Brené Brown wrote about her views on the conflict in Gaza. Many people were upset by the views represented in her post. She wrote a follow-up post and addressed those comments, and used words like, “I failed” in that response. People are still upset with her.

I need to confess that I am lost in our modernity and its discourse. I feel especially lost when there are far away, complex, and emotionally devastating events in the world because I am confused by how we wrestle with them together, as people with little to no power or influence on those events.

Brené Brown felt the need to express herself and her feelings. I get that. But I can see in her post this need to firmly plant every feeling within its proper context, but the conflict she’s reacting to is a multi-layered monstrosity and history itself has become weaponized. She was never going to be able to provide full context, because she’s not qualified to, and certainly not enough to satisfy a diverse and divided mass audience. That’s another thing I am still reckoning with, when do our feelings require a mass audience and when is a private setting better? Just because we can alert the world to our personal anguish, should we? Perhaps she genuinely is hoping to use her considerable platform to influence the outcomes of events, I am unsure how that’s possible. I feel that we are confusing social power with actual power; thought leadership for coercive authority.

I am also deeply confused by her readers. Not that they disagree with her; this is an issue that warrants debate and disagreement. But by the feelings of betrayal they voice to her, that her words did them violence; that they could reach the level of feeling betrayed by a fairly well-intentioned, but not a theologian or historian, self-help guru/academic that largely promotes a smiling brand of self-actualization. She has visibility, but she’s not a world leader. She published a blog post, she didn’t pass a law. I can’t help but feel that we are holding the wrong people to this level of accountability; that we are firing wildly at the wrong targets. Admittedly though, I also believe that I have no real right to direct where and how people express their own grief, so long as grief itself doesn’t transmute into violence. But I have no clue when words cross the threshold to become violence. Does anyone? And it seems to me that the level of violence that words can do, aside from words that are literally designed to incite mob physical violence, are largely up to the receiver and their own resilience (which yes, is moderated by outside systems). 

I am just left with a mess. And I guess that’s the nature of all complex human relationships, but certainly messes must have degrees and certain degrees of messes cannot be tolerated for very long. I don’t know where we go from here: where people with followings need to express their views on all matters (look at me doing just that!), where people who see this happening must try to bring them to account or even bring them low. And that this tumbleweed of social disorder just blows right by the actual human tragedy and the people with levers of power. Here I find myself a growing conspiracy theorist, that this media environment is actually serving those in power and they’re happy to see our futile squabbles play out while they profit or prosper from the conflict. Whatever fuels clicks and riles clans is good for the business of power, I suppose?

In all my confusion, I fall back to asking “what’s mine?” Both what’s my patch of grass to tend, and how far my reach can extend past it. And honestly, I am feeling ever smaller. I love my patch and try to be a diligent gardener, but believing that I have some grand ability to reach beyond it seems quaint. Is this what getting older is? Is this just the optimism of youth receding, or is it also the energy of youth draining as well? Am I actually more influential and I am squandering it while others suffer? I really wrestle with that one. I have tried using my voice before, and it has cost me dearly and I don’t see that it has done much good at all. Am I realist, a pessimist, or even a barrier to a better world? I increasingly feel that, whatever I am, I am insignificant. I also wonder if maybe that’s the best place to start from, versus our culture’s solipsistic dream of every person being a superhero. But if I join your camp, what will you gain? Your camp seems so self-assured and eager for retribution, I am neither. Maybe then, I am indeed an impediment to people more confident than I that they themselves can create that better world.

I also don’t know where to stop writing here. There is no conclusion to personal questions like these. No declarative statement, no resounding restatement of a thesis. I am thesis-less at this moment.