i love the trolley problem and even more i love the memes that have founted forth from it. the format is simple: if you’re not familiar, it’s a trolley on a track and at some point, further down the track, there are some people strapped to or asleep on or blacked out on a track and — *gasp* — if we don’t do something, all those people on the track will perish. Luckily, this rail system has an emergency off-ramp that we can direct the trolley onto before it ever reaches those people — all we have to do is pull a lever. There’s a catch: on the off-ramp, there’s one person strapped (or whatever, no judgment) to the rails.
To swap ramps is to commit this person to die. What do you do?
The game (and it is a game) tries to delineate your values: is it worth taking personal agency to save three people or remain “neutral” to save one? in this original permutation, the obvious answer, to me, is to save the three people: why would you not? do some people think that one’s intent behind pulling the lever is not to save three people but to kill one?
There are infinite permutations: what if there’s a baby, what if there are children, what if there are doctors? What if some of them are virulent racists or soldiers? What about a cop? What if the people on the main track are all very old? The trolley problem is asking us to do triage with the luxury of time and consideration.
Anyway, infinite permutations:
Part of why i like them is because they’re lucidly asking what you care about in a cute literary device (exactly why i like “fuck marry kill” and, to a lesser extent,
”would you rather.”)
(Also, who are these people? Are the three people close to me? Do i trust them?)
In the past two months, there’ve been a few more of these with a new tone and tenor as Palestinians are massacred in increasingly gruesome and dehumanizing ways—just a couple of days ago, it was reported that the IOF crushed civilians recovering in their tents with bulldozers—the memes have stopped being funny and started to just suggest bitterly the perceived lack of collective agency. I smile with the very edge of my lips, but i don’t laugh and, behind my eyes, i don’t even feel a fraction of joy lighting them. I just repost it, email my senators (Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, by the way, neither of whom should ever sleep well again; curse them with every ounce of your being) and pretend like that’s enough:
For many of us, we’re beginning, finally, to see the subtle outlines of the fascist caste society emerge from the deceptive waters of normalcy that we’ve always waded in; everyday it feels like there is less and less we can do, as the government equates criticism with hate crimes, as the police repress and arrest peaceful protesters, as BDS is criminalized, and our representatives represent nothing but their personal interests. It truly feels like there is no lever.
Of course, a joke contains a seed of truth, but a joke is not the truth in itself. In this case, the despair and grief are true feelings—how can they not be, as the very brim of our capabilities within this system are revealed to us?
But that despair is hiding the truth: there are no levers, or at least no literal levers—the magic lever that, when we storm the houses of power, we pull to resolve all of the disease and destruction that empire has brought down upon us—but there have always been many metaphorical levers. (Why would we say there is no lever but to return to a space of dismal comfort in the state of things? It makes me think of that saying, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (and settler colonialism.))
I reject the lack of agency. There might not be a lever, but we have our bodies and if we have our bodies we have agency. And that agency must be manifested through organizing our people as a response to the organized ignorance, neglect, and genocide of indigenous Palestinians. And to the organized abandonment of those suffering from long COVID and other disabling conditions. And to the cops relentless, merciless killing of Black people. And to empire’s persistent razing and extraction of our homes, our land, our beyond-human neighbors.
There is no lever. But there is the brilliance and resilience of our enduring humanity that lights up our cores in the face of destruction. i’ve written this post over the course of a week, often in the extreme privilege of safety.
This was a blessing. And it’s also fucked: we don’t have the luxury of time but we also don’t have the luxury of a magical lever so we must be judicious, strategic, and rich in our spirits and our people. To that end, i offer five questions (all interchangeable):
Where are the levers that you and your people can pull?
What will make you feel beautiful and enduring in your spirit? Can this strategy be sustained?
Where do settler-colonialist and capitalist cultures infect your daily life? How do you resist, escape, dodge, fight them?
To that last question, i imagine Dr. Refaat Alareer’s kites and how they move with the wind, constantly resisting the drop back to a bomb-torn earth.
We will make it. Palestine and all colonized people will be free.
Here’s what i’ve been reading this week:
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, “Notes On Craft: Writing in The Hour of Genocide”:
If we are to consider our writing a space in which to fight, we’d better know who we’re fighting, who we’re fighting with, and why. Political thought and political education are the vital building blocks of that knowledge. Craft asks us to consider the language first and the politics second, tells us that a political education is not central but peripheral to being a writer.
Steven Salaita, “Hamas is A Figment of Your Imagination”
Zionists say they want to rid the world of Hamas but are ironically beholden to Hamas’s endurance. Which other pretext could better facilitate Israeli ethnic cleansing? More than that, Zionists talk up Hamas to the point of mythic proportions and have thereby entered into a state of what Baudrillard called hyperreality. The world wouldn’t make any sense to Israelis if Hamas suddenly went away. Their own identity would go away, as well.
Here’s a short read on conservation efforts of one of my favorite birds, who are absolutely one of the highlights of spring and summer in zhigagoong.
Tara Giancasparo’s Substack is like watching a vacation slideshow by your most rizzed-up friend; peak insomniac read for those of us who feel very heavy in the night.
The last three images in this piece were screenshotted from @levelsofnuance on Instagram.
Much love to all of you <3