Perhaps Resistance Isn't Really Futile

A North Texas winter sky

Since my last post, I've been experiencing what many like-minded folk have, when practical solutions to current political chaos seem, well, futile. I've often joked that with all of the artificial gadgets that now occupy my body (chief among them an artificial aortic valve--but also stents in old bypass grafts and interocular lenses in both eyes) I'm well on my way to Borghood. The Collective's warning upon meeting any new species is that resistance to assimilation is futile. Try as one might, becoming a fellow cyborg is inescapable. 

Now that this country is in the process of being overwhelmed by the Collective-like apparatus of the fomenters of Project 2025 (including our current president and his minion-in-chief--or is it the other way around?), finding ways to escape the doomsday scenarios that emerge daily seems unlikely, if not (yet) a completely futile effort.

And so, rather than give in to the probably-inevitable cultural and political emergence of true dystopia, and given that most of us (especially fixed-income retirees with ties to hearth, home, and animals) aren't well fitted to actual Revolution, I thought I'd share some of the strategies I've been pursuing to combat utter depression and ease unavoidable anxiety. If you are in a position to actively Do Something (or, as Revrunner advised in a comment after reading my last post, to follow Nancy Pelosi's advice to stop agonizing and start organizing), please do. Please do. Alas, my days of protesting, marching, and sitting in are long behind me, so I have to content myself with sending a few bucks to worthy causes. And--as a few of my loyal readers have advised--keep blogging.

It's probably a very good idea to keep reading, as well, since there are so many wonderful writers and websites and newsletters out there that I keep running across during my weekly exercises in rabbitholery. In terms of actual strategy, here's an idea that's working wonders with my attitude and with keeping my brain from shriveling up and crawling somewhere dark and dank: Re-read the people whose work got you where you are today, intellectually, politically, religiously, or whereverly. For example, I'm currently in the midst of rereading Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea works.  Shortly after her death in 2018, I was given the collection of her stories (in the volume at the link). It's a heavy tome, and so I've taken to reading it downstairs in my living-room comfy chair, then continuing with individual volumes upstairs when I go to bed. The troubled universe she describes in the books is disturbingly like ours in its current configuration, minus the mages and magic. But her astonishingly wise take on human frailty--race, gender, economics, art, craft, and the nature of wisdom itself--is both frighteningly prescient and reassuring at the same time. Even though I generally prefer science fiction over fantasy, I have long enjoyed these books and stories. But the science fiction segment of her work explores many of the same themes, which novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Telling consider in equal depth. [Even though I haven't joined their affiliate program, I would urge anyone who wants to buy these books to order from Bookshop.org, or directly from the publishers, rather than to enrich Mr. Bezos more than we have to. Another option: buy them used from a local bookshop.]

I also plan to revisit Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which begins in what was then the "near future" of 2024 (the book was first published in 1993) and in the very LA neighborhoods (Altadena and Pasadena) that have been devastated by the recent fires. Although Butler died in 2006, her legacy has survived in part because of her own prophetic vision--and the diligence with which her readers preserve her work and its messages. 

In addition to reading, I urge folks to write--to blog, to start a Substack, to send letters to the editors of local newspapers, and to avoid the attention-culture as much as possible. Although I do have an Instagram account, I only use it to follow a few writers and a local prairie gardener. I use Pinterest only as a curatorial tool for myself; I don't engage with anyone on it. I visit Quora less and less, and usually just to answer questions about cookery and being old. I've avoided twitterhood entirely, and see no reason to subscribe even to Bluesky--although if you find such a platform necessary, it's probably the best available choice at the moment. I try to subscribe to media populated only by folks who think and write about what they're thinking, but when I do, I resist requests to follow platform "recommendations." I will shortly be going through my own blog roll to make sure any links are active, relevant, and worthwhile. If you're interested in the cultural can of worms the Attention Economy has dumped on us, try reading Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing [a web search will turn up videos, workshops, and discussions on the book] or Chris Hayes's The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. [Again, there's a great deal online about this book, including interviews and Hayse's own podcast.] 

The benefits one can derive from keeping a journal in dark times seem, at the moment, immeasurable. In part because of what I often describe as "sleep-related marble-leaking" I tend to forget things quickly. It does, therefore, help considerably to spend an hour or so several times a week trying to record things that might be needed at some point in the future. My father's deathbed advice to my children was to "write at the end of your stint," which I've taken in earnest during the last decade or so. But don't wait! Do it now! My son will be fifty next year, and although I can plainly remember the jollity with which he posted a sign on my office door (during his brief studenthood at the Art Institute) announcing my own fiftieth birthday, that's just another indication of how quickly it all goes by. And keeping journals (I now have several, on reading/thinking, cookery, gardening, and design ideas) helps organize the brain, provides a creative outlet, and gives you something to do with all the free time you have if you give up futzing around on Tik Tok or Instagram or Facebook. If you need to keep in touch with people, write them letters in email and keep a record of the correspondence. I still have the letters my father and I wrote to each other via email from about 1997 to 2004. I copied them, printed them out, and cherish them to this day. They're like journals, only with more dimensions.

Finally, try a bit of Tikkun Olam--the Jewish practice of finding ways to heal the world. The link is to a page on the Orthodox understanding of the term, and it provides some useful ways to think about taking care of an increasingly endangered planet.  Every little thing we do, especially if multiplied by others, helps to stem the tide of of demise. Keeping even a little garden, providing even a tiny bit of habitat for wild critters, home-keeping, spending time in the out-of-doors, helping neighbors, buying less stuff, driving less, using less energy,  paying attention to the planet--even simply sky-watching. 

We really do need to enjoy what we have while we have it--and to do what we can to keep from losing it. 

Genderism

Maybe it’s because I recently finished rereading the late Octavia Butler’s xenogenesis series. Or maybe it’s because I’m just getting really tired of hearing hypocrites like Newt Gingrich ranting about how gay marriage stands to destroy the structure of family values and lead America down the path to rack and ruin.

But when I read Frank Bruni’s article in today’s Times, Genetic or Not, Gay Won’t Go Away I couldn’t stop thinking about the way gender has been treated through most of history on this planet: there are only two (male and female), male is inherently superior, and females are primarily baby-making machines.

Butler’s wonderful books, Dawn, Adulthood Rights, and Imago (later reissued in a single volume as Lilith's Brood), consider the impact of introducing a third gender into the mix, but it’s really rather more complicated than that. Hers is a post-apocalyptic earth visited and rescued by a race of traders in genetic material who provide humankind with a path toward survival after they’ve damned near blown themselves to smithereens. But human beliefs about gender specificity (and proper roles for women and men) hinder the evolutionary possibilities available to the survivors.

In our present-day, so far pre-apocalyptic world, we seem so bent on making sure everyone follows the traditional paths—especially those codified in religious texts—that we end up falling into camps that don’t do much to expand possibilities. We either support gay rights because we think they have no choice (i.e. it's all in their genes), or we condemn all varieties of sexual difference because some Bible or other says it’s an abomination (whether or not the text of that Bible actually says so).

Bruni points out that whether or not someone is genetically programmed toward a particular gender doesn’t matter. Gay people just aren’t inclined to change, and there’s no real reason for them to do so.

It occurred to me while reading Butler’s novels that we really don’t have just two genders anyway. There are homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, heterosexuals and asexuals; some people may be more than one over the period of a lifetime. And trying to fit everybody into two convenient categories doesn’t really seem to do anyone any good.

Pronouncements about the sanctity of marriage based on ignorance don’t make things any better. If family values (loving parents taking care of well-loved and guided children; familial loyalty and affection; extended families) are so important, it seems to me that we should be allowing them to spread wherever they can sprout. In my own experience, some of the most engaging, respectful, creative, and clearly loved children I’ve ever met have been raised by gay people who may or may not be their biological parents. And one of the best consequences I can think of is that none of these children feels compelled to fit into any particular role just because he or she is a he or a she.

Even when I'm talking about art history, I find myself pointing out gender disparity in that vast span of human experience between the Paleolithic (when men may not have understood their role in procreation) and the development of agriculture (when they seem to have decided that they had everything to do with making babies). What anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher once called “the pernicious analogy” (semen = seed) developed during the Neolithic beginnings of farming (which seems to have suggested “planting” the “seed” in the womb, where it would be nurtured as in fertile soil), and was followed by the notion that women were merely empty vessels just waiting to host a little homunculus. Inexplicably, however, if the woman didn't bear sons it was her fault. Sigh.

Things are only now beginning to look up. When I was a fourth-grader, I wasn’t skipped to a higher grade, despite evidence of some intellectual talent, because we hadn’t covered fractions yet and girls weren’t “good in math.” But my male classmate was skipped because boys were supposed to be innately much better at quantitative skills. Nowadays, girls are much more frequently encouraged to excel in whatever they can, but that glass ceiling persists, and true gender equality still seems to be a long way off.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that consideration of multiple genders isn’t really even on the radar at the moment. Human beings seem to be really good at partitioning out “otherness” in terms of color, religion, culture, and/or political economy. Of course, we still use mere otherness as a reason to discriminate, and that’s not likely to change soon, either.

Being able to label someone as a deviant from the norm used to be the purview of despots (witness the concept of Degeneration popular in the 1930s, which became one of the excuses for annihilating Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals). If we were to expand the concept of "normal" to include not only all races, colors, creeds, and politics, but multiple genders as well, who would the bigots be able to pick on?

Image credit: 3D expanded gender symbols modified and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ju gatsu mikka.