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- Havdalah #33: Winter, ICE Detainees, & the Limits of Compromise
Havdalah #33: Winter, ICE Detainees, & the Limits of Compromise
7 Kislev, 5785 / December 7, 2024
White Rose RI
December 07, 2024
Dear Neighbors,
As winter’s chill settles in, I am wishing you sustaining warmth, as well as moments of delight in the brisk cold. Our world is not always gentle towards us. And it is not always easy to distinguish the challenges we can collaborate with — like the recurring rhythm of cold which reminds us the importance of rest, and helps us grow artichokes and lavender — from the adversaries with whom no partnership is possible. James shares more in this week’s Sidebar. Whatever each of us might be facing this week, may we face it with integrity.
In solidarity,
Lee
The AMOR Community Fund for ICE Detainees
The AMOR Community Fund for ICE Detainees is a volunteer run, community funded project dedicated to supporting folks in ICE Detention at the Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls, RI.
Since their August Fundraiser, the AMOR Community Fund for ICE Detainees has distributed $1,999 to 18 individuals experiencing ICE detention at the Wyatt.
With the funds raised so far, AMOR has focused on providing commissary support so that folks detained can afford the phone calls that are often critical to getting connected with their family and broader community of support. Access to funds for commissary also helps the people in detention access basic necessities like deodorant, lotion, toothpaste, soap, and snacks.
With threats of mass deportation, the world feels scary right now and it can be hard to know what to do or how to help. Your donation has a tangible effect on people experiencing detention in our community right now.
Help keep the AMOR Community Fund for ICE Detainees alive by donating today, or becoming a monthly donor!
Office Hours with The Womxn Project Team
When: Every Tuesday, 3:00pm-5:00pm
Where: Zoom
Need a little support or just want to know what’s going on? The Womxn Project team will be on a live Zoom to answer your questions or point you in the direction of where to turn.
We Fight Back! Organizing Meeting
When: Saturday, December 14, 2:00pm-4:00pm
Where: 999 S Broadway, East Providence, RI 02914
Join PSL RI and the RI Shut It Down for Palestine Coalition for this organizing meeting to start planning on how to defeat Trump's extreme right billionaire agenda and grow the struggle for a liberated Palestine! With Trump's election, we know that we need to build up our fights for Palestine, Black liberation, indigenous sovereignty, immigrant rights and environmental justice to be bigger and stronger than ever.
Continuing Actions for Palestine
Jewish Voice for Peace Weekly Flyering
When: Every Wednesday, 5:00pm-6:00pm
Where: Providence Train Station, 100 Gaspee Street, Providence, RI 02903
JVP RI invites all to join them in their efforts to spread the word about their work and simple actions people can take to demand an end to the genocide in Palestine. They meet on the Statehouse side of the train station.
Weekly Kaddish
When: Every Sunday, 1:00pm-1:30pm
Where: Michael Van Leesten Pedestrian Bridge, Providence, RI 02903
Jewish Voice for Peace RI and allies will be hosting a weekly gathering on Sundays to recite the Mourners Kaddish and communally grieve the Palestinians murdered by the Israeli military. You need not be Jewish to attend; all are welcome to participate.
Power Half-Hours for Gaza
When: every day, Monday through Friday, 3:00pm EST
Where: online
Jewish Voice for Peace is holding Power Half-Hours for Gaza every day — join us as we channel our fury and sorrow into collective action to stop genocide.
Ceasefire Today Toolkit
This toolkit has a variety of links, including call scripts, groups accepting donations, phone banks, petitions, and more
News Coverage
As always, especially when getting news from social media, be aware of who is sharing information and why they’re doing it.
Al Jazeera Coverage of the War on Gaza has continued to be a reliable source
Mondoweiss has also provided excellent context and deep dive pieces.
On November 11th, the Boston Globe published an anti-trans op-ed defending Seth Moulton. I will not be linking it here for obvious reasons, but it’s tremendously frustrating that the Globe’s editorial board appears to have low standards for the intellectual rigor of pieces it will run.
Multiple Democrats have come out of the woodwork in recent weeks to publicly clutch their pearls and bugle concern over the small gains that the trans movement has made over the past several years. It’s a cynical move, using the opportunity of the Harris-Walz defeat to finally voice their already-held prejudices under the pretense of unity with their Republican cohorts. Some broke ranks to (bafflingly) claim that their party was too far to the left on trans issues, although the majority of their colleagues rightfully collected them.
The New York Times, whose self-importance can always be relied upon for proffered prescriptions, published its own piece on November 26th. Continuing the years-long campaign to rationalize transphobia, the writer bemoaned the extremism of the trans movement, casting the population as ungenerous, overly critical, inflexible. A few prominent trans people were tokenized in service of this argument, while the writer defended JK Rowling — a questionable choice, considering her transmisogyny has escalated to Holocaust denial.
These publications’ lack of integrity is self-apparent, but the spirit of their arguments, supercilious though they may be, is shared by many cis people who consider themselves liberal or even progressive. Despite the Democratic Party’s stance on trans rights being noncommittal at best, there persists a feeling of grievance among the center-left at being saddled with responsibility for us. The resentment at the new effort required of them to qualify as open and inclusive is increasingly directed at us for imposing any expectations in the first place. Those who wring their hands about trans rights “going too far” and those who breathlessly complain at length about how hard it is to use pronouns tend to be the same people. They sympathize with conservatives; it’s all so hard, it’s all very confusing, it’s all a little too far in the other direction, isn’t it? Mustn’t there be some compromise?
No.
I have spent the last month since the election in a furious fugue, heedless of threats to my safety, chin defiant and teeth bared. I wake up angry, I go to bed angry. I haven’t been like this since I was a teenager.
I’ve already confronted two different strangers in public, ready and prepared to face altercations and their consequences. I have done this without regard for the danger to my body and mind. This is not bravery, because I am too angry to feel fear. There is only a radical acceptance of what may be done to me.
This is the only way I can live now. Dauntless. Unyielding. Without compromise.
I believe fiercely that cohabitation with plurality is not optional, with all that that implies. I strive for consensus and democracy, and I know how difficult their praxis is. One might think, then, that I of all people would extoll the virtues of compromise. One would be wrong.
In her book, On Compromise, Rachel Greenwald Smith autopsies the contemporary American valorization of compromise as a value, as opposed to a tool.
“Compromises are containers for conflicts: they bring incompatible elements together into an internally contradictory agreement, practice, or action. Often this is a practical necessity, because compromises temporarily reconcile clashing positions when grappling with such explosive forces is impossible or dangerous. But compromise is also always in danger of obscuring the existence of the conflicts they contain by reducing them to what appears to be a single, comprehensible, rational answer. And it is from this transformation – from compromise as a provisional container to compromise as a singular answer – that confusion between compromise as a means and compromise as an end emerges.” (8-9)
So what Question, then, is answered by compromising the existence of transness in public life?
The trans person is not kept safer, nor is the bigot satisfied with anything less than total eradication. These compromises benefit only the center, who want to do neither the work of protecting us nor the work of killing us. They want to be good again, without doing good. They want freedom from both present responsibility and future culpability, because even they know that compromises are only temporary. At some point, the levee breaks. The center won’t hold. As Greenwald Smith points out:
“Compromise does not nullify the conflict it temporarily addresses; it does not touch the fundamental structures that have given rise to the division it tries to reconcile. It is, therefore, never anything more than a brief pause in the clanging of a fire bell.” (81-82)
At the end of the day, there are some conflicts that cannot be reconciled.
What the center is doing is not compromise. It is capitulation.
The magnanimous intelligentsia, the pompous writers at the legacy papers, the sanctimonious politicians who were already disgusted by our deviance; all of them are performing surrender of a principle they neither had nor wanted.
Or, more succinctly:
“A compromise is not a compromise when it is offered up, fully formed, in advance.” (50)
We are being left to the wolves.
We cannot control the universe with our actions. We cannot keep ourselves safe by compromising who we are. The closet will not protect us, assimilation will not protect us, compliance will not protect us. Showing your belly to prove you aren’t a threat will not save you, it will only offer the enemy better access to that softer, vital flesh.
There are many arguments I am not willing to hear anymore, let alone entertain. Plurality may dictate that these opinions will exist, but it does not require my tolerance of them. Does my inflexibility, my lack of generosity, and my impatience run counter to the democratic ideal? I don’t think so. Greenwald Smith asserts that “democracy suffers when we are asked to compromise our principles in advance in order to be practical, palatable, or unthreatening to those who want to maintain systems of injustice” (197).
I agree, and at the risk of evangelizing, I think that this is the attitude that we should all have. Single-minded ethical commitment infringes on no freedoms, and, I would argue, actually protects some.
Greenwald Smith writes, “Democracy does not require neutrality; it requires equality of access. And equality of access does not mean each position is treated as if it has the same inherent worth” (73).
This is a concept that the Globe and the Times clearly don’t grasp, despite their aspirations of discernment.
I don’t care about seeming reasonable or open-minded. I don’t care about respectability. I don’t even care much about surviving anymore. I care about living.
Living truthfully, living meaningfully, living beautifully. Living fully in every way available to me. There is no room for compromise here.
For those who do not want me to live at all, there is no compromise either.
The effort to find a satisfying middle ground between the two is not only a futility: it is a profound disrespect.
I walk through each day exhaling smoke through my nose, waiting to breathe fire at the enemy. Some people are not open to persuasion, my best friend reminds me. They can only be defeated.
I walk each night as though the streets are mine, because at this point, if you want them, you’ll have to kill me to take them.
There is no compromising with the enemy. There is only winning.
Give no quarter.
Recommended Reading: “We Are the Strange and Scary Things in These Woods”, Margaret Killjoy
Needle Drop: “The Bear”, The Tragically Hip
No Fash Watch this week; life is kicking our butts.
screencap from “The Thing”
