Pretending to love each other
I’ve found it hard to write since the New Zealand election, and more generally over the last few months.
I don’t think there’s any lack of things to say, and I’ve deeply appreciated the many outstanding writers who have said them (a small selection below):
For me, it’s felt like a weight to grapple with, to push and pull at until the sheer size of it becomes something that can be carried, held, recognised. Named.
Even today, I’m not sure how to say the things that have been part of that all-consuming weight, how to convey the sense of thin ice cracking, how to explain the map with the crossroads marked. How to start walking the path.
I’ve been making lists of things that have struck me as signposts - changes in policy and approach that point to a dangerous road.
Someone responded to one post saying “get a life, you short-haired Grinch” and all I could think was yes, that’s what I’m trying to do.
Arundhati Roy once said “the pandemic is a portal”. If we accept that this is true of all crises - how does one live compassionately, differently, in spite of?
There are places in the world currently where the question is much more stark and urgent - how does one quite literally get a life, in the truest and most precious sense of that phrase?
There is so much pain and harm to mark, and it’s important to look at it, to account for it - and to take action so that it no longer continues.
We like to say never again, but we always seem to do it.
Someone I trust, who sees the world in colours that I can’t always see and that I’m grateful to have described to me, recently summarised an interaction I was telling her about as “pretending to love each other”.
It was startling not because it was some grand revelation, but because it was the truest reflection of the way things are.
Something slid into place from that moment, and I’ve started to use “pretending to love each other” as the name for that weight, the blunt truth of why it’s hard to chart the map forward, hard to see a future where leadership and resulting policy helps, instead of harms.
We’re currently on the side of the portal where we pretend to love each other, pretend to create equitable policy, pretend to be taking action, pretend to care.
We’re on the side watching increasing numbers refuse that version of the world, who are charting a way through to a new reality.
The number of people who are scouting that terrain through protests, through petitions, through rage and art and unflinching truth is heartening.
The number of people who refuse to pretend, who see each other wholeheartedly and who can both embrace every nuance of colour and help to describe it is heartening.
George Bernard Shaw once said that “Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.”
My favourite quote from James Baldwin is the counter to that, and I think sums up the road ahead:
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
There’s a path forward.
Thanks to everyone who has been marking the trail - and look forward to walking together in 2024.