Cooling off

This is the summer when I finally watched “Apocalypse Now.”

Image from "Apocalypse Now."

This is the summer when each day’s news brought another punch to the gut, something more awful than before, and it has sometimes seemed like we’re all on Willard’s boat going up the river, not knowing what terror or madness is around the next bend: Airstrikes in Gaza. A passenger plane shot down. A plague in West Africa.  A journalist beheaded. Another unarmed black teenager shot by a white man, and an American city in chaos.

The horror. The horror.

This is the summer when a lot of good and well-intentioned people – mostly white Americans – made movies of themselves dumping ice on their heads in a show of “awareness” of a devastating and fatal disease.

My wife said last night that it’s almost like something from one of our better fiction writers. Margaret Atwood, maybe, or George Saunders or Karen Russell. What do we do in the face of relentless horror? We film ourselves cooling off? We wink in acknowledgment that the world can be cruel and unjust?

I know, I know – I’ve read the reports over the past couple of weeks about all the money that’s been raised through these ice bucket challenges. And I have acquaintances with ALS and have read the late historian Tony Judt’s heartbreaking essay “Night” about the embodied experience of ALS. It is an ugly and painful disease.

Some of you know that I’ve long been critical of these types of “awareness” campaigns – particularly in the years since my diagnosis with brain cancer. Too often these seem like bandwagons to jump on, a way for (again, mostly white) people to feel less impotent. But at what point do such gestures cease to mean anything? The ice bucket challenges have quickly become a parody of themselves, with humor sites rounding up slapstick videos of "ice bucket fails."

LIVESTRONG bracelets were all the rage for a few years, even after Lance Armstrong’s fall from grace for doping. Pink ribbons are still ubiquitous, despite more knowledge of how suspect some of the breast cancer organizations are. (I’m looking at you, Susan G. Komen Foundation.) When the National Football League – an organization that has repeatedly looked the other way or shrugged when its players have perpetrated violence against women - has a Sunday when players' uniforms feature pink ribbons in a show of breast cancer “awareness” – what, exactly, is the message? 

My problem with such gestures is that they do nothing to engender meaningful change. They put the onus on private citizens to fundraise for healthcare. They demonstrate no collective, visionary thinking about how to reduce disparities in access to resources and education. There’s no larger conversation about inequities, particularly those borne by people of color. Kate Harding has said this far better than I in a recent essay for DAME Magazine. 

In 1999, twenty years after the initial release of "Apocalypse Now," the late, brilliant critic Roger Ebert wrote that the film shows "how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover." 

This is a summer when, more than ever, we need to be recognizing these truths and having those hard conversations. In the face of all of the world's horrors, and especially when an American city becomes militarized and looks more like Coppola's nightmare vision, let's not keep cooling ourselves off. I challenge all of us, myself included, to think about how we can better and more thoughtfully engage. 

Riots in Ferguson, Missouri, August 2014.