Hope Through Flooded Eyes
The first Monday of a June that will scorch the Northern Hemisphere, water from an overnight storm blesses the ground beneath me. One hundred Fahrenheit degrees the day before and the day after will oppress in both their blazing presents and the suffocating future they portend, but for this single pass of light over Austin, there is moisture and breath and relief.
Along the trail that circles the city’s river of a lake, rain still clings to the leaves and branches rationing drops to all underneath, teasing the possibility of another, softer shower, not the torrents and lightning that flooded the darkness and felled their relatives a few hours before. Certainly, the Central Texas climate has never lacked for atmospheric grandiosity, for hot sun and big thunder. Perhaps that makes the magnitude of the shift a little easier to ignore, but the shift is undoubtedly underway, the desert loping in from the west while the tides grow deeper in the east.
The tree canopy sheltering my bike ride breaks temporarily, making room for what remains of the Holly Street Power Plant, which for five decades burnt one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the city to energize the rest of it. It’s been more than ten years since the current stopped flowing, yet the neighborhood threatens to be unrecognizable by the time demolition is complete. The sight of Holly directs my pedaling towards the capitol. I know something’s happening there this afternoon, but not really what it will be or what it might do.
Fifty years after losing King, there has been a reunification of conscience under the banner of his final cause, the Poor People’s Campaign. A weekly series of actions centered in DC have made the news — some news, at least — but I’m not quite sure what to expect down here. Protests on the capitol grounds are as steady as the droughts before the floods, though for every mass march with thousands of attendees, there are a dozen weeks of dozens rallying. Austin is never short on opportunities to holler at the plugged ears of power, or on the hollering kind.
I’m greeted by someone drawn to the event towing her own vague uncertainty. I do not know her age, but, in spite of eyes that give away their lingering hope of seeing something new at any moment, her age is apparent. There is a tuft of white hair on her chin. Her cane has lost whatever grip it was manufactured with, and she’s got nothing for a new one, so the handle is wrapped in toilet paper and cheap tape. “My pastor told me to come down here, says they trying to do something about all this hurting. It’s about time. People been hurting for a long time. We been waiting too long for something like this.”
An assembly of perhaps fifty people, most all of whom have spent years or decades in the ceaseless work of trying to do something about all this hurting, march towards the offices of the Texas Railroad Commission.* On the capitol’s eastern staircase, a group of schoolchildren poses for a class photograph. As we pass, all homemade signs and chants and spirituals, they erupt in cheers. It’s not by any means the undisciplined freak-out of a group of kids met with a distracting surprise; they are standing proud and as tall as they will eventually become, a busful of preteens in solidarity, eyes showing an understanding of justice far beyond their years. The teachers and chaperones join the applause, though they seem to be directing it at the kids more than us.
In the lobby of the Railroad Commission, as might happen when you stumble into action not knowing what to expect, I find myself holding the banner. Seven people are arrested for blocking the doors that the fossil fuel industry opens to file its paperwork re: tearing the earth out from under, converting air to a toxin, defiling water where it is most precious, and sealing the future’s coffins. Among the civil disobedients is a mother who has traveled from Pasadena, a refinery town on the Houston Ship Channel:
This happens every day. A thunderstorm, a lightning storm goes off and it knocks out the power in those refineries, and there’s flares and there’s toxic chemicals being released every single time, and I am tired of it. It affects our health. We know that our children are going to get cancer one day. We know that. We don’t know when, but we know it’s going to happen.
…This is something that is powerful, that is destroying us, and we have to cut it off. We have to stop that power. We have to get that power to yield to us, to understand that it is affecting us, it is killing us.
After the arrestees are released and the assembly dissolves, I pass another group of schoolchildren at the capitol. They are wearing matching t-shirts in a variety of colors. Before the flash and the shutter, they exclaim “Democracy!” in unison, eyes showing that they mean it.
*The Texas Railroad Commission’s name is an obfuscation. They are the state agency that regulates the Texas oil and gas industry, which is to say that they make it regular for the oil and gas industry to do whatever it damn well pleases. The theme of the week’s Poor People’s Campaign actions is “The Right to Health and a Healthy Planet: Ecological Devastation and Health Care”.
It is July now, and many things are very wrong. The memory of the children at the capitol has been joined by the fact of the children separated from their families and kept in makeshift cages right here in the selfsame state. It occurs to me what I suspect has already occurred to both the children up here and the children down there — how thin the line is between freedom and subjugation, as thin as any line on any map, as thin as your epidermis.
We mostly watch dire news about everyday people through telescopes, understanding the impact of events logistically, translating war and capital and suffering into box scores. It certainly seems easier that way, and maybe on the whole we need to deal with the numbers because truly dealing with the humanity would just be too much to sustain.
Sometimes, though, some objective detail pushes a button that opens you further, forces the rawness of another’s feelings in. You recognize some particularity in the pain of strangers, and while their pain remains theirs alone, it rubs up against yours, half embracing and half scraping. It could be the commonality of your backgrounds or the familiarity of their situation. It could be a murder on a boulevard you strolled or a flight that crashed as yours was landing. In this case, for me, it’s a date on the calendar.
The Federal District Court in San Diego has ordered the children kidnapped by immigration authorities be returned to their families by July 26. It’s an excruciating point to hinge the door between a series of misfortunes and a place without solace. July 26 is also the date that, six years ago, my favorite person ended her life.
If our individual, private suffering is good for anything, it’s that it can serve as the dark aquifer of our empathy, a wellspring for our compassion. I can only imagine the terror of daughters and sons, far from a lost home, torn from their mother’s arms and trapped in the corpse of a Walmart. I can only imagine the desperation of a parent in a different prison who, after weeks of not knowing where their child might be, hears them crying for help on the other end of a phone. What I do not need to imagine is the devastation that all trauma leaves in its wake, the way that the bad things that happen to you and within you over the course of your life don’t actually make you stronger so much as they force you to use all of your strength.
Sometimes that strength runs out, the will breaks. It doesn’t necessarily break in the moment, though it may, as it violently broke from Efrain De La Rosa last week in Lumpkin, Georgia. After the international attention changes its foci, the psychic pain will continue to haunt these families in myriad complex ways. Surely some among them will cope in manners that make them appear to have grown stronger. Surely others will run out of strength, maybe with a sudden brutal halt, maybe almost invisibly over the grinding years, but tragically all the same.
In a letter to the nonprofit Grassroots Leadership, the imprisoned mother of a seven year old girl and a ten year old boy tried to find words to describe her torture:
Please help me, I am begging you, I don’t know what to do without them. They killed me alive, I swear. I need your help because from here locked up I can’t do anything for them. There are moments I swear I feel am going crazy and I hope that if any of you is a mother, you could understand the pain that we are feeling because they have ripped away the most wonderful thing God has given us, which is our children. Is it that the President doesn’t have any children so he can ignore the pain he is causing us? I am one of the mothers that is running away from their own country because they threatened to kill me and my children, and that is why we ran away, but here they killed us alive by taking away our children.
I think about the most terrible sound I have ever heard, the primeval howl of my favorite person’s mother in the moment before they closed her casket. I think about the feeling of powerlessness when faced with such limitless grief. I think about how hard it must be for the mothers writing letters just to pick up a pen. I think about what doesn’t kill you.
The boundary between grief and depression is an effusing liquid. At the edge of the river in a deluge, the difference between standing in sheets of rain and slipping into the undertow might not be apparent until drowning registers as sonic void. You might wash back ashore coughing and too soaked to recognize earth until you notice the lantanas and the fireflies asking if you’re okay. This is a place of mortal danger, but the wounded have no other place and no prayer beyond the knowledge that floods have come before and floods have passed.
We are in a season of profound sorrow and despair. Malignant imbalance defines our modern ecosystems and economies; generations that were raised on the starry dreams of the space age are passing along to their descendants nightmares of a depleted planet. High technologies of extraction — geological, financial, psychological — engorge markets with blood squeezed from stones. Every harrowing moment is one that has never come before. But there have been other floods, there have been other droughts, there are still blossoms.
Six years ago, in the moments when I was able to pull up for air, I felt as though I was experiencing the world for two. Everything I felt, I felt unbearably. Oftentimes those emotions would tear in half, joy and sorrow shaking apart from each other as they engulfed the space inside my chest I had never known to be so vast. I did not see how I could survive that magnitude of aching receptivity, yet promised that I had no choice because to be alive had never felt so sacred. The future arrived a single breath at a time. A single breath at a time, it took on new shapes and traveled in directions that I could never have imagined, either before or after any of the tragedies or fortunes of my experience. Perhaps, now, I’ve grown enough scar tissue to be able to think beyond the next breath, but my ability to divine the future is no greater than it was, then or ever.
In her foreword to Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit traces a line between the personal and the social:
One of the essential aspects of depression is the sense that you will always be mired in this misery, that nothing can or will change. It’s what makes suicide so seductive as the only visible exit from the prison of the present. There’s a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don’t always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in, and memory, the collective memory we call history.
…Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.
We are conditioned to withhold our deepest personal experiences from our communities, to mask our suffering in daily life, to privately medicate. “Grief pulls back the curtain” as someone recently put it to me, and that kind of clarity is very unpopular with the wizards of our emerald cities. People united around hurt and struggle ask uncomfortable questions and make unreasonable demands and start recognizing the cures on offer are just placebos. Upset people upset things.
It is more than a tick, more than a trigger, more than a trick of chemistry that witnessing courage and resistance shakes me wide open like six years never passed. The shouting sea of orange in the rotunda 2013, the footage of icy hoses on Backwater Bridge 2016, the entire street singing “Power!” last January, the kids at the capitol and the disobedient at the Railroad Commission and the letters from the ICE box. The feelings tear apart, rage and longing and persistence and desperation, and when I can’t hold them in my chest any longer, I hope through flooded eyes. When I thought I was feeling for two, I’d already forgotten how fast she made friends, how little time before she’d bring all the rest of the ghosts along to scream and dance and raise their fists with us who are here now.
On the retaining walls of the Holly Street Power Plant, the people surrounded their antagonist with beauty. Many of those murals are fading, but one was recently restored. For La Raza celebrates struggle and survival from Aztlan to the plant’s fenceline, a history carried in memory. The year after it was originally painted, 50,000 gallons of oil spilled, a fuel line fire shrouded the city in smoke, and a report found that the risk posed to the community’s health was of no concern. The power plant is less than a skeleton now, and beauty remains.
