What Counts As Genocide?

 I regularly attend a lot of monthly book clubs. Like, six (or more) each month. It might actually be too many, but it's fun to see all the different groups of people, so I will likely stick with them all for a while. I attended one on Wednesday where we read "The Lost Year" by Katherine Marsh. The book is a middle grade story that follows three narrators; a boy living through quarantine in 2020 with his mother and great-grandmother, who is 100 years old and was a Ukrainian refugee during the Holodomor. In case you didn't know (as I didn't), the Holodomor was the great Ukrainian famine in 1932-33, which was orchestrated by the USSR government and killed millions of people in Ukraine. The other two narrators in the book are cousins living in Brooklyn, NY and Kyiv, Ukraine during the timeframe of the Holodomor, one of whom is the grandmother in the present-time narration. 

This book was heartbreaking, mostly because of its depiction of a human-made famine. For the most part, Ukrainians would have had enough food for their own survival, but the government wasn't allowing them to keep enough to survive. It calls to mind the more widely known Irish potato famine, where the British forced the Irish to give up what little food survived the potato blight to the point that they Irish weren't able to subsist on the food they had left. At one point in the book, a child gives a description of soldiers coming to demand food from her mother, insisting that they must have kept some hidden for themselves because they hadn't met their quota of contributions, all the while the mother and three children were clearly succumbing to starvation. It was brutal to read and I kept thinking, "Who could do this?!? Who could look at people so clearly malnourished and insist they were being selfish and withholding food meant for others??" 

But the reality is that stories like this are still happening. Look at the forced starvation happening in Gaza right now. Those people have no idea when food or supplies or relief will arrive because it's being withheld from them. This is the most immediate and obvious example in the current world, but another example I thought of while reading was a bit closer to home. 

Right now in Austin, the weather forecast says the temperatures will barely go above freezing for the next week. That's not crazy cold for other places, but it's pretty damn cold for here. Houses here weren't built for weather like this. Almost nobody has a basement and all of the plumbing is directly under the house and still above-ground. When the weather gets close to freezing we're supposed to leave all our faucets dripping to (hopefully) avoid frozen and burst pipes. But these inconveniences are nothing to what the unhoused population in the city faces. Just days ago homeless encampments were being swept out and trashed. What little these people have been able to accumulate for themselves is totally gone in mere hours. What will these folks do when the temperature is deathly cold? There are some resources available, like warming shelters, and the library is an often-used resource for people without homes- but the library will be closed today and tomorrow in observance of MLK day. So that option is unavailable to them during this critically cold time. It's scary.

I brought up homelessness as an example of socially acceptable genocide in our society, and I think it blew the mind of the librarian who runs that book club. Now, the technical definition of genocide according to the Oxford English Dictionary is "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." Perhaps disregard for people experiencing homelessness doesn't completely fit that definition, but it comes pretty close. Too close for comfort, in my opinion. I don't know how many panhandlers I drive pass each day, but I rarely give out money to them and I know I'm not alone in that. As "successful" members of society, we view these people as a blight, as an inconvenience, as dangerous, as any number of things but most especially as lesser than. These people, who exist on the fringes of society, are barely seen as human. We have collectively decided to overlook them in our daily routines and it often comes at the price of their lives. We look the other way when winter weather comes and kills these people. Or when they die of heat exhaustion in 115° temperatures in the summer. 

I'm not saying that it is each individual's burden to care for every person in need they see, but I do think it's important to address how, on a systemic level, we have deemed certain members of the population sub-human and refuse to give them access to life-saving resources. Because really, in America (or anywhere in the world) if people are dying because of cold or hunger it is because a choice has been made not to help them. There is absolutely no reason for those things to ever cause deaths here, let alone with regularity, and yet people will die in Austin in the next week because they couldn't find somewhere to be safe and warm to ride out the cold snap. People die every day because of preventable hunger. People keep dying in Gaza under Israeli occupation and we, as US citizens, are culpable. I'm not sure how we got to a point where we justify preventable death and even murder. I'm not sure why such cognitive dissonance exists around the value of human life. 

But what I do know is that some day, hopefully not too long in the future, it will be glaringly obvious that what's happening in Palestine right now is genocide. That what's happening there is inherently wrong and evil. And I suspect that someday within my own lifetime, young people who have to learn about this genocide through history lessons will wonder how people could possibly have been so callous about human pain and suffering and we'll have to chose to either face the reality of our decisions or double down on the cognitive dissonance (and based on American history, I wouldn't be shocked if we chose the latter). I know that when we consider how we might have behaved if witnessing the Holocaust or the American Civil Rights movement or any other well documented, state-sanctioned violence, we need only consider how we're reacting right now to human rights atrocities happening in Palestine. 

A Thought Experiment.

 Last year I stayed mostly off of Instagram. Instagram is still an annoyingly necessary source of information for meetups, gatherings, and events I want to go to, so I took the app off my phone and relegated my usage mostly to the occasions I was at my computer (though as the year wound down I found myself increasingly invested in checking up on different people and re-downloaded it for larger chunks of time). This year I want to explore my relationship with that app in a different way, so I'm taking a new approach; one photo from the week posted each Sunday for the entire year, and a coinciding blog post for those who check in here. (So, Nate Johnson. HI NATE! But mostly just for myself and for posterity.) 

The major inspiration for this came from the instagram user @blakeoftoday, whom I discovered only a few weeks ago and who posts video recaps of "this week in fatherhood" and gives a beautifully composed synopsis of some of the highs (or lows) of his week. It is weirdly compelling, partly, I suspect, because he's invested in nice sound equipment and has a good voice for voiceovers, but also because he is insightful. He's reflecting each week on small moments of joy or growth or struggle that make up the mundane existence of everyday and which we so seldom spend time considering while trudging through our own daily routines. I wanted to set aside time for myself to reflect. To think each week about what has happened, how time has moved forward, ways that I feel I am changing or stagnating. Anything, really. So we'll see how this goes, I guess. 

This week, something I've been thinking a lot about is setting goals and intentions. Clearly I'm not alone in this. I think probably more people than not have at least some idea of habits or routines they decide they want to alter and use the new year as a catalyst for starting fresh. That being said, one of my favorite takes on New Year's Resolutions this year was a video of a man explaining that for most of history the "year" started in the spring, and that the gregorian calendar we use moved it to January as part of a way for the church to control people (I've forgotten the specific reasoning there, but honestly the guy who made the video readily admitted that he had heard this and hadn't bothered fact-checking it because regardless of whether it IS true, it feels true and that it enough for him. I feel the same way). In nature, winter is a time of hibernation. Animals are supposed to slow down, sleep more, conserve energy. Really, just survive. Yet the holiday season pushes us to produce, consume, celebrate, socialize! More, faster, better, happier! Then immediately, with the changing of the year, we force ourselves to try to make sweeping lifestyle changes. Become new people! It makes more natural sense to do this in the spring, in the time of new growth. 

And yet. I like the demarcation of the new year as a starting place. I like the introspection of one year coming to a close and a new year being full of possibility. Of course this could happen at any time of year! But culturally, our new year starts on January first. So I still make goals. Though I usually wait until January first to even start thinking about my goals for the year, and then a few weeks in (when most folks have abandoned their resolutions) I finalize a list for myself. 

Yesterday I stumbled upon the account of a hand-dyed yarn company. The yarn was so beautiful! It made me want to buy yarn! And then I noticed that the account had all these photos of beautiful yarns displayed, and very few photos of anything knit out of these yarns. Which, granted, is probably not their goal as a business, but it made me stop and think. I've often walked into a yarn store and just adored looking at all of the beautiful options available for purchase. In college I spent unknowable amounts of money on yarn (if I had to guess, probably at least a thousand dollars over the four years) that I bought without real plans of what I'd use it for; I just saw lovely yarn and wanted to own it. 

The same is true when I walk into fabric stores. Over the past couple years I've started exploring quilting as a creative endeavor and while I really like it and plan to continue, I've already accumulated an amount of fabric that it would take me years to make quilts out of. I actually prefer the aesthetic of quilts made with solid color fabrics, but when I walk into a fabric store I adore looking at all of the cute and beautiful and charming and clever prints and I want to buy them alllllll! (I *don't* buy them all, but I definitely still buy more than I have a real plan for.) I also get this feeling in bookstores; despite owning over one hundred books that I haven't even read yet, if I walk into a bookstore I will almost certainly walk out with at least one new book. I love walking into bookstores even on the rare occasions when I don't buy a new book- even just the feeling of walking into one is thrilling.

As I thought about all of this, I realized that part of the allure in all these stores that sell the individual pieces of my hobbies is the potential. Definitely part of what I love is the doing, the making, the process of creating something or the escape and journey of reading something. But there is a different, very real and separate, joy to walking into a place that holds all the potential for that enjoyment. Walking into a yarn/fabric/book store is stepping into a realm of possibility where there aren't any obligations. It's pure opportunity.  

And that's how I feel about the new year. There's magic in the possibility. A new year is not yet marred by any goals that didn't get accomplished in the year before; it's unadulterated potential for myself and the world around me. 

I've often wished I could own a bookstore. Or a bakery. Or any of these businesses that capture the feeling of bliss I get when walking into one. But then I remember that owning a business is a whole ordeal and not one that I'm particularly interested in. So, at least for now, I will save my excitement for stepping into the many businesses that I patronize to support my hobbies. And for the commencement of each new year, even if the date is arbitrary and misaligned with the natural seasonal time for new growth.

New Year, New Problems.

Hey Siri, play Swim Good by Frank Ocean.

I actually don't have any new or pressing problems with the onset of this year, but I thought that sentence to myself earlier and it made me giggle, remembering when my friend Liam once said "Mohair, mo' problems" while knitting.

I took Instagram off my phone in an attempt to spend my time in ways that feel more intentional to me. More luxurious. I still have an account and have opened it for at least a small amount of time each day from my laptop, but without the app I don't open and scroll as a compulsion, a habit encouraged by muscle memory. 

In some ways, I don't believe in wasted time; we all have the exact same amount each day and the conviction that we must use it purposefully and always striving for more is probably a weird and gross side effect of Capitalism. I don't need to use my hours to get further or do more. But I would like to go through life enjoying the real world around me. I don't like the feeling of stacking myself up against others and coming up short (which is entirely too easy to do with glimpses into other people's world as we get on Instagram). I don't like the feeling of realizing I've spent an entire evening scrolling through snapshots of other people's lives. 

In the first few days I kept having moments that I would have normally been inclined to share with others but in the weird, impersonal and indirect way that social media opened up for us. I wanted to post a close friends story complaining about some small annoyance. I wanted to post a video I took of the three tiny snails (think peppercorn size!) I plucked off my Christmas cactus and watched slide around on a shopping receipt, leaving little trails behind them for a few minutes before depositing them into my yard. The world is full of tiny wonders. Days- all of life even- are made up of moments where we seek commiseration or approval or recognition. Moments of approval and acknowledgement. 

It's the desire to feel seen and understood. Deeply human and in some ways satiated by social media. But in other ways cheapened by instant gratification, by validation made supremely impersonal. 

So instead I've tried to appreciate these moments just for myself. Take a few extra seconds to note how delightful the reflection of rippling sunlight the pool casts on the ceiling is. To watch the impossibly small antennae of tiny snails wiggling. To appreciate the way the rosy tinge of indirect light right around sunset bounces around my neighborhood and feels almost corporeal, as if the dwindling sunlight is a real presence hovering in the thick air around me, just about to settle on my shoulders but disappearing before it gets the chance.