Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

by Sarah Schulman

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, people with HIV were among the most oppressed people on earth. In addition to oppression by race, geography, class, gender, and sexuality, they faced a terminal illness for which there were no known treatments. They had no laws of protection, no services, no representation, and received no compassion. Their lives did not matter and their prognosis was unabated suffering and inevitable mass death. Millions suffered and died without care, comfort, or interest, vilified by cruel projections, neglect, and unjustified exclusion and blame. They were systematically shunned, their experiences and points of view viciously excluded from policy, representation, dominant cultural mores, and law. I witnessed this firsthand. Only when people with AIDS and their friends intervened against the status quo and forced an end to the shunning by forcing interactivity through zaps, sit-ins, initiated agendas, actions, interruptions, shut-downs, exposes, research, and demonstrations, did systemic progress begin to be made. The state theorized this unwanted insistence on appropriate treatment as an act of violation, calling it “disorderly conduct” instead of resistance, an illegality to be punished and stigmatized. They shunned people with AIDS and therefore did not hear what they had to say to about how they were being treated. As a result, thousands of arrests took place of people trying to save lives, many of whom fought passionately until the day they di...

Of course, some people just give up. They internalize a story about themselves that they are unlovable or incapable of loving an equal, or that they are perpetual victims, or that they “can’t do” long-term relationships, but thinking these things doesn’t make them true. In order to “protect” ourselves by keeping our lives small and shutting out intimacies, we could actually be hurting ourselves, missing out on a transformative experience of the heart, and sabotaging our small but crucial contribution to making peace. And the withholding also mis-trains those around us to not see us and others like us as sexual, loving adults who have the right to be in intimacy with equals. Relationships of all kinds, after all, are the centerpiece of healing. Some of the fear is based in earlier experience. If we were in a car accident, we can become afraid of cars. If someone close to us died, we could become terrified of normative loss. If we experience sexually alienating encounters, we could construct ourselves as not sexual. If we are physically violated, we could imagine that every person who reminds us of the assailant is going to assault and violate us. If we are socially oppressed or marginalized or punished, we could mistrust everyone from the category of the oppressor. But this fear of potential threat is not always based in actual experience. It can also be a political construction, one that is fabricated and then advertised through popular culture and entertainment, or enforc...

Being accused of desire is as old as history itself, and is central to the queer experience. It has been very, very dangerous. Both seeing and imagining queer desire in another has and can cost us our lives, our homes, our families, and employment. We have been excluded, shunned, imprisoned, and murdered for knowing or believing that desire is reciprocated. Sex workers, especially trans women, often lose their lives expressly because they were desired. And certainly “homosexual panic defense” has been used successfully in courts to justify the murders of gay men, perhaps gay men who had absolutely zero sexual interest in their assailant; or cis women, trans women, or gay men who responded to another man’s wanting. And of course many of us have been violated by the person we most loved and desired, and who loved and desired us. We are accused of desire when it never manifested, and we are accused of desire when it is full and free. Being desired is not the same as being harassed, and we do not have to punish or shun the person who sees what is special about us. Just because you want me, doesn’t mean I have to hurt you. Especially if I also feel attractions that I don’t pursue for reasons of projections from my past. I don’t have to avoid you, ignore your call, refuse to return your email, or block you. We can actually talk to each other, and find the other ways and realms in which to connect. We can be people. We can deal with it. We can build friendships, collaborate, and ...

When I think about it deeply, I can see multiple moments in each day when I have the option to act hurt, to act put-upon, to be offended, to make accusations. Anyone can point to any little thing and turn it into a moment of outrage simply by calling it so. There is an arbitrary element to rejection. I remember I once said to a friend, “You know, I was thinking about going to San Francisco for a week.” “What do you mean, You know?” she said, incredulous, offended. “How am I supposed to know?” Of course I meant you know like uh, um. But she needed to construct me as someone doing something bad to her. Assuming. And of course this made any fun conversation about San Francisco impossible, because now I was wrong. At any conflicted moment that is available to interpret one’s self as somehow transgressed, there is often the option of not seeing it that way. Or of asking the other person what they mean. There are all different kinds of choices. Many, many times a day we could say yes instead of saying no, or find something interesting or revelatory or enlightening instead of offensive. To talk instead of shun. Of course, to always respond this way is problematic because then we never stand for anything on our own. But while recognizing that for socially marginalized or demeaned people, exclusion and silencing are everywhere and must be addressed, we still have choices about how to understand each other.

“When a provider is trained, they are told what domestic violence is,” Hodes said in her presentation. “But I was never told what it is not. And based on what I was taught, I could have looked at every relationship I know and called it abusive.” She suggested that social workers change their methodology, and instead of simply asking, “Are you abused?” ask clients questions that would elicit more information. She encouraged the workshop’s new professionals to create interactive conversation with clients, rather than narrow experience down into easy categories. This strategic evolution reveals a newly articulated goal to stop organizing the conversation in a way designed to automatically produce the pre-determined revelation that the person is being abused. Instead, the conversation should be redirected to elicit a deeper and more multifaceted factual understanding of what is actually happening, in order to reveal more nuance and dimension that could lead to real solutions. Knowing what really happened is more important than deciding who to punish. One suggestion was to ask the client: “Are you unsafe, or are you instead uncomfortable, angry, or hurt?” People who describe themselves as “Abused” when they are actually in Conflict are not lying; they usually don’t know the difference. We’re not talking here about the tired false cliché of the vindictive woman who “cries rape” or diabolically constructs the other as an abuser while knowing full well that the charge is false. Wh...

Instead of encouraging people to label themselves either as victim or as abuser when that may or may not be the case, the role of the friend, caseworker, family member, or witness here was not to reinforce distorted thinking or justifications of punishment and victimology, but rather to elicit a truthful and complex telling, at the base of which is something that novelists, like myself, know very well: Truths can be multiple and are revealed by the order of events. As I teach in my creative writing classes, each moment is a consequence of the previous moment. So truths can be complex, and complexity is articulated by its details. Anyone who refuses to hear the details is making a deliberate decision not to understand. “She yelled at me; she’s abusive.” Is that an originating action? Or is that a response? Were you sitting innocently eating your breakfast and she yelled at you because there was no milk, and you are responsible for serving her at every turn, which would be Abuse? Or did she yell at you because you stole her milk money in order to buy drugs? Which would mean that you created the originating action and the yelling was a consequence of that action. So there is Conflict about your addiction, and the Abuse accusation is a smokescreen to avoid facing it. Or were you so traumatized from being demeaned constantly as a child that as an adult you can’t tolerate difference, and any normative challenge is perceived of as an assault or threat? Is it that, in fact, nothin...

But for years I have been grappling with my colleagues’ almost prescribed instinct to punish, using the language originated initially by a radical movement but now co-opted to deny complexity, due process, and the kind of in-person, interactive conversation that produces resolution. I discussed this with my therapist, now deceased, who had treated victims of McCarthyism later on in their lives. He told me that some of his patients had found themselves caught up in the whirlwind smoke of shunning and innuendo, whisper campaigns and exclusions. No one ever sat down and told them what they were being accused of, and they never had a chance to discuss or inform or respond. Instead, group pressures, intimidations, and false loyalties produced a climate of mysterious chill, in which they were denied jobs, kept out of social events, shunned by acquaintances. People were mean to them without ever saying why, and no opportunity for clarification or repair was ever presented. These people found both the material and emotional consequences overwhelming, but even more so they were hurt by the amorphous nature of the problem. Not being able to know exactly what they were charged with, not being able to talk through the accusations, never knowing where they would face these hostile expressions drove many people to extreme suffering. Even later when classic McCarthyism was dismantled and delegitimized, these unnecessarily broken relationships could not be healed. My therapist explained t...

This placement of the authority to “stop violence” into the hands of the police produces a crisis of meaning. The police are often the source of violence, especially in the lives of women, people of color, trans women, sex workers, and the poor. And the police enforce the laws of the United States of America, which is one of the greatest sources of violence in the world. US foreign policy is enforced by the military who are a global police, and domestic order is enforced by the federal, state, and city structures of policing. The law is designed to protect the state, not the people who are victimized by the state. So while police intervention can importantly separate violent adults from their victims or each other after violence has begun, this job of “stopping violence” has shifted from stopping the causes of violence to reacting punitively to the expressions of those unaddressed causes. What was even more distracting and confusing was that the job of punishing the expressions of patriarchy, racism, and poverty was assigned to the police, who also cause violence. This responsibility, in some cases, produced additional acts of violence on the part of the government, like “stop and frisk,” and racial profiling that committed violence in the name of claiming to fight violence. These laws also produced more access for the state into the homes and families of the poor, and more incarceration of Black and other poor men. Instead of empowering women and the poor, the fate of the...

While radical anti-violence movements declined, the police got primary control of the official discourse of “ending violence,” at the same time that they were causing violence. Expressions of this confusion appeared on network television. There is the zeitgeist and then there is the corporate zeitgeist. Television shows like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit surfaced with a focus on sex crimes and family violence. In a typical episode, a purely innocent victim, who does not participate in creating conflict and is inherently good, is stalked/abused/attacked by a purely and inherently evil predator. The answer to the conundrum is the police. Popular mass entertainment, a corporate entity that is not self-critical, makes the message clear: people are either victims or predators, and therefore the answer is always the police, who are also not self-critical. If some of these people were understood as Conflicted instead of only as victim/perpetrator, then the solution to conflict would be mutual accountability and negotiation, rather than escalation, which would locate authority and responsibility far from the hands of the police. Unfortunately, the necessary social conversation that could help us to understand how people participate in the escalation of conflict became conflated with the real crisis of blaming victims, even though they are two entirely separate things. As I will discuss later, the issue of how people operating with Supremacy ideology escalate conflict was ign...

Why do we call the police? I was discussing this with a room full of people at the Vulva Club in Berlin in 2015, as part of an early presentation of ideas from this book. “If I was being stabbed and I saw a policeman, I would want him to make it stop,” I said. “But if someone stole my cell phone? Why would I call the police? What would be my fantasy behind calling the police? So that a person who could not afford the phone that I can afford should be put in a cage. Why?” One of the main reasons that people call the police, other than to stop ongoing violence, is because they are upset and they want someone else to be punished. But what is that going to give them? How many people call the police because they are angry and don’t want to deal with their own actions, behaviors, or feelings? They just want the other person to be hurt. People often call the police to get their partners or children thrown out of their mutual homes or for other incidents in which there is no violence. It is punitive against the “crime” of opposition. You want someone to do something that they don’t think is just, and so you call the police. Involved in this process is a fantasy that the police are going to take responsibility for problem-solving out of the hands of the caller. But time and time again, Americans are reminded of the fact that the people who become police officers in the United States are often absolutely incapable of problem solving.

Sometimes, of course, people call the police even when no violence has occurred. They may be enraged that they are not being obeyed, they may be escalating to avoid facing themselves, they may be in a power play where they refuse to speak to the other person and can’t back down. They may not know how to negotiate. They may be angry that the neighbor’s dog is barking. They may be hurt that the neighbor is having a party and they weren’t invited. They may want their child or partner to unilaterally follow their orders. They may be too impatient or compulsive to go through a process of working out conflict. They may have negative friendships or a bad family relationship in which they are encouraged to blame and escalate. Overreacting in the present is often a consequence of unresolved anxiety from the past. We don’t have to be professionals, geniuses, or scholars to understand this. It’s common sense. And, as all novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters know, people do things for reasons, even if they don’t know what those reasons are. Anxiety is best addressed by support and love in trying to understand those reasons, not the false “loyalty” of aggression to escalate unjust actions. When we are in community with people who are escalating, we have to ask the right questions in order to understand what past experiences the instigator is responding to in the present. That is the responsibility of real friendship, the true definition of love.

I knew another woman whose family was in a similar situation of projecting the pain of the past onto an undeserving object in the present. A college professor named Diana had come from a family of intense violence and sexual abuse. At the point that we knew each other, Diana’s mother, sister, and niece were all unemployed and living on welfare; the father had died over a decade earlier. The mother was depressed and watched TV all day in a dark room. The sister was working in the sex trade, and the niece wasn’t doing much. The mother and sister had enormous fights on a regular basis, in which they would each escalate the conflict. The sister would yell, “You let Daddy rape me,” referring to events involving her abusive father that had occurred twenty years earlier. Instead of saying, “What your father did to you is wrong, and I regret that I didn’t know how to handle it. I love you and I am sorry, how can we make things better between us?” the mother would yell back, “Get out of here. I never want to see you again.” Neither the mother nor the sister knew how to negotiate, how to deal with conflict. They only knew how to escalate it. Whenever the mother became louder and more agitated, the sister would escalate by storming out of the house. The time that I was there, she took the mother’s cat with her. “Give me back my cat!” the mother screamed, further escalating the situation when she should have said, “I’m sorry we’re yelling at each other. I love you, let’s calm down.” S...

Implied in the public’s support for same-sex marriage is a fantasy that gay marriage is a mirror of straight marriage. And even though we don’t really know what the reality of straight marriage is, there is an ideal that involves an aspiration towards monogamy or some kind of sexual constraint. It’s fair to say that many straight people support gay marriage because they see it as normalizing, and do so with an undercurrent of expectation that gay marriage will tame gay male sexual culture and produce approximate monogamy among gay men. In this way, gay marriage is unconsciously understood as an antidote to AIDS, thereby separating “gay” and “AIDS” in the public imagination. Once gay marriage is available, people who refuse it are, in a sense, refusing the offer of normalcy, which means refusing clean, approved, and controlled sexuality. They are offered “good” homosexuality, but may choose “bad” homosexuality, making them even more deviant, different, and socially dangerous than they were before.

It has never been shown that punishment works. Punishment, denouncing, excluding, threatening, and shunning often create a worse society. It divides people, causes great pain, compromises individual integrity, and obscures truths in the name of falsely shoring up group reputation. Similarly, there is no correlation between having the ability to punish and being right. More often than not, the wrong people get punished. And the punishers use their power to keep from being accountable. So creating new classes of people who can threaten someone with the state, or who can call the police, does not produce more justice, and is more likely to produce more injustice.

But there are all kinds of actions: some are designed to acknowledge and reveal the sources of conflict and pain in order to resolve them, and some are designed to obscure those sources so that resolution/change can never occur. Which one we choose, of course, is related to how we see ourselves and others, and what we don’t see about ourselves and others. There is no evidence that time heals all wounds, or even most wounds; instead, it freezes unnecessary enmity and makes it harder to overcome. Time allows perpetrators to forget the pain they have imposed. As Bertolt Brecht said, “As crimes pile up, they become invisible.” And so I don’t believe in an ideology of non-response. Therefore, this is no argument for silence. Silence can itself be an escalation. Little children give their parents “the silent treatment” because they don’t know how to negotiate: how to listen, to respond in a way that is transformed by having listened, to change in order to meet the other. Ideally the parent does know how to negotiate, and so they help the child learn how to express and how to listen. But we all know now that many parents are the source of the problem. They either impose the pain from their own lack of resolution, or they employ the tactics of shut-down, refusal, and punishment instead of trying the radical openness that produces positive change.

In our own realms—families, cliques, communities, workplaces—we have all experienced the patriarch, the male supremacist, the nationalist, the racist, or just the local provincial big man who will not tolerate any opposition. He can never be wrong. He can never apologize. He explodes in rage whenever there is another experience being presented. He belittles others but can’t stand any criticism of himself. He may use sarcasm or cruelty to tear others apart, but his understanding of emotional life is shallow. He won’t allow people to talk to him about what is going on. He doesn’t seek resolution, which means to him that he would have to acknowledge having made a mistake, which is an impossibility. He is petty, the kind of person who sends an attacking email and then, when the recipient phones to discuss the conflict, won’t take the call. He denies complexity, and the people around him do not challenge him directly. His partner, his friends, the people who feel protected by, elevated by, or who benefit from his power, organize other people to not oppose him. They deflect criticism from him. They are careful around him, and are rewarded. He doesn’t ask other people, “What are you feeling?”; never says, “I don’t understand what is going on. How do you see it?” He acts as though others should follow his orders, and when they refuse he punishes, bullies, shuns, makes false accusations, organizes group exclusion, distorts narratives, and may threaten and use the law or even violen...

This question of shame seems important in escalation. Why does one person approach a situation and want reconciliation and peace, while another approaches the same situation and needs to shun, destroy, and thereby feel victorious? The business of psychological studies is a messy one. There are so many and they contradict each other, but like poetry, they can stimulate thought. I read a study by June Price Tangey and Patricia E. Wagner published in 1996, and another by Hadar Behrendt and Rachel Ben Ari written sixteen years later that pointed to a similar answer. Both teams felt that people who come at conflict from guilt approach it very differently than people who come at it from shame. In fact, both studies found that people who come from guilt very much want to negotiate, are able to apologize and admit fault, can make concessions, and are invested in positive resolution. People coming from shame, on the other hand, direct anger, aggression, and blame towards the other party. This difference was explained by the assessment that people who feel guilt experience less emotional stress and anxiety than those who feel shame. And guilty people can therefore focus more on the implications of their own actions on others. They found that those who feel shame also feel more threatened and are deeply concerned about what other people think of them. Behrendt and Ben Ami write in the Journal of Conflict Resolution: Guilt plays a pro-social function in strengthening relationships; it...

If a person’s sense of self has been punctured, and they have not been willing or able to repair it, they may become intolerant of difference. They may confuse anxiety and vulnerability. They may exaggerate threat, overreact, seek the protection of bullies and shun others, and thereby become bullies themselves. They may lash out particularly cruelly at people they love and desire, as the feeling of loving can remind them of the abusive parent that they once loved. They may never feel safe unless they have an unreasonable amount of control over others, as in shunning. Shame, too, seems to be a driving force in traumatized behavior. Negotiation feels like a defeat, a reminder of the earlier violation. Giving in, adjusting, and changing feel life-threatening. Difference, as to the Supremacist, becomes a threat. Supremacists and the traumatized can be through-the-looking-glass, employing similar tactics for opposing reasons. The people they can’t control become cast as monsters, dehumanized specters that both the Supremacist and the Traumatized collude to create as manifestations of their own projected anxieties: the anxiety of being faced with difference. This monster can be a person with HIV, a Palestinian, or even just someone we know, have loved, desired, or shared space with, who has a challenging or merely different perspective and therefore becomes unbearable. They become a dehumanized object to be destroyed because of what they reveal about us; that there might be some...

Escalation can take many forms: • Escalation can be a smokescreen, a way to deflect attention from the real problem at hand because the person acting out doesn’t know how to approach the conflict and doesn’t have support to do the work to make that possible. The only support they have is to blame and assume the role of the “Abused.” • Escalation can be an expression of distorted thinking or mental illness, and can be rooted in earlier experience, some of which may have a biological consequence. These projections from the past onto the present can be expressions of anxiety. They can also be a compulsion, a hyper-vigilant automatic action with no room for thought or consideration of motive, justification, or consequence. • Escalation is almost always exacerbated when parties are members of shallow communities like dysfunctional families and bad friends. Religious/racial/national Supremacy concepts are at the basis of destructive groups, bound together by negative values. • Escalation can be a tactic of the state. In the case of this book’s subject, overreaction to conflict, the patterns are often familiar. Someone says or does or is something that the reacting individual or group doesn’t like. Perhaps the offending person objects to a negative situation, they respond to an unjust structure, or by just being themselves they illustrate difference. In other words, they say or do or are something that requires an individual or a community to examine i...

I would certainly also agree that in expressions of narcissism, an entitled and arrogant person can create that environment in a relationship, community, family, or household. They can bring the ideology of their Supremacy, especially White Supremacy or Male Supremacy, into other people’s lives through the integrated conviction that they should not have to be aware of others, negotiate with others, take other people into consideration. This is an ideology that men often bring to their relationships with whomever is serving them, whether it is a mother, a female or male partner or child, or another female adult. The objective is that the woman’s independent needs, or the subordinate man’s actual experience, should be subservient to keeping the supremacist male on track with his goals, even if those goals are dependency or self-aggrandizement. That this is common in sexual relationships is so well known it doesn’t even need to be illustrated. As well, it is common for adult men to expect women in their circle, including the workplace, to drop everything in order to perform favors for them that usually involve compensating for some task they didn’t bother to take care of or complete themselves. Certainly I have seen adult males feel confident and secure in living off their mothers, controlling their mother’s sexual and emotional lives, and having their mothers cook, shop, clean, and earn money for them. That daughters and sisters absurdly have to serve their male relatives is...

Maybe it’s because I’m an old-school New Yorker. After all, pre-gentrification, post-World War II New York was the haven for pioneer psychoanalysts, refugees from Fascist Europe. So many of them came here, trained others here, opened institutes, taught, staffed hospitals, wrote, lectured, and had private and public practices with many patients and students. During that vulnerable period, our city welcomed people whose life calling was to understand and heal suffering as they emerged from mass killings by fascists. I’ve always been moved by the photograph of Sigmund Freud’s home at Berggasse in Vienna, after he was in exile in London and Nazis had taken it over. The photo depicts the former site of his offices covered in swastikas. It’s a cogent representation of the desire for understanding covered with shit. Many of these Nazis and collaborators were individuals whom the refugees knew personally and so had to be dealt with on very personal as well as socio-psychological terms. It is stunning to read over and over how psychoanalyst refugees from fascism tried to understand the fascist psychology. Many had the desire or the fantasy to engage fascists in treatment, to help them understand that feelings do not need to be acted on. I find a great beauty in their desire to understand cruelty, even when it was aimed at them. Perhaps in this way their influence, as refugees, had permeated late-twentieth-century New York City. Partially as a result of this influx of scapegoated pe...

Today, a “good” family model is based on an ideology called “loyalty” or, more neo-liberally, “being supportive.” Often this is one in which the members reinforce each other regardless of the content of their lives and the consequence of their actions on others. They are “always there for you.” They overpraise in a broad sense. George W. Bush may be a war criminal, but his family is always there for him. As Edith Weigert recalled about Harry Stack Sullivan’s observation, families can create a “deprivation of indulgence.” No standard for how to treat others is forged. They can reproduce class and gender Supremacy systems by not expecting their members to face and deal with conflict, to learn how to take care of themselves or others, to literally and spiritually clean up after themselves, or to be self-critical. As a result, family members learn how to be exploitative, expectant, and entitled. They learn to view some jobs as beneath them or some paths as above them; they understand that accountability is beyond them because they always have the family and its emotional resources to fall back on. They can come to expect a level of gender, class, or race Supremacy without having to work or earn their comforts. From the family’s perspective, this is considered “love.” Some “good” bourgeois families build their strength at the expense of others, especially others in need or who don’t have a family. It’s inherent to the construction of the bourgeois classes. The family says “no” ...

The “bad” family, as we understand it, is the opposite of this Supremacy model. Instead of bonding with each other to the detriment of outsiders, the family turns on its own members directly, demeaning them, beating them, fucking them, conditioning them towards self-destructive and socially detrimental behaviors. As my father once told me, “Families do worse things to their own members than they do to other people. They kill them, they rape them, they burn them in boiling oil.” And he was right. The problem with this pathological dichotomy is that when “bad” families destroy their own members, they produce people so traumatized that they can’t problem-solve with others and become the source of impulsive, triggered acting out: e.g., blaming others, committing violence, overstating harm, bringing in the police or the state in lieu of problem-solving. The problem with “good” families is that they do the same thing, but from a place of over-privilege and Supremacy, so that when they are cruel and unfair, their family members “stand by” them, and create no consequences for their actions. Both of these systems hurt other people’s lives and produce new adults who don’t know how to be responsible and to problem-solve, who are entitled to a level that is detrimental to the rest of the world. And the rest of us have to live with these people. Even if we also are them, taking into account our earlier recognition that Supremacy and Trauma can exist in the same body. I believe that a t...

We have an enormous challenge now that the community of queer friends is facing profound transformation by queer pro-family ideology, an ideology that constructs the idea that people are bound together as a central legal and social structure of “protection” against outsiders, who are a “threat.” This is the very same construction that victimized many of us in fundamental ways in relationship to our own families. Lest we forget. The pro-family politic in the queer community has overwhelmed a lot of things that we once understood but no longer remember. Childcare is privatized instead of collectivized. Interestingly (and I leave it to historians to chart this one), lesbians in the feminist movement of the 1970s and ’80s, before the dawning of the pro-natalist mentality, were more overtly active for quality child care, which was considered to be one of a number of issues that were grouped together as “reproductive rights” (“Abortion rights, affordable and safe birth control, an end to Sterilization Abuse, Lesbian Rights and Quality Child Care”). But in our contemporary, queer pro-family ideology, there is no visible gay or lesbian movement for childcare rights. Our understandings about the consumerism of privatized living are forgotten. We’ve lost a lot of imaginative ground and also emotional complexity in how we talk about and understand relationships. Most importantly artificial ideas about perfect parents, ideal children, and storybook romance do great harm to many of us....

This was not in Gaza, but in Israel, the place that many commentators were extolling for its “democracy.” The demonstrators represented a large cross-section of Palestinian society in Haifa and its environs. Honestly, it could have been taking place in New York. They were westernized, casual; some were religious, but not many. They carried Palestinian flags but no weapons, no protective clothing. Chatting with each other, many were smiling. Something was being expressed and it energized the crowd. Then, a few minutes later, a very large group of Israeli riot police appeared. They were armed and carried sticks, and wore helmets, visors, and bulletproof vests. This was not a demonstration that needed to be repressed or controlled. There was nothing dangerous or inappropriate or out of control. And yet this clearly didn’t matter. The police ritual was designed to enforce obedience, an exercise in overreaction, overstatement, projection, dehumanization. The Palestinians’ reasonable reactions to the murder of their own people were responded to unreasonably by the very people who had caused the pain. Suddenly the police were grabbing, arresting, throwing people to the ground. The demonstrators were wearing t-shirts; the police, armor. And still some of the Palestinians talked back. It was incredible to watch. They may have been afraid, but they knew that what they were saying was true, whether they were saying, “Don’t hurt him” or “This is our right.” They spoke in Hebrew, which...