Eira Tansey

Posts Tagged ‘deeply-personal’

Bearing witness for our kin

The big change around our house these days is quite literally around our house. Working with an organic landscaping business, we ripped out our front yard and replaced the grass with a variety of native and pollinator-friendly plants. Whenever we tell people about this, one of the first questions folks have is “How do the neighbors feel?”

Bee balm

A robin playing near the ferns

I’m delighted to report the neighbors are pretty into it. The front yard still requires a considerable amount of weeding (something we hope will taper off as the plants grow together), so I’m often out working in the front yard on weekends. I’ve met more of my neighbors just in the last few months than I ever did mowing my lawn, and many of them stop to say how much they enjoy our yard.

But the sweetest joy of our yard has been seeing the bees and other pollinators working the plants. The world may be collapsing around us, and indeed bees are in the insect canary in the coal mine. But I feel like with every bunch of flowers, I’m throwing them a small life raft. There are few everyday sights that move me as much as watching bees enthusiastically buzz around flowers.

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I recently saw Robin Kimmerer speak at FGC Gathering (a large conference for Quakers). Kimmerer is a professor in the SUNY system, and the author of Braiding Sweetgrass. Robin’s talk was incredibly moving, but what stayed with me was her call for transitioning from the “it-ness” we ascribe to non-human animals and plants and natural elements. We refer to birds as ‘it,’ we refer to trees as ‘it,’ we refer to rivers as ‘it.’

Kimmerer called on us to consider using kin as “a pronoun for the revolution”, inspired by her indigenous language, for the creation around us. She notes how and why to use “kin”:

Kin are ripening in the fields; kin are nesting under the eaves; kin are flying south for the winter, come back soon. Our words can be an antidote to human exceptionalism, to unthinking exploitation, an antidote to loneliness, an opening to kinship.

The day after I heard Robin speak, I was checking the news and saw one of the most profound acts of bearing witness to our kin in recent memory. A mother with her child on her hip confronted Scott Pruitt, a man who probably thinks of anything winged or feathered or mossed or leafed as “it”, saying to him:

“Hi, I just wanted to urge you to resign because of what you’re doing to the environment and our country,” Kristin Mink told Pruitt inside a Teaism restaurant in downtown Washington, not far from the EPA’s Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters. “This is my son. He loves animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. Meanwhile, you’re slashing strong fuel standards for cars and trucks, for the benefit of big corporations.”

And a day later Scott Pruitt resigned.

I don’t know whether he resigned because of the mother and her child. I don’t know if it was because Pruitt realized that being a sleazy capitalist selling out future generations involves less harassment if it’s dictated from a board room than a public office. I don’t know if all that righteous Quaker energy pouring out of Toledo was bending something in Washington DC.

But I know that bearing witness for our kin, kin who are collapsing en masse, kin who cannot speak for themselves, is one of the most sacred acts we can engage in as a way of trying to repair so much of what has been broken in the march towards elevating innovation over creation. I’m so grateful to that mother and her child for speaking out for our kin.

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A few weeks after I was in Toledo I joined about 75 others to go speak out against proposed deregulation of Ohio River pollution control standards at a public hearing, the only public hearing to be held in a region of 5 million people who get their drinking water from the river. As I was driving down the highway the only thing I prayed for was to pack the hearing. And as I crossed the Brent Spence bridge and could see the Ohio river below out of the edge of my vision, I silently said to kin, “I’ll do the best I can for you.”

Many members of the various faith and political communities I’m connected to showed up. And then I yelled at the commissioners for my allotted 5 minutes for public comment and after that I ended up getting interviewed by a local news station.

This is what I said in my testimony:

Good evening commissioners. My name is Eira Tansey. I am from Cincinnati, and I get my drinking water from the Ohio River. I am a member of the Metro Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky Democratic Socialists of America. The Democratic Socialists of America is an organization of over 45,000 people across the United States fighting against a capitalist system that silences the voices of working people.

And that is why I am here today: because only a few years after the water crises of Flint and Standing Rock, we are on the verge of another nightmare in which regulators are more interested in carrying out the wish list of polluting industry than protecting the health of the public.

Make no mistake: the public does not want this commission to abdicate its authority and responsibility for setting regional unified pollution control standards. Many of us want you to make existing standards stronger. Over 97% of the responses from the 900 pages of first round public comments called on you to do just that.

We have been told that a majority of ORSANCO’s commissioners favors Alternative 2, a path towards deregulation that happens to line up with the interests and stated preferences of polluting industry. We have been told that the federal Clean Water Act is sufficient to clean up the river, but this is anything but reassuring. As Mary from West Virginia wrote to you on February 22: “If state and EPA agencies’ work is adequate, why do I keep reading that the Ohio River is the most polluted inland waterway in the country?”

Ohio’s status as one of the dirtiest rivers in the country can be directly traced to several of the companies who have requested this commission to gut pollution standards. Alcoa, AKSteel, American Electric Power, ArcelorMittal, FirstEnergy, Duke Energy, Jupiter and Aluminum have all had dozens of Clean Water Act violations in just the last 3 years.

The majority of the commission has not acted in good faith. ORSANCO’s own reporting has found over 100 pollutants for which it has issued standards that are not found elsewhere within federal or state guidelines. It is outrageous that the only public hearing during this comment period is happening at an out of the way hotel in the middle of the week. It suggests the commission is not very interested in hearing from the public. So we must ask – why is a majority of ORSANCO leadership more interested in protecting polluting industries than in protecting the 5 million individuals who depend on the Ohio River for their drinking water?

Could it be because half of the commissioners have ties to polluting industry themselve? They have either worked directly in the mining and energy industries, or they represented them as clients of their consulting firms and law practices. Commissioner Snavely of Kentucky retired from Excel Mining. Commissioner Caperton of West Virginia worked at Massey Energy. Commissioner Flannery of West Virginia is on the National Coal Council. Commission chair Potesta of West Virginia has represented clients like DuPont, who has been one of the worst polluters of all.

This is not sound science or policy making. This is the fox guarding the henhouse door. If the commission guts regional pollution control standards, it is selling out the health and safety of everyone living downstream from polluting industry for the ability of corporations to make more money.

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I don’t know what’s next, for the river, for the bees in my yard, for the animals and the toddlers who love them being carried on their mother’s hips. I’m worried for my kin. Bearing witness on their behalf is the only thing I know how to do right now.

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A decade later, and circling back [some thoughts about visiting New Orleans]

Ten years ago last week, I received a job offer to work at Tulane University as a paraprofessional archivist. I was graduating from the University of Cincinnati in the summer of 2008, at the same time the economy was collapsing. I had been a student worker at UC’s archives, and thought maybe I’d like to become an archivist. So I sent tons of applications for staff positions out into the wind, hoping I could get a paraprofessional job for a while before deciding whether I wanted to pursue my MLIS. The only response I got was from Tulane, and all my interviewing was over the phone. The first time I ever set foot in Louisiana was when I drove down there, with my dad, to move in to my new city.

I spent five years at Tulane, during which I got my MLIS while I was working full-time. It was probably the most formative five years of my life. New Orleans is where I became an archivist, where I met my husband, where I learned a lot about how the history of a city as complicated as New Orleans is both a warning and inspiration for how to navigate a chaotic future. I moved back to Cincinnati in 2013 for professional and family reasons, and I’ve now lived back here almost as long as I lived in New Orleans. As a lifelong Ohioan, Louisiana is the only other place I’ve ever built a life, and I carry a bit of New Orleans in my heart always.

I’ve been back to New Orleans a couple times since moving back to Ohio, but the trip  back for this year’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section conference hit me right in the Feelings Department. The 10-year anniversary of my job offer at Tulane also meant that I’ve been an archivist for a decade. In 2008 I took my first leap into archives in New Orleans, and in 2018 here I am, back in the same city where I got my start, presenting about the impacts of climate change on the profession. I go up for tenure later this year, which comes with all of its own anxieties. Cincinnati is my home – it’s where my family lives, my roots are, where I have a house, and where my husband and I are very deliberately cultivating our communities for the long haul. But I’m so profoundly grateful that even several years later, New Orleans still feels like a very familiar second home.

New Orleans is not an easy place to live in. When I moved down in 2008, I had to evacuate just a couple months later for the first mandatory evacuation after Katrina. I rode out another hurricane a few years later, but my now-husband’s apartment lost power for several nights. The heat was insomnia inducing, to the point where we had to go visit some wealthy family friends with a generator out in the suburbs just so I could sleep for a few hours. When my husband and I had been back in Cincinnati for several months, at one point we turned to each other and said, “We haven’t had to boil our water for several months.”  My salary in New Orleans was just a hair above the poverty line, and there was a house down the street from my second apartment in the Lower Garden District where a man had been murdered in a mistaken identity drug dealing ordeal. I jogged past it early on the mornings I would go for a run, and I tried not to look at the front door very hard.

But the thing about New Orleans is that there is no place like it on Earth. I sewed a new costume every year for Mardi Gras. I learned how to cook red beans and rice. I was too poor to drink good beer, so Miller High Life will always taste like a damn good night out. My friends and I made bike maps of the city, organized zines in the info shop, and baked each other deliberately ugly birthday cakes and beautiful homemade king cakes. I doubt I ever went more than a week or two without dancing at some live music. Before I moved in with the man I eventually married, I had four roommates – three of whom were locals. One, the daughter of a shrimping family, helped me find out my shellfish allergy wasn’t as bad as I thought it was and I’ve been safely eating shrimp and crawfish since. One made the best damn gumbo I’ve ever had and then his family guided me through my first Passover Seder. One would bring home fresh soy milk her mother made a few miles away in New Orleans East. I learned a lot about how to be sensitive to an entire city’s collective trauma around being drowned and forgotten. “Y’all” entered my vocabulary and has never left since, and I hope it never will.

It felt so good and so right last week to see old colleagues and friends, dance to brass bands, eat the kind of food that the Midwest can never manage to turn out, and sweat in the ubiquitous sauna heat of the city. This country – this world – is profoundly lucky to have New Orleans. And I feel so fortunate I got to experience it first hand for the time that I did.

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Congratulations, Ireland

(I originally wrote this on Facebook on May 26, 2018, the day my Irish sisters, brothers, and cousins voted to repeal the country’s abortion ban. And now Argentina might be moving in a similar direction. As the US slides into ever more repression of women’s basic human rights, it’s been a joy to witness these victories across the world.)

I’ve been crying on and off with joy and thankfulness since Ireland voted to repeal its abortion ban. I’m so glad to report that it looks like the tiny village of Gurteen in County Sligo, where my branch of the Tanseys came from, went narrowly for the Yes to repeal, by just a few dozen votes. I wrote a long reflection last night trying to figure out why I couldn’t stop bawling my eyes out. Here it is:

On the evening of the 2016 federal election, my dad was the one who phoned to tell me the election was called for Trump. I had gone into a total media blackout after finishing up my duties as a poll worker. I guess that after busting my ass for more than 12 hours to do my part for participatory democracy, I’m glad I learned the shittiest global news of 2016 from someone I love rather than from a TV screen.

Today I got to deliver equally dramatic election news to my father, but I’m glad to say it was far more joyful: that Ireland repealed its abortion ban. I had a much more emotional reaction to this than I anticipated – I saw the exit polls saying the vote to repeal was almost certain as I was getting home from work, and I started crying in the middle of the sidewalk before I even walked through the door.

I think, in large part, my emotional reaction is because of my father.

My dad carries a lot of identities, but probably the most consistent one is that of being an Irish-American. He has a picture of Ben Bulben as his laptop wallpaper. He has an old faded map of the counties of Ireland hanging on his wall. He has shelves and shelves of books about Irish and Irish-American history. He constantly rants about the Notre Dame “fighting Irish” mascot and the phrase “paddy wagons”: both are profoundly offensive to Brian Tansey. The only thing he finds more offensive than Irish stereotypes are people like Bill O’Reilly: Irish-Americans who forgot what kind of discrimination Irish immigrants once faced in the US, but who now turn around and spit on today’s immigrants.

My dad is old enough (85) to have briefly experienced the old-school anti-Irish sentiment that once circulated in bourgie WASP circles, and still talks about the time he got called a “mick” when he was attending Columbia University in the 50s. My dad schooled me on Irish-American history starting with coffin ships up through Irish-American city ward machine politics, and it was threaded through with tons of colorful family legends: like how when James Tansey left County Sligo in the 1890s with his buddy for Liverpool’s docks, they were stumped on where to go next. The coin flip decision turned up America – otherwise it was Australia.

And as if you needed any further proof of how seriously my dad takes his Irish-American identity, well, uh, he’s the one who named me “Eira.” Which, at least in my dad’s telling, was a feminine homage to Éire (the Irish word for Ireland). I’ve yet to find any scholars who can verify this as an accurate variation. Oh well, it’s on the birth certificate. And so every day, when I have to spell out my name on the phone or have someone ask me about it’s origins, I’m reminded that a larger part of my genealogy traces to Ireland, and that my Dad sure wanted me to be reminded of this every day until I expire.

My dad and I have travelled to Ireland together, twice. The first time was when I was studying abroad at the University of Sheffield back in 2006, and the second time was when I was living in New Orleans, in 2011. Both times we got a car and drove up to County Sligo where our Irish ancestors came from. On our most recent trip, we visited the tiny village of Gurteen in County Sligo where Dad’s grandfather came from. We visited with Father Joe, the parish priest, who took us on a tour of the area and pulled out some marriage records from his office desk that mentioned some of our family names. Father Joe even helped us meet and connect to some distant relatives. Dad still talks about the salmon dinner Father Joe served us, I still remember the Guinness pints we drank at the bar where there were pictures of the local darts team with men who had the last name Tansey and the same dark curly hair as mine.

With our newly found relatives! 02

While we were there, it was very clear that the country was moving apart from the church. This was when the Irish leadership and the Dail were told telling the Vatican off for their handling of the child abuse scandals. The stories of how generations of Irish women were systematically abused at the hands of the Catholic laundries were well-known. Ireland was definitely finding its way to an identity that stood apart from Catholicism. It was so affirming to see Ireland resoundingly and democratically pass gay marriage a few years ago. And now this? Y’all. I’m so happy.

Where I live in Ohio, it’s a never-ending horror show of how much politicians want to destroy women’s fundamental human rights to bodily autonomy. I have no doubt that if Pence and Kasich have their way, they would immediately try to create their own 8th Amendment in the United States. Goodness knows they’ve both tried everything up to that point in Indiana and Ohio. I’ve been mulling over what my moral responsibilities will be to my fellow women, and wondering how much we’ll have to relearn the lessons of the Jane Collective. Or more likely, Women on Web, which has helped many Irish women obtain an abortion in the last several years.

Victories for women’s fundamental human rights are so precious and rare these days. Every day I am reminded that I live in a country that profoundly hates women, that does not trust women, and that is led by men who only value women as grabbable pussies or as reproductive chattel.

To see that there is a country in the world today where a majority of voters cast a vote to trust women as opposed to inscribing hatred for them is extremely moving. And tracing some of my own background to Ireland makes me feel a profound connection to all the women whose stories were never told, many of whom suffered terribly, but whose work reverberates across the generations.

Thank you, Ireland, for giving us a bit of light in these dark times. I am so proud, but more importantly, I am inspired.

Guinness Storehouse

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This machine coddles fascists (or, why I’m leaving Twitter)

President Trump has engaged in utterly disturbing verbal threats of nuclear war for months, and on January 2 he escalated it to this:

Despite Twitter’s recent efforts to rein in the hellscape it has created, it still gives a pass to the President because he is noteworthy, because of loopholes created for military and government officials, and because Twitter somehow believes that enabling bellicose threats is part of “necessary discussion.”

If you really want the honest truth of why Twitter will never ban Donald Trump from its service, you don’t need to read their public relations statements. Read what they tell the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Twitter is a company that measures its success by how many active users (measured by both monthly and daily metrics, aka MAUs and DAUs) it has. Looking at their most recent SEC filing, it’s clear that the company is working on increasing daily active user activity – likely because they’ve probably hit saturation points with how many new users are using the system. SEC filings require companies to disclose risks, and Twitter states:

If we fail to grow our user base, or if user engagement or ad engagement on our platform decline, our revenue, business and operating results may be harmed.

The size of our user base and our users’ level of engagement are critical to our success. We had 330 million average MAUs in the three months ended September 30, 2017, representing approximately a 4% increase from 317 million average MAUs in the three months ended September 30, 2016 (see “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations – Note About Our MAU Adjustment” above). DAUs for the three months ended September 30, 2017 increased 14% year over year. Our financial performance has been and will continue to be significantly determined by our success in growing the number of users and increasing their overall level of engagement on our platform as well as the number of ad engagements. We anticipate that our user growth rate will continue to slow over time as the size of our user base increases. […] If people do not perceive our products and services to be useful, reliable and trustworthy, we may not be able to attract users or increase the frequency of their engagement with our platform and the ads that we display.

Twitter then goes on to state the following, something which is so brazen in its denial of the problem it has created, it’s actually kind of amazing (emphasis mine):

“[…]if we are not able to address user concerns regarding the safety and security of our products and services or if we are unable to successfully prevent abusive or other hostile behavior on our platform, the size of our user base and user engagement may decline. We rely on the sale of advertising services for the substantial majority of our revenue and a decline in the number of users, user growth rate, or user engagement, including as a result of the loss of world leaders, government officials, celebrities, athletes, journalists, sports teams, media outlets and brands who generate content on Twitter, advertisers [sic] may deter new advertisers from using our products or services or cause current advertisers to reduce their spending with us or cease doing business with us, which would harm our business and operating results.”

None of this is shocking or surprising for a company that notes the “substantial majority of our revenue is currently generated from third parties advertising on Twitter.” So when I see Twitter banning Next Door Neighbor Nazis and not banning Trump, I see Twitter trying to have it both ways: attempting to show they’re “doing something,” but also doubling-down on the fact that “world leaders and government officials” are the cash cows that keep on driving engagement. In other words, Twitter does not distinguish between any world leaders threatening nuclear annihilation and world leaders attempting to keep us from sliding into the gates of hell. They are simply content generators, like the rest of us, that lead to advertising. Global consequences be damned.

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After the 2016 presidential election, many people implored us to determine where our line was. To identify where angels fear to tread among where there be dragons. To draw a line in the sand. We were cautioned against letting the unthinkable become normalized, that doing so would be to cede the grounds of not only the American democratic process, but our basic humanity.

The problem with this framing is that it conjured up scenes of going up against the barricades, of hoping that the US would suddenly be inspired to go on a general strike when most folks had never marched around and chanted. It set up expectations that America’s citizens would run a marathon when most of us were still learning to walk for the first time.

Over the last year I feel like I’ve been plunged back into being a teenager – when my political baptism was protest against the Iraq War. My country invaded Iraq before I could vote. When I was 17, I somehow convinced my boring west-side-of-Cincinnati Episcopal church to kick in some money to help fund a bus of protesters to go to DC. I spent many dreary afternoons shouting chants on a street corner I can see from the windows of the library that I work at 14 years later.

As the war drums start beating again, there is at least one line that has become increasingly uncomfortable for me over the last several days. I can no longer use a platform serving as a propaganda outlet for normalizing and trivializing the horrors of nuclear war. This is why I’m leaving Twitter, after using it regularly for over seven years.

Twitter is clearly committed to amplifying the voice of a racist demagogue with impulse control and the unilateral authority to launch nuclear weapons, and this is in direct conflict with my opposition to war and militarism. The President clearly has many platforms he can use to spread his propaganda besides Twitter – George W. Bush certainly managed to do so well before the advent of social media. By not shutting this down, Twitter is saying is that there is no line in the sand for them; that allowing their service to become a tool of nuclear propaganda is preferable to any possible alternative.

Nuclear proliferation is often discussed in coldly clinical supply-chain terminology. Some state acquired uranium, another is expanding testing of missile delivery systems, etc etc. What gets left out of deterrence game theory bullshit is that banging on the war drums constitutes a form of nuclear proliferation by repeatedly putting the option on the table. As we get further away from the cultural memory of what it means to industrialize war, to efficiently kill thousands (really, millions) of people, joshing about having a nuclear button that is “much bigger,” “more powerful,” and “works” just goes to show that the very person with the unilateral authority to annihilate much of the planet within minutes is treating global holocaust like a fucking game.

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Deciding to leave Twitter is not easy. I’ve taken several breaks from Twitter before, typically during Lent. After a while, I don’t miss it that much. But I’ve always hesitated to cut the cord entirely for two reasons: Twitter has undeniably helped me accumulate a lot of social capital in my profession, and it’s been one of the most efficient and fun methods of professional networking I’ve ever found.

Archivist Twitter is a real thing, and it’s been a huge part of my professional identity formation. I joined Twitter right around the time I decided that being an archivist was the career path I would set out on. I used Twitter to follow archives conferences before I started attending them, and then I used Twitter at my first SAA to network. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations that start “hey I follow you on Twitter…”

On Twitter, I’ve found professional development opportunities, cultivated new collaborations, learned so much about my profession’s history and culture, and forged affirming and wonderful friendships that are the real deal, with people I’ve broken bread with offline, who I know will be in my life for a very long time. I strongly suspect that a lot of the public profile I’ve built within my field has been thanks to my presence on Twitter. Walking away from that is really hard.

I know how silly this must sound to people who haven’t had this experience with Twitter. Even though I’ve received some pretty ugly harassment on Twitter, my good experiences outweigh the bad. And that’s why it’s taken me months now to come to terms with exiting a service that clearly does not give a shit about the safety and stability of the world at large. I don’t know what my career will look like without the networking and informational capabilities of Twitter, or how promoting my work will change without Twitter. That’s scary in a culture that emphasizes rapid engagement, developing a voice (the nice writer word for brand), and being easy to reach for any opportunity that might land in your lap.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Quaker war tax resistance. Not because I think my decision is on the level with tax resistance, but because it’s about withdrawing one’s personal participation in the normalization of war machinery. On and off throughout history, many Quakers refused to pay taxes that fund militarism. This has often been at great cost to their livelihoods, liberty, and economic security.

I find the history of tax resistance refreshing within a current leftist atmosphere that tries to decouple personal individual morality from the political organizing work of dismantling larger systems of oppression. It’s a mistake for us to assume that choices made to reflect a personal moral stance are synonymous with the organizing work that dismantles oppression. Sometimes it’s a good thing just to make a moral choice that allows one to live with an easier conscience, even if the only person it “makes a difference to” is a single individual.

The phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is true. But it’s not an excuse to step away from examining one’s life choices, and too many people treat it as one. You must start somewhere.

We’ve confused Twitter for a commons because it is fantastic at helping us find voices we wouldn’t encounter otherwise, which makes it easy to ignore that Twitter has been enclosed from day one because its only real goal is to make money. To continue to participate in the only form of capital it has – regular participation that drives advertising – is to enable its continuance as a platform that trades in bigotry, undermines democratic processes, and now, reaps money from the proliferation of nuclear threats.

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Lord make me an instrument of thy peace

Before going to bed last night I hopped on Twitter, and Twitter was doing what it does best: providing breaking news and commentary about a heart-rending story hours before mainstream news outlet picked it up. It was the mass shooting (which, I hope and pray will be investigated and classed as an act of domestic terrorism) at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The suspect is a young white man, and 9 people have died as I write this.

This story is gutting on many levels. It breaks my heart to see a house of worship, often safe harbors for people sheltering from many of life’s storms, to be the site of such tragedy.

Many people on Twitter were saying many of the hard truths that this country — and specifically white Americans — need to wrap our heads around.

And here we are, repeating everything that much of America would like to think it solved decades ago. In particular, that an attack on a black church is terrifying precisely because it cannot be alienated from its historical context; black churches were routinely targeted during the civil rights movement, with the most horrifying act of white violence against black church-goers culminating in the deaths of four little girls.

It’s worth remembering that what’s happened since Trayvon Martin was killed is a sliver of the staggering amount of contemporary state-sanctioned and societal violence against black Americans since the passage of federal civil rights legislation. In my hometown of Cincinnati, you might know that fatal shootings by police officers happened a lot in the 1990s/early 2000s. But what’s happened in the past year is, without a doubt, a magnifying glass on how insidious and well-established structural and cultural racism continues to embed itself within America, and how saying Black Lives Matter is still heard by many white Americans as a statement, as opposed to a truth.

I think what marks the terrorism in Charleston as a particular zenith of horror is for many people, houses of worship are a bedrock of one’s community and an avenue for renewal. It’s bad enough that black Americans cannot walk down the street, spend time in their community, or be at home without being harassed, abused, and targeted by white and state-sanctioned violence. Targeting a church, a space that people rightfully expect to be safe in, and an important place in the history of black America’s struggle for justice, takes it to a whole new level of evil.

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And yet, as many people point out, if you know your history, a shooting attack on a house of worship is par for the course when hate-fueled people are looking for convenient scapegoats. This is not new, and indeed it’s happened several times in the last 10 years alone.

To recap:

In 2008, a Unitarian Universalist congregation was targeted during a children’s musical performance by a white man with “hatred of Democrats, liberals, African Americans and homosexuals.” Two people died, including “an usher who deliberately stood in front of the gunman to protect others.”

In 2010, abortion provider George Tiller was killed while he was ushering at his church, by a white man who had harassed and intimidated abortion providers since the 1990s. The gunman threatened “two others who tried to prevent his departure.”

In 2012, a Sikh gurdwara was targeted during services, by a noted white supremacist. Six people died, and the government treated the attack as an act of domestic terrorism. The president of the congregation died while trying to prevent the attacker from inflicting any further harm, and his actions helped many of the children get out of harm’s way.

In 2015, as the news develops about the Emanuel AME massacre in Charleston, we are seeing indications that the young man who perpetrated this act of terrorism also identified with white supremacy.

…and this short list doesn’t even begin to include the many acts of vandalism and intimidation against houses of worship, in particular black churches, mosques and synagogues, that are fueled by racism and bigotry.

We know in this country that one of the largest threats of domestic terrorism comes from right-wing extremists. These extremists are overwhelmingly disaffected white men who direct their anger at people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, and non-Christian faiths. But what we talk about when we talk about terrorism and community violence does not seem to indicate that we take threats of domestic terrorism carried out by white men seriously. We perpetuate white privilege by treating white gunmen as lone wolves, or people who had “mental issues,” while we hold entire communities responsible to higher standards. The point is, white privilege gives white people the permission to be judged as individuals while it does not afford the same to others:

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I did not quite appreciate the reality of violence at houses of worship until I began dating my now-fiance, who is Jewish. The first time I attended services with his family was during Rosh Hashanah, and law enforcement was very visible walking up to the synagogue. Having grown up attending suburban Episcopal churches, this sight was pretty jarring the first time I saw it (and if I’m being honest, I still haven’t gotten used to it). I have a pretty small sample size, but visible security measures and/or armed law enforcement have appeared at every Jewish congregation I’ve had the privilege to visit so far.

What does it do to people’s spiritual health to have to contemplate their own physical safety while spending time at their congregation?

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I drifted away from any semblance of spiritual practice for most of my late teens and twenties. My parents  married in a UU church, and I grew up Episcopalian. My father  attends a notably progressive Presbyterian church. For years he has been involved with  anti-death penalty activism as an expression of his faith in action. I was involved with anti-war activism when the US invaded Iraq, and many of those I worked with came from a Catholic and mainline Christian social justice background.

For much of my adult life I’ve been a “devout agnostic” — contemplating the existence of God and spiritual matters seemed like a luxury, an unknowable question that distracted from working towards the “real” questions of poverty, war, bigotry, and environmental destruction. Even as I didn’t attend church or cultivate a sense of spirituality, I still silently prayed when ambulances went by, on behalf of whoever they were heading to. I’m guessing that when an ambulance is heading your way, it might be one of the worst days of your life. I have no clue if anyone’s listening, but doing it felt like the right thing to do.

I’m not sure what flipped to inspire a search for spiritual nourishment, but it happened at some point last fall. I think it was in the aftermath of Ferguson and a feeling of growing helpless rage at the trajectory of our country. I was angry so many friends of color were terrified for their own and their children’s futures. I was angry that my fundamental human right to control my own reproductive decisions remain under serious threat. I was angry that the rich were getting richer, that destruction of the planet was a key indicator of economic growth, and how very helpless I felt.

I’m still angry about these things. I show up and do the work of activism when I can, but it still doesn’t address my inner fatigue. I knew I needed to find a way to channel my anger constructively, or else it would consume me and prevent me from being the advocate and compassionate human being I want to be. I knew I needed a community, and something led me to a Quaker meeting. The Quakers were always on my radar because of my college-era anti-war activism. I’ve been attending a meeting for several months now. While I’m not sure yet if it’s a way station or a permanent home, I  recognize it’s filling a vital spiritual need for me, in a way that I never would have anticipated had fury and rage not flung me towards something bigger than my own helplessness.

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So where does this leave us? For those of us who incorporate aspects of faith in our lives, it seems that a universal value is challenging ourselves to bear witness to the suffering of others. The golden rule doesn’t mean shit if you’re willfully blind to the pain and agony of people who don’t look like you or live your life’s circumstances.

One of the most insidious responses you see whenever a national tragedy occurs is a rush to tell people not to politicize it. The problem is that bearing witness — acknowledging other people’s pain and agony — cannot be separated from “politics.” If a central article of faith is to do unto others, you have to square that with recognizing how privilege, systemic bigotry, and structural violence is used over and over to hurt communities who have asked you to recognize injustice time and time again. You cannot do unto others unless you recognize what is being done to others. You cannot bear witness until you learn how to listen as much as you learn how to speak.

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