fascism

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Accountable to history

Photo by Al Benoit on Unsplash

When I was very young, I used to believe that my parents were omniscient and infallible. They knew everything and were never wrong. As I aged, I of course realized the faults of my assumptions. Being a parent now myself, I especially realize how absurd that notion was. We make it up as we go along, doing the best we can with the information we have at hand. Mistakes are part of the practice.

Part of my younger beliefs was that my parents were responsible for or had control over worldly developments. They were adults, they had agency that I did not. I am sure there is some psychological term for this, but, likely for the sake of simplicity, I subordinated systems of authority and power into the hands of those I was most familiar with who also had such seemingly tremendous power and authority – my parents.

Again, this belief waned as I grew, but it became replaced by a perhaps more right-sized view of accountability and action in the world. Rather than holding the expectation that my parents could control everything, I was interested in what they contributed to change and making the world a better place, broadly speaking. As my worldview became explicitly infused with politics during my adolescence and its accompanying arrogance, I more specifically wanted to know what they did that was in accord with my view of what they should have done.

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Glimmers Against the Horizon

For a little more than a year I lived in Palestine. This text is not about that time but rather a phenomenon I first encountered there. That would be, in an overarching sense, the experience of the normalization of the expectation of the abnormal event. In this context, an abnormal event refers to an incident or circumstance that is outside the range of normative human experience and often beyond the capacity of the human psyche to make sense of or healthily integrate. During my time in Palestine, abnormal events were occurrences such as the nighttime raids of villages or homes, killings, woundings, beatings, kidnappings, tortures, and home demolitions carried out by Israeli military forces or settlers. (This is limited to the West Bank and would be much more devastating if expanded to include Gaza. Also left out are scenarios such as protests, which one enters into knowing that Israel will utilize varying levels of violence.)

Israeli forces carried out these actions with a consistency accompanied by an intentional unpredictability. In practice, this meant holding in one’s awareness the knowledge that something bad was going to happen, and soon. There was no if. When, where, and how bad? were the ever-lingering questions. And, given the limited territory on which these events occurred, would it involve those one knows or perhaps even oneself? To daily hold the apprehension, dread, or anxiety of the knowledge of an impending but unknown calamitous event is psychologically and physically exhausting. Its presence festers in the background, tingeing even the most positive or enjoyable of activities with an ambiguous darkness, an ill-at-ease that can not be put aside. For at any moment, the phone may ring or text may arrive with the news that something has happened.[1]

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