Comments
RED QUEEN IN LA - The Democrats are in divided, keening mode to be sure, but (a) we’re in better shape than TheOtherGuys and (b) there was No Horse.
No one brought a horse inside the convention center in Sacramento (November, 2023), despite what you may have heard. There was a lot of drama at the Party Convention; there is a lot of real drama in the world. But everyone needs to keep their powers of observation – and credulousness – under tighter leash.
This crisis of credulity has been growing in scale, and impact, for a long while now. The age of internet and information-overload contributes. Covid certainly exposed just how hard it can be to really figure out what is going on, despite or even because of this torrent of information at one’s fingertips. It has become manifest how hard it is to locate a droplet of Truth among a sea of alternative facts.
So perhaps the confabulist’s tracery last month, around the events which upset California’s Democratic conventioneers inside Sacramento’s “SAFE” Credit UnionConvention Center, should be less surprising.
There was a horse. It punctuated a crowd determined to arrest attention on human rights abuses visited upon Gaza following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 on Israel.
But the horse didn’t go inside the convention center, wouldn’t fit through the door, couldn’t ride the escalators, even while the protesters did.
Protesters were in fact in and out of the extensive convention facilities all day long Saturday, November 18, 2023, exercising their right of free speech and association, singing outside the convention hall, marching around inside of it, upstaging senate candidates, provoking emotions on and offstage, rebranding the Party’s no-consensus endorsement vote into a plurality-win for the octogenarian “peace candidate” Lee.
Protestor’s chants echoed throughout halls all afternoon. But come suppertime following a scuffle with security at one entrance, perhaps due to threat from the pointy-end of a finial, raucous protestors settled into a large atrium outside where the evening’s caucus meetings and hospitality suites were scheduled. The building was briefly and electronically locked down, with a lot of fear filling the interstices where information was lacking.
The events comprise unfortunate ironies and missed opportunities. But also deep gratitude is owed all those involved regarding what was essentially a violence-free exercise of civil disobedience.
Unpopular feelings in surround sound
My own feelings may be unpopular on “both” sides, but it is also the case that surely anything said at all will offend not just someone, but everyone.
And that is a terrible, anti-democratic state of affairs. Niemöller’s proverbial poem rings powerfully across all these years, because failing to speak out is not just a missed opportunity in the moment, but far more profoundly, it normalizes tacit support.
Whether in righteous indignation or as an excuse to avoid reactionary outcry, clutching emotional pearls of offense amounts to the perfect foil for… hearing. That’s what is at stake when fear and offense are thrown up: hearing. And rationality. Horses can’t ride escalators and raucous cries don’t signal threat. We cannot afford to allow reason or listening to be frozen out.
I saw a collection of peoples mortified at the death and destruction meted upon their people, their children – gratuitously and indiscriminately, now, independent of context. Just here and now: devastation. With no recourse of being heard, the cries and tactics escalate in a desperate bid simply to be heard. As an elected representative I feel it is my responsibility to listen. I was shocked to feel and see so many of my fellow delegates governed not by rationality and responsibility, by what I understand is fear – true fear, presumably, but not justifiably. In the crowd of the disaffected, I never once felt fear. I felt anguish, from the protestors, gradually replaced with my own anguish in understanding how fortified againstunderstanding, my own fellow delegates had grown.
My discontent is deep – with the protestors for silencing the caucuses specifically where the most activist among us look for their opportunity to express precisely that outrage conveyed by the protestors. With my fellow delegates for pedantically insisting that words are an expression of violence rather than the last, only hope of avoiding it. With the Party for promising punishment upon those seeking voice and action for injustice, the prerogative of our politics.
And I am dismayed to feel so little agreement in all this among my fellow party representatives. To me, this is all obvious: we must all of us listen, hear, act with good faith and ethically. Performative outrage is not a serious reaction, and whether the specifics of this particular outrage are meritorious relatively is never the point: addressing immediate pain is. In my view, there can be no equivocation: There must be a CEASEFIRE in Gaza now. These are preconditions for when and how listening starts. There is nothing normal about killing upwards of seven thousand children, of fatalities that are reportedly 70% women and children.
And there is nothing normal in insisting that slogans are demonic proxies, that pain is a ploy, that irrational thinking is justified: War Is Not Healthy For Children And Other Living Things. Democrats should not deny this, Americans should not support it, and no one should believe that a horse recapitulated Trump’s machismo via escalator.
(Sara Roos is a politically active resident of Mar Vista, a biostatistician, the parent of two teenaged LAUSD students and a CityWatch contributor, who blogs at redqueeninla.com.)
