walking over a bridge in san jose, costa rica after talking to an Israeli ex-pat in the hostel and preparing for RightsCon tomorrow, i realized why i haven’t been writing, at least one of the reasons
the work is not so much to pull a thread of sense out of my tangled thoughts – that is work, but its the good part
(oh wow as a side note wordpress has gotton so awful about interrupting while i’m trying to write, i may switch but all my things are here. moving this to a plain text editor)
the bad part, or the hard part, is framing thoughts for an audience, in particular an audience that in my opinion has actively harmful frameworks and assumptions embedded. its exhausting trying to think of how they are thinking, being bothered at it, and then trying to talk in a way that will be convincing or compelling. that is why i do not write more, i think. also where to do it and probably no one in particular wants to read it anyway! the part about voice and personableness might have not a little to do with it as well!
but back to the frameworks. the one that exhausts me most is this assumption of a “state”. i realized, to talk to someone about Afghanistan, for instance, i would say first – hold on, lets back up. the words you are using in shorthand are actively harmful constructs in my opinion, or at least not useful. lets see if we could agree on some others, to make it easier to talk without constant battle over assumptions behind terms
“government” – lets agree this no where near applies. please don’t use that word unless there is some organization that represents people and where harm has recourse. words have to mean something. i met a historian at the book festival in tucson who wanted to say it meant “control on the ground”. there is so much wrong with that.
lets start with, there are a lot of people there, many of them right now have guns and steal from and hurt many women. lets call the ones with guns who fight and work with each other to take things, lets call them mafias. the women, lets call them ‘the unlucky women’ because that is what a group called themselves who i was working with and i love that. so now, here we have a problem, some of the unlucky women are having to hide from these guys with guns, some have trouble getting enough to eat, and also they don’t have a way to cooperate safely and organize and get recognition from other communities to, you know, work and live
so lets look at this problem, that the unlucky women don’t have a safe way to deal with the orgnanizations that have resources, to have jobs and maybe “aid” – that thing that people cooperate to make available to other people in unlucky situations. and when one person is hurt or disappeared there isn’t any system to tell someone about it and make it stop – that’s called accountability, that is a good word not often misused.
if you are trying to solve this problem, then i want to talk to you. lets figure out the words, the phrases, the systems, to solve it.
and sometimes, i will try to write for the people who don’t see it this way, who see other shapes and ghosts and maybe see the world in some geopolitical calculus of moving weapons. but most of the time i dont’ want to talk to you, if that is you.