ambient noise.
reading the news and it sure looks bad.
Over the weekend our refrigerator started making a loud low hum, like an agitated car idling. It’s an anxious, grumbling kind of sound, one that’s difficult to tune out entirely and that a person just might have the urge to shush audibly—for heaven’s sake stop whining—as if it were a grousing grandpa they’re dealing with, not a kitchen appliance. It’s the kind of noise that can test my coping ability, or rather, it’s one that I think I’m think I’m coping with well enough until I find myself spinning on a heel to snap at an unsuspecting family member. (I’m sorry, my love, it’s just that the m*#4@%-f*)^!&# fridge is so VERY loud.)
A low hum of agitation is something I don’t need a dying refrigerator to help me conjure. I imagine this same is true for many of you. The air is so full of disquiet these days, it’s easy to feel as if there’s never any silence at all. In apps, increasingly exposed as being threats not only to our mental health, but to democracy as well, we’re met with an endless hailstorm of noise. We have a president making it his business to stir up as much mayhem as legally and extralegally as possible. Our outrage is being courted and coddled and I deeply understand the impulse to simply check out. Our nervous systems can’t take it! We’ve lived through the hellscape of constant exposure to an explicitly hateful administration once before, why on earth would we do it again?
Because we have to. None of us can afford to check out entirely and those of us with the most privilege and protection least of all. No matter how much I understand the impulse to declare myself so bothered by the noise that I need to tune it out altogether, I’m also deeply concerned about what could happen if I do. If any of us does. This week, Elissa Altman reminded me of E.B. White’s 1940 essay “Freedom”, in which he wrote of his fellow Americans’ complacency to the threat of fascism abroad: “Where I expected to find indignation, I found paralysis, or a sort of dim acquiescence, as in a child who is duly swallowing a distasteful pill.” It’s harrowing to think how applicable this is to this moment, and the threat of fascism we’re now facing at home. Normalization of a deeply concerning moment won’t save us. Ignoring a buzzing fridge won’t stop it buzzing.