Brave: No Matter Where You Go, There You Are
If memory serves me well — and it is failing in that regard as I tumble toward 60 — this is my fifth summer in a row to take a week-long or so vacation grounded in cycling.
For a couple summers, we went to Colorado, Boulder and Ft. Collins, but now we drive the brief hour just north of where I live to Asheville, NC.
But for all the proximity of geography, I might as well be slipping through a worm hole or walking into some sort of science fiction portal involving much more than time.
This summer of 2017 has come at significant costs to someone with incredible privilege and a life of mostly leisure — a traumatizing car and bicycle accident at the end of 2016 and then June brought my father’s death just days after my mother’s stroke.
More physically and psychologically tired than I can ever remember being, I walk around Asheville now as the U.S. spirals further and further into proving ourselves to be a truly awful people — primarily because of what we refuse to do.
The majority political party, Republicans, maintain a relentless drumbeat toward repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), pronounced Obamacare, as political theater and a not-so-thinly veiled next step in the renewed racist energy embodied by President Trump.
While the virulent racists in the U.S. may be few, the “best lack all conviction,” more than willing to remain neutral on this moving train of inequity.
A sizable majority of comfortable people (what we enjoy calling “the middle class”), mostly white but all financially stable enough, may think things are bad here and there, but doing something about pain and suffering for the struggling among us (children, the elderly, carers, the disabled) could disrupt what they have, and they’ll risk none of that.
Just last night a few senators (all of whom are enormously wealthy) stalled (derailed?) yet again the repeal of the ACA — some offering rhetorical flurries about their own medical struggles and eliciting praise for their bravery in the face of political pressure.
Also last night, I had a conversation about the fractures among feminists, specifically involving someone such as Emily Ratajkowski who shares a sort of capitalist feminism once championed by Madonna — the right for a woman to control and market herself as men are free to do even when that crosses a line viewed as objectification or sexualizing.
Not to be too simplistic, but Ratajkowski is the sort of brave witnessed in the senators — brave within a system but unwilling to overthrow a system that benefits them.
And I watch and feel this as I walk around Asheville where a bohemian way of life looks brave to me but is really not that brave at all in Asheville, where this has become normalized by being monetized. Part of the tourist schtick of Asheville is dreadlocks, tattoos, tie-die, and quirky eateries along with lots of breweries.
I mean lots of breweries, including the mega-craft brewery New Belgium, which boasts a powerful ownership model and much-praised corporate values.
So on vacation for daily mountain biking and several rounds of breweries each afternoon, I am mired in thoughts of bravery — or to be honest, the lack of bravery in me and those around me whether I am where I live or here in Asheville.
No matter where you go, there you are, and mostly everyone is cowardly and selfish.
And as I often do, I think about the reduced circumstances of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The rarely discussed consequence of the sacred Invisible Hand is that it keeps us often frantic so that behavior that falls short of any sort of human decency looks brave — senators barely keeping a healthcare system afloat that is criminally inadequate but even so better than the alternatives being promised.
To be brave, then, wherever you live, wherever you are, comes with great personal costs. As Ratik Asokan writes: “Most middle-class Indians hate Arundhati Roy — or, rather, they hate the political activist she has apparently become.”
Roy, it seems, has committed the sin of bravery, a sin most offensive to the so-called middle class — and this is about India, a country of tremendous poverty.
“Fiction is the only thing that can connect all of this together,” Roy explains about returning to the novel as a writer after decades writing essays as a political activist. “Fiction is truth. You turn to fiction when you can’t express reality with footnotes and evidence and reportage.”
Normal, it seems, becomes powerful and evil, ultimately. No matter where you go, there you are with your normal against the normal around you.
I feel both at home and entirely out of place in Asheville, but I am merely visiting and spreading my disposable income around town, often at breweries and restaurants where I am just wasting time and hoping to come out the other side — if not brave at least a bit less of a coward.
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See Also
The Low Road, Marge Piercy
