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AFTER TRUMP WAS ELECTED IN 2016, we took to the streets in our pink hats, with righteous enthusiasm. Though we wondered how we would keep it up for four years, the moment contrasts with the exhausted present, when even reading the paper can feel like too much. After having campaigned in Pennsylvania most weekends in the fall of 2024, I have attended exactly one protest this year. Like many, I am overwhelmed; it is hard to know how to fight effectively.
But there may be more to the story. At the ROOM 2.25 Roundtable in April, Rina Lazar, Mohamad Kebbewar, and Anastasios Gaitanidis looked at the life-sapping loneliness that comes with being both a victim and perpetrator. In our discussion, we explored the effect, both internally and in the world, of passively looking away as a particular form of hatred.
I have been haunted since childhood by concerns about being a “bystander.” As a descendant of Puritans, I am interested in the possibility that this preoccupation is woven, at least in part, from transgenerationally transmitted American themes of vitality and guilt, and also from deeply embedded questions of ostracism. Riddled with this toxic mix, we slip and drift. Perhaps, then, we fail to access the energy we had in 2016, or even last fall. While my people hold no monopoly on passivity, I am thinking about how to reclaim our capacity to work in this moment.
As a child born in the late 1950s, I was haunted by two related images: I wondered if I would have done enough to stand up to the Nazis if I had lived in pre-war Germany. I also fretted over an ad from an international aid organization that offered the possibility of sponsoring children, which featured the picture of a starving girl, and the text “You can help Ana for $12 a month, or you can turn the page.” Of course there are familial reasons for my preoccupations, but today I am interested in exploring cultural strands in my background.
On first blush, my worry made littl