I’m having surgery on Tuesday which, I’m fairly confident, will remove the pain I’ve have had for the last eight months. Before I do, a word about what this experience has taught me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about vulnerability since I hurt my back on July 23. Since then, aside from the three-week periods after I got two spinal injections a few months apart, I’ve stood and walked with pain and have had trouble moving around. And that’s left me feeling more vulnerable than usual.
That feeling comes most often when I’m near cars. I’m much more careful crossing streets because once in a while the pain gets so bad that I just have to stop for a moment. And while I can pick up the pace for a brief burst, I don’t respond as quickly as I usually do. So I’m afraid of cars coming around a corner or speeding up as I cross a street.
It’s not just cars, however. I’ve recognized that part of my sense of security in walking down the street in urban areas is my confidence that I can take care of myself in a difficult moment. It’s not that I have many or really any such moments recently. As a short guy who didn’t like getting picked on because I was smart and outspoken, I got into a few fights in my life. And being a lot more aggressive and tougher than others suspected, I came out of them well. But that was a very long time ago. I don’t recall throwing a punch at anyone except in play since the ninth grade. Still, I have had an underlying sense of being strong and capable that meant something to me when I was out and about. And that, like my ability to work long hours and to act in stressful situations, has a lot to do with how I live my life, especially in the world of politics.
Some of that sense of confidence in the streets is gone at the moment. If trouble arises I can neither fight back nor run away. And even if that kind of trouble is incredibly unlikely, it’s affected how I think of myself. And so does finding myself more tired and having to limit work hours because the frequent pain wears me out.
So I’ve been feeling vulnerable in ways I never have before. And that has made me think more about the role the sense of vulnerability and invulnerability plays in our lives. And I’ve especially thought about the lives of those who are a lot more vulnerable than I was either because of their physical limitations or because they face a lot more challenges than I do on the street—women, people of color, those who are disabled, those whose sexual identity and presentation is not traditional.
It has occurred to me that my current sense of vulnerability, like the confidence I once had, is a bit of a mirage. Was I ever really as invulnerable as I thought? Is anyone? My late friend, the long-time transit activist Peter Javsicas, was walking down the street in Center City minding his own business last year when a car spun out of control and crossed onto a sidewalk and killed him. My grandmother and her friend the
Of course, police violence is a lot less likely to happen to me. And that, among other things, leads me to think that no small part of my prior sense of invulnerability in the streets had something to do with my privileged position as a white, fairly prosperous, middle-aged man. Confidence in the street has something to do with one’s physical being, but like most things, it’s socially constructed as well, and in ways that reflect the dynamics of power in our political community.
Our sense of confidence and safety in the world is shaped by who we are and by political and social forces outside us. But it’s also a product of what we are used to. I was always more vulnerable than I recognized before I got hurt. I like to think of myself as tough but I am not that big–and sometimes that matters. And I was always vulnerable to all the random ways of being hurt, from illness to accident. Our sense of vulnerability is measured on a relative scale, formed by our previous experience, not on an absolute scale. I’m more vulnerable than I was on July 22. But I wasn’t nearly as secure as I thought on that day either. (I wasn’t thinking, for one thing, about what picking up a suitcase to put in the backseat of a taxi whose trunk was full could do to me.)
If one has had a charmed life, like I have—with good health, some economic means, a good education, and supportive parents, family, and friends—one is probably fairly confident out in the world. But a lot of that sense of confidence is, again, a mirage. It’s based not so much on personal attributes but on the resources and rules from which one benefits. And it’s also based on a healthy dose of denial about all the random catastrophes—from illness to disaster to economic and political crisis—that can damage any of us at any moment.
This denial isn’t wholly a bad thing. That I had more (partly false) confidence before July 23 most likely helped me live well—and also do the work I do. And that’s true for everyone. We can’t live well—or work and love well, either— if we don’t have some confidence in our safety in the world and our ability to be effective in accomplishing our goals. We have to put aside thoughts of random disaster and catastrophe and illness to get on with the tasks of our lives.
But it would be better if those of us who have lived charmed lives recognized how much our sense of confidence and invulnerability is a product of luck and privilege, not our own doing. And would be best if we could create a political community in which these advantages were available to everyone.
One of the problems in America today is that too many of us think that we do it all on our own. The mirage that we are more invulnerable than we really are may be necessary in life. But when that mirage takes an individualistic form, the consequences for our political community can be awful.
Our individualism leads those of us who are doing pretty well to fail to recognize how much we have been given. And that then leads us to blame the victims of misfortune. We in America are always quick to find something wrong done by someone who only suffers from one or another kind of bad luck, whether it comes in the form of illness, disability, or economic disaster. Recognizing the impact of chance on our lives is unsettling. One way not to see how vulnerable we all are, to protect our sense of security, is to blame the victims.
Our individualism has another bad consequence: When people organize collectively to reduce some of the effects of luck and privilege on their lives—when Black and brown people and women and members of the LGBTQ community assert themselves—those who have benefited from good luck and privilege often object. They made it on their own, they think, and can’t understand why anyone else needs help. And so they deny their own privileged position on the one hand while organizing to fight to protect it on the other.
That dynamic becomes even more striking when some of the people who have been privileged for much of their lives—older white working class men for example—have also been suffering more in recent year because our economy has increasingly left them out. It’s really hard to understand how the rules and distribution of resources have benefitted you when those benefits have been slowly going down the drain for a decade or two.
Failure to recognize your advantages even when you are down in life makes it easy to get people to fight back against the aspirations of those who seek a fair share of those advantages. It’s no accident that those who do so fight with the kind of braggadocio that expresses both their privileged position and their deep fear of losing it. The R
There is no easy way to deal with these tensions, I think, except by directly addressing their source. And that means dealing not just with political churn on the surface but with the deeper political, social, and psychological dynamics that underlie them. A political campaign may not be the right place to do it, although I’d like to see someone try. But the task of changing our country is far bigger than any campaign and it’s one we all have to undertake.
We have to recognize that the confidence and sense of invulnerability some of us have in this life is a product not just of our own attributes but of the rules of our political community and the distribution of resources within it.
We have to recognize how many people don’t share in that sense of confidence and sense of invulnerability because they have been disadvantaged by the rules of our political community and the distribution of resources within it.
We have to recognize that any confidence and sense of invulnerability any of us have is in large part a mirage, created by our hopes and fears more than the reality of our lives.
We have to recognize that, in truth, none of us can do well in this life without the help of others who ground, sustain, encourage, and welcome us.
We have to recognize that we have a responsibility to provide everyone with the same chance to be grounded, sustained, encouraged and welcomed in their lives.
And we have to recognize that far from undermining individuality, the best way to encourage individuals to step up and take care of themselves and others and to push forward in the endeavors that define their lives, is to give them the same good start and backup that the most privileged of us take for granted.
Postscript: I had back surgery on May 2 that has relieved the pain I had been suffering for 8½ months. Every day I fight the human inclination to forget the pain I had and to remember the lessons of it.