Changing seasons often heighten my emotions. I am unsettled, agitated, sometimes with a rare urge for a drink but today I want to turn that energy into writing. I want to write my way through the stuckness, knowing I’ll never reach the Certainty Centre.
At Christmas my son got a voucher and at the beginning of the summer I got around to using it - he wanted a water pistol he told me, ok, I thought and went online and after a few minutes found a cheap and fast option, a pair - one for both boys. A couple of days later, when a friend was visiting, the delivery driver arrived and I was embarrassed as he handed me the Amazon parcel containing big hunks of new plastic moulded in imitation of automatic weapons. I am part of the problem, I thought.
I was asked to sign an open letter calling for the UK government to boycott Israel. I look on the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement website list of priority targets while sitting at my desk and see my HP Printer - I just bought an expensive new ink cartridge - and the telly which has a Disney+ account which the children watch. Earlier in the year we got an insurance payment for our stolen van from AXA. I am part of the problem, I think.
I am writing this in a spirit of honesty and guilt. So often I find that people point fingers and see themselves as blameless and but I feel highly aware of my own complicity in the problems in the world: in consumerism, individualism, complacency. I find that our comfortable western lives are deeply economically entangled with the military industrial complex and with Israeli interests and that this is probably why - in complicated and horrifying ways - the genocide continues.
For the last year. I’ve had this churning uncertainty about my work, as a ‘memoirist’, as a ‘nature writer’. I’ve been exploring the seashore connected to the sea that people in Gaza are forbidden from entering. I’ve been researching regenerative agriculture when farmland in Palestine has been razed. I’m writing books when libraries and universities have been destroyed. I’m writing about conservation on a laptop made using minerals that fuel brutal conflicts in Congo.
I’m not going to finish upbeat. I just don’t know. I haven’t bought anything off Amazon since the water guns. I can find almost anything I want or need second hand. We stopped our Disney account. I explain to the children why I don’t like them playing shooting games. I know that problems are structural and there is only so much we can do as individuals but it’s a good place to start. Last night I went to a meeting of our local Green party and that felt like the right place to be. When I got home I heard about the bombing of a children’s hospital in Gaza City.
It’s always difficult when we’re aware of the issues as well as our part in them. We feel impotent and complicit in equal measure. At the same time, I think it’s just as important to acknowledge our complicity while also cutting ourselves some slack. The money we pay in tax funds our own oppression as well as the oppression of others. And yet, we need to work to survive and support our families. It would be impossible for most people to stop going into work. I don’t order from Amazon myself, but oftentimes the seller will send my parcel through their postal service anyway. Some things are really just out of our hands.
In many cases, we have no choice but to work within our limitations, while at the same time pushing against them. There are people who do have the power to stop what’s happening in Gaza, to reduce the effects of climate change, to end homelessness, et al. They’re on the telly everyday. We can acknowledge our complicity, and we should, but not at the expense of directing all our efforts, our anger, toward those who shape our conditions in the first place. It sounds like you’re on the right track anyway.
I struggle with this so much too, Amy. Somehow I think we have to hold the paradoxes, as ever. We are guilty, but if that guilt then traps us in the hole of despair and yet more self-obsession, we help no one. We make the world brighter when we live and enjoy our lives and our people and environments without the anxiety of overthinking, but we must also give up claiming moral superiority and thinking shallowly in ways that ignore our interconnection. We can all choose to change something for the better but we will still always fail someone or something. It's a bruising, complicated and hard place, isn't it?? It helps to talk about it, thank you.