Pain
"By telling us about his pain, he invited us to think about our own, and in doing so, to really see each other. "
Josh Berthume, our Senior Dystopian Correspondent, sees hope and empathy in the Democratic National Convention.
We’ve always known pain is real, that trauma can invisibly weigh us down and eat us up. Pain and trauma are not new, but the last five months have forced people to know them in a more visceral way, like how water becomes differently real and takes on new meaning for someone who suddenly finds themselves to be drowning.
That is to say: context matters, and we find ourselves awash in signs and signifiers that the world we knew is gone. As Annie Dillard once wrote, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.”
The days are just packed with fear and anger and sorrow. We are what we are doing. At least 180,000 of us are dead, and we have it worse in that regard than any other country in the world. We can’t hear every little thing because our ears have been ringing since March.
Not everything makes it all the way through the filter of sadness and trouble, and that’s dangerous. We have to keep watching and knowing what’s happening. We need to know and feel the truth of it, deep in our bones. We have to share it with each other, too, which might be the hardest part.
The post office is in real trouble. The bipartisan Senate intel committee confirmed this week beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Trump campaign sought help from Russia in 2016 and took it when it was offered. On the last night of the DNC, Trump told Hannity that he is planning to send law enforcement to polling places to check IDs. And more than a thousand people are still dying every single day.
In short, we are low on good news and high on good reasons to feel low. None of us are alive right now, or at least, none of us are really living. This period is a single blurry day that both never seems to change and somehow serves up fresh horrors with merciless regularity. It is an unlife, a liminal period that we are living through rather than in.
For four years, our pain has been demanded, expected, and extracted with relentless cadence by a president and a political party that does not care about our pain as anything other than a currency. They needed it from us to power whatever machined cruelty was next on their inexhaustible schedule of inflicted suffering. Some of these exploits are narrowly targeted while others are cast broadly across every house. Often the pain was stolen or ripped out in different intensities and amounts from group to group, but every act of darkness demanded, always, at least, a little, from everyone in this country.
This week, at their convention, the Democratic Party did something different. They exposed and shared pain, being careful with it in the process. They didn’t ask to use or repurpose my pain, or yours. Instead, they are asking you to think about your pain, to sit with it, and for just a moment, here amid all the trauma and trouble, to let it settle, to feel the weight of it, the heaviness of the last five months, and the last four years.
It isn’t about asking if you are better off today than you were four years ago. Instead, under the weight of our settled pain, the Democratic Party asked us to look within and judge what we are willing to do to head off the end of American history.
It is a different ask than the conscripted, forced, violent withdrawal of our collective panic and unease and terror, a process to which we’ve become accustomed. They are asking us to consider our pain because it is the most appropriate lens through which to view our collective unlife.
We have to keep watching and knowing what’s happening. We need to know and feel the truth of it, deep in our bones. We have to share it with each other, too, which might be the hardest part.
If you can truly understand your own pain, it leads to empathy. It allows you to imagine that people who aren’t like you might feel like you do, even if the details are different. For Trump, empathy is the enemy, because knowing each other makes it much harder for us to hate each other.
It may be that this moment in the American timeline was made for someone who, on an atomic level, understands suffering, for someone who cannot only be real and candid and vulnerable about his own grief but has the hard-bitten tools and experience to be capable of understanding ours.
Trump’s message, grounded entirely in fear and disinformation, is resonant with almost half of America. This segment of our country is afraid, too, and with no better leader or example to follow, they long desperately to understand their fear as strength and not weakness.
It is a powerful position in which to put people, but it has a short shelf-life. Before long the bottom falls out and the logic dissolves. It can’t endure, because fear isn’t strength or weakness. It is fear, a close cousin to grief, and a unifying and democratizing force for the human race. We all feel afraid, and we all feel grief. Neither makes us weak or strong. Both make us human.
We all feel afraid, and we all feel grief. Neither makes us weak or strong. Both make us human.
When people weaponize fear, they occlude our ability to see ourselves in full. We can’t recognize it in each other until we can truly see it in ourselves, and in his convention speech, that’s what Joe Biden asked us to do.
He invited us (or maybe gave us permission) to grieve, to feel our anger and sadness, by being honest with us about his own fear and pain. This was part of a powerful rebuke of fear-based disinformation made programmatically possible by a reimagined, remote convention: a collection of real, vulnerable people telling us the truth – about themselves and how they feel about where America is right now.
This effort was led by a fundamentally good, imperfect man who rose to the moment by doing nothing more than admitting to us that he feels it, too. He laid bare his own considerable grief and suffering and then asked, earnestly, for the chance to go to work on our behalf.
By telling us about his pain, he invited us to think about our own, and in doing so, to really see each other.
What is possible, with empathy? What are we really capable of, as a people, if we can really see each other? We’ll find out in ten weeks.
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