Failures

by Lucy S.

The more I've thought about it, the worse I feel about how I handled the situation with someone we had staying here. She arrived suddenly from out of town, needing a place to stay till she could find a room. We didn't know each other. Someone asked me if she could stay here for a night or two. But talking with her, hearing about some of the many difficulties she'd gone through, I thought, why not, when she said she was looking for a room to rent. I hated to think of her having to stay a week here, a few days there... I should have never gone with the plan of someone paying for a room in that way. I don't want a role that in any way feels like a landlord, even without profit.  And I should have taken more time in the first place, invited her to stay a week or two with no talk of longer term situations, just simple hospitality and solidarity. It bothers me that a month in, I ended up thinking along the all too common, dreary, petty lines of noticing someone spending so much, not paying their agreed on 'share,' and so on.  It bothers me that I didn't come up with better boundaries in the first place.  Or, not need those kind of boundaries. Or something. It bothers me that I STILL do not really know NOW all that I should have done differently or did do wrong, while nonetheless sensing that I did not handle it right. 

This pained sense of failure brings no absolution, either, of course. 'Feeling bad' does not absolve me. I suppose that part of the problem is still feeling too many experiences inside the terms of blame and absolution, or sympathy and obligations. These confuse things. 

I didn't ask her to leave, and I would not have. But she moved out suddenly, deeply upset when I tried to talk with her one day about some concerns. So now I've somehow added to the hurt she carries. And I feel hurt as well; I feel defensive protestations rise in me about my 'kindness' and so on. 

Maybe I'm as infused as ever with wrong thinking and wrong ways of being.  Maybe I don't know how to find my way beyond these walls. I want to learn a better way to be, but how? Many others don't seem to know, either.  We yearn for some kind of deep communion with people, the truest cause to put our all into, work that actually makes things better and not worse -- at least some of us yearn for this. Most of us?  Yet, how? How do we become people with those capacities? 

Sometimes I feel so close to knowing. Or I think that I at least partly know. But I'm confronted with this failure now. So I still have not found an answer.

I remember seeing a locally made documentary about a particular group's trip to Haiti before the U.S. succeeded in removing Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president there. Father Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest, was saying, in a sermon purposely delivered in English to be filmed and go out to an American audience: "I'm hungry!  Look at how much food they're throwing away there in Florida!"  Florida, so close to Haiti, with its glut of goods so unattainable for most Haitians. Haitians who sometimes eat dirt to make their stomachs feel full, though it has no nutrients, no ability to fend off the bodily decimations of starvation.  Haitians now dying from cholera. Haitians who carried out the one and only successful slave revolution ever, who then were forced to pay an enormous fee to France for the loss of France's valuable property - the colony and the people it enslaved. Haiti, which our government occupied with Marines from 1915 to 1934. I've read the testimony of Haitians rounded up as forced labor by the U.S. occupying forces back then, the brutalities done to Haitian people who resisted. There is too much to tell of the history of U.S. involvement in Haiti then and far more recently – here it will only sound like rants and raves – but I know it well enough to know that there is no way to say that the destitution there is disconnected from us here. And always, our cheap goods come to us on the backs those around the world, economically blackmailed into performing cheap labor. Are they real to us?  How can we make them real enough, and make all the connections visible all of the time, and then realize the responses demanded by those connections? 

It is systemic, of course. It is political, of course. Yet I can't help feeling personally implicated in these truths told by the majorities, those who live outside our wasteful United States. Why do we consume and waste so much?  Can we somehow recognize and address the systemic AND the personal?  Might they be intertwined? 

What about factory farms, overflowing landfills, rising seas drowning out land where people live who never consumed what the West consumes? Devastations of eco-systems and animals and masses of other people.

I bring this up because these things, too, always weigh on my mind as I grapple with the meaning even of generosity itself. Generosity toward whom?  How should it manifest? I know too much to not be sickened a bit by the purchases of yet more trinkets and toys and gadgets and stuff by and for people who will not find satisfaction in all this. And I'm never outside of that. It's easy to see one person's purchases as indulgent and wasteful while justifying our own. And yet, how do we stop using our own failures to live as we should as reasons to not try for real transformations in ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our world? Doesn't it become a vicious cycle?  

All of this courses in me and surges up, and I can't tell if it's pointless moralism, or asceticism, or destructive anguish, or a small piece of truth. Is there any hope in it?  Can pleas for honest conversations sometimes be a kind of hope?  Is it somehow hopeful to ask: do we have too much of what we don't need and not enough of what we do?

I am always grappling with how to weave all these questions and partial realizations into other truths - the truths of wounded people. 

I'm probably not being clear enough. I'll try to explain it another way.

Today is my niece's birthday (who I call Rose here, though her name is longer and more unique, so unique that I won't use it because I don't want this to come up in internet searches by family members). It's Rose's birthday, and she's been gone from us now since September 16, 2007.  At times, I have told the more awful things she suffered as if this would make others understand something. Her brother's cancer when she was 6; her mother hauled away by police that year while she screamed and cried in the car; the years of days spent always in her mother's car driving because her mother felt that she couldn't handle her kids without that confinement; being raped at 10 by a family member - and the subsequent death threats by his brothers, angry at his imprisonment. Her mother beating her brother who stuttered so much. The years her mother talked her father into taking strong sedatives she bought out of the country – taking them every day when he was off work, so he'd only sleep or work. Rose calling me to pour all these past and sometimes more present truths out in her late teens.  Her father breaking down one night, grabbing a hammer and hitting himself in the head repeatedly, bleeding, and her screaming at him to stop. The time she told her father parts of what her mother was doing, and her mother demanded that he choose – either he tell Rose to leave the house at 17 or her mother would leave him. "I'm sorry, mija," he tearfully told his oldest daughter. "I don't want you to go, but I can't lose your mom." Wrenching betrayal, bottomless hurt. How could she, she kept asking me, and how could he? In the face of that and so much more: which requests or demands of Rose were we supposed to grant or deny or ignore? Which pitched in money for cars, which meals out almost every day, expensive brands...  stuff I couldn't afford for my own kids, because our income was low? Weren't they all substitutions?  I lectured; I gave in; I refused; I tried to find the right response. But how could I give her what she needed, when what she needed was her family to be completely different, and a different history and life and world? 

And still, this is all a reduction of her into only a victim. This too is a failure on my part. She was so much more. I laughed with her many more times than I cried. 

What is to be done in the face of all of these things? How do we gently, carefully respond to those in need, not reducing them to victims, not patronizing them, not substituting, and not functioning in a 'just business' mode?  How do we balance that care with other deep ecological concerns, or care for those most powerless?  How do we acknowledge but also push at our own individual limitations?

It isn't that I expect someone else to give me the answers. It is that I am so tired of trying to find them alone. I want help creating them. I wanted help long ago, and so little could be found. I wanted real wisdom, something forged in dialogue and relationship with others who have similar concerns and beliefs. 

Sometimes when the confluence of recent events and surfacing memories churn in just the right (or wrong) ways, I find myself compelled again to find answers. I write and write and write, to a friend or to myself, and now here.  I try out formulas and amateur philosophies. THIS, I will sometimes think - THIS is it. Then I will realize the flaw or even what feels like a terrible implication in what I wrote, and I will write more, trying to get it right.  I fail, and at a certain point, that much writing itself becomes another failure, another reason to feel ashamed.  

Still, we need to make our way with others, not alone.  How? 

***

Postscript:

This is fragmented in certain ways, I know. Leaps are made which aren’t clearly explained. I might tell one of my students now, if they gave me a paper doing something similar: “You know what you mean, so it may seem obvious to you, and I think I even know what you mean, but many readers might not understand the connections. Make them clearer.” But I’m more comfortable speaking fragmentedly here about these things. I’d rather that they be evocative than prescriptive.

If I had to identify a central argument here – a ‘thesis’ – it would be, in general terms, that so many of us have too much of what we don’t need and not enough of what we do. Applying that to specific situations is what is hard. We’re called on to make these specific applications of general principles as an inherent part of life, but it doesn’t mean we do it ethically or intelligently. Because I distrust what passes for common sense in the parts of U.S. society I’ve been part of during my life, I continually end up a step removed from my own reactions. I have those reactions, but I don’t necessarily trust them. My dad says many people tend toward a ‘judgment for others – mercy for me’ stance. Inverting it is another distortion, and one that doesn’t necessarily hold (backlash can manifest as self-pity). I don’t want to decide in any binding way what another person does not and does need – and I am not asking some other individual to give me that answer, either – about myself or some other person.

I am saying that what we’re doing on small and large scales in this country isn’t healthy. Something is profoundly wrong at the personal and systemic level. I think we need sustained conversations about these things. We need deeper relationships. Continuing to believe that we either meet our own ‘needs’ OR care for the rest of the world can only perpetuate the failures we are withering or drowning in. We need to connect a multitude of realities that are somehow one reality.