The strategic naiveté of kindness

I was not planning on such a long gap between my last post and this one, but such has been life. Between wrapping up a summer class (on scifi and urban futures; I’ll share more on that sometime soon), and preparing for and traveling to attend the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America (my primary professional society; more on that at some point too) at the beginning of August, I had my hands full. As if that wasn’t enough, I have also been preoccupied with care-giving responsibilities as a single parent supporting two kids each dealing with long-term disabling illnesses that have all of us stressed out for several years now. But the stress had mounted so much that I am currently on leave (glad to have the FMLA to lean on, at least until the fascists in charge decided to take it away). Anyway, enough about my woes. Speaking of fascists, here’s something that has been sitting in the drafts folder since before the ESA meeting that I would like to share.

It’s been a hot, humid few months under the heat waves / domes that have swept across North America this summer. It feels like back home in Mumbai—except I’m not that young anymore, and my body doesn’t quite remember what to do when it is so hot and muggy. But I guess it better get used to this and reactivate some of those forgotten physiological pathways, and prepare for whatever else this unfolding climate catastrophe will bring next. For hurricane season is not far behind in such a summer—indeed it has already started—here on the US southeast coast.

Perhaps the heat might be more bearable if one’s faith in humanity wasn’t constantly being challenged by the doom cycle of news these days. It is an overwhelming deluge of horrid news to see the worst people put in charge of governments and institutions around the world—firmly so in both my natal and adoptive countries—empowered to enforce their most cruel power fantasies upon the rest of us. One is torn between the impulse to turn away from the unfolding disasters and seek refuge in fiction or get drawn deeper into the doom cycle. While some mental escape valve is important for maintaining sanity, it is also important not to turn away, especially from the ongoing genocide in Gaza, I keep telling myself.

But it seems we are past the point of empathy fatigue, and deep into numb despair as no amount of visible suffering, including children starving when not being blown apart, seems able to move the needle on… well… anything at all in global politics. Instead, all the leading institutions in the US appear to be falling into line under pressure from the now openly white supremacist and fascist administration in charge of a federal government system whose constitutional balance-of-power has completely collapsed.

Even as we were talking about ecology in nearby Baltimore last month, federal troops were sent marching into Washington D.C., under the guise of fighting a made-up “crime emergency”, and masked and heavily armed agents of the xenophobic white-supremacist regime were busy harassing / arresting / kidnapping people deemed criminal or to “not belong here”, i.e., people who look like me. Meanwhile universities and other institutions across the US have been caving to pressure from this regime to conform to their ideology or lose grants and funding. Some of this feels like institutional betrayal that was just waiting for the right permission structure. It is not an easy time to be an academic nowadays (no doubt the same applies across other labor sectors).

When things become so overwhelming, I do turn to fiction, to not escape reality per se, but to help process whatever is happening in the real world. Disappearing into a darkened theater (or living room) for hours on end may not seem like a step towards facing the harsh light of reality, but my brain has always somehow found both refuge and meaning in movies. Maybe having my brain wired this way is a consequence of growing up in a small town outside Mumbai, a child needing escape from the weight of parental expectations. So I continue to alternate between doomscrolling, watching movies, reading / writing academic papers, reading fiction (scifi mostly), preparing presenting ideas and findings to students and colleagues, and reading / watching some more fiction. Kids keep me grounded by smacking the doomscrolling device out of my hands from time to time, and sharing the darkened theater experience with me—except for some of the heavier fare I tend to punish myself with (in their words).

And so it is that I have found better responses on the big screen to the unfolding humanitarian disasters and genocide than from so-called political leadership in the real world. At a time when we are supposed to be beyond the point of empathy fatigue, the empathy machine of cinema, as the film critic Roger Ebert so aptly described it, keeps giving us ways to replenish our empathy supplies if we are open to it.

Let me share three examples of what’s keeping me from drowning in despair. They each come from films that may seem unlikely sources for such succor, let alone wisdom about how to deal with the cruel powers of this world, for they are all fantastical stories featuring superheroes of one kind or another, but it is in the fantastical that people can be freer to explore things that seem really hard on the ground now.

“But people were going to die!” The recent Superman movie, which featured such an originalist version of the undocumented immigrant superhero that it managed to piss off the rightwing trolls, turned out to be, under all the CGI and the punching and bloody violence, ultimately a desperate plea for the powerful to show some kindness and caring for the lives of the powerless. You can hear it in Superman’s anguished cry (at the 1:10 min mark in the trailer linked above, so no spoiler here) in response to the tough/cynically jaded reporter Lois Lane grilling him about whether, in intervening to stop a genocidal attack by a powerful country against a defenseless people who couldn’t be more like Gazans, he paused to think about the geopolitics of the conflict or the optics of his role as a representative of the US: “But people were going to die!” People are dying and we have to keep reminding ourselves, and especially our journalists and thought leaders of that fact.

“I’m here. You’re not alone.” This line, in the climactic conflict scene in another recent superhero movie really took me by surprise! And yes this one is a spoiler, so be warned if you intend to see this film. I wasn’t, given the nosedive in the quality of MCU fare in recent years, and the boycott of Marvel since they added a new superhero to their roster who just happens to be an Israeli soldier! But at a low point last week reeling from all the news, my mind sort of went blank and I found myself watching the Thunderbolts* on tv. I was expecting more mind-numbing, punishing violence but was not prepared to find hidden underneath all that a treatise on the nihilistic void of depression that is sucking us all into a vortex of destruction, and how the best way to combat that is to lean into community and to support each other. I was not prepared for the lead of the anti-superhero team to pull back the main antagonist who is punching the void of his own depression that is destroying the world, while telling him “I’m here. You’re not alone.” And for her team to join that embrace to collectively defeat the void without further violence. I keep telling my kids and everyone in my circle in real life that I’m here, we’re not alone, even as I withdraw from social media spaces that have become more like that void.

“When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything… This is how I fight.” Speaking of the void, remember the bagel that sucked everything everywhere all at once into another nihilistic black hole of depression a few years ago? I was naturally reminded, as I often am these days, of my favorite scene in Everything, Everywhere All At Once, the most remarkable film I have seen this decade, heck in this lifetime. You’ve seen that too, haven’t you? If not, stop reading this and go watch it now! Have your mind blown at a radically different depiction of a multiverse in trouble and a superhero who only beats back the void because her naive mild-mannered husband pulls her back in the middle of a melee and urges everyone involved to “Please! Be kind!” Many good words have been written about this life-altering film, and everyone loves the romantic “laundry and taxes” line, but this is what resonates most deeply with me. If you were to ask me about my own approach in life, I couldn’t put it better than Waymond’s speech in this scene.

We have to be kind. What have to be here for each other, with love. We need and have to be part of community. We need collective action to beat back this fascism that thrives on division and hatred as it sucks us into its nihilistic void. I hope you remember this too the next time you find yourself staring into the void. And join me in the darkness sometime to watch the next film that might help us see our troubles differently.

Peace.