your enemy's enemy

the winter strips everyone’s faces naked. back in NYC and i keep thinking about a conversation i had with a friend who’s always the life of the party until 4am when the sadness behind all his jokes creeps in. he told me he prefers winter to summer because you can watch everyone’s eyes peeking out from their bundled heads. “everyone’s just surviving.” he said it with this soft wonder in his voice and it always stuck with me because he’s never serious about anything. at the time i didn’t get it because i hate winter and couldn’t imagine getting past the discomfort to the sense of stark, fresh, quiet that its been giving me since i got back to north america, but here we are.

the warmth last saturday felt sudden and came with notifications alternating between sports style coverage of what we’d blown up in Iran, and who we’d killed, and elated texts about the good weather. i walked out of my apartment to go run sprints which is an insane thing to do while your country bombs another but also there’s nothing in particular that isn’t an insane thing to do in these circumstances.

people tilted their faces up to the sun and i thought about being in Ukraine at the start of the war and wondering how the Russians could just go on doing life while their missiles whistled and thudded into Kyiv. and also remembered that i already knew exactly how cause we do it all the time. ukrainians would ask that question and i would think of iraq and afghanistan and feel sick. my mom said on the phone the other day that judgement is just another way of distancing yourself from something you’re uncomfortably close to. i went for my little run and when i got back the headlines were still rolling.

some things shouldn’t be bite size. reporting the play by plays of war is necessary but its normalizing. S. texted me and asked me what i made of it and I said I don’t know shit about the region but obviously bad and she pocket dialed me while i wiped down charlie’s dirty paws with a towel and for a moment we both shook our heads into our earbuds, without much to say.

at an appointment on monday the doctor asked me if we should be worried about retaliation here and i said not so much in terms of direct military strikes but yes in terms of making the world a worse place. in terms of blood all over our hands, yes.

i ran into an Iranian friend in the park and hugged her hard. she said her family and friends are fighting and taking sides and she’s locked at home smoking all day feeling like everyone’s gone crazy.

about a year ago i was at a block party and i was trying really hard and mostly failing to have fun, while avoiding someone who was there. i ran into a friend of his and tried so hard not to be awkward while battling fight or flight. relatively often i have conversations with men who like to explain things to me about Ukraine and Venezuela. they can’t resist the urge to correct my world view, which they know is wrong from reading, or lets be real, listening to podcasts, and flipping some insta slides, although they’ve never set foot in the places they’re explaining to me. They like to tell me, that Ukraine was invaded because of NATO and US foreign policy, and that Putin is misunderstood, and I must not have realized about this thing called the CIA which does this thing called imperialism. like i didnt read chomsky in highschool too my guy.

the acquaintance explained these things to me. i crossed my arms and felt my eyes starting to smolder. i tried to inject some nuance and find some common ground. not kumbaya centrist kind of nuance but real life suffering and so many sources of evil at the same time in any scenario nuance. that invasion from any direction is imperial and wrong. that perhaps, sometimes, what the people want in a place like Ukraine, or Venezuela, organically, due to their own experiences and agency, their own history and their own home grown bad governments, there is some overlap between the US imperial agenda and their own desires, which neither validates the US imperial agenda nor invalidates their wishes for their country and their future.

these uncomfortable facts give Russia no more right to invade Ukraine, than it gave us the right to invade Venezuela, or Israel the right to raze Gaza to the ground. that human rights, sadly, are not about liking the politics of the victim, or hating the politics of the violator. its not about teams or banners. allegiance to an ideology to the point of oppressing people whose views you abhor still turns you into a monster. its sticky and annoyingly complicated and makes it difficult to wear your political identity as a cute accessory, or a badge of intellectual superiority. political binaries of left and right don’t translate well across cultures and continents. they contort in transit. the words mean different things in different contexts. the axis moves and the connotations and semiotics mutate. i wish it was simple but if you try to rubber stamp the view you formed about your own country onto another that you’ve never been to, even with the best of intentions, i promise you it never quite fits.

i bit my tongue. i had a couple of embarrassing, exasperated tears in my eyes, i asked questions like, “have you ever been there? Do you know any Ukrainians? ”

They tell me, how Maduro is a rebel martyr, and the Ukrainians are not fighting a just war to defend their homeland because the US manipulated them into not wanting to be part of Russia, and they’re just victims of psy-ops. my brain plays back the wet furrowed eyes of torture victims and quivering stories of extrajudicial killings and people starving and bombs and missiles and drones and little old ladies with trickles of blood leaving trails in the plaster dust on their cheeks, and friends that didn’t make it, and that one kid who got his chest blown open with my nickname on his lips, and i usually get so overwhelmed i’m not very articulate and i sputter something like, but i know these people and i loved them.

that i wish it was that simple too and i miss the days before i met all these people and saw what happened to them when i thought that you could just hold up a ruler to how hardcore someone’s belief in certain things was and more or less measure their character. but words are just window dressing. i dont care what you say i care what you do. no amount of psychobabble excuses or childhood trauma really change the hurt an individual does to another under duress. no amount of yap about anti imperialism or terrorism or whatever the ideological hat you want to wear erases torture or authoritarianism. i might have more patience and empathy for certain versions sure but harm is harm.

i tried to keep the conversation cool at the block party. i never want to be that girl that gets too intense. i failed as usual. for him its an abstraction. a debate to be won. i extricated myself and hid in a circle of my girlfriends for about an hour before irish exiting.

***

i’m trying to figure out how to be a journalist in these times while saying what i need to say. I tell my students that its impossible to be neutral and human a the same time. less if you’re seeing ICE separate families in person or sharing bomb shelters with children. That the myth of the objective journalist is a lie. I use a cute robot emoji in the slide show when we discuss this. “Are you a robot? No. Then you have feelings. Then you will care about the people you photograph and the issues you cover. That’s not a failure, that’s your fuel.” Our mission as journalists is not to adopt a frigid, sterile distance from suffering, but to be honest about it. even when it forces us to portray people we’ve come to love or admire as flawed, or undercut the veneer of perfection that a movement we generally believe in would like to project.

We do that not because we’re snitches, but because by reporting the inevitably messy reality beyond the headlines of literally anything, we earn trust. Because there’s no such thing good guys or bad guys. If journalism has taught me anything, its that the powerful are mostly either bad guys or slightly less bad bad guys. That your artistic or political hero is often an asshole in private. That the guy who risks his life to save someone might be paying down an ugly karmic debt. That we’re all doing our best and sometimes its pretty bad. the only side i can consistently find myself on is that of the civilians trying to get on with life under fire and mostly politics at that point becomes inconsequential fluff. As soon as you get up into the ranks of power everything starts to stink, even when the politics of the group in power sound nice from a distance.

It cuts the other way. I see more and more in media this myth of the innocent victim. the idea that an oppressed person is inherently saintly. As though they are somehow not deserving of fundamental dignity and safety if they’d ever made a big mistake before. As though by being persecuted or worse they’ve earned moral superiority instead of simple human rights. As though we can’t tell you the truth about the working man who in fact has done a crime or two, who doesn’t deserve to be deported, and is still someone i can share a meal with and feel safe and laugh. Life is like that and we all know it. Have you ever met someone innocent? And yet in our current washing machine of warp speed polarization i feel the walls of dogma pressing in on me from all sides. Of course breaking every rule of war to fly in and kidnap a president and drag him home like a hunting trophy is catastrophically bad illegal and wrong. That doesn’t mean he was a good revolutionary or that he didn’t steal that election. It shouldn’t have to. a tyrant attacking you does not make you a saint. your enemy’s enemy is not, in fact, your friend.

***

often when i raise this stuff, the guy speaking deftly swats my little feelings aside with some talking point he vaguely remembers from a college essay or a reel and subtly implies i have a confused and weak political mind. or worse, people whose worldview i find abhorrent assume i’m supporting theirs.

in these last couple of weeks these conversations, and there have been many, have stuck in my head more than i’d like to admit. a friend who is an excellent journalist tells me these are internet people, that they’re not real, but lately i seem to run into internet thinking everywhere. I spent 5 weeks on the road reporting on the fallout of our foreign policy (if you can call it that) in Latin America. I make the arguments to myself in my head and struggle with how to write them because my goal is to be able to keep doing this work and that means i have to watch my mouth. But I will say the math is easy. No politics supersedes being pro- civilian, and anti- killing them.

If dogma acrobatics somehow land you in favor of violence against civilians, whether its some kind of pragmatic justification of ICE ripping kids away from their mothers or shooting nurses in the back, or in order to keep X country safe and “free” we have to blow all of this one’s women and children to hell, or extrajudicial killing is less bad if the dictator claims to be anti-imperial, go watch them die, in person, not on video, and let me know how the theory holds up.