1/21/24

 Sunday, January 21, 2024

In bed at 9 and up at 6 after a rough night with BPS and chronic pains.  3° and a high of 20°, wind is WSW at 9 mph, gusts to 15 mph, wind chill is -11°, ranging today from -12 to +5°°.  Sunrise at 7:07, sunset at 4:49, 9+31.

Treadmill; pain.  Considerable BPS last night, especially at 3, 4, and 5ish.  Last night's chili???  Plus the now normal sore right wrist and left shoulder.  Yesterday I had very few PF spasms.  This morning I am feeling some warning tightness. . . 11 a.m., 30:16 & 0.70 watching another interview re: Israel & Gaza & Palestinians with a UK professor.

I'm grateful to have come upon a blog called "THE HOMEBOUND SYMPHONY" maintained by Alan Jacobs, a professor at Baylor University and before that at Wheaton College.  He is a very thoughtful writer and he already has me reading and thinking about W. H. Auden's poem Atlantis whence Jacobs gets his blog's subtitle: 'Stagger onward rejoicing,' and listening to Rachmaninoff's Vespers.  I'm a big fan of so-called sacred music, especially mass music and most especially requiem mass music.  Despite my disparaging of the Church as an institution, I feel gratitude for much of the art that has come forth from religions, including the Church's abundant contributions.  

    On 1/15/24, Jacobs posted a typically thoughtful piece called "Silence, Violence, and the Human Condition" including this:

Shall we say, then, that silence is complicit in violence? It’s obvious why that is a more defensible argument [than that silence is violence], but it is not as dispositive as people who use it believe. I recently wrote something about Israel and Gaza, but I didn’t do it because people told me that otherwise I would have been complicit in the violence done there – though indeed people did tell me that. I wrote it for my own reasons, not because I felt that I was complicit in anything.

There are more evil things going on in the world than any one person can respond to. You could spend all day every day on social media just declaring that you denounce X or Y or Z and never get to the end of what deserves to be denounced. If my silence about Gaza is complicit in the violence being done there, what about my silence regarding the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uighurs? Or the government of Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya? Or what Boko Haram has done in Nigeria? Or what multinational corporations do to destroy our environment? Or dogfighting rings? Or racism in the workplace? Or sexism in the workplace?

There are two possible responses to this problem. One is to say that I am inevitably complicit in every act of violence I do not denounce, even if it would be impossible for me to denounce all such acts. But that position leads to a despairing quietism: Why should I denounce anything if in so doing I remain guilty for leaving millions of violent acts undenounced?

The second way is better: pick your spots and pick them unapologetically. It’s perfectly fine for people to have their own causes, the causes that for whatever reason touch their hearts. We all have them, we are all moved more by some injustices than by others; not one of us is consistently concerned with all injustices, all acts of violence, nor do we have a clear system of weighting the various sufferings of the world on a scale and portioning out our attention and concern in accordance with a utilitarian calculus.

 

I am grateful for anything that helps relieve my frequent feelings of complicity in all the world's wrongs, from global racism to wasting water while doing dishes.  I do not regret having regret for having lived my life too complacently, for having failed to contest in whatever way might be useful the wrongs of the world, of 'going along to get along.'  But I'm prone to overdoing it and to making myself miserable about all that's wrong with the world and with myself.  Cui bono?

LTMW at a hardy little chickadee in the near zero weather working diligently at getting a seed out of the safflower/sunflower tube.  It is about 2/3rds empty so what remains consists of big clumpy seeds and nuts and an occasional twig, i.e., not the easily nabbed and nutritious white safflower seed or black-oil sunflower seed.  The chickadee's feathers are fluffed out to hold on to some of his or her bodily-generated heat and I marvel at what seems to me to be a miracle, how the tiny birds, or large birds for that matter, are able to survive in weather like ours.  Now a brightly-colored house finch shows up on the tube and a snowbird and a squirrel work the ground under the feeder.  I suffer with my approach-avoidance conflict: to remain on my recliner in my comfortable, warm house or to put some clothes on, walk on the treacherous snow & ice,  and fill the feeder. . . . . The birds win; I fill the feeder. . . . The red-bellied woodpecker shows up to loosen and fly off with a big chunk of suet.  His pecking is so powerful I'm glad he works on the suet cake and not on my head.

More Israel stuff.  I watched a couple long lectures by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt on their LRB article and book on the Israel Lobby and its effect on American foreign policy.

Dinner tonight with the Goldbergs and with Micaela.