In defense of the lukewarm take
Why silence is sometimes the best we can do
I’ve been unusually quiet here for the past week or so, friends. Between landing a book deal, weighing the potential life changes of accepting a new job, and traveling 7 hours away to run my family bookstore for the weekend, October has been extremely full and my usual publishing cadence was already getting a bit out of whack. And now, Eric and I are planning a party this weekend to celebrate our wedding (we got married in May but it was a small ceremony), which means I’ve been in planning and guest-welcoming mode most of this week.
Given the state of the world right now, it’s been simultaneously frustrating to have so little free time to devote to current events - and also? More than a little bit of a relief. Moments of great societal strife are a hard time to be someone who both wants to take care of all people (Enneagram 2) and a person who flails around in complexity, so desperate to “get it right” by siding with the most correct stance (and the people who hold it). Because of these warring tendencies I often feel compelled to side in solidarity with the most passionate (or simply most persistent) voices in my feed in the immediacy of a crisis, and then, after I fire off a hot take, feel deep shame when I later realize the inadequacy of my initial response and wish I’d taken more time and care.
When I do take my time in responding, though, I almost always later realize that it was the right call. “Only the most lukewarm of takes for me,” I once joked in an Instagram comment, but I’ve become serious in my belief that slowing our collective social-media roll is the only way for us to get a handle on our digital lives and the way they reflect, distort, and shape our real worlds.
It is highly unlikely, after all, that me condemning terrorists on my Instagram is going to make them reconsider their views. But the rush to “take a stance” by people not immediately affected by what’s happening often has the effect of drowning out the words of those who are. Consider 2020, when a sea of black squares effectively drowned out the voices of actual Black people. Did we all rush to respond in that prescribed way for the right reasons, the wrong reasons, or simply because we are social animals who are terrified of being rejected, forgotten, blacklisted, cancelled?
Probably all of the above. So these days, I try to ignore the voices challenging me to wake up! and speak out! and say something! Those people are not wrong to feel passionately and urgently. But I’m also not wrong to temper that call for immediacy and replace it with something that is, for me, less performative and more productive.
But did I mention it’s hard? I’m horrified for people who have been affected by violence and bloodshed, as well as for those who certainly will be in the days and weeks to come. My feeds have reflected primarily pro-Israel and anti-Hamas sentiments, but I’ve come to realize that there are conversations happening all over the Internet that are terrifying to my Jewish friends (as detailed in today’s heart-rendingly raw and honest post from
.The thing is, though, I’m not seeing those same conversations in my social feeds - my algorithm is putting me in a different digital world entirely. Do I really have to state, out loud, that I believe the slaughter of innocent people to be terrorism, that I condemn it? Apparently so, which is blowing my mind. I assumed we were already all on the same page that terrorism is bad, and while I realized that Israeli’s current government has plenty of critics and that the Israel/Palestine conflict is complicated, it never occurred to me for a moment that there would be a contingent of people justifying and propping up violent antisemitism. It took me a few days of confusion to realize that I may have been wrong about that - not because I’ve seen the justification firsthand, by the way, but because I am hearing about it second- and third-hand.
Thanks again to the algorithm.
And I guess it’s that algorithm that keeps steering me away from making any kind of statement on social media this week, beyond the blandest of posts in support of those who are scared and hurting. Otherwise, I am reading, listening, learning…and for now, bowing out of the larger conversation. It’s not mine, it seems, to have.
I realize this is seen to some as complacency or complicity - but to me, it feels like having the humility to realize that adding my voice is not helpful.
Atrocities are always atrocious, and there’s no room for any justifications to elbow their way into that truth, even when the atrocities are just one plot-line in a large, old, and complicated story. So if there’s ever another piece of terrible news that I don’t remark on right away, I hope you know that this will always be true for me. I will always believe atrocities are atrocious.
wisely wrote, “People are not their authoritarian governments. People are not the terrorist organizations who act in their names.” And that’s what it comes down to for me amid all the rest of this complication and complexity: I stand with people.And right now - maybe always - that’s the best I’ve got.
PS: I may be a little quiet again next week as I go right from my wedding-celebration weekend into hosting an amazing group of women for the REINVENT Retreat. Registration for the in-person retreat experience is now closed, but registration for REINVENT Online is open through October 15 - head over to the website to learn all about it, and use code ONLINE15 for 15% off.