Life Behind The Curtain
My work, my avocation, and one of the abiding passions of my life has been witnessing people in the process of becoming more fully themselves.
That has made me wary of easy certainty about others. I believe each of us sees from somewhere, and no one has privileged access to the whole truth of another person’s experience. Facts matter, as does listening.
Much of my working life requires me to engage closely with people whose assumptions, loyalties, fears, and conclusions may differ sharply from my own. I value that. I do not want to live only among people who agree with me.
What troubles me now is how readily human beings become abstractions: “illegals,” “MAGA,” “the left,” “socialists,” “criminals,” “the enemy.” Once we reduce someone to a category, we no longer have to encounter the person in front of us. History has taught us, repeatedly and catastrophically, where that kind of dehumanization can lead.
My instincts run the other way: Who are you? What happened to you? What are you afraid of? What do you love? What might I misunderstand about you?
I work in a public-facing role in Bergen County, and being publicly identified with a political cause could complicate relationships important to my work. The people I work for, I gather, do not share my politics or many of the values that inform them. I have no reason to believe they would have my back if those differences became consequential.
There are things happening in this country that alarm me deeply, particularly the normalization of government power against people with little ability to defend themselves, and the ease with which cruelty can become procedure.
Because of my work, I cannot always put my name beside what I believe or participate publicly in everything I might otherwise support.
I have come to believe there are many forms of citizenship. Some people march. Some organize. Some write, give, attend meetings, help neighbors, challenge cruelty when they encounter it, or simply refuse to become numb. And history (even recent history) is full of people who have risked, and sometimes lost, their lives helping others.
For some of us, there is also the quieter obligation to keep doing our work well and ethically — to be fair when unfairness would be easier, to listen when caricature would be easier, to treat people as people, and to resist the pressure to become smaller ourselves. I have come to see that as a virtue, too.
I am still figuring out what my own form of involvement should be. For now, part of it is witnessing. Part of it is helping people become more fully visible. Part of it is refusing language that makes human beings smaller.
I think that matters. I hope it does.
—Anonymous, 58