May 6, 2024

Homeostasis and Protest

just some light housekeeping today

Oh my god, I have to clean my desk off again. My three pencil mugs and two pencil cans are overflowing. How can this be when every bag I have is also full of pens, and why can I never find one when I need one?

Last fall I bought some cargo sweatpants from Target that were fabulous, I absolutely lived in them all winter and they looked very stylish. Today, while at Target, I bought some lightweight cargo nonsweatpants that cinch at the ankles, and I feel like a guest star from a lost crossover episode of I Dream of Jeannie, in which I am Jeannie’s queer cousin and I live in a Mason jar on the very top shelf of Sam Drucker’s General Store in Green Acres.1

While we were at Target, my spouse bought some flavored seltzers. Now, I don’t really like flavored seltzer. While they smell absolutely divine, that’s a lie. It’s a lie! I said it! The fizz is too aggressive for so little actual flavor, and as I drink I can’t sit quietly and listen to the enamel on my teeth crack the way I can when I have a soda. But today, I was so thirsty that I tried the Good & Gather cucumber mint flavor on the way home. The mint top notes were assertive without ever putting me in mind of toothpaste, and the cucumber, while mellow, was beguiling throughout. You know what? It was good. (Maybe it was also gather.)2

My spouse and I share a house with my parents. It works for us. They’ve been gone for the last ten days on a road trip, and we used that time to do some housekeeping in the nondigital sense of the word. We cleared out an accumulation of stuff from the basement, a real spring cleaning kind of situation. The basement floor is clear now! There is room under the stairs!

I went through my yarn stash and decided to donate a lot of it to a creative reuse thrift store about an hour away from where we live. I still have a lot of yarn, never fear, but about a third of the total knitting yarn has left the house.3 For a long time I felt sad about my yarn stash because it reflected a knitter I no longer was. An earlier version of myself, who didn’t quite know what she liked to knit with or what she wanted to make. This was someone else’s yarn, these were someone else’s decisions—and while most of the time I could sort out what she’d been thinking, I didn’t want to carry on with them. I’m a lot happier with what I have going on now.4

And then there was the daily exercise of keeping the house itself. I absolutely cannot imagine how I would function if I were the only person responsible for the workings of this house. I do not know how other people do it. I can imagine how division of labor, mental and household alike, becomes a marriage-breaker, a soul-crusher. This house is too big for two people, which makes sense, we bought it because it could (mostly) contain four adults each with their own hobbies, interests, and jobs. We kept it going, though, and between yesterday and today I did a deep vacuuming of the first floor, completed only by dint of my noise-cancelling headphones. Seriously. These things are a miracle.

But all miracles have their limits, and I still need to clean off my desk. Send help.

Also, as long as I have you lulled into a not entirely false sense of security with the foregoing chat, a word about student protests. Last week, at SUNY New Paltz, a peaceful protest encampment was broken up by cops with dogs, and 133 people, most of them students under twenty-two, were arrested.5 They brought dogs to menace college students sitting out on the lawn in a place they live. This is outrageous, disturbing, and cruel, like so many of the reactions to the student protests all over the country.

When I was in college, my classmates occupied a school building that was about to be torn down. The building was a converted department store, for the record, and desperately needed to be torn down. In its place was to be built a much grander flagship building for the university, containing facilities that might be recognizable to modern college students, like classrooms with windows and an actual library as opposed to a basement. My classmates were protesting its destruction—it was part of the character that drew them to the New School in the first place, that sense that the school was of an older era, in a good way. An era of protest and argument, an era when things seemed possible. And, they were protesting the then-president of our university, Bob Kerrey. Some of their number had been harassing him, on one occasion chasing him down the street. (What they thought would happen if they caught the former Green Beret, I do not know.) They hated his connections to the military-industrial complex. They hated his record in the armed services. They thought he was a poor steward for the university at best. They wanted him gone. And he was a strange choice for The New School, a university founded as an educational protest all its own, steeped in counter-cultural thought and committed to questioning tradition in practice.

We went there, many of us at that seminar college, because we wanted a different kind of education. We didn’t want to be beholden to the systems that governed our world. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, those systems were themselves collapsing. There didn’t seem to be anything for it. Occupy Wall Street was a mere twinkle in the eye when five of the protestors took over 65 Fifth Avenue and remained there for several days.

Bob Kerrey was a businessman’s choice. A practical choice for a university attempting a massive fundraising push and a rebranding effort in times that suddenly became much leaner. The occupying students eventually left. Some of them were arrested and then released. The building was torn down. The one that was built to replace it, the University Center, has a dorm in it called Kerrey Hall. The University Center has been the home of a protest encampment since April, and has been occupied many times over the years. On Friday, a bunch of New Schoolers were arrested after “multiple rounds of negotiations failed.”6 The University Center has been occupied many times since its opening. And to that I say, hurrah. Not every student protest has been righteous in the course of human history, but that isn’t the point. The point is that students protest. And the people they protest become the names on the buildings that the next generations of students protest in.

Many of them stop protesting when they leave school, lured and lulled by the societies that desperately need the protective shield of buy-in to their systemic injustices, their inequalities. In exchange for a giving-up, there has always been a gain. But the gains are eroding, everything is eroding, and I think we see in the largely violent response to largely peaceful protest an understanding on the part of the institutions that they have much less to offer than they once did. That their power can no longer be enacted by capitalist cajoling, but must be punitively coercive in order to keep the unruly in line. And the unruly right now are, in extremely high percentages, peaceful, orderly, and organized. More so, clearly, than the institutions of higher learning that are supposed to be guiding the protesting students towards some kind of greater understanding.

Bringing dogs to the mass arrest of college students who want a better world and are agitating for it with the only power they feel they have is an act of cruelty. It is a betrayal. It is organized terrorizing. It is wrong.

I also have plenty to say, for the record, about the violent state response as it impacts the Jewish students in those encampments, and how it plays into a long, long history of American punishment of Jewish radicalism and the assimilation bargain that our grandparents and great-grandparents made. But that’s enough for now.

Just some light housekeeping here today.

This is how it is now. We are all so raw, there is no fun update for me without the rest of it, without the world pressing in on all sides. Thank you for reading both.

See you next time,
Miranda