Life in the Balance: Knowing, Caring, and Acting

Photo shared by Dorothy Van Soest and used with her permission.

November 2020

By Dorothy Van Soest
WILPF US Liaison to the Poor People’s Campaign

At the beginning of March, Seattle is designated a COVID-19 hot spot. Sheltering in the comfort of my privileged existence is an inconvenience, not a hardship. As a white woman in America, it is second nature for me to center myself in the crisis, search for ways to stay balanced. But the pandemic fills our morgues and hospitals with bodies of the most vulnerable, people who keep our cities and towns running without a safety net, disproportionately black and brown and poor people. Where is the balance in such staggering inequity, such unfathomable human suffering? 

Spring comes, its hope of new life overpowered by grief, terror, and discord. Morgues are full, dead stored in refrigerated trucks. On my morning walks, I curse those for whom precautions are a mere inconvenience. I scowl at people not wearing masks, place my palms together, mutter “Nomaske” instead of “Namaste,” give them the finger, sometimes hidden, sometimes not. I have a satanic urge to unleash the virus on those who care more about the economy than people, who mismanage and manipulate the crisis for personal gain. My friends say anger is normal but a little voice inside says otherwise. You’re not like other people. You’re too excitable and unstable. You make people uncomfortable. I cancel my inner critic and my airplane reservations to Washington, DC for the Poor People’s Campaign mass march and rally in June, promote it as an online event instead. 

Summer comes and, as if the pandemic isn’t evidence enough that there is no context in which black lives matter, police kill Breonna Taylor, a frontline ERT worker. Wanna-be cops murder Ahmaud Arbery while he is jogging. Police murder George Floyd. Two days later, Tony McDade. Collective grief and outrage flood the streets with protesters of all races, ethnicities, genders, ages. Unidentified armed militias sent in to silence cries of “stop killing us” met by a wall of white moms in Portland. Emotions are raw. COVID-19 takes 1,470 lives, the highest number in a single day, four times as many people of color as whites. 

I look at myself in the mirror, forehead angry and tight, shoulders sagging under the weight of two public health emergencies. Uncontrollable cowlicks sprout from my head like ghastly COVID-19 and racism viruses stuck in my hair. I long to be out protesting, rail at the health vulnerabilities holding me captive at home. Outraged, I focus on what divides us, the unmasked from the masked, the racists from the anti-racists, the privileged from the oppressed. Then, on June 20^th, tears flood my cheeks as two and a half million people unite at the massive Poor People’s Campaign virtual rally and sing, “Everybody has a right to live.” 

By mid-October, 220,000 American lives have been snuffed out by COVID-19. The racism pandemic, far deadlier and longer lasting, paralyzes Jacob Blake, a black man shot in the back seven times by police who then let a white boy with an automatic rifle walk away after committing murder. Fires consume millions of acres of our land while conflagration on our streets burns down centuries of willful ignorance and silence. For weeks before the election, falsehoods and nightmare scenarios have been spreading like wildfire, and crowds of white people are gathering at mass rallies without masks.

I reject the privilege that I know is mine to focus right now on my own coping. Instead, I get to work. Write. Contribute. Organize. Collaborate. Call. “No action is too small, every action counts,” I shout at the voice inside whispering you’re not doing enough, it won’t make any difference. 

September 23. My last nerve. No charges are filed against the plainclothes police who killed Breonna Taylor, her name not even mentioned. No one will answer for her death. Peaceful protests are decreed as unlawful assembly. States of emergency declared. White supremacist groups galvanized. I rage in defiant rejection of everything I was taught about white people being rational and intelligent, in other words, superior. I scream at my inner critic. Don’t even try. No more with there she goes again. No more with you need to be balanced. My outrage honors the fire raging within, the deep mourning that spurs me on, the moral compass that points me in the direction of fairness and justice. Yet, even as I rage, I know it’s not about my feelings—it’s about what I do with them. It’s not just about being informed—it’s about getting out of bed and doing something about it. It’s not just about shouting, it’s about doing. Ringing in my ears are the words of Rev. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, at a recent Get out the Vote rally: “it’s not about the awakening, it’s about the rising.” 

I rise up and look at myself in the mirror. The wrinkles and age spots and caved-in places on my face jump out at me and remind me where I’ve been. What I’ve lived. My hair, wild and uncut during the pandemic, is once again a symbol of free expression like it was in my twenties, when it was blonde. When I remember the despair of the sixties, the eloquent rage and actions of that time branch and flower on my weathered face and the old becomes new. I look into my seasoned eyes and they tell me who I am. And then I know that, even when it may not appear to be so, I am as balanced as a three-legged stool. The first leg is my knowing: read, listen, learn. The second is my caring: suffer, grieve, scream my rage in private, not as a performance or a burden on others. The third is acting: use my abilities to do what I can. Old messages about being too loud, caring too much, and not doing enough make me wobbly sometimes, but my stool stays steady. And as long as I do what I can, the best I can, for as long as I can, then I know that change is still possible.

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Dorothy Van Soest is a Seattle writer and novelist for social justice. Nuclear Option, her third Sylvia Jensen mystery, will be released December 1, 2020. For more information about her and her work, go to www.dorothyvansoest.com