politics – Kara Jorgensen

Not gonna lie, I’ve been going through it emotionally lately. It’s hard for me to talk about feeling anxious and depressed when nothing obviously horrible is happening in my life. Knock on wood, no one has died, nothing catastrophic has happened, but if I think a little too hard about my current situation juxtaposed against the state of the world, I find myself k.o-ed by a brain death spiral more often than I would care to admit.

I often think about Otto Dix and other Post-WWI artists and authors. When I was younger, I never understood how they could all be so sad and traumatized years on, even though the 1920s seemed so upbeat, especially compared to the 1910s. I get it now. The big joke about Millennials is that we’ve lived through too many historic events. A merry-go-round is fun until it won’t stop spinning, and you’re ten seconds from hurling or jumping off. That’s where we are. The only time in my life where the world was stable was from ages 0-9, which was just enough to lull me into a false sense of security that things could get better. Things have never gotten better in any meaningful, big picture way. I look back at those poor, ennui-filled people living through WWI and then a pandemic and then having to face more of life’s messiness with no real hope of things getting better, and I’m like yeah, same, bud. At the crux of that ennui is the idea that so much of this death and destruction could have been prevented.

Instead of WWI, my generation has the Palestinian Genocide. Day after day we’re confronted with horrific images of children being blown to pieces, bombs dropped on schools, on mosques, on ancient sites, libraries, universities, whole communities and families wiped out in a senseless instant. Even worse is knowing that an AI algorithm decides who lives and dies while Israeli troops post videos of them proudly rummaging through Palestinian people’s houses on Tiktok. I often think it isn’t hard to be not be a shit head, yet every day people seem to prove me wrong. Much like WWI, it’s all about land ownership. Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Palestines lived side by side for centuries, and they could again if it weren’t for people who are hellbent on turning Gaza into a seaside resort and running Palestinians out of the West Bank, once again, for the real estate.

On top of all this, there’s the pandemic, which, FYI, we’re still in. The radio silence from our leaders about Covid grates on me. Wastewater data doesn’t lie that we’re currently in another wave of covid. Each infection has a good chance of leaving you with long covid, for which there is no cure or treatment. There’s something about people willfully infecting themselves and their children with something that could give them brain or organ damage that fills me with far more dread than nearly anything else. I can ride out economic mess, I can white knuckle it through more trans- and homophobia, but I can’t stand that people won’t mask up because it “salts the vibe.” Sorry, baby, covid isn’t done with you yet, and viruses don’t care that you’re tired of their existence. Studies have proven time and time again that it isn’t milder, it isn’t a cold, and vaccines protect against severe disease only and do not prevent you from catching or spreading it. Masking would prevent so much sickness and disease, but so many well-meaning liberals just won’t anymore, no matter how much you explain how this affects chronically ill or disability people or even themselves (I mean, who wants to potentially become chronically ill or disabled?). I don’t know how to make you care or appeal to your humanity when it apparently isn’t there anymore.

“Pandemic fatigue,” “compassion fatigue,” what I’m tired of is the bullshit from people who want to pretend nothing bad is happening and that they can’t possibly be complicit. Newsflash, you are.

At the same time, I’ve been heartened by seeing others online masking, especially as the #Yallmasking went viral on Twitter. I didn’t feel so alone seeing so many people post selfies in their N95s and KN95s. Seeing the sudden renewed verve for pissing off conservatives and calling out their ridiculous bullshit has been heartening since Kamala Harris announced her run for president. Do I think she’s perfect? No. Do I think she’s spurred something akin to hope? God, I hope so. I feel like democrats are suddenly growing something at least vaguely resembling a spine, and I think Harris can be pushed further left than we’ve been in a long time. If we can gain that momentum and keep pushing left, we may actually make headway. I feel like I need to guard my heart against hope because I’ve been burned one too many times, but if there’s progress to be made, I need to feel that disenchantment, burn it off, and pick myself up again.

Since you’ve gotten this far into my soapbox rant, I hope you will

a) mask up for your own health and the health of those around you. If you can’t afford masks, see if there is a mask bloc near you

b) support the Airborne Act of 2024 by calling your congress people and asking them to support this bill, which gives tax incentives for businesses and public spaces to filter the air, which would help current and future pandemics

c) demand your congress people support a permanent ceasefire in Palestine as well as reparations for the Palestinian people, so they can rebuild. You can also leave a message for Vice President Harris.

I’m starting to think the path of least resistance and the road to hell are the same thing. With what is going on in Palestine and my own country’s various issues, the vast majority of which stem from white supremacist ideology, I’m happily putting a stake through the heart of my palatability.

I’ve never been a people pleaser. To be a people pleaser, you have to actually please people, and when you were born weird and slightly arrogant, that doesn’t come easily. Typically, people pleasers will blend in with whomever they’re around, letting go of their edges and corners until they’re palatable. At this point in my life, I’ve decided to grow out my points.

At 32, I’m tired of making myself smaller to make other people comfortable. I got a taste of this in college as the student who always raised their hand and received dirty looks and snide remarks from my classmates. Frankly, I didn’t care. The eye-rollers were assholes, so I ignored them. Unfortunately, going to a very neurotypical-staffed grad program and then an abysmal job market eroded my “I don’t give a shit about other people’s opinions of me” attitude. Pretending I was normal (or masking, as we say in the neurodivergent world) sucks. It’s soul-sucking and wrong to the point that I burnt myself out playing normal. When I finally gave up and told my students that I’m autistic and queer and acted more myself, I ended up having a much better relationship with them. A weight had been lifted, and there was no going back if I could help it.

On the writing front, I’ve been far less willing to blend. I saw a post back in October where a new author was worrying that their audience might not align with their political views, so they decided to just not say anything. The knee-jerk reaction I had to the cowardice dripping from the post made me set my phone down. My first thought was, “Oof, I guess you’re white, cis, straight, and Christian.” Only someone whose identity aligns with the political “norm” would have such a shitty take. I used to be upset when I received homophobic reviews on my first few books. At this point, I smear so much queerness and neurodivergence across my books and online posts that someone would have to purposely ignore it to not see it. If you’re conservative and reading my books, you’re probably hate-reading, and I still have your money in my pocket, so *shrug* go ahead and leave a review that lures in queer readers.

Art is political. What we do or don’t include, who we do or don’t portray and how all gives a glimpse into our politics. If you want to sanitize your work to make it palatable for everyone, there is no chance that you’re creating anything worthwhile. Is it worth it to hack off your edges to make a few more bucks?

While I may not be immediately clocked as queer or nonbinary in the wild, I still stick out as a mask-wearer. I’m immunosuppressed, but even if I wasn’t, the science says we should avoid the plague at all costs if we want to maintain our and our loved one’s health. Masking is community care, and if you’re someone who feels strongly about racial equality or disability justice, you should be masking. You can’t be an ally to communities of color and not mask when they are more likely to have worse outcomes than white people. I don’t care if it’s weird or people think it’s over the top. It’s no skin off my nose to put a mask on when I’m at work or the store. It’s the least I can do.

I’d like it if everyone could take a look at themselves and figure out what parts of themselves they’ve been sanding off to make themselves more palatable and why. Obviously, if you’re in an unsafe situation, you should do what you have to in order to preserve your life/sanity, but for those of us able to step out of line or march to our own beat, we should stop trying to be palatable.

Being palatable is blending in, being palatable means not making waves, being palatable allows genocides to unfold, whether they be of queer people, Palestinian people, disabled people, and I’m not about that life.

Tag: politics

Emotional Whiplash

On Not Being Palatable