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You who the earth was for

Your pure face turned away

This post discusses self-harm/suicide and hate-based violence.

I saw a church sign a few weeks ago that said KEEP THE FAITH AND STAY ENCOURAGED, GOD WILL DO MORE IN 2024. To be honest, it seemed a little apologetic, if not threatening. Even by 2020s standards, the end of 2023 felt especially bad in my circles, and the public year ahead looked grim. Nearly every member state at the UN could call for a ceasefire in Gaza, and it wouldn’t happen if the government I pay taxes to didn’t feel like forcing the issue. The presidential election would be a retread of 2020, and the information economy was melting in a pile of gray LLM goo. The last thing you could want from 2024 was more of how we were trending.

And more was what we got. It feels trite to say people of good conscience are carrying a lot of pain these days. (Even people of awful conscience just lived through a global mass death and disabling event, too, whether or not they also supported policies that helped it along.) But it's true, and for some, it's desperate. In the time since I started writing this, Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in D.C. and soon died of his injuries — said “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” went up in flames, and then "Free Palestine!" A woman in Atlanta did similar in December. What could be added to that, as a statement? And what do you say afterward?

I’ve seen some discomfort around glorifying this kind of act. I get that, and I don't disagree. I’m also thinking of how we sometimes call the controlled demolition of one’s own life, in fast or slow motion, a death of despair. There's something useful in that framing: that a self-induced death can be devastating and preventable, and also a legible response to real circumstances, perhaps even an understandable one. Commending or condemning it isn't the point, necessarily. I am thinking, too, about how veterans or war-affected civilians who die by suicide are also casualties by any reasonable definition of the word.

I see deaths of despair, here, and I see casualties: tragedies, unequivocally. There’s no question these people should be alive; I don’t want or encourage anyone to repeat what they did; I also believe it’s right to honor their memory and convictions by continuing the work that only the living can do. Isn’t that how you’re supposed to think about people who die on the just side of a war?

A novelty of reaching my early thirties is that I've now logged just enough years of reasonably mature-brained consciousness to have firsthand memories of periods that are now historical. (Fun fact: the theatrical release of The Producers was closer to the end of World War II than we are to 9/11; as of today, it’s about a two-month difference.) People my age sometimes process this kind of thing by saying how old they feel when zoomers get into Y2K fashion, or whatever, which I'm a little bored by; it’s like a twelve-year-old thinking they’re vastly more worldly than an eight-year-old. More interesting to me is the implication that the time it takes for a baby to become a young adult — which is also about the time it takes for a young teen to become an early-mid-adulthood adult — was never a very long time, though a lot can happen during it.

The 1970s, for example, once seemed as good as a different planet to me, but about twenty-two years ago, they were about twenty-two years ago. That’s a span of time you can measure within a human life, not even a long human life; it’s a human-scaled quantity, like how cubits are measured with the forearm. Protesters self-immolated then, too, in the US and in Vietnam among other places; the best-known were in the 1960s, but they didn’t stop then. (And of course, the 1960s weren’t that long ago either.) You don't have to glorify that to consider that it might be understandable, an understandable response to a real situation. Keep counting back the decades, a couple of decades at a time, and the periods where major crisis or overlapping crises were going on — acute suffering and horror, the kind of stuff where it seems like earth should just stop in space — quickly seem to outnumber the periods with less of that. If ever there were any, unless you were fully insulated from the horror of your own time, which some were.

Another thing you see is, histories of resistance and survival have rarely been a one-and-done thing of confronting an unjust actor and saying, look here, you can’t do this, and them going, oh, okay. I’m sorry. You oppose the war and the war keeps going; you protest the deaths and the deaths keep coming; you fight and the fight doesn’t end. And not having an immediate, observable effect isn’t the same as having no effect. (I’ve returned often to how Charles Blow put this a couple of years ago: “What protest does is that it crystallizes and defines the parameters of morality on an issue […] What policymakers, voters, whomever, do with that changing of the narrative, crystallizing of a concept, is another, almost separate step.”) In the meantime, though, real hurt keeps happening to real people, some of it irreversible.

I don’t remember how I got there, but the other day I was reading the special issue of Ramparts magazine on Freedom Summer and the Freedom Summer murders. There’s a reported scene in the first article, an orientation for out-of-state activists bracing them for the reality of what they’d signed up for. The organizer Robert Moses (not the urban planner) tells them, “Don’t expect them to be concerned with your constitutional rights. Everything they do in Mississippi is unconstitutional.” R. Jess Brown says, “If you are riding down the highway […] don’t get out and argue with the cops and say ‘I know my rights.’ You may invite that club on your bead. There ain’t no point in standing there trying to teach them some constitutional law at twelve o’clock at night. Go to jail and wait for your lawyer.” It’s urgent to anyone who knows anything about the landscape, clearly, to impress on them that they will likely be abused and might be beaten and could be killed, and whether they believe it happens in a fair society is immaterial; real power does what it wants.

And some of them did get beaten and killed. They killed those people. It’s sixty years ago, or about here to 2004 and then that a couple more times, which is not long ago at all. I want to say they killed those kids, because here in my wizened early thirties, people in their early twenties seem very young. That is young. But the fact is, they killed actual kids in Mississippi, too.

The woman who accused Emmett Till died less than a year ago, remember that? To all appearances unrepentant, too, though maybe it’s not finally my business, or the point. She wasn’t a child then, and he was; either that didn’t stop what happened or it was part of why it could happen at all, depending on whether you’re looking at what should happen or what does happen. And what still happens, because they do still kill Black and brown people, and those who would stand in the way of killing Black and brown people. And they do still kill kids.

Eve L. Ewing has a poem where Emmett lives a long, gentle life, if you would like to read it.

So, these are the conditions. What do you do with them? My own answers are, more or less, don’t tune out information (though I disagree that it’s a moral obligation to mainline graphic footage without taking care of yourself, because that's an injury hazard and we need each other well); don't turn off compassion; focus on the human-scale things you can do; appreciate flowers and sunsets and the company of your friends and stuff, the good things that nourish and sustain. Look to history, because someone you admire or even just relate to was probably bearing up under difficult times, too, whether they were active in the French Resistance or sort of hanging in there and making those paintings you like. I teased God a little at the top here — God can take it — but faith does help me, though I don’t really proselytize; people have heard of God. Art helps. Grief is inevitable, and survivor’s guilt is common and understandable — an understandable response. But survival matters; life on earth, in the body and the mortal mind and among other people, matters. You grieve when someone’s cut off from those things because it's inalienably true that it matters. It’s what everyone’s born deserving.

And then what do you do with, you know, the cruelty? How do you reckon with it? Be on guard for it in yourself, I guess, but past that, I have fewer suggestions. It is a component of my faith specifically that I'm commanded to love my enemies, and I try to, but if that’s not your commandment then you can do what you want. What makes it a discipline, I think, is that it’s not intuitive or necessary on its own merits, in the same way you don’t expect most people to observe Salah or Shabbat or Lent if that’s not something they personally do, extra, on top of regular interpersonal decency. Fundamental respect for human life seems like a good baseline, but if you don’t want to love certain people further than that, I won’t argue. Trying to is one technique, one practice, I use to try to live my life. It doesn’t always come easily.

It shames me that those parts of the Gospels, which I think are pretty clearly about self-discipline before anything else, have often been used to coerce forgiveness from the afflicted without penitence from the offender (Danya Ruttenberg’s On Repentance and Repair is a good read on this), and that’s not a legacy I get to disown because I think other people’s biblical literacy is bad. It’s helped calibrate my own thinking to remember Matthew Sitman pointing out that the instruction to love your enemies does name them as your enemies, and as such, it’s not an instruction not to have enemies, or good causes for enmity. (Some people have earned it!) It’s also helped to remember that Jesus counseled pacifism but didn’t model conflict avoidance, especially toward the comfortable, or within your own group.

Still, there’s not much immediate satisfaction in it. I don’t really believe in hell like that, so when I see people block aid deliveries to Gaza, or blast music and lights outside migrant shelters, or call queer and trans people like myself and my loved ones “that filth” after the death of a child, I have no confidence they’ll pay for it in another world. I’ve also lived too long to believe they all experience their own lives as sad or pathetic. A lot of awful people sleep fine at night. But if hell is complete abjection from whatever essential value in humanity makes our lives together worth something, puts all of us in relation and responsibility to each other — I would use God, or the soul, to describe this, but it's not necessary to — then in those moments, they are pretty close to hell. If I can wish any kind of good for those people, I think I have to hope they get out of that somehow. I also can’t avoid knowing that people don’t always get out of it.

It’s a correct assessment of the situation that trans lives are in a state of emergency, and it’s important to say that and keep saying it. As a trans life myself, it also gets painful, and wearying, to keep talking and hearing about my own precarity, the stacking of odds against my own health and happiness and the health and happiness of people I love. So I hope it’s alright if I let others do the talking on Nex Benedict, a trans child of Choctaw ancestry, beloved of his friends and family.

Hear from his classmates and teachers, who paint a picture of a sparkling and passionate kid, and his parents, who seem like truly gentle people; they remind me, if I can say this, very much of my own parents, who might have lost either of their trans children as quickly and mercilessly as this. There are varying pronouns and accounts of the identities he used in these stories. I don't know this about Nex, but I can say for my own life that, at one period or another, I've had multiple simultaneous genuine, loving relationships where I asked to be known different ways in different contexts, and the freedom to let that unfold over time has been precious to me, and made the fullness of my life possible. We don’t get to know — he doesn’t get to know — how he might have introduced himself a year from now, or ten years from now. That kind of flowering of a life and a self over lived years is what the living get to do; it’s what life on earth is for. Nex deserved that; he was born deserving it. It was taken away.

I’m glad the coverage and conversation, at least what I’ve seen, has mostly avoided the girls in the bathroom, whatever happened in the bathroom. They’re minors as far as I know, and safety and due process are owed them as much as anybody else. Frankly, I’m also aware that there’s a national apparatus ready to paint them as the real victims and grant them a sick kind of celebrity, if they choose to accept. I don't know this, either, but it seems possible that they have many years ahead to have to live with, at least the possibility, if they can face it, that they maybe caused another child's death. I worry for them that there are people — and you know there are these people — who would tell them nah, and anyway, your life counts more. If it comes to that, I’d like to hope that some or all of them can see through that and resist it. If I can wish any good for them, it’s that.

I’m glad the conversation has not avoided implicating the many public adults who encourage suspicion and bloodlust towards queer and trans people, and therefore hurry on not only our violent deaths, but our deaths of poverty, or despair, or the long diminishment of lives pushed to the margins. The terror campaign is the point, and it’s working:

A hotline run by the Indianapolis-based Rainbow Youth Project received 237 calls from Oklahoma over the weekend, founder Lance Preston said, nearly three times what it logs in an average week. Two-thirds of the callers mentioned Nex’s death. More than 80 percent said they were victims of bullying at school or on social media.

“There’s a real fear,” Preston said. “We already have kids who are reporting they don’t want to go back to school. Even though there’s not a lot of information available still, there’s that fear: ‘Oh my goodness, they killed that student because they were nonbinary. What’s going to happen when I go to use the bathroom?’”

And what do you do with that? What do you do for those kids? Gillian Branstetter has some thoughts to start, on what different kinds of visibility do, and the possible futures our habits of description and association suggest for different kinds of people. If you’re cis, especially, and have been talking about grief and precarity a lot, I’ll ask you to consider taking some time with them when you can.

That line about loving your enemy and praying for those who persecute you, or a major version of it, is from the Sermon on the Mount, not long after the Beatitudes. I waver a little on full-throatedly calling myself a Christian, but I am a Beatitudes person. They are simple, lucid statements, and they are also kind of mysterious, and between those things — like a lot of the poetry that helps me live — they seem to me to say everything, even if I can't quite paraphrase it all.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted; blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth; and so on. They’re an abjuration of a certain kind of worldly power, or the worth of that power, and a psalm of sorts to the spiritual worth of those who don’t have or don’t use it. Or so I think. Plenty of people with a lot of worldly power swing around the book that’s in but don’t appear to take that part very seriously, presumably for the same reason people with a lot of worldly prominence and success don’t appear to pay much attention to the parts about hoarding wealth (firmly discouraged, many times, Old Testament and New).

Of course, you don’t need that book to get the moral principles, which include that no one is beneath caring about or honoring, and also that there is honor in a just life, or a gentle life, even when its horizons are limited by earthly circumstance — more honor in that, no question, than there is in stepping on other people's necks. For what it’s worth, I also see those verses as sort of a meditation on the inevitability of suffering, and the elusiveness of the comforts they promise. The merciful will be shown mercy, the meek will inherit the earth, but those things are held away from the present, in the future tense — they're not clearly, manifestly here to remedy the pain you're in right now. And even so, that blessedness can be part of the truth of that dispossessed state, a little, in a way that is nearly outside of time. I think that part holds up as secular poetry, though it’s hard to explain further what I mean. You can take it or leave it, yourself.

When I’m feeling afraid before a march or a protest — and I usually am; you can be within your rights on paper and still meet violent opposition, whether it comes in uniform or alone with a gun — those are the verses I go back to. I couldn’t tell you, really, whether I’m praying for the safety of the vulnerable or courage on their behalf, or whether “the vulnerable” are those who go to the struggle or the people who have the struggle thrust upon them. You can’t always separate resistance and survival, or separate either of those things from risk. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied, it’s written. I believe the first part, and I try to believe the second. It’s one way to keep going. Which is, I think, what we all have to do.

That last name, Benedict — it means “blessed one.”

Freedom Oklahoma advocates and organizes for 2SLGBTQ+ people across the state of Oklahoma and neighboring tribal nations. You can contribute here.

Operation Olive Branch collects verified crowdfunding links from Palestinians seeking medical health and safe passage from Gaza. You can access the spreadsheet here.

In the U.S., call or text 988 anytime for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. (I've done it.) International resources here.

Poem: “In prison” by Jean Valentine

In prison
without being accused

or reach your family
or have a family             You have

conscience
heart trouble

asthma
manic-depressive

(we lost the baby)
no meds

no one
no window

black water
nail-scratched walls

your pure face turned away
embarrassed

you
who the earth was for.

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Mags Colvett is a writer and editor mostly raised in east Tennessee and currently living in Queens. You can find them on Bluesky and Instagram. Subscribe free for more where this came from.