Arriving at the Banality of Evil

An insignificant memoir - a rare political post

This week has been given to procrastinating, the biting of teeth in pain, two trips to the emergency room to check on an a post-surgical infection, sleepless nights, and cabin fever. The rain has been coming down relentlessly since Wednesday, and I’m struggling to get a full breath. Something is bothering me. And, ironically, if I could just bring myself to write, I might be able to calm myself and breathe.

This is not the first time I’ve had this breathing issue. I first saw a doctor about it when I was in my 40s. It didn’t stop until I quit my job. Then it started again during cancer treatment. It has something to do with losing the hope that I will ever feel moored. Instead I feel that my life is flowing backwards into chaos instead of following a story arc from rags to riches—metaphorical riches—like all those stories I read as a child. The heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess had a martyr-like disposition, had a neighbor with a monkey—though I would absolutely settle for a neighbor with a donkey or some fainting goats.

Can I at least expect a deus ex machina to swing in sometime in the next decade and make me feel like I have “done something with my life” before it’s over?

Memoirs have story arcs about transformations. And while I’ve been trying to shape this memoir, I’ve been writing these poems about wasps, who transform from eggs, to larvae, to wasps; from carnivores to vegetarians. But I’m not sure that I’ve undergone a transformation. Or maybe I’ve undergone several, only to morph back again to my basic insecurities and my dysfunctional methods for compensating.

The proper metaphor isn’t transformation, but walking home from the store with a dozen apples in your arms, dropping one, bending down to pick it up, only to drop two more. I’m not sure that’s a story arc. Unless settling and accepting that there’s no arc, is a relatable arc?

Sometimes it actually stuns me that people exist who don’t spend at least a half hour of every day second-guessing everything they did, or said, or wrote; who don’t go through their days trying to justify their existence. Sometimes I wonder if they just don’t see their own faults? The kind of faults that make other people suffer?

Is evil the behavior that results from this kind of blindness?

I interviewed a friend in America on Thursday. I asked her about the protests that I’m not seeing on the news. I’m far too inarticulate to put the kinds of vague-yet-specific fears I’m experiencing into words. In fact, I think I am afraid to say anything out loud, as though I might conjure the future horrors. I fear for America. And for those in other parts of the world abandoned in by USAID. I fear for Europe. I fear for both of my children for different reasons. For the people they love.

And I fear for the people in the world whom I will never meet, but know exist in sickness and in hunger. I fear the erosion of empathy and the resurrection of “those people”-ing.

Come next Christmas, when families are watching one or another iteration of A Christmas Carol, will they be slightly less appalled when Scrooge says, “If they would rather die they had better do it and decrease the surplus population”? Will Tiny Tim’s sentimental “God bless us, everyone,” not just seem worthy of jaded titters, but outright contempt?

I wonder if the people who keep saying that it isn’t as bad as it seems, are just… innocent? Not stupid, mind you, but so secure in their families, in their people, that they’ve never seen for themselves what human beings are capable of? Is it that they literally cannot conceive the truth unless they’ve experienced it—and that what is in history books, or on the news are filed in a working memory with Jurassic Park and The Handmaid’s Tale.

I would like to think that. But I don’t.

To approach the phrase “The personal is political” from another perspective: I have spent years considering how passivity enables evil. Whether my mother, looking the other way for a decade, was to blame for what was done to me. It’s an uncomfortable question to answer on a tiny, private scale, and just as uncomfortable on the scale of a community, a society, a country.

A world.

I don’t remember a lot of the philosophy courses I took in university, but I remember Hannah Arendt and “the banality of evil”.

For a couple of weeks I’ve been planning to put together a small anti-fascist anthology, publication by the end of 2025.

As the book will be published print-on-demand, all of the income will be sent to PEPFAR, President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has lost USAID funding.

BBC Global News reported that, since loss of funding, by February 20th 300 babies had been born with HIV, that would otherwise not have been infected.

People will die. And I may not be able to do much about it, but I can make a visible effort. Leslie F. Miller, a poet and voice of love/anger/reason, has agreed to help me edit the book.

I will post more information about A Torch for the Long Night: Voices Against Fascism next week.

Until then, may the turbulent world find a bit of calm, and may you find windows of joy.

Warmly,
Ren

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