I’ve been trying to write about disagreeing with all of my peers without bringing in the actual issues we’ve disagreed about.
There are so many reasons to go about it this way. One: Because when you bring in specific issues, people tend to rely on their closely-held political ideologies, which is very understandable. Of course, only now that I’ve broken with my previously closely-held ideology, that conversation—ideology v ideology—is not as interesting to me.
Secondly, I’ve realized that as soon as a specific issue is mentioned, the conversation pivots to arguing about that exact issue when really what has bothered me the most is the way in which my peers have argued their position.
But the more I wrote without bringing in the specifics, the more the writing wasn’t working for me. My arguments felt vague, abstract, a little cagey. The writing itself felt frustrating and labored.
So, I shifted my approach. I began writing about a particular issue, and the words came tumbling out of me. This is so much easier, I thought as I typed and typed. I wrote until it was time to pick the kids up from school, feeling quite accomplished.
But then, hours later, I began to doubt myself. After having cooked dinner and while working on a puzzle that’s taking up most of the kitchen table, I started feeling that to publicly share this piece, I would only be adding to the Internet’s cache of politically-minded angry people. That it would be selfish of me. Potentially even dangerous! That maybe I should just scrap the whole thing.
Fortunately, another part of me knew that this wasn’t entirely accurate. This part of myself, though quieter, knew that I wasn’t writing just to rant but because I was trying to figure something out. And that this process—of writing to understand and be understood—wasn’t just important but necessary. Especially in this age of social media.
Still, the following morning, I felt stuck, pulled in opposite directions. I felt like what the piece needed was a supporting quote by some other writer—preferably one who was much more popular than me and who was obviously left-leaning. This kind of quote would lend credence to what I was trying to say. It would give me permission to keep going.
That’s when I remembered a recent Substack post by Elif Batuman.
You should read Batuman’s whole post because: one, her writing is very enjoyable, but also because she takes the passage I’m about to reference in a different direction.
She starts by relaying an anecdote in which the punchline is a person’s disability. And then, she says that though she thinks about this anecdote often, she rarely mentions it, “not from any conscious policy, but because at some point [the anecdote] started to feel somehow ‘pre-2016’ and unsuitable for sharing, or even sustained contemplation.”
She then goes on to: “wonder what exactly is pre-2016 about this story.” (Though she hasn’t yet mentioned Trump, it’s clear to me that by pre-2016, she’s referring to the time before Trump became president.) She goes on:
I realize that, for some years now, whenever an anecdote or observation involves acknowledging some demographic “difference” (ability, race, etc.), I feel caught out, and immediately dismiss it.
This feels very true to me. I find myself even hesitating to admit that I thought the anecdote she tells is funny because almost immediately, “I feel caught out.” But wait, Batuman keeps going:
There are a couple of cultural impulses at play here. One is an increased awareness of the personhood of others, which is clearly salutary and conducive to thought, imagination, etc.
Interjecting to say: YES. Trump’s election, though so very painful for those of us who didn’t vote for him, has had the positive effect of spurring a great deal of much-needed awareness both personally and collectively. Here is more Batuman:
But another [cultural impulse], I think, is a post-Trump U.S.-American sense of “NOW we know what’s sensitive and insensitive, and from now on we can just triage our way through narratable reality,” which is less conducive to thought—in part because it leads to shame, and shame makes it impossible to think anything beyond “OMG so wrong.”
Okay, so this is the quote I needed, guys! It explains not only the dynamic I want to discuss—this triaging through “narratable reality”—but also why it’s so difficult to write or even think about. Because my brain shuts down from shame!
I particularly appreciate Batuman’s use of the word triage, which is a word I’ve mostly associated with an emergency room. But in terms of life post-Trump, isn’t that what it has felt like for many of us? Like we all had to do something. Now! And quick! Because America was dying! And just like in an emergency room, the people who were injured but not in life-threatening ways, i.e. those of us who would come to identify as privileged (over and over and over again), seemingly all agreed we needed to prioritize those who were bleeding out, both literally and figuratively. This all felt deeply understood post 2016.
But what I most want to focus on is how this triaging has been, as Batuman says, “less conducive to thought.” Because what if your main job is writing and thinking, and so, you have been thinking about all of this. For a while. And that’s another reason I love Batuman’s usage of the word triage. Because it implies provisionality. We can’t all live in a state of triaging forever. Or maybe we can, but do we want to?
Because: what happens five or six or eight years later, when there is a new president, when your own personal circumstances have changed, and when maybe you feel like a certain issue needs more attention but everyone around you is still in triage mode.
I want to write about what happens if because of 2016, you’ve made choices in which your life—previously not one that needed to be prioritized—is now intertwined with a group of people who are bleeding out. And yet still, a group of people, some of whom are your peers, are (indirectly) shouting at you: “But you’re not bleeding out enough!” What I want to do in this post is ask the question: Just how physically endangered do you have to be to be prioritized?
In the wake of the pandemic, I began disagreeing with my progressive peers over a homeless encampment that had formed across the street from my kids’ under-enrolled, Title 1, public elementary school.
I feel the need to describe my peers as progressive because that—our particular political alignment—was one of the main reasons I considered them my peers. (And in some ways, they still are my peers. I’m for Kamala Harris, just as they are.) But in the lead-up to the 2020 election, this political alignment felt solid and uncomplicated. We were outraged by the same things. We were phone-banking for Biden. They understood my frustration with my Republican physician mother, who believed in the safety of vaccines but also seemed very noncommittal about gun control. In short, we didn’t just talk politics often, we connected over our shared sense of what’s right and wrong.
But then: the homeless encampments.
Maybe you’ve heard about California’s divisive homelessness problem or maybe you are reading this from within Los Angeles and have experienced it yourself. If you are reading this from Los Angeles, you probably have an opinion about it.
But first let’s attempt to tackle the schools issue.
If you’re a parent who has chosen or is choosing an elementary school, you probably know how these conversations go. By the time your child is two, you have an understanding of the known public schools: the ones that are “okay” to send your kid to and the ones that are not. (Obviously, there is the private school option, but if you’re a true progressive, if you’re campaigning for a Democratic Socialist, I don’t think you can choose that option, at least not without some major explanations.) Point being, our neighborhood public elementary school wasn’t one that was being talked about.
And partially because of this, I was apprehensive. The school also simply didn’t look very nice. But I was a progressive in Los Angeles in a post-2016 world! It felt plainly wrong to me to buy a house in this gentrifying neighborhood and then ship our kid off to a school outside of the neighborhood.
But also, and this is very interesting, once my husband and I began to investigate, we realized that our neighborhood school wasn’t even lowly rated. It’s a Title 1 school (which means that it qualifies for federal funding because “40 percent [or more] of the students are from low-income families”) but so is the other closest elementary school option—a magnet to which we could have applied. (We were not zoned for the two most talked-about public elementary schools on the east side of Los Angeles, both of which are not Title 1.) And so after touring our neighborhood school—for clarity (and fun), let’s call it Tater Tot Elementary—we decided to give it a try. It was only kindergarten after all.
But in the final weeks of preschool as the parental small talk at pick-up and birthday parties turned to where we’d decided to enroll our kid next year, I got an even clearer sense of how outside the norm our choice was. When I answered with the name of our school, the location of which was a three-minute drive from the preschool, most parents hadn’t heard of it.
They were like: “Tater Tot?”
And I was like: “Yeah, Tater Tot. Like the stubby little French fry.” I held my thumb and forefinger up to show how big a tater tot was.
Of the two separate parents who had heard of Tater Tot–because they were zoned for that school–they were choosing the other nearby (and lower-rated!) Title 1 public elementary school. We’ll call this school Beebop Elementary.
A little while after this, in the months before kindergarten, one of the preschool moms sent out an email to the entire preschool class pushing for parents to choose Beebop, touting its new magnet status. This was particularly annoying to me as by that point it was obvious that Beebop was becoming the newest “acceptable” public school for–let’s face it–hipster white parents. Beebop didn’t need more PR. I wanted to respond to the preschool group advocating for Tater Tot (also a magnet), but then I didn’t want to come off as weird or combative. So, ultimately, I did nothing. (Except six years later, I’m now writing about it!) #weird #combative
I could write so much more about how much this choice to send our kids to their local school has separated us from our peers. About the other instances since preschool of meeting kids who live in the neighborhood but whose parents didn’t choose Tater Tot. I could write about the cultural differences, too–the way that Tater Tot doesn’t have fundraisers where you have to pay $50 to get in, how I’m seemingly on-average a decade older than the parents of my kids’ friends. But for the sake of time, we need to fast forward to 2020, to Covid, and the homeless encampment.
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