I need you to know how much I love you all, but I also need to scream what the hell

The dilemma is, we ware capable of great beauty and wonder and care, but we also keep killing each other

I went to a wedding on Saturday for a couple whom are both deeply in love with each other and deeply loved by their community. I can’t get enough of weddings, just as I can’t get enough of quinceañeras and B’nai Mitzvahs and retirement ceremonies and baby showers and book launches and divorce parties and milestone birthdays and any moment, really, when we pause and place all of our collective attention on either one person or a small number of people and say, in essence, “may you never forget how much you matter to us.”

The wedding was perfect, but the weekend headlines were not. They say three is a pattern, and by Monday morning that’s where we stood. Jewish Australians, celebrating Hanukkah on the beach. College kids in Providence, Rhode Island. A famous Hollywood couple.

Those are just the notable stories, mind you. Every weekend, in the U.S. at least, there are far more than three homicides, most that never make the news, most that are written off as collateral damage in a country that’s gotten used to both caste and casting off.

Every weekend, in the multiple places where war and genocide rage on, merely three attacks would be a miracle.

But three headlines, each of them chilling for the same and different reasons, is enough to stop you in your tracks.

There is nothing I love more than other human beings. It is the core of everything I hold dear— my politics, my theology, the active choice I make to wake up every day and try again. I love you all in ways that feel both relatively selfless (that is to say, a pure expression of delight and wonder at the ways you all walk in the world) and impossibly selfish (because I don’t know where I would be without love from others). I love that, through time, we have built and created and hugged and wiped away tears and cared for each other at our most fragile. I love that we could have destroyed each other for good, but somehow we have not.

But love is not love if it is not honest, so this too is true. Goddamnit, we are awful to each other. Just immensely so. We all know (or at least I like to imagine that we all know) that the worst thing we can do to another person is to snuff out their light and life. Perhaps we even know that doing so will not bring us peace. But we keep doing it. Directly, with weapons. Indirectly, through deference to billionaires and strongmen and armies. With bullets and ballot boxes and averted glances.

We are addicted, to so many things, but especially tools of death. Guns, yes, and various incendiary devices, but also ideologies of hate and systems of domination and stories about who belongs and who is to blame and “what it means to be a man” and how “it’s a dog eat dog world” and so many others. We are addicted to all sorts of numbing agents, be they ones you ingest or ones you like and share or ones you elect to lead a country.

I love us so much but I want to yell in your faces sometimes, and have you yell in mine.

We are better than this. Or I hope we are, in spite of the resounding evidence to the contrary. I need to believe, for the sake of loving us, that we are better than this, but I know, like all matters of faith, that I can’t prove that conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.

We are, and will keep being, the greatest gifts in each other’s lives. And also, we will keep doing this: killing each other, making each other’s lives hells, maintaining our reverence to systems that both promote and benefit from the massacres. To believe in the second fact without the first is to be a nihilist, and therefore to be incapable of building and organizing and care. But to believe in the first rather than the second is not love either. It’s adherence to a fantasy version of human relationships with no bearings on reality. We will disappoint you, us human beings, if you love us with no guardrails.

This, I suppose, is why the arc of a year of essays reads like a ping pong match between pep talks and elegies. Do you know what I was writing about a week ago? A psalm of gratitude for what we built this year. Do you know what I was writing about a year ago? Getting a call from my son’s school that turned out not to be the worst news in the world, but for a couple hours seemed like it could have been. It will always be like this, it seems.

Yesterday, I read the headlines as new information came in about each case. The men with the guns in Australia were anti-Semites. The man with the gun in Brentwood was likely an angry son. The man with the gun at Brown could still be anybody, with any motive. We wait to find out, perhaps because we want to understand, but more likely in order to calibrate whom among us gets to have the most epistemically pristine reaction.

I metabolized that laundry list of motives as I shopped for Christmas presents. Another expression of love, albeit complicated. I drove around a frozen Milwaukee listening to my dear friend Courtney Martin talk to our mutual friend Sarah Wheeler and her podcast partner Miranda Rake.

In my headphones and car stereo, Courtney talked about sandwich generation caregiving, about her father’s dementia, about America’s morally and fiscally bankrupt elder care system. But what she was really talking about— in a way that left me slack jawed in awe— was love in action. Of sitting with her father, one of the loves of her life, and both mourning the loss of the man she knew while also learning to love the mystery he is now. Of loving but also cursing and not feeling resilient anymore because she’s exhausted and her mom is exhausted and her kids have been asked to grow up quickly and her dad has lost so much already and soon will be gone for good.

I love Courtney with all my heart, both as a writer and as a friend, so I knew this story already. But there was something about hearing her voice yesterday, breaking through to-do lists and headlines, that felt like a prayer. One of lamentation, most likely. Maybe even one of those prayers where you point a literal or figurative weapon at the sky and yell, whether you believe in a God or not, some variety of “… you want a piece of this too????” But a prayer nonetheless, which is to say an expression of hope and grief and awe all at once.

It matters that they had guns, of course. It matters that they were men. It matters that death is more likely to take place in some countries than others, but that it is not limited to one place. It matters that they were all shaped by desperately flawed and rigged systems, by patterns of domination and hatred that have managed to outlive us all. It matters that there are both policy changes and sweeping societal transformations that would make it much less likely that we kill each other. It matters that we live in a society that doesn’t just live by the sword but that has always resisted efforts to beat those swords into plowshares. It matters that, for so many, it is easier to imagine a miracle in an explosion than an embrace.

It matters that we have never actually experienced the world of our dreams, the one where we’d stop doing this to each other.

But it matters (most of all? I think so) that there is something about us, both who we are as individuals and who we can be as a collective, that will keep taking your breath away, I swear.

Somewhere in the middle of that mess of contradictions is where everything lives. The whole ball of wax that is our intertwined lives together. Jeez, we are awful, but not just awful. We are also the absolute best, or at least the best we’ve got. We could be better. We really could.

End notes:

1. The last couple issues have been more announcement-heavy so, for now, I will just say that the end of year offer for new subscribers continues— lots of new merch, including various potlucks hats and shirts and (now) posters and also old favorites like the “love harder than the fascists can hate” shirts but most of all I just hope you know how much I appreciate your support. After you become a new subscriber (or get a gift subscription for somebody else) you or they should get an email with a link to request your free merch. If you don’t see it, just email garrett at barnraisersproject.org and I’ll help you out.

2. Here’s what the new posters look like, by the way. If you can’t read the text, it’s the image from this essay. It, too, is a secular prayer.

   

3. I should probably disclose that Sarah Wheeler has another podcast too, one that she co-hosts with me. This Week in Breeders, we call it. I think you’ll like it.

4. There will be essays during these last couple weeks, but (likely) fewer than normal and a bit irregular. I hope you understand and even more so that you get a little break yourself.