“Care is our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive—along with the planet itself.” — The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, The Care Collective, Verso Press, pg. 6
Sometimes I feel heaviness in my body that tells me I am not made for this world. A world so full of wonder and beauty—for example, the complexity of a peony, the wonder of springtime and cycles of nature, the fact of saved pumpkin seeds placed in the ground and a few weeks later sprouting green, puffy wings—all rapidly being destroyed by men in power, full of greed, rife with death wishes, bleeding imperialism.
I know, I too often think in big generalizations (and too often I write in extra-long sentences because I love them). So, of course, not all men are destroying the planet and, by extension, our spirits. Yes, some women are quite destructive too. Big generalizations and big conclusions (perhaps the four seasons will persevere in spite of climate collapse?) are not appreciated in everyday conversation. All the bigness is not helpful to my soul.
But is it just me or do these big juxtapositions seem bigger in 2025? Is this what age and wisdom does, allows me to see contrasts in clearer relief in order to know there is no us and them, no either / or, no duality, only oneness and interdependence? I find it impossible to see a child starving in Gaza and not also feel the aching love in my chest for my own daughter. I cannot see a journalist targeted and killed also in Gaza and ignore our own U.S. administration work to silence the free press. I cannot see lines of people waiting for food in cage-like fencing and not remember the concentration camps of the Holocaust. I take in just enough headlines and news clips to be aware of what is going on, yet even with little bits, my nerves still rattle, my soul wilts, my head pounds, my heart breaks and breaks.
Like everyone else on the planet, my own daily life is filled with juxtapositions. Yesterday, for example, I took my mother to a morning doctor’s appointment. I called in to say we would not be there the (ridiculous) required 15 minutes early but we were all checked in online and would be there at the appointment time. (The last time we waited for this doctor for 40 minutes; neither Mom nor I were in the mood to do that again.) On the drive there, however, (thanks Murphy’s Law) we got caught in construction traffic. That fact plus the literal building-length ramp my mom has to walk up to get to this office, which specializes in geriatric patients, made us arrive (my mother standing leaning on her walker, short of breath) five minutes past the appointment time. The receptionist said we’d have to reschedule. My body vibrated with rage. I demanded to talk to the manager like a white woman would. I got her card. (I will call, because the rules and accessibility of this building are ridiculous.) I muttered vitriol about the U.S. health care system all the way back down the ramp. By the time we got outside into the too-hot-for-May weather, my mom said I was “a little scary in there.” That’s when my voice broke, “Mom, I just cannot handle having such a fucking terrible system of care while a doctor in Gaza trying to help little starving and sick kids for years comes home to her house to find nine of her ten children dead under rubble!”
My poor mom. Talk about juxtapositions. I am an exploding volcano full of lava. She is the fragile obsidian made from the fires. I shook my body and hummed before I got back in the car with her.
Many people might be better at compartmentalizing these juxtaposition. They put these dualities aside and get on with their day. I suck at doing that. Another contrast: even though I am an exploding volcano, I’m also a double-Pisces, i.e., super watery and porous. I have no compartments.
The book I quoted at the start of this post articulates the fundamental problem of those in power compartmentalizing humanity, e.g., these people deserve to live, those people don’t. With each separation, with each hierarchy of value placed on all forms of life, those of us who are no good at compartmentalization or dualization feel the moral and spiritual injury of blatant lack of care across the globe. Further, when we see and feel the juxtapositions, as painful as they are, we connect in empathy and humanity. Juxtaposition comes from the Latin iūxtā, meaning “close by.” In feeling into the contrasts, we can know people even as far away as Gaza, are our neighbors; they are us, there is no us and them. And in feeling that close by-ness, we may be able to act publicly in better solidarity, for the sake of our collective liberation. So we may all be free and not stuck behind chain link fencing. As The Care Collective argues in their book “The practices of care that recognize the complexity of human interactions also enhance our ability to reimagine and participate more fully in democratic processes at all levels of society (pg. 30).”
Caring pretty well for my mom every day while feeling the debilitating depletion of care across the globe is not a shortcoming on my part. Holding both those realities helps me work for a future where the quality of care for elders and children is our actual measure of global health. Not profit, not production, not exploitation; care.
One more story. Last year, I was at an opening event at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art for a months’ long exhibit and with local, national, and international artists called, “Policing Justice.” The exhibit and additional programs interrogated, through multi-media art, the intersections of policing and what I’d name as care in community. At the exhibit, I talked to the family of a loved one, a young Black man who my county police shot on the street as he ran away, unarmed. Police left him to bleed, with no care, in the bushes for two hours before he died. I’d been showing up for this family in various ways, so we knew each other, but too not well.
The grandmother asked me, tears in her eyes, “Why do you show up? Did you have a family member killed by police?”
“No,” I said. “I just—”
“Give a shit?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, “I give a shit. I care.”
I care about what’s happening; the militarization, the fascism, the corruption, the thick upwardly displaced inequitable concentration of wealth, power, and influence across the globe. I, like many others willing to speak and sing out (for example, here and here) are having a hard time functioning under such separation, doing the day to day while metabolizing such grief and inhumanity. I kind of blew it with my mom yesterday, and today, after her back went out again (I blame the ramp), I’m feeding her cut up bits of toast, and rescheduling doctor’s appointment; the first available appointment was in August.
I will work today to hold these juxtapositions and embody the close-by. For as The Care Collective says, “Caring societies can only be built by overcoming careless nationalist imaginaries and fostering truly transnational outlooks among radically democratic cosmopolitan subjects, people who care across difference and distance.” In other words, just give a shit.
P.S. (Trigger warning, TMI ahead) I was prompted to write this essay because, yesterday morning, before roiling in person about our inaccessible U.S. health care system (which I’ve certainly written about before like here and here), I ugly cried while writing in my journal about the Palestinian doctor’s nine dead children. I continued to ugly cry while realizing I also needed to take my morning constitutional. I laughed to myself while crying because of the juxtaposition of feeling like I was losing my shit while taking a constitutional while America’s constitutional crisis is an ongoing shit storm. See, there are many ways to give a shit. I hope you find one that leads to actual close-by care.