding other sources of protein that she likes eating. (This could be a fun project, trying new foods and cooking together. I know it was for us.) Your job as a loving parent in this situation, I believe, is to support her decision, whether it lasts a few days, weeks, years, or forever.

I remember this coming up, with some nervous chuckles, in parenting groups I attended when Rio was little: people embarrassed when their kids pointed out to them that they use the same word for the nuggets they are served and for the cute farm animal (“chicken.”) A breathtaking variant is the person who doesn’t like the animals on their plate to look like what they are, which is animals.

Conflicted? Embarrassed? Giggling about your own hypocrisy? Facing your child’s tears upon learning that you are participating in something horrific for animals and for the planet? Go no further! I have some advice to offer you, offered in all caps for those who need special clarity:

IF YOU ARE UNCOMFORTABLE SHARING WITH YOUR CHILDREN THAT MEAT COMES FROM ANIMALS, DON’T EAT ANIMALS.

IF YOU FEAR YOUR CHILD WILL BE DISTRESSED WHEN THEY LEARN THAT THEY ARE EATING ANIMALS, DON’T FEED THEM ANIMALS.

IF IT EMBARRASSES YOU TO TELL YOUR CHILD “HOW YOU FEEL” ABOUT EATING ANIMALS, STOP EATING THEM, AND THEN YOU’LL FEEL FINE.

IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOUR CHILD ABOUT EATING ANIMALS, DON’T EAT THEM, AND THEN TELL THEM WHAT I TELL MY SON: “ANIMALS ARE OUR FRIENDS AND WE DON’T EAT OUR FRIENDS.”

That’s fucking it.

A few recommendations for books to read with your child:

Essential viewing for you:

Also, enough already with the fucking protein. It’s not the struggle/challenge that people make it out to be. Kids need 1-1.5 g protein for every 2 lbs of weight. If you feed them good food, they are getting enough protein. Kids all over the world happily eat beans and tofu and their parents don’t fret about protein. Why don’t the animal eaters ever ask themselves about vitamins and fiber?

Thanks for listening to my TED talk.

The New Salem

Many years after writing his play The Crucible, Arthur Miller reflected in the New Yorker:

In any play, however trivial, there has to be a still point of moral reference against which to gauge the action. In our lives, in the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties, no such point existed anymore. The left could not look straight at the Soviet Union’s abrogations of human rights. The anti-Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional committees. The far right, meanwhile, was licking up all the cream. The days of “J’accuse” were gone, for anyone needs to feel right to declare someone else wrong. Gradually, all the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dali watch. Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed.. . .

In those years, our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid, that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick one’s teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma. Yet I kept being drawn back to it.

I came back to Miller’s commentary after reading Tre Johnson’s commentary in today’s Washington Post:

“Once again, as the latest racial travesty pierces our collective consciousness, I watch many of my white friends and acquaintances perform the same pieties they played out after Trayvon, Eric, Sandra, Korryn, Botham, Breonna. They are savvy, practiced consumers of Meaningful Things: They’ve listened to “Serial” and become expert critics of our broken criminal justice system after just one season. They’ve watched “Insecure” and can suddenly imagine life as Molly or Issa. They’ve shared the preordained “amplifying” social media post that just reads “This,” followed by a link to something profound from a black voice.. . .

“The confusing, perhaps contradictory advice on what white people should do probably feels maddening. To be told to step up, no step back, read, no listen, protest, don’t protest, check on black friends, leave us alone, ask for help or do the work — it probably feels contradictory at times. And yet, you’ll figure it out. Black people have been similarly exhausted making the case for jobs, freedom, happiness, justice, equality and the like. It’s made us dizzy, but we’ve managed to find the means to walk straight.”

Johnson, of course, falls into the trap that everyone else has fallen into, but at least he sees the trap. The combined effect of COVID-19 “content” (what an odious word) and, once more, the merry-go-round of commentaries on yet another horrific racial tragedy, have filled the social media universe with exhortations: Stay the fuck at home! Check your privilege! Wear your mask! Look within yourself! Be a good ally! Educate yourself! Flatten the curve! Dismantle white supremacy! The electronic town square holds trials for the Karens and Beckys of our time, which, given the centuries-old racist marinade we have been submerged in, are never in short supply. Everyone has an opinion about those (me included.) Everyone has an opinion about someone else’s opinion (me included.) Lists upon lists crop up in our social media feeds: Rating activities as to how safe they are (followed by the obligatory argument that the writer refrains from all of them, out of an abundance of caution); do’s-and-don’t’s for protesting “properly” are modified. Well-meaning people sincerely ask whether their white children may raise a fist on TikTok and receive fifty replies, all different. The actual issues are buried under edifices upon edifices of performance, performance, performance. Meta conversations about performance are rabbit holes. Every day some celebrity or other wears something or says something or performs some physical gesture, providing more grist for the mill. Every horrific incident of violence, racism, or racial distress, every photograph of someone out of compliance with the pandemic mandate-de-jour, becomes a morality tale, fueling endless takes, opinions, and new lists of instructions. Pandemic prevention enforcement and “how to be a good ally” have linked hands and are now the new religion of social media. We are in a panopticon, but the Foucaultian roles are reversed: we sit in the watchtower in the middle, and all around us are bloviating pulpits.

(I realize this post is falling into the same trap of exhortation, but this underscores my point–there is no end to a sea of pointing fingers. It’s turtles all the way down.)

If we were half as busy actually doing world improving things as we are performing our goodness in the public square and moralizing others, we might be in a different place. But public image is everything, and “content” (there it comes again!) must be provided. Citizens United has come full circle: now that corporations can speak like people, people speak like corporations. Everyone is a public entity, and so everyone has to issue on-point “messaging” to the public. Jeff Skilling’s infamous statement, “I am Enron,” is now true for everyone. Performance comes before feeling or doing. We must be on brand.

The problem is that “the personal is political” works both ways. It is one hundred percent true that we all play a role not only in pandemic spread, but also in the perpetuation of white supremacy. It is one hundred percent true that every revolution starts with individuals, and that individuals have the power to change the world–especially when organized. But these truths obscure other truths. “Flatten the curve” and “dismantle white supremacy” are big, pompous, vague goals, and in the absence of responsible adults at the helm of the country, there are bound to be differences in how we, the people, parse them into everyday behaviors. We’ve missed the train on testing and contact tracing, and now we’re left to pick at each other for mask violations.

The incessant chatter, be it contrite, derogatory, or both, is not “doing the work” that we are told to do. It is performing the work, which is something else entirely. It is exhorting others to perform the work. All the world’s a stage, and on this particular stage, we are performing The Crucible 24/7. There’s no escape from watching, from participating, from fretting about participating lest our flawed goodness be exposed.

I deeply understand where the urge is coming from. There are good intentions. There is a desperate need to do something in a situation in which we feel particularly powerless; we are sheltering at home, our face-to-face meeting places are closed, this online discourse is a poor substitute to our in-person conversations. As more and more avenues to do good close, either because they are impossible or because they are severely criticized, we are clutching at straws. These bursts of personal propaganda are the best thing we have, and we figure they are better than nothing, because silence is also a problem. And most importantly, there is pain. Searing, unbearable pain and grief. Grief for the sick, grief for the dying, grief for the people being killed and injured and ostracized and ignored. Grief and guilt. It feels overwhelming to sit with it. We take to our keyboards to find some relief, to tell some story about it, to remove the center of grief from our hearts to our heads to our keyboard. But verbose descriptions of grief are not the grief itself.

Can we take an intermission? Not from the work itself–improving the world is the project of a lifetime–but from the performance of it? Can we stop obsessing about our goodness and the goodness of others? Can we stop “messaging” so that we can actually feel something? Can we quiet our nimbly typing fingers to listen to the cries of the world, of friends and neighbors born to disadvantage, of our dying planet? Can we quiet them long enough to hear our own hearts quiver in compassion?

#LSA2020: ADVOCATE

What a treat we all had this evening at the Law & Society Association Annual Meeting! We got to view the excellent Israeli documentary Advocate about attorney Leah Tsemel who represents Palestinian defendants in Israeli courts. Tsemel is revered in some circles and reviled in others for her iconcolasm, bravery, and unwavering commitment to the Palestinian struggle.

The documentary showcases one of Tsemel’s most difficult cases: the defendant, Ahmad, 13 years old, ran around with his cousin with knives. They stabbed an Israeli child, also 13 years old. The cousin (15 years old) was killed by the Israeli police/military. Throughout a horrific, brutal investigation, after sustaining serious beatings and a cracked skull, Ahmad argued that he had no intent to kill, only to frighten, and did not want to attack children. Tsemel faces a tough dilemma: because of his juvenile status, if Ahmad confesses, he won’t be incarcerated but rather sent to six years at an institution. if he goes to trial, he might face imprisonment. She is adamant that she will support his right to continue to tell his truth.

The film also tells the story of Tsemel’s life, from her experience of the 1967 occupation of Jerusalem as a law student, through her activism in socialist anti-Zionist movement Matzpen (“compass”) in the 1970s, her husband’s involvement in radical activities, and her adult children’s thoughtful, complex reflections on their family life in the shadow of their mother’s convictions and unusual career. Tsemel emerges as an unusually brave and committed person.

I was very glad to have the opportunity to see the film, and surprised at the points at which Tsemel’s life choices illuminated my own. I served for five years as a public defender at the Israeli Military Defense Counsel’s main office, where I occasionally represented people who, on the surface, are on the opposite end: Israeli soldiers who looted Palestinian homes and abused Palestinian detainees. I vividly remember an evening at which four of us, who strongly identified as left-wingers, sat at a pub in Tel Aviv and talked about our moral convictions about the occupation. Two of us said they would refuse to represent soldiers in these cases; one of them, still someone I like and admire a lot, explicitly said so to our commander and ended up getting disciplined but insisted on taking on other cases as a trade-off.

I admitted to my friends that I saw no ethical problem representing these folks (older than Ahmad, but not by much.) I sometimes worry that expressing this position will be incomprehensible, or even reprehensible, to friends who see the conflict in black and white. It was precisely because of my conviction that the occupation was vile and debased everything and everyone that touched it that I saw it as a duty to represent these soldiers. To me, they were placed by their government and their commanders in morally impossible situations akin to the student participants of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Encouraged by the overwhelming racism and intractable duality created by the conflict, and marinating in a military culture that ignored (at best) or condoned (at worst) their wrongdoing, they were victims of the horrors of the occupation, like their Palestinian counterparts (albeit, of course, not to the same degree.) When I interviewed Israeli conscientious objectors, most of them former combat soldiers, about their experiences, it was evident how tortured and scarred they were by the memories of engaging in things they now considered atrocities; this is one of the reasons I have so much respect for Breaking the Silence (“shovrim shtika”), an organization of former combatants revealing their experiences. If there is ever to be peace, everyone should have the opportunity to exorcise the demons of this horrible, violent conflict, so that real peacemaking work can be done. I see the way the occupation has damaged the occupiers every day in Israeli society–the machismo, the lack of empathy, the culture of not listening, the verbal and physical violence. Of course the other side suffers orders of magnitude more, and both sides are locked in positions in which they ascribe victimhood to themselves and crimes to the other party. These identitarian labels and the truthiness they come with are very hard to shake.

Growing up as a largely nonpolitical nerd, I was fascinated by organizations like Matzpen and by friends who had strong political consciousness, were radicalized since high school, and went to protests and somesuch. I envied, and marveled at, the ability to wake up in the morning with the unwavering feeling that One Is Doing God’s Work and that the adversaries were unquestionably the bad guys. I felt so childish by comparison because my opinions were so unformed. It was much later, in the army, that I found my own political consciousness. There’s nothing like ranks and stupidity and reading Catch-22, which felt like a documentary of my life at the time, to crystallize unfairness, injustice, inequality, and the burning need to help people caught in Kafkaesque situations not of their making. But even then, I simply couldn’t resign to a formula under which one side was the good guys and the other the bad guys. The miasma of the conflict infected everything around it, and the crumbs of ugliness that fell on my professional plate did not always neatly arrange themselves in a way that made moral determinations easy. It didn’t always favor one category of humans over the other, and it made for interesting, reflexive experiences, thinking about what world improving action I could take given what I had in front of me. Much of what I learned in practice, particularly how class differences played a horrible role ruining young people’s later civilian lives, informed and enriched my later scholarly work.

But the sense that the world of good and evil is complicated, and that there is too much suffering around me to take sides and stick with them in perpetuity, seems to have remained as a permanent feature. Today our hearts cry as protesters respond to the horrific killing of George Floyd. Opinions fly back and forth about rioting and property destruction–is it wrong, is it right, who is doing it, what would MLK say about it–and I just find that the heart is big enough to contain and feel, really feel, the suffering of everyone, before being so sure about what I think about every aspect of this situation. Maybe Leah Tsemel would shrug and simply say that the evils of racism justify any means and that it’s not for her to judge the reaction–and would feel comfortable in her unwavering commitment to this ethic, and sleep soundly. Me, I’m not sure of anything, except of the profound sadness I feel–for George Floyd’s family and friends, for his community, for Black people feeling traumatized, for Black lives being devalued, for the rage and grief that prompts people to destroy, for the unloved, cynical emptiness that would lead people to jump on the bandwagon of destruction, for the losses of local businesses, for the people challenged to respond in a human, decent way, and not knowing what to do, for everyone who is angry and sad and afraid and feeling inadequate to mend the sorrows of the world. It is a thicker, more overwhelming sensation, perhaps, of ethical humanity, but I have grown to accept what is in my crying heart–in any human heart–and its miraculous ability to hold the extremes of joys and sorrows. When called upon to rebuild, I trust in my ability to determine, as best I can, how I can reduce suffering in the world. It’s all any of us can do.

How to Vent During a Pandemic

A few years ago, Susan Silk and Barry Goldman penned a wonderful article in the L.A. Times about how to cope with situations involving suffering and grief. They advised to draw a set of concentric circle, with the person directly experiencing the distress at the center, the people closest to them around them, situating people on a continuum to closeness to the situation:

Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, “Life is unfair” and “Why me?” That’s the one payoff for being in the center ring.

Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.

When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you’re going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn’t, don’t say it. Don’t, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don’t need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, “I’m sorry” or “This must really be hard for you” or “Can I bring you a pot roast?” Don’t say, “You should hear what happened to me” or “Here’s what I would do if I were you.” And don’t say, “This is really bringing me down.”

If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that’s fine. It’s a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.

Comfort IN, dump OUT.

Susan Silk and Barry Goldman, How Not to Say the Wrong Thing, Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2013

I mentioned ring theory in my mindfulness meditation course Sheltering in Compassion when we talked about reactivity to pain and fear. Later, my friend Sarah made a really important observation: because on social media one has a large and diverse audience, the rings get “smooshed together.” Some of the people you speak to are closer to grief than you are, and some are farther away.

The pandemic really drives home this “ring smooshing” situation. It is tempting to offer the comparing mind free rein to scan around and assess who got dealt better or worse hands than ourselves. But the comparisons are always incomplete, because while you might have the external parameters of another person’s situation (and sometimes not even that), you do not have their internal experience. Some people might be busier than others, or caring for more people, while others may feel more isolated and lonely. In short: When we complain online, we don’t know whether we are being read by people in a closer or a farther away ring. Being mindful of the impact of our complaints of others, and noticing when we hoard emotional energy, is valuable.

But complaining can have a detrimental effect on our own wellbeing as well as that of others. Recently, I came across Cianna Stewart’s No Complaining project, and read her book (more of a workbook) with great interest. As she points out, hearing oneself complain can generate despair, aggravate depression and anxiety, and, importantly, give the person a sense that they are “stuck in the complaint”, thus divesting us from the power to figure out solutions to our problems. Stewart, who worked in HIV prevention during the AIDS epidemic, knows a lot about the importance of changing the script of a negative, self-defeating narrative.

So, should we clam up and never complain? Should we say that everything is hunky dory at all times? Suppressing or denying all negative experiences and feelings, sometimes extremely manifested as “toxic positivity“, does not make the negative experiences or feelings go away, and ignores an important cue that we are experiencing something meaningful. Any emotion, positive or negative, is our mind’s way of calling attention to something important about the human experience.

Nor does intellectualizing the feeling or telling ourselves stories about it help. Some of the behaviors we frame as “healthy venting” aren’t; they foment the sensation and cause artificial upheaval, propping ourselves up through a sense of righteousness that masks any insights we could draw from a quiet reflection on the situation. So, both expressing and repressing unpleasant feelings can take the shape of resistance to what they have to teach us.

A good way through the muddle is to heed the Buddha’s instructions on right speech (samma vaca), which is part of the Eightfold Path, to abstain from “lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter.” I found lots of fantastic resources and examples of right speech, ranging from Marshall Rosenberg’s well-known classic Nonviolent Communication to Beth Roth’s terrific article about improving communication with her teenage son. In the context of complaining, the elements of right speech can help us discern whether our complaints are making the world (including our own minds and spirits) better:

Is It True? Unexamined emotional upheaval can lead us to be stuck in a rigid view of a situation in which we are 100% right and the other person is 100% wrong. This is seldom true. When I revisit painful conflicts from many years ago, I invariably find that, with the perspective of time, I can open myself to a broader view of the situation. This is not easy to do when I’m “hooked” and in the throes of the strong emotion. All the more reason to sit quietly with the emotion, befriend it, try to find out what it needs or what it wants to teach me, and only then respond. I’ve mentioned here before Byron Katie’s The Work; while I have reservations about how she runs the workshops, I think using this worksheet to process a situation can be helpful as a mind-opening tool.

Is It Gossip? I once visited a Waldorf school , where the principal told me of the school’s efforts to foster a healthy communication culture not only among the students, but among the administrators and teachers. One of their most important communication rules was “go to the source, or let it go.” This prevented gossip from leading to misunderstandings and festering in the community without solution. It also occurs to me, along the lines of Cianna Stewart’s work, that going to the source empowers the person with the grievance to shift the situation in a constructive way, whereas witnessing oneself gossip without solution doesn’t help. I’m going to add to this that “callout culture”, which is sometime hailed as “speaking truth to power,” is not exactly a “go to the source” solution. True, the source will be exposed to what is going on, but so will many others: callouts are a social theater and have an audience. Precisely because of the performative aspect, the supposed benefits of “starting a conversation” or “bringing about a reckoning” usually fail to manifest (I’ve written about this here and here and talked about it here.) Whatever can be resolved with a direct conversation, should, and going behind someone’s back or broadcasting broadly should be done only when there are important considerations that rule out going to the source.

Is It Abusive? Relatedly, complaints should be framed in a constructive way. Lashing out at people, especially in public or behind their backs, or engaging in cynicism and ridicule, is counterproductive. Striving to find a way to say even difficult things with kindness not only encourages a broader view of the situation, but also goes a longer way toward ensuring that our speech has its desired effect.

Is It Necessary? Online discourse has a democratizing feature–the virtual floor is open to anyone who has an opinion and wants to share it. Consequently, we are bombarded with hot takes and opinions from all directions; even when we have good crap detection skills, it is still time consuming and burdensome to deal with the incessant flow of opinions. This pandemic time is teaching me great lessons about the need to be more discriminating in my online communications, if only not to overburden people who are already drowning in a sea of things to read, to process, to engage in. I’ve started asking myself whether what I have to say really adds anything to what is already out there. A related important inquiry has to do with the social footprint of the speaker. My good fortune in life and what I do for a living mean that I often get to hold the proverbial talking stick, and have become mindful of the importance of passing it to voices that receive less than their due attention, or speaking for them if their own voices are muted by tragedy or lack of social advantage (speaking for incarcerated people during this pandemic, for example, is crucially important, because it is hard for the public to get the information firsthand, but whenever possible we should hear from people released from prison and from families of prisoners.)

Underscoring these four guidelines is the fundamental question: Am I expressing myself to deflect, ignore, or rid myself of feelings that have important lessons to teach me? Or am I engaging with my feelings, aware of them, accepting their valuable teachings, and then skillfully considering where my words might have the most beneficial effect? It is not necessarily true that “if you don’t have something positive to say, it’s best to say nothing at all”; sometimes negative things need to be said, pain needs to be voiced and honored, for things to change. Let’s put our precious and valuable words to their best effect.