Dahlia Lithwick: Why Politics is Both the Poison and the Cure

[Nevilledog]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/uvalde-shooting-politics-is-the-poison-and-the-cure.html


At the start of the pandemic, I began searching around for a complicated word that would express the idea that I was basically fine but also utterly shattered (I assumed the German language has a word to accommodate this vague concept for reasons I cannot at present identify). I never found such a word, but my friend and teacher Tamara recently proffered the phrase “broken but blessed.” Her phrasing gets close to describing the feeling: That sense that you can personally be surviving but also that nothing is actually okay. This is all separate and apart from the language of “privilege” or “languishing” or “behavioral activating.”

What I meant, looking back, is that I knew the feeling that I was “okay” was tenuous. The world around me could get worse, but at the same time I also couldn’t imagine things devolving any further.

Then everything got worse.

Last week’s Uvalde shootings, coming in the wake of the Buffalo massacre, last month’s assault on women’s health and liberty, the resurgence of a toxic assault on LGBTQ people and their rights, finally made me crave the language to describe my even worse feeling of being cracked and also now completely broken.

As I struggled to reassemble myself to at least write something about the school shooting in Texas, I reminded myself that broken but also broken is akin to “hopeless” and that I was not prepared to be that, either. In any march toward authoritarianism, fostering a broad sense of public hopelessness is very much the point. As Amanda Marcotte noted last week, once a majority of any population has fundamentally given up on politics, on institutions, on voting and education and protest, you’re in pretty good shape to be rolled by the next wave of Trumpism.

*snip*