{thanksful: 17 – partisan}

This morning, found myself holding on convulsively, fingers clutching fabric and skin in what was meant to be a light embrace. Sat down at the breakfast table and felt my pulse racing. Felt this sense of Impending Doom, and a hive developing on my chest. Mama neglected to mention there’d be days like this.

Finally got around to catching up with a week’s worth of articles – read through a thoughtful School Library Journal piece on bias in reviewing – and then looked at the smoking garbage fire in the comments. Another hive formed.

I skated last night’s social media, saw the Vogue piece on diamond-encrusted safety pins because why shouldn’t you both center yourself in the struggle of the Other and pander to capitalism while accessorizing allyship? – and after reading a lot of things from Muslim writers that made me both thoughtful and pained, it was time to leave Twitter, too.

The blurry, Impending Doom feelings I struggle to compartmentalize — a note from my agent reminded me that there is value in work — but before I bury myself again, I wanted to remember the words of Angela Y. Davis, that freedom is a constant struggle, and that, if we look away, we get… what we get. This great agitator – and Communist, yes – is still standing up. As old as she is — she’s 72 — she’s dismantling tolerance and working to educate and inform people. She refuses to be a neutral party, gamely insisting on fairness and “hearing both sides” – which is a form of cowardice to which I have been most attracted. But, sometimes, there’s just not any worth in what the other side has to say.

So, today, I’m grateful for the unfair, the agitators and poets like Denise Levertov. I’m grateful for their words, and for the people who don’t tolerate the tepid, thin mouthings of “tolerance,” but insist on real work, real action, real acceptance and true love; the kind that comes with sweat and tears and unpleasantness.

Goodbye to Tolerance

~ Denise Levertov

Genial poets, pink-faced
earnest wits—
you have given the world
some choice morsels,
gobbets of language presented
as one presents T-bone steak
and Cherries Jubilee.
Goodbye, goodbye,

                                    I don’t care
if I never taste your fine food again,
neutral fellows, seers of every side.
Tolerance, what crimes
are committed in your name.

And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread,
blood donors. Your crumbs
choke me, I would not want
a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped
by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never
falter: irresponsive
to nightmare reality.

It is my brothers, my sisters,
whose blood spurts out and stops
forever
because you choose to believe it is not your business.

(Read the rest of the poem here.)

Everything is my business, unless the people I’m trying to help say it’s not. Period.