An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

on the sort of emotional death I suspect a lot of us are navigating (she says, trying as hard as she can to avoid typing the phrase 'in these uncertain times')

My days lately have looked like this. I am busy – I wake up, I rush to my first class or appointment of the day, I engage in my work with my students or colleagues in what I hope are meaningful ways. I eat lunch, I cook dinner, I load the dishwasher, I push a small cart through the grocery aisles, I think about how to repurpose the leftovers. I drive in the car to one campus or another, I circle the block for parking, I wave hello to my neighbors when we pass each other on the street. I do the New York Times puzzles before bed, even though it is objectively dumb that I activate my brain before attempting to shut it down for the evening.

I also think about human rights abuses. A lot, in the last few weeks. Probably about every five minutes, on average, during those times when my brain is not actively engaged in talking to a student, writing an email, or doing any of the tasks that qualify as paid, productive work. The rest of the time – the dishwasher, the red light, the grocery store – I’m thinking about what handcuffs feel like. I’m wondering what happens if you have a cough or a cold, when you are chained to another human being. I’m wondering what occupies your mind when you are imprisoned; what the captive mind engages with when you lack the tools to speak your thoughts aloud or write them on paper. I’ve learned of the existence of CECOT and I can’t stop thinking about what such a place means for your soul.

And then the light turns green, and I pull into the parking lot.
And then a new email lands in my inbox.
And I am suddenly out of my own head and back in my own body, safe and sound at my office or in my classroom or curled under a blanket in my warm, inviting living room, and I feel genuinely disoriented for a moment as I remember who and where I am.

I’m not alone in this, right? I suspect there’s no way I am alone in this experience. This morning, my alarm went off, I opened my phone to silence it, I reflexively opened Twitter, and then I watched as a plainclothes man broke the window of a car parked outside a dentist’s office, glass flying everywhere as a sobbing woman watched her husband get dragged out of the vehicle. Then I brushed my teeth, changed my clothes, kissed my husband, and drove to work.

**

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. Even we psychiatrists expect the reaction of a man to an abnormal situation, such as being committed to an asylum, to be abnormal in proportion to the degree of his normality. The reaction of a man to his admission of a concentration camp also represents an abnormal state of mind, but judged objectively it is a normal, and as will be shown later, typical reaction to the given circumstances. The prisoner passed from the first to the second phase; the phase of relative apathy, in which he achieved a kind of emotional death. - Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I re-read Man’s Search for Meaning recently. It’s both essential and incredibly gruesome reading – Frankl’s language is blunt and direct as he recounts his experience in a concentration camp, and the ways that his own mind adapted to the most abject horrors that humans can inflict upon one another, in order to survive.

I turned back to this book, which I haven’t re-read in many years, because I was trying to make sense of my own apathy – my own emotional disengagement from experiencing objectively horrifying truths about the world while feeling nothing, day after day. I’ve been experiencing this emotional deadness for years now, scrolling past videos of bombed-out cities, fathers crying over their child’s lifeless, dismembered bodies halfway across the world, in the same feed as my friends’ pet photos, a cartoon frog reminding me to stay hydrated, an influencer showing me the best tips for a sourdough starter. I’ve started to worry that so many years of then go cry about it, libtard has divorced me from the fact that crying about it is in fact a normal human response to injustice; that to be upset and outraged at a moral wrong is, or so I recently believed, one of those shared things that made us all human.

In the last few weeks, I’ve read stories about Andry, the gay makeup artist sentenced to CECOT after applying for asylum from the Maduro regime; I’ve watched the video of Rumeysa Ozturk, the grad student apprehended on the street near her Tufts classroom for the apparent crime of co-authoring an op-ed critical of Israel; I’ve read the Times piece about the Harvard scientist who has been jailed for improperly classifying frog embryos as she moved through customs; I’ve read the story of the Canadian actress who spent two weeks detained for a paperwork error with her visa; I’ve read the sort of mealy-mouthed PR emails that varying university higher-ups have sent me about “uncertain times,” I’ve familiarized myself with what the script should be, in the event that ICE shows up to my classroom.

I’m finding it difficult to process that “I think cruelty is bad” is, I suppose, a liberal-coded belief now. At least, that is how I feel when I view the official White House Twitter account, which is just shitpost after shitpost in which the cruelty is so clearly the point.

And my highly-attuned-to-injustice, deeply sensitive, deeply feeling self is feeling a lot of … nothing. At most, a sort of blunted, dull feeling of sadness and anger – a far cry from the sort of sharp, pointed rage that I would expect to find in myself, and that an earlier version of myself emphatically did feel. My inner world is sadder, more muted than it once was – as if someone has taken my feelings and forced them to surface deep within, where some sort of numbness and compression takes over, and I can go about my day. I stare at my phone, I view the casual cruelty of human beings over and over and over again, and I identify in myself the absence of outrage and anger, the wet fart of well whattaya expect, mingled alongside and what am I supposed to do about it, with perhaps a dash of to allow myself access to the appropriate feelings would be unsustainable; I cannot allow myself to feel that deeply anymore.

(Every now and again, the anger does show up in these sharp, pointed tendrils of hot pink electric rage, and they are almost always a result of a Democrat texting me to ask for $5. No, you can’t have my $5. My job is to teach undergraduate students and run a summer camp. Your job is to think with intellectual and moral clarity about how best to serve and support the wellbeing of the American people, and implement policies that keep us healthy, safe, and free. With all the time and effort you’ve spent on building a really A+ crackerjack fundraising machine, perhaps you could have spent some portion of that time on, oh, I don’t know, dealing with the rampant income inequality that’s drawn comparisons to pre-revolutionary France, or addressing the issues unleashed on society by a tech-bro culture unconcerned with the consequences of their actions, or giving us fucking healthcare, or really anything to avoid the absolute dumpster fire we find ourselves in today. I need the $5; that’s 5/6ths of a carton of eggs! You want my $5? In this economy?!)

And the closest I can get to clarifying what that wet sluggish feeling actually is – the closest word I can come to, is grief. That’s what it is, I think: I’m grieving. I’m grieving the loss of my country; the country that I thought I knew in some foundational, unshakeable way; the country that I was raised to believe valued our freedom, both physical and intellectual. I’m grieving the kinds of stories that we told about the collective values that we hold; I’m grieving the mythology of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the Declaration of Independence. I’m grieving the ways in which stories about those institutions have been twisted into a particular brand of cruelty – I’m grieving because it reminds me of nothing quite so much as the ways in which the religious beliefs of my childhood diverged from the practices of the same church’s leaders, the pain I felt in the subsequent years of detaching myself from a cultural tradition that no longer supported the person I wanted to be in the world, or the values that I held as moral and just.

I’m grieving the loss of institutional norms, but I’m also grieving a particular kind of moral courage that those around me in positions of authority seem to lack. I’m moving through my days, cooking my meals, waving to my neighbors, grading my students’ work, and wondering what the churches and synagogues are saying from their pulpits this week; what the board meetings at large institutions of higher learning are going to do about their students who are now vulnerable and targeted. I’m looking to my political leaders for anything that matches, in tone and in action, the weight of what appears to be happening around us. I’m waiting for anyone other than the most outrageous grifters to say, “Yes! We see this too, and feel the same way you do, and the thing you can do about it to help is (X)!”

Because here’s the thing, folks: The things I value most in this world are, I think, in no particular order: love of my fellow humans, and a desire to engage with others in spaces of kindness and generosity. A belief in the value of hard work, when the work is geared towards making the world a better place to be. A sense that we are stronger together; that the collective efforts of humanity mean that we have a responsibility to look out for each other, and help those less fortunate as best as we can.

It’s hard to move through the world feeling like those values are childish and stupid.

Because they aren’t childish and stupid. They are the values of the Christ of my childhood; they are the values of most of those I know, love, and hold dear. And yet, damn, is there a sophisticated and expensive apparatus at play attempting to make me feel hopelessly naive for dedicating my life to those values; and, damn, it is so much worse when the people who share those values are convinced that the only thing holding them back from them are immigrants, or queer people, or anyone else who fits the box for “other.”

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer of the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

I don’t really pray anymore. But I’ve been doing something close to prayer, as I think about the people in CECOT tonight; as I think about those wrongfully detained in a country that should be full of abundance; as I think about everyone who isn’t quite sure how or what to feel anymore. I hold the absence of that anger and sadness in my heart, turning it over as I think about love and I think about healing, and it feels like a prayer.