I Don’t Mean to Be Alarmist: A Dayenu for the Modern Age

For the past several weeks, whenever I’ve talked with friends about the current state of the world, my first statement has been “I don’t know what to say.” I’m not actually convinced that that’s true—I know what to say about individual issues. I work in nonprofit communications and I have a graduate degree in history; I can quickly rattle off my historically- and personally- informed, educated thoughts on a few dozen hot-button political issues and policy initiatives. Where I struggle, I think, is to express the grand collective everything: the fact that nothing happens in a vacuum, and that when you add up the individual issues and look at it through a big-picture lens, the downfall of democracy and of life as we know it seems imminent and yet also, given history, inevitable.  I say that I don’t know what to say, because I don’t know how to condense my outrage and fear and practicality and anxiety and frustration and even hope into words that go in the right order that fall into neatly ordered thoughts.

I keep returning to the phrase, “I don’t mean to be alarmist.”

I don’t mean to be alarmist, but a gun has more autonomy than I do in this America.

I don’t mean to be alarmist, but the highest Court this country has to offer is actively attempting a religious extremist coup, and they’re planning—not just contemplating the thought of, planning – to overturn the federal protections against voter suppression and election oversight.

I don’t mean to be alarmist, but as a Jewish bisexual woman who would like to wait a few years before having kids, I’m not convinced that I have a federally guaranteed right to safely be… well, any of those things. The overturn of Roe v Wade codified a Christian understanding of the relationship between life, conception, soul, and birth in a way that both my understanding of biology and my faith struggle to attach reason to.

And perhaps that’s part of the issue—I’m still searching for reason. There is, fundamentally, no political reason to try to outlaw condoms or hormonal birth control pills. Just like there’s no rational political reason to refuse initiative after initiative that could help the unhoused, just like there’s no rational political reason to deny the efficacy and validity of vaccines and medical research.

None, except to stick it to the Dems.

Someone pointed out a while back that capital-R-Republicans, particularly those who lean towards the cult of Trump and McConnell, think in “gotchas.” Their goal isn’t to make effective policy changes or to help—or even, God forbid, listen to—their constituents. It’s to hold on power, to make liberals or leftists or whoever angry, and to collect money. Those aspects of their policy-making decisions happen to manifest themselves in racist, harmful, problematic rhetoric, which in turn manifests in racist, harmful actions. I don’t know how to explain to these people that helping someone else doesn’t mean hurting yourself. That giving someone else power doesn’t necessarily mean taking yours away. And if it does, then that says something significant about what that power (im)balance was to begin with—that if giving someone else power means taking yours away, then maybe you shouldn’t have had so much to begin with.

But that thought process would require reason, and rationality, and empathy, and all three seem to be missing these days. Not just from politics—I think that’s what I’m struggling with the most. On the one hand, it’s the politicians, but I think it goes beyond that. It’s the fact that many white, straight cisgender people seem to willfully, intentionally lack the basic empathy required to acknowledge that not everyone shares their life experience, and that love and success and freedom might look different for other people.

Loving and affirming transgender children prevents suicide.

Providing safe, legal abortion access prevents suicide.

Vaccine mandates prevent millions of deaths and virus mutations that proceed to kill more people, endangering even those who did everything right.

Climate legislation prevents starvation, food deserts, and pollution.

Supplying time, money, and resources to the foster care system prevents both child abuse and suicide.

Gun safety laws don’t prevent people from killing people, but they sure as hell make it harder for guns to kill people.

Police and prison reform prevents murder, reunites families, and provides at least a semblance justice.

I’m not saying the Democrats have everything right. Frankly, I’m not convinced that anyone has anything right. But I don’t understand how half the country, and more than half of the electorate, can be so committed to refusing facts, law, logic, and the ability to understand what someone else is going through before making decisions based on money, rumor, and an uninformed gut feeling.

I don’t mean to be alarmist, but the United States of America is in a crisis of morality, and not the one that the religious right wants you to think.

Often, I’ve been reminded lately of bits and pieces of Jewish prayer, scraps of verse that flit through my head on long days.

Shemah. Listen. Hear. Understand.

Ufros aleinu sukat sh’lomecha, V’tak’neinu b’eitza tova mil’fanecha, V’hoshieinu l’ma-an sh’mecha. V’hagein ba-adeinu, v’haseir mei-aleinu, oyeiv, dever, v’cherev, v’ra-av, v’yagon. Save us, shield us. From enemies, plagues, swords, famine, sorrow. Protect us.

Um’sadeir et hakochavim b’mishm’roteihem barakia kirtzono, God has arranged the stars and the universe in their courses according to some greater plan.

But a different verse keeps finding its way back into my head, half-unwanted. Dayeinu. It would have been enough.

If women’s rights and marriage equality had been codified into law through amendments and legislation, not through court decisions. Dayenu.

If regular testing, hygiene practices, vaccinations had been mandated at the start, two years ago. Dayenu.

If climate legislation had been a priority over corporate greed. If gun monitoring, let alone control, had taken precedence over lining the GOP’s pockets. If impeachment processes were an option for Supreme Court justices who blatantly lied under oath to achieve their positions, if federal prosecution had been more automatic for the President who sought a coup. Dayenu.

This isn’t how we usually use the word. Typically, dayenu is reserved for the things we have, the things we’re grateful for. It would have been enough, by itself, had we only had our rightful access to self-determination, to the freedom of speech, to our religious practices and so on. But we have so much more than that—we have libraries, and books, and scholars who pass on their knowledge. Even that, dayenu, would have been enough,but we have even more than that—we have brilliant researchers and advocates and authors and thinkers and artists and poets, dayenu.

And don’t get me wrong. I am grateful for the things that I have and the circumstances under which I live. Hope hasn’t died, not for me, anyway. Not yet.

But I don’t mean to be alarmist has, in some ways, become my much-less-celebratory dayenu for the modern age. I repeat it, over and over. Each new item I attach it to makes the first few times I said it look so unbelievably tiny in comparison. I don’t know where it ends. I don’t know at what point we need to raise the alarms, light the beacons, call for help.

I’m a writer and a reader and a historian, so half the time I think in allegory. If this was (insert fictional universe here), then we’d be experiencing (insert drastic event that shapes the characters and the plot here).

If this was The Lord of the Rings, we’d be a cracking-apart Gondor calling for aid to a Rohan that doesn’t want to answer.

If this was Fahrenheit 451, the Hound would be on the loose and we’d have no place to hide.

If this was Star Wars, this would be the weeklong period of crumbling peace when the war gave way to mass murder and the rise of a fascist Empire. So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause.

We have so many fictional examples of what the fall of freedom looks like, yet we struggle to see it happening around us. We have so many examples of how to rise up, whether in thought or in action or in unionization, and yet when the time comes, we falter.

So when do we acknowledge that it’s time to be alarmist? When do we admit that we haven’t done enough? That reason, and rationality, and empathy might be the core of our rebellion, but that without action and active compassion, we’re not getting anywhere? At what point to we acknowledge that it isn’t getting better?

I don’t have all the answers. I don’t really have any. But I’m determined not to let complacency and hopelessness win out. If we’re still thinking in terms of fiction and hope, then how’s this:  Rebellion is built on hope. Good, smart, empathetic people are working as hard as they can, to try and help, even just a little. People are organizing, unionizing, protesting, and even on a very small scale, it’s working. Maybe each individual effort isn’t enough to tip the scales, but each attempt moves the needle a little bit more. And for those saying it’s statistically impossible? Have another one: never tell me the odds.