Today a song: It’s Quiet Uptown from the Broadway musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The song is about the unspeakable grief of losing a child.
I woke up yesterday morning and learned that a plane and helicopter in Washington D.C. had crashed. I had taken cold medicine the night before and was unusually groggy, so I got to witness my brain processing the news slowly. First, I tried to determine whether anyone I knew could have been hurt. Once satisfied that none of my friends or family were likely to have been on a flight from Wichita to D.C., my brain moved on to trying to figure out how this crash fit into the political landscape. I’m sure that it will take a long time to fully understand how the recent turmoil in the federal government may or may not have contributed to the crash, and I’m certainly not qualified to weigh in on that. What was interesting though was how my view of the event changed when I determined I was unlikely to know anyone who was hurt. The crash became abstract. Instead of the sudden and tragic deaths of dozens of people, I felt like I was reading about an executive order being signed or a law being passed.
But of course, the workings of the government always affect people's lives, often in ways just as visceral as a plane crash. For most of my life I have been sheltered from this — I have been financially stable, had healthcare, and taken for granted that I would always live in a small-l liberal democracy where no rights would be taken away. However, if you ask anyone who has served in the armed forces, or struggled to afford life-saving medications, or faced the threat of deportation, politics has always been a matter of existential importance. Something like the suspention of PEPFAR has the potential to cause inconceivable amounts of suffering to people around the world, many of whom are children (at the time of this writing PEPFAR spending has resumed, though it’s unclear if it will continue).
A central tension that I’ve explored in my writing on this blog is the value of confronting uncomfortable truths and the importance having a light touch when doing so. Tyler also writes about our limited ability to comprehend the suffering in the world. Although I often consider it a blessing to be able to turn away from the horrors of the world, I have found that sometimes trying to distance myself from the suffering of others feels worse than leaning into the sorrow. To intellectualize the horrors of the world is to deny a part of my own humanity. After I read stories of people who died in a plane crash, and of people whose HIV treatment was interrupted amidst the pause in PEPFAR funding, I listened to this song. And listening didn’t make me feel better, but it did make me feel more human.