A Sea of Troubles

TW: non-detailed references to sexual abuse

You must understand that I don’t count the sea as a metaphor for everything I run into. This one is Hamlet’s doing, not mine.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.

I’m delighted that Hamlet is in fashion again. The play that once touched my tortured teenage soul, then later exasperated me while watching performances “good god, he’s talking it through again, why doesn’t he just kill him?!”, gets reframed so many times through so many lenses that there is one for every moment, every stage of life. I loved the Lion King as much as I love Hamnet. When will the Muppets finally give it a go?

There are seas of troubles in our (also lamentably non-Muppet-cast) hyperconnected world that are immense: both seemingly elsewhere, and yet incalculably ever present. While the world burns, fascism rises, and reality blurs with computer generated imitation, it sometimes feels like we have to choose to focus on disasters in turn - a matter of “where do I direct my hopelessness this week?”. And this week, for me, it’s been Epstein. The breadth of influence evidenced in the Epstein files, the focus on the impact on powerful figures and the lack of it, the men whose identities are being protected while their victims are exposed, and now, the potential that Trump will escape reckoning in exchange for pardoning one of the architects of mass abuse.

These individual awfulnesses are, I suppose, among the scattered imprints of one of those things Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”1, huge concepts like climate change and black holes that can only be perceived in fragments of evidence. They join other marks of this great entity, those I’ve known all my life. A family member saying “well what did she expect, going to a house party with a bunch of sportsmen?”. A friend, assaulted by a stranger in her home, who never saw a conviction. A time, of the many times, I’ve been stroked or groped or grabbed, or told to smile, or to give the old man a kiss because it’s his birthday. Don’t be a spoilsport, this is just the way it is.

How do we fight something that is everywhere? And how, Hamlet, does taking arms, by opposing, seem like a sufficient plan to end a sea? You can’t fight liquid. But can you mope around like a Danish prince not doing anything useful? I’m not going to pretend I know the answer, but I know that for all my anger, I feel like I am not doing enough, for this or any human calamity. I thought I’d write a little about why that might be to help me think it through.

Taking arms demands, first of all, coping with the weight of acknowledging such objects in the first place. Reading an article like Carole Cadwalladr’s excellent piece on the paedophilic culture the Epstein case reveals requires a recovery period in itself. The anger and sadness are real and we can’t pretend otherwise. I remember friends who’d been involved in environmental campaigning groups eventually leaving for their own good because they became depressed by the constant reminder, through discussions and materials, of our species’ failures. The fight for your world is intertwined with the fight for your own sanity - with recognising your capacity, finding engagement and action meaningful, seeing the potential for change. If we don’t acknowledge our pain, how do we heal it? If we start from a position of hopelessness, or if we concentrate more on what we can’t change than the potential of participating, how long can we last?2

And however we take arms will look flawed, especially as individuals are affected differently. To torture a metaphor, some people are occasionally splashed by the sea, and others live on the tidal plain - we might wonder who we are to speak for lives more affected than our own. We all know some annoying dude who tries to make himself a symbol for “not all men” by speaking for women and turning the attention to his own Good Samaritan struggle. It’d be easy to get put off taking action by the examples of those who are, to some or many, “doing it wrong”, and the desire not to be them. But we still need those cringey men to talk to other men, and I guess we all need to get ready to take on some cringe behaviour ourselves, if we’re going to be heard.

Action is difficult, and effortsome, and it often feels unfair. Appealing to men (and sometimes women) to acknowledge the humanity, let alone equity, of women and girls, is energy-sapping work that we shouldn’t have to do. There is a wave of defensive fallacies ready to be unleashed by drawing attention to problematic practices and systems. And capitalism demands that you are too busy earning and purchasing to engage with the problem. The workload of administration required to even schedule, let alone engage in, activities that might be considered political or activist, teeters precariously atop a pile of shit that needs to be done, blown by a breeze of all the things that makes that hard.

Like I said, I don’t have the answer, but I might know two things that can help with all the above, at least:

1. Go small. Check in with one woman friend. Or engage with one article. Or talk to one man about something that girls and women face that they maybe don’t realise. We never know when something might make an impact. Small accumulates. I once told an ex about a party I’d just been to that I’d spent protecting a friend from a predatory man, where she’d not dared to tell even our loveliest male friends because she thought they’d brush it off, because we know they do that in their own conversations. He was shocked, and that changed the way he spoke to his friends about behaviour and attitudes that previously went unchallenged.

2. Go communal. Collective action distributes the workload, but it also distributes the hope, and the information, and eases the cringe, and quietens the loneliness of holding pain. And it’s effective, sometimes - from changing laws to changing minds. When it comes to this particular tentacle of the omnicrisis, we might need to dig out groups who really care about women’s rights from those who use it to spuriously mask their hatred for trans people or immigrants. I’m a huge fan of the Good Law project, who to my knowledge tick the “right side of history” boxes on all fronts.

I am ignorant and my thoughts are, as always, tangled and incomplete. The potentials for conversation and action are the only things that stop this feeling too unbearable to think about, so comment if you know what else should be here. Whether we swim, sail, or build a wall to block the sea of this catastrophic situation, drowning is not an option.