I vote for abolition
Meditations on denial
When I was five, the mother of a smaller boy asked me to take him to get some water. He had cast on his left wrist. I held his arm on the cast instead of his hand, and as I led him to the water fountain, I squeezed. I squeezed hard enough until he drew back, crying, and ran to his mother.
I cannot recall the shame I felt at that moment so much as re-experience it bodily, as though it’s not an echo of the past but its great-great grandchildren clinging to my intestines, consuming every forlorn notion of my own intrinsic goodness.
When my father told me about evil, I knew it was a warning. I knew that I had something terrible inside me that I couldn’t let out.
I understood early why hurting others might be a way to ease unnameable things inside yourself. And I understood that I could either be the girl who would squeeze someone weaker in a place that already hurt, or I could be the girl who refused to do it ever again.
I already knew someone who had made the first choice. No matter how often everyone told me we were similar, no matter how gnarled I grew with shame—I refused to be like him.
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I don’t think that most denial comes from grief. I think it comes from shame.
Shame of something done to you, or shame of something you have done to another. Sometimes—often?—both. You were harmed and so you harm. Denial over the one leads to denial over the other. Admit one tangled stitch and you unravel the whole sweater, and then what will keep you warm? How much work will it be to reweave a story of yourself, stitch by honest stitch? Better just to deny what you know. Better just to find a way to win, and to forget about being true. We all do it. With some people, it gets to the point that everything they say or think at any one moment must be true, and the slightest contrary opinion is met with a lightning strike of raging denial. Every harm they inflict is just another point in their favor. What feels like harm to you is, in fact, a cure for your soul, or—at the last resort—a righteous annihilation, richly deserved.
This is a brutal endgame, a sociopathic singularity, when it happens to an individual. And when that individual comes to power, only the second Republican to win the popular vote in my adult voting life, at the crest of a wave of hundreds and thousands of people just like him—what can you think, except that we are experiencing the sociopathic singularity of an entire social class?
Slavery is the eradication of another’s will in order to exploit them for their labor. It never left this country. In fact, we have a higher slave population than any other. What happens when the people in power divide everyone into slaves or masters? If the world around you has proven that the divide is true? Well, if you’re white or close enough, or if you’re a man, voting for the masters might be the logical choice. No one wants to be a slave. When one party offers you the heroin of imagined dominance, and the other a status quo that you’re barely surviving, and everyone tells you that this terrible choice is the only one you have—
I’m not denying the cruel mindset of those who voted for Trump. I don’t think deciding you want to be a master makes you a good person. If I truly only had those two choices, I would vote for the terrible status quo, like the overwhelming majority of Black women did.
But this choice is a false one, and it always has been. In a system of slavery, you can be a master, or a slave—or you can abolish the system.
I vote for abolition.
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In the days before the election, I found myself thinking a lot about this brutal cry from the heart by Sami Hamdi:
Tell me what is so terrifying, that you are willing to forgive the genocide in Gaza? Tell me what scares you so much that you are willing to step over […] the over 240,000 corpses to get to the ballot box […] and vote for the one who did it to them! Vote for the one who slaughtered them! […] You will put a cross next to the name of Harris, the one who committed the genocide with Biden, and you would yell to those spirits and say, ‘I did it for you’?
I could find no answer to his question but the obvious. No, there is no moral rubric with which I can justify voting for the administration that has supported and provided weapons for this genocide of the Palestinian people. It seems the government of Israel is another group that has crossed the sociopathic singularity. Abuse other people long enough and anyone will get there. Abuse provokes shame, shame provokes denial, which justifies—at some point seems to demand—more abuse.
The fact that the abusers were once abused is only more evidence of the moral imperative to stop the cycle.
If someone is charged with murder, the fact that their family was massacred when they were children is not a legitimate defense. If a group of people experienced collective trauma—even one as totalizing as the Holocaust—they are not recipients of a “get out of genocide free” card. They do not have special privileges to target hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and—everywhere—children. They have no special right to the word “genocide” or to litigate the nomenclature of another people’s annihilation.
Some might argue that they have the opposite: the duty to recognize evil where they see it, and to be vigilant against its persuasions in themselves. I aspire to this ideal, but I don’t require it in others. What I expect from victims of abuse is what I expect from every human: to avoid causing harm and to value other life. Acknowledging reality is a bonus, but if you can manage the first two, you should never get too far from the ground in the first place.
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So why is it so hard? In myself, I go around in circles like a dog on a short leash, gnashing at all the self-destructive denial around me, and stabbing myself with doubt over my own traumas. Why can’t these supervillain billionaires at least get it together to save the planet from baking like a potato? I mutter, and then wonder if I can’t fold my past like a letter and mail it to someone else. I loathe the catastrophic consequences of an international shame crisis brought about by late-stage capitalism, and I can barely get through the day without taking a dip in my own putrid waters.
A certain kind of neo-Panglossian moderate likes to claim we have always been this way, that every generation always thinks the world is about to end, society is going to the dogs, and that this atrocity is greater than any before it. The supposed ubiquity of these disquieting notions is meant to nullify the alarm they provoke, if not falsify them outright. But the thing is, we have direct archaeological evidence that ever since the dawn of agriculture human societies have lived in steadily degrading natural environments. If our ancestors complained that things were getting shittier, that might simply mean that they were. And while I have no idea how you would do this study, the acceleration of environmental degradation and human-made catastrophes in the last two centuries could plausibly be related to an acceleration of the intensity and frequency of these catastrophic warnings. Perhaps instead of being a measure of human oversensitivity, we are looking at an inter-generational human warning siren. The apocalypse approaches! Beware! How are we, the siren’s chorus, to know exactly when it will come? The future is not like the past. We can glimpse it, but we can’t read it. And as Franny Choi’s poem so beautifully encapsulates, whatever apocalypse we can imagine heading our way, there are plenty more where those came from behind us.
The only way to stop the cycle is to build a society rooted in reality and intolerant of abuse. This includes the active and passive abuse of every other creature with whom we share this planet. If you don’t think the climate crisis is part of this cycle, it’s time to open your epistemology.
It is our urgent work to imagine a society whose engine does not run on exploitation.
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I vote for abolition Our ancestors do not lose Their slavery Because ours is climate-controlled And all shades of the rainbow And is called every other damn thing— (Workfare, Illegal Immigration, Minimum Wage, Blue-collar, White-collar, Unemployment, Inflation, Housing Bubble, Tech Bubble, Wage Theft, Deflation, Subprime Bubble, Amazon Prime, Corporate Crime, Stagflation, Private Prisons, Federal Prisons, That Time on Rikers’, Import Economy, Labor, Emancipation) —But slavery. The masters still know they’re masters. We should not ask ourselves Masters of what? (Industry, Finance, Trade, Oil, Checkpoints, Ghettos, Food Stamps, Welfare, Water, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on Ukraine, the War on Gaza, Humanitarian Aid, Small Earth Metals) No— Masters of who?
Thank you so much for reading! I have been overwhelmed for a lot of reasons for the past month, but I appreciate all of you and will see what I can do about publishing essays here more regularly. There’s so much I want to say! What a time to have chosen to move (temporarily) back to the US. We are living through dark times, but even those of us who grew up in relatively stable circumstances should have seen them coming. Now it’s our responsibility to meet them, as best we can. Much love to you all.
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