Summer, apparently, can last a lifetime. What started as a small summer project on Memorial Day Friday in 2017 has—in this alternate universe, at least—stretched into a lifelong treatise on the very idea of "the new." To live one's life attempting to experience what one might deem as "new" can wear on a person. You start to wonder what "new" even fucking means. What is new? Does changing one microscopic detail about any of life's normal activities automatically render it "new"? If so, then doesn't that make everything you do "new"? And then if you're going to structure your entire life around that, then doesn't the new itself become tedious and very much un-new? Look away, friends—for to save the very idea of what is new, we must ignore the new, else the idea collapses upon itself.
Today, I took my usual walk to Wawa (much less usual, now that I am avoiding carbs and have avoided my usual lunch, which, according to Wawa's nutrition calculator, could feature up to 200 grams of carbs, but still, yes, "usual" still). Except, on the way back, the walk featured a subtle aberration; walking east on Arch St., I maybe shifted my walking path 5° to the left, and ended up in a public plaza memorializing the Holocaust.
I've never stopped and considered this public space and its importance, despite the fact that I have been seated at an office desk overlooking it since the day it opened (which was Day 515 of Joe's New Summer, by the way). As it stands now, here in 2021, now that we know full well the scope and scale of America's willful ignorance on such subjects as human suffering and civil rights, it can easily be said that the Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza is incredibly important as a source of knowledge, pride, courage, and so on.
I can acknowledge this and take pride in my city for its existence, while also maybe acknowledging that this Memorial isn't necessarily for me. Like, okay, the displays that I newly took the time to read today laid out a general argument of "this is the ways in which human rights are guaranteed in a just society, and then these are the ways in which the Nazis greatly violated those rights." E.g. one stone tablet describing how human equality is assured in the Declaration of Independence, and the next tablet describing how the Nazis believed in "the Master Race," and how it was believed that all men were not created equally, in the eyes of Hitler, et al.
When I say this "might not be for me," I'm saying that I found all this information... pretty obvious? I didn't need a beautiful display at the beginning of the Ben Franklin Parkway to explain any of this to me, because I knew it already. But of course, this is overestimating the average measure of human emotional intelligence—there are people who might read this and have their eyes opened, or, there are people who would read this and disagree with its argument. Which is horrific to think about, but then again, so were the numerous displays of white supremacy condoned by the previous presidential administration and performed by his millions of followers.
I'm allowing myself to wade into the tall dark political weeds yet again on this godforsaken blog because, again, I need to know what is "new" here and what isn't. Okay, so it was new that I sat down in the Holocaust Memorial Plaza, but the words I read there were not new? The words confirmed my own behavior, so how is that new? (What a stupid goddamn blog project.)
No, I'm finding that sometimes the true new can only arrive without planning. After my early lunch involving Holocaust displays, I arrived back at the office and participated in a office-wide Zoom "town hall" meeting. I wasn't privy to what it was about before it started, but I was informed that it was important, and that the mayor's office and the departmental higher-ups would be participating in the meeting. A lot of my coworkers came in heated, and made allusions to several injustices that had occurred in the workplace.
Gradually, it was revealed that this meeting was about a particular higher-up specifically. I won't go into details, but I'll say that I've had issues and conflicts with this individual in the past. I also acknowledge the existence of the "chain of command" in governmental employment, and so I've never "gone to bat" against this individual in any capacity. There's just always been a lingering, low-simmering dislike for this person.
And so, the new—unbeknownst to me, apparently a lot of other people feel this way, currently, about this individual. Dear reader, I spent a solid two hours on the computer today listening to my comrades talk shit on this member of their chain of command, to administrators higher than the person in question. People were yelling at each other. People were angrily shaking fists. People were straight up crying on my computer screen. And these were people who I had just assumed were tight, and maybe even cliquish, to an extent, with this person.
I won't go into the details—I probably even cannot do so legally—but I can say that, in general, the past year of existing within the confines of a deadly pandemic has put a considerable strain on many otherwise solid relationships in our lives. Certain decisions, ones that may have been considered annoying but ultimately innocuous in our pre-COVID lives, these days seem downright evil, now that they could reasonably result in needless sickness and death. If you continually lie to your employees for over a year about having their health and safety in mind (especially in an organization that is ostensibly focused on "human services," for christ's sake), then eventually shit's gonna dissolve into a miserable Zoom meeting with the head of the company, ya feel me?
Here's the actual new thing that came from this, catching me completely off-guard. I actually started to feel a little bad for the person getting knocked out in front of their superiors. The individual wasn't part of the meeting, but I think in terms of how bad I feel, that made it worse. I just kept imagining how it must feel to know that your former friends are all (virtually) gathered together, right now, discussing in rather horrifyingly honest details all the ways in which they believe you are a fuck-up. I personally know exactly what it feels like to be a fuck-up, generally, but to be in a situation in which I knew people were in the room right next door extracting the various ways in which this was true, that yes, I totally am a fuck-up, and here's why, might be a situation too difficult to bear.
Then again, everyone at the meeting spoke their truths, and they were truths I mostly agreed with, and so my empathy for the person in question only stretched so far. After all, I too have been going to work every day and having to deal with the very real fact that my employment can't even seem to bother guaranteeing the basest of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Even though I didn't speak (I don't give a fuck what was said about confidentiality, I know full well that breaking the chain of command will come back to bite your ass, eventually), I completely empathized with my peers, who spoke to our mistreatment over the past year. Maybe this was all an act of scapegoating, or maybe it was deserved, but I think we can all agree that everyone is just fucking worn out from being scared all the goddamn time.
Now, it would be unethical and embarrassing and totally inappropriate for me to attempt to directly compare my two experiences today—fear of an illness that I didn't contract, and having the privilege of expressing those fears to superiors, versus a very real fear of genocide held by the Jewish communities in 1940s Europe—but I do think there is an emotional through line here. In terms of my reactions to all of this—the historical horror and the smaller-scale horror that hits me at home—it all comes down to empathy. It's a matter of how I can react to these injustices, whatever their scale, and understand what it must feel like to feel those injustices (and indeed, occasionally feel them firsthand).
But empathy isn't "new" for me either, so what the fuck am I even doing here? Why have I wasted 1413 days of my sorry goddamn life writing about the "new" shit I've done?! Help, I am trapped in the alternate dimension. If you are reading this, send assistance, please.
And if anyone questions how you know that this is the Joe from the alternate dimension typing all this, then just tell them that if this was your Joe, from the real world as it actually exists, then you'd just fucking know that that motherfucker would've done something a lot more pedestrian for his "new" activity of the day. In fact, I have it on good authority that he first attempted to buy a Wawa cheeseburger for breakfast and use that as his "new thing of the day," and only ended up at the Memorial Plaza, contemplating heady ideas such as "empathy" and "fear," because the Wawa on Arch Street didn't serve cheeseburgers in the morning. He probably would've just ranked fast food burgers from worst to best or some inane cockshit like that.
HELP. PLEASE.
Love,
Joey
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