witness
Emil Venkov, Lenin (1988) in Seattle, WA.
I made a mistake. Instead of going directly to City Hall, the starting point for a demonstration against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I got off the bus near Seattle Center, thinking I’d intersect crowds, or at least handfuls, of people preparing the outdoor amphitheater for the rally, the culmination of the mile-and-a-half march from City Hall. No one was there (beyond the typical smattering of tourists and locals managing, feeding, and entertaining the tourists). I’ve made a huge mistake, I said to myself à la Gob Bluth. Now…which way to City Hall? I don’t know Seattle well enough yet to travel by instinct - instead, I pulled out my phone, found City Hall and my location on the map, and started walking. I was tentative, not sure which of the avenues the march would follow. Then a blur of blue and yellow flew past me, and I exclaimed to myself, Follow those Ukrainians!
I found myself working hard to keep up with a family, a pair of brothers who led the group at a brisk pace, each cloaked in a Ukrainian flag and carrying a wooden pole that draped another, oversized flag, followed by a woman married to one of them and their two tweenagers. As we waited for the light to change, I asked the woman if I could take a photo of her daughter’s sign, and in lieu of saying “yes” they just snapped into a practiced pose. The daughter lifted her handmade sign, a piece of blue cardboard with letters drawn by lighter markers pleading “SAFE THE WORLD FROM NUCLEAR WAR.” Her brother turned out slightly, framing one side of the earnest and misspelled message, and their mother grabbed the flagpole from her husband and framed the other side.
Within a couple of blocks, I realized that I’d found myself in a privileged position. I was able to take in the reactions from passersby. As we marched briskly forward, some other pedestrians reacted with smiles and cheers, drivers with honks of their horns or shouts from their windows. Such impromptu enthusiasm and camaraderie made the ones who didn’t react somehow conspicuous, somehow suspicious and complicit in their silence.
I felt like a volunteer staff photographer, keeping a minimal distance in their stead and snapping pics of the bright blue and yellow flags as they flapped through downtown Seattle. We neared an intersection, and the red light allowed my adopted family to merge with two other families waiting to cross. They greeted each other with familiar hugs and bright expressions, and they continued the trek to City Hall where they’d merge with hundreds of other families, hundreds of other flags around shoulders and on improvised flagpoles, hundreds of signs made by children’s hands.
Walking at a slower pace as we approached them, two women found themselves immersed in the group, visibly delighted with being surrounded by these overnight activists and just as interested as I was in the kids’ signs. When a passing driver honked and shouted support, the group waved in thanks and cheered back at him. I caught the two women sharing a smile, feeling the same thing I was - happy, inspired, relieved that people cared.
Why do we use raw noise to show our support? Think about it - the applause that Lady Gaga lives for is just us slapping the most percussive parts of our bodies to make loud sounds. We shout indiscernible and etymologically curious phrases like huzzah, yahoo, yippie kay yay, hoo-ah. The greatest demonstration of support is a standing ovation, which pushes the applause and the shouting to the max. When performers perform, when the defeated rise, when we are filled with so much joy or rage or determination, we jump up, stamp the ground and clap our hands, we scream. It’s primal, isn’t it? It’s one of those primal instincts that, even after a couple of hundred thousand years, homo sapiens are still reduced to when we know wonder, when we stand in awe, and when we want what we don’t have.
When the proverbial “they” said that history repeats itself, I didn’t think “they” meant it would happen during my lifetime. Most of my historical framework was shaped by my undergrad experience, particularly my exploration of the history of anti-Judaism, antisemitism, and the Shoah, and one insight from those studies continues to shape my worldview: persecution is cyclical and predictable. Political, economic, social, or natural calamities are always followed by persecution of people on the margins. They either get blamed for the calamity or they are identified as competition for resources; either way, they’re degraded and dehumanized, making it easier, more palatable and socially permissible to isolate them, to make them bear the brunt of collective rage, or to eliminate them. In medieval Europe, anyone deemed an essential outsider was especially vulnerable in the wake of volcanic eruptions, outbreaks of plague, or agricultural blights. With the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern eras, that instinct, an extrapolated mob mentality, just morphed into institutions and systemic oppression. To me, the most disturbing and irrational examples are the vicious fictions of “host desecration” and “blood libel,” but I was always struck that Jews suffered these accusations (and often official prosecutions and unofficial, mob-fueled pogroms) in the wake of some other disaster.
Knowing where the patterns and cycles of anti-Judaism and antisemitism led, recent history makes me very nervous. Minority groups with recently achieved visibility, status, and legal protections in the US have been under fire from groups on the social and political “right” (and I use the term very narrowly). The most vulnerable among the most vulnerable are targets for slow but steady erosion of hard-won rights. Fifty-seven years since the Voting Rights Act, African Americans and economically disenfranchised people are targeted for political isolation through gerrymandering and disruptions that make it just that much harder to vote. Fifty years after Roe v. Wade, political strategies have all but secured the imminent erosion of women’s legally protected autonomy over their bodies. Fifty-three years after the Stonewall Riots and almost seven since Obergefell v. Hodges, queer people might be able to marry, but access to and equity in employment, housing, and healthcare is, at best, dangerously inconsistent. Now, activists on the right have fixed their crosshairs on transgender kids, the most vulnerable among the most vulnerable. Just more than a century ago, an influenza pandemic killed 50 million people; now, we seem to believe we are emerging a pandemic that has already killed at least 6 million. What comes next?
In terms of the achievement of human rights (to varying degrees) around the world, we’ve come a long way, but to assume that those rights are secure, irreversible, is hubris. In Jewish history, the late 18th century is characterized as an era of emancipation because, country by country, Jews achieved full citizenship in most of Europe - an unimaginable feat just a few generations previous - but with the dawn of the modern era and the rise of the nation-state, Europe also cultivated the language and institutionalization of pseudo-scientific racism. What had been hatred of the religious other (anti-Judaism) became the dehumanization of an entire group of people according to the construct of race (antisemitism), and when Europe experienced the collective fallout of a global war and economic depression, Jews were once again but so much more vulnerable. Spikes in what we’d now call “hate crimes” and gradual legal disenfranchisement, all justified or at least normalized with the language of science, paved the way for Nazis and their collaborators to isolate and eliminate Jews, Roma, Sinti, disabled people, homosexuals, and political opponents. Through this lens, if Putin’s invasion of Ukraine echoes Hilter’s invasion of Poland, things portend especially badly for folx on the margins.
When we neared City Hall, a detail of police on motorcycles was ready to go, waiting for the cue to slowly move forward and secure the path to Seattle Center. I stopped and waited on the curb, letting my little adopted family disappear into the swarm of people assembled behind a blue banner with yellow letters, announcing WE SUPPORT UKRAINE. I watched most of the column pass me and tried to take in all of the messaging, all of the emotion, all of the solemn rage.
I slipped into the crowd, steadily moving toward the Space Needle. Everyone wore some form of blue and yellow, many held homemade signs. Some showed up with friends, some as family units. I noticed that I was different from most of the solo flyers - they had cameras (real cameras, not just smartphones) and darted up and down the column, seeking out powerful and provocative statements. I guessed most of them were journalists or professional photographers eager to document this particular moment in history and found myself suddenly paranoid. Do they think I’m a spy? I was just a guy walking along in the crowd. I don’t look Ukrainian. I carried no sign or flag. Did anyone notice my blue sweater or my yellow socks? I joined in chants I could understand and smiled politely and supportively when the group slipped into Ukrainian. Maybe I should’ve brought a sign.
NO FLY ZONE!
HELP UKRAINE!
STOP THE WAR!
At one intersection, loud and aggressive honking came from traffic stopped on either side, but the honks didn’t seem to conform to the light and rhythmic honks from earlier passersby that seemed to say, We’re with you! These honks sounded more like, What the fuck? Marchers only responded with smiles and cheers in response, either unaware or unbothered by the possibility of collective passive aggression of Seattle drivers. I remembered a demonstration in New York - I was shopping in the Flatiron District and delighted to see a parade of protestors coming down Broadway. When I realized that they’d momentarily be blocking my path, with full shopping bags in both hands, I darted across the banners at the helm. Once across, I felt an immediate pang of shame. They gave up a day to demonstrate and stop traffic in Manhattan, I thought. The least, the very least I could do is to stop for two goddamned minutes to listen, to watch, to think…
We approached the Giant Red Twin Popsicle, marking the final stretch of the march. The night before, I’d thought about finding a Pride flag to carry to show solidarity with LGBTQ Ukrainians…but I forgot. I flipped through the photos I’d taken, I looked around, hoping to find one or two Pride flags: nothing. I checked my gaydar: nothing. I couldn’t get too judgy, though, as my great attempt to communicate solidarity was to carry a Pride flag. Lackluster at best, and I forgot. Where are the gays?
I heard some reporting on NPR about the State of Israel’s complicated position in this conflict. On one hand, they’re morally opposed to the invasion and to Putin’s unsubstantiated claim that he’s defending ethnic Russians from genocide. On the other, Russia’s friendship (or, at least, lack of animosity) is crucial to Israel’s survival. Oh, and, over the course of the last few hundred years, Jewish communities suffered systematic and random persecution in Ukraine. That’s not so different from most regions in Europe, but by the 19th century, about a third of European Jews lived there. By the end of World War II, the Jewish population in Ukraine had reduced from nearly 900,000 to fewer than 20,000, a terrible fact that, many historians argue, could not have happened without local collaboration. In this light, I can understand why Jews and even the entire State of Israel might hesitate to enter the fray - if nothing else, people need a moment to bolster themselves when attempting to love someone who hates them.
Maybe this points to a parallel insight about queer folx. Private, same-sex relations (also known as “gay sex”) in Ukraine might be technically legal since 1991, but exclusion from fundamental rights like marriage and adoption are indicators of the fragile social climate for LGBTQ people there. Maybe the gays have stayed away because of the history and current reality of heterosexism in Ukraine. Then again, maybe we’re just distracted by the bigots in our own backyard who are targeting trans youth, picking fights about who can and can’t play sports, and clogging the judicial system with attempts to erode very hard-won legal protections for queer people. Maybe we’re preoccupied with the Florida state legislature who have collectively decided to stoke heterosexism and hatred in an election year by, once again, painting LGBTQ people as predators, by criminalizing allyship, by returning queer kids to invisible and even more vulnerable status in the classroom. Apparently, Anita Bryant’s legacy is stronger than we thought.
What is it about conservative cultures that makes sexual difference such a target? It’s not just stereotype threat, and it’s not paranoid to suggest that I can reasonably assume that a socially conservative dish comes with a big, fat helping of hatred for queer folx. Why do these people hate me but those people don’t? Is this actually a symptom itself of some other cause, a ripple effect of shared national or cultural trauma? Does each invasion, each drought, each economic collapse arrest the collective social development of a group?
In My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem explores inherited, intergenerational trauma and offers a distinct starting point for understanding and healing from racism. We know now that trauma has a biological impact and that it is passed on and becomes so familiar that it passes for family norms or culture.
Historical trauma, intergenerational trauma, institutionalized trauma (such as white-body supremacy, gender discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination, etc.), and personal trauma (including any trauma we inherit from our families genetically, or through the way they treat us, or both) often interact. As these traumas compound each other, or as each new or recent traumatic experience triggers the energy of older experiences, they can create ever-increasing damage to human lives and human bodies.
Most of the book focuses on the experience of African Americans, but Menakem invokes a little historical empathy, too, asking readers to consider the Europeans who colonized the Americas and enslaved Africans. He asks,
Isn’t it likely that many of them were traumatized by the time they arrived here? Did over ten centuries of medieval brutality, which was inflicted on white bodies by other white bodies, begin to look like culture? Did this intergenerational trauma and its effects end with European immigrants’ arrival in the New World?
It’s a halting and haunting question. And for those of us who feel culturally, philosophically, and morally enlightened or progressive, it’s also a call to compassion, even for - especially for - people who hate us. It doesn’t excuse conscious choices that directly or systematically harm a group of people, but it does remind us that, underneath layers of bigotry, there are layers of pain, generations of pain. And, underneath all that pain is a person, sometimes buried so deep their humanity is nearly undetectable. We may think of ethics and choice in the domain of the conscious, individual homo sapien, as pertaining only to navigating discreet relationships with others and the world. It’s easier to believe in our own autonomy (and to cleanly and directly blame others) that way. But now we know that we have inherited and will pass down choices that have harmed others, that harm ourselves. Ethical discernment is part of our biological and evolutionary development. Our choices, quite literally, shape future generations.
Cultures like Ukraine, rooted in regions rich in natural resources or of important geographic and commercial intersections, have been shaped by millennia of aggression from neighboring powers. Could this be a clue as to why marginal groups are so vulnerable in the region? The insight doesn’t excuse the history of antisemitism, the targeting of Roma and Sinti, the ongoing persecution of queer people. It certainly doesn’t excuse the current denial of Black and Brown people, fellow refugees fleeing a war, from boarding trains and accessing borders. Instead, the insight magnifies these choices. How we respond now, how we treat each other now, will instruct generations to come on how to achieve (or how to disastrously miss) a true and lasting peace.
I’m reminded of “This Land Is Mine,” Nina Paley’s dark and satirical depiction of the history of Palestine, a history of constant successive invasions by bands, emerging nations, and empires who hid their thirst for power and resources behind the veil of political or religious hegemony. We could probably imagine a similar depiction for Ukraine, trampled and tossed around from empire to empire for thousands of years. I could even imagine a similar attempt to capture the persistent persecution of queer people. Couldn’t you? Gloria Gaynor belts “I Will Survive,” an animated drag queen lip syncs through successive threats. Medieval and modern torture devices give way to the restriction of access to fundamental services, civil rights, and healthcare, and then, finally, to battery by legislation. I’m just a bill, yes, I’m only a bill…The important part of the story wouldn’t be the constancy of persecution. The important part would be the survival of that drag queen. Instead of the Angel of Death consuming the world as in “This Land Is Mine,” it would end with the drag queen standing up after being beaten by the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, putting on a new wig, and touching up her lipstick.
Since the early 20th century, the early days of the movement for LGBTQ civil rights (it didn’t begin with Stonewall, folx!), one goal queer people have shared is survival, but maybe it’s time to shift gears, to shift our ambitions. Now that we’ve got some modicum of legal protection and security in some parts of the world (and apparently more firmly in some parts of this country than in others) maybe it’s time to cultivate compassion for others who have also been used as punching bags by more powerful others, even if, especially if they hate us.
I turned to my left and felt my dander rise at the sight of a Blue Lives Matter cap. Within a few blinks, I decided that the (from what I could see) straight, white, cisgender man wearing it was an asshole. So much for compassion, Bill. I laughed at myself, at my moral inconsistency, at the fact that I’d been spending so much time checking my and others’ privilege that I forgot to also check my proclivity for quick and brutal judgments.
GLORY TO THE HEROES!
Huh? That one confused me. The heroes? To my overly sensitive pacifist ear, invoking heroism is a complement to glorifying war, to glorifying and perpetuating violence, the violence that killed them in the first place. Maybe it sounds better in Ukrainian. The last march I was in was (mostly) silent, a long walk through Seattle in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arberry. Were they heroes? Their deaths weren’t particularly glorious. I’ve walked in various Pride parades over the years, most recently Seattle’s in 2020. Pride parades have drifted far from their original (and, ostensibly, still core) purpose to demonstrate, to advocate, and to protest in a society that denies our lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness. Now, most of the big-city parades look like decadent marketing conventions. How would that sound in a Pride parade, I wondered, “Glory to the heroes”? Who are our heroes?
As the column of demonstrators moved into the park, we trapped drivers in a parking lot and passed a sprinkling of people, families and tourists who took advantage of the sunshine and warmth to spend the day in the shadow of the Space Needle. Some took their phones out to snap pics, making me wonder how many of us would pop up on some stranger’s Instagram or Twitter feed, how many of us would be deleted on the way home, how many of us would remain to be stumbled over months, years later.
NO FLY ZONE!
We arrived at Seattle Center echoing the leader’s chant, but I had to admit to myself that I didn’t really understand this one. I reminded myself to Google it later. Moving through the pedestrian boulevard toward the amphitheater, we passed a violinist really rocking out with a recorded accompaniment. Usually, his music and charisma would rake in a few bucks from passersby, but with a steadily moving parade of blue and yellow dominating his stage, I wondered if he was pissed that no one was going to drop a dollar in his case, or if he was so enthused because of his support for our cause, or if he noticed us at all.
STOP PUTIN NOW!
Music blasted from speakers along the amphitheater’s stage to spur a festive mood, but the area was quiet, solemn. Fifteen minutes after I arrived, so many bodies continued to spill into the amphitheater that the emcee asked the crowd to squeeze in, to make more room. As I found a spot in the shade, a guy walking past said to his friend, “Maybe they have a speaker system so everyone can actually hear this time.” There’s always that guy, isn’t there. The emcee tried to vamp, clearly eager to get the program going and overwhelmed by the numbers of people still filling the knoll. A children’s chorus was assembled on risers, where they’d wait patiently while various officials gave rambling speeches and led anemic chants. “Last week the skies cried,” the emcee announced, attempting to stoke a little hope. “The weather, or God,” she said, “is on our side.” A man stepped forward to sing the Ukrainian national anthem with a powerful and graceful tenor voice (over an almost campy orchestration). Many around me sang along, and the crowd applauded brightly for him. The emcee spoke of her pride in this moment of being a Ukrainian and an American, and the US Anthem started to play. Within a few bars, I noticed my right hand floating up to rest over my heart and my mouth moving as I sang along. When did I get so patriotic?
The emcee asked the crowd to take a minute to honor 37 fallen heroes, and we all fell silent. Well, all but one couple over my left shoulder who got my (and several others’) sharp and judgy glare. Three seagulls overhead cawed and broke the silence, applause followed. The emcee returned to the mic: “Heroes never die.” Heroes never die. An official from the Ukrainian consulate did his best to spark a fire in the crowd, but his passion and desperation were stymied by the barriers of language.
FIGHTER AIRCRAFTS TO PROTECT THE SKY!
It lacked rhythm and pith, but when it didn’t catch on, almost as if someone whispered a correction in his ear, he tried again.
MORE FIGHTER JETS!
I went to see and be seen. I went to listen, to learn, to think. I wanted to witness history, but I didn’t expect to be history. I didn’t expect to see myself reflected in it or to see a part for me to play. I’m not bearing arms or rushing to provide assistance at the front. Honestly, I’ll probably do little more than keep up with the news, donate to relief or refugee organizations, and engage in heated dialogues about whether this or that should happen, but being a witness means opening my eyes and mind, choosing to be impacted, choosing to transform. We’re not stuck with the way things are, and we’re not stuck with our primal instincts. We always have a choice, and our choices are the only way we’re going to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.
