Back in June, when Brood X was still building its crescendo, I got a text from a neighbor.
“Poor Lily … she’s so upset that the boys are killing cicadas … she’s not happy,” it read.
I told my neighbor I’d be down soon to check on her.
Lily loved those bugs- forever scooping them up off the sidewalk to study them- setting them down away from stomping feet. She’d even let them crawl across her face when she was wearing a mask. The thought of any creature- not matter how weird or creepy looking- being harmed pains her. Almost as if whatever is happening to that creature is happening to her. Her eyes get bright with tears. Her body twists into a grimace.
She doesn’t even like it when I fuss about our pets from time to time. “Cats are not helpful pets,” I’ll say. And she’ll correct me, “MOOOOM! That’s not nice! You’ll hurt Pretzel’s feelings!” And Pretzel, who has draped himself across the dining room table, casually flicks over drinking glasses with his tail while staring at me in smug superiority. And God forbid I yell at Snacks for stealing yet another sandwich off the counter. God forbid I suggest he’s anything but perfect when he’s barking at the same dog that’s walked by our house every day for the past three years as if that dog were a pack of wolves prepared to maraud the contents of his food bowl. “MOOOOOM! Don’t say that! Snacks is a good dog!”
When I got down to the pool the other moms filled me in. This wasn’t just a case of Lily defending the honor of some bugs the kids had been bad mouthing.
“He was pulling the cicadas’ wings off in front of her. He was stepping on them. He was doing it on purpose to upset her.”
And the scene became clearer for me. Lily, Jovie, and their friends rescuing cicadas from the water. Chiding the older boys for harming them. The older boys getting annoyed. The older boys deciding that the afternoon’s entertainment was torturing cicadas in order to get the biggest reaction from Lily. They’d stopped by the time I got down there. Lily and Jovie had decided to go home. I could tell they were both still shaken up.
“I kept telling him to stop and he wouldn’t,” Lily told me. “So then we decided to rescue all off the cicadas so he couldn’t get them. And he kept coming over and pulling their wings off…” her eyes welled with tears again.
“He hurt them, Mom.”
I hugged them. I told them I was proud of them for standing up for the cicadas. I told them they were right to tell the moms they knew about what was going on. Enlisting an adult can help in situations like this.
The next part I still feel torn about. I told the girls that after they’d exhausted all the efforts- they’d asked the person to stop what they were doing nicely, then firmly, then adamantly and repeatedly; they tried to get the things being harmed to safety; they’d enlisted help from an adult- that sometimes they’d still need to walk away. That in this case, the boys weren’t going to stop when they were the pawns in the game. When the fun being had was their tears and their screams of horror. That by walking away, by ignoring them, they made the whole enterprise less appealing.
The boys did stop eventually. But not before maiming many, many cicadas unnecessarily. Not before making the neighborhood pool feel a lot less joyful and safe. Not before leaving me with this uneasy feeling about the lesson I taught them: Sometimes the way to protect yourself and the things you care about is by hiding your earnestness. Walking away from the vulnerable.
Is that right? That can’t be right.
It’s not right.
It should be enough that a child pleading on behalf of a harmless (albeit large and strange-looking) bug is not enough to sway another person from ripping it apart for his own amusement? What is the world we live in where that is the pastime?
These boys certainly weren’t alone in their fascination with cicada torture. At the end of the school year we took our students outside one day during English class for some fresh air and I watched in horror as multiple boys entertained themselves by stomping on the cicadas or hurling them at the brick wall off the school. I asked them over and over to stop. It was almost impulsive for them. Almost as if they did not view the bugs as animate beings. Just objects to be destroyed.
When I asked one boy why he killed them, he said simply, “because they’re ugly.”
Babies do not arrive in this world with the desire to maim. Do they even have a sense of what is ugly until they see it reflected on the faces of those around them? I can’t tell. Annie was terrified of the cicadas for the first month they flew around. No matter how much I celebrated them. No matter how much I explained about them. But she didn’t try to kill them.
Maybe this is one of those things our reptilian brain was conditioned to fear.
Luckily our brains are elastic. They can be retaught.
By the last weeks of the cicadas’ visit, Annie calmed. I could nab one off her shoulder without her screaming in terror. We could squat down on the sidewalk and study them- not too close- but with more openness. “Silly cicadas,” she’d say with only a hint of nerves.
I’m desperate for my girls to stay earnest. To stand up for the defenseless. To stand up for the things no one else sees the point in defending. To find beauty in weird, ugly, unsettling things.
I write this aware that I sound naive. In fact, I know I also need to prepare my girls for a world that continues to ignore their value, their boundaries, their capabilities, their strength, their voices, their autonomy. A world where their bodies are legislated. Where their emotions and convictions are dismissed as inconvenient and unnecessary. I don’t want them to tolerate the ugliness the world will enact on them.
Lily and Jovie cry readily at the injustices others face. They are raw nerves of human beings. This sense of justice. This sense of compassion and empathy is beautiful. It is crystalline. It is precious.
It is also the thing I know adolescence and young adulthood will chip away at. Will cloud and crack and obscure. It will get buried by all the practical, logistical, “adult” concerns. It will be this glowing thing at the heart of their personhood. The thing they need to be most mindful of. But are constantly told to ignore for the purposes of commerce and convention. It’s the thing we all have learned to dismiss.
It’s the thing I told them to dismiss.
“Don’t show that boy you care so much and they’ll get bored.”
But what about the boys? What was the lesson for them? You can do hurtful things without repercussions and eventually people will give up demanding that you stop?
You can ignore those frantically pleading on behalf of the voiceless?
When I think about all the crises we face as a country and as a planet today- the crises of poverty, of race, of climate, 0f addiction- I think about all the voices pleading earnestly. There is no shortage of Lily’s and Jovie’s out there trying to call our attention to the wrongness of what’s in front of us. No shortage of individuals racing around the pool scooping out the drowning bugs one by one, trying to get them to safety. Look to Malala Yousafzai. Look to Greta Thunberg. Look to Alicia Garza. Look to the other young voices telling us, “THIS ISN’T OK.”
All of their efforts go in vain when their voices fall into ears that have learned to ignore them.
Your pleas. Your frustration. Your desperation. Your anger. Your sorrow. Your tears.
None of it means anything.
You are making a big deal out of nothing.
Boys will be boys.
This is the way of the world.
You aren’t being realistic.
There can’t be progress when we’ve filled our ears with dirt. Or worse, when we’ve raised our children to believe that tears are frivolous and that it’s OK to ignore the pain another person is experiencing if it gets in the way of your entertainment or your comfort.
Why should the lesson be that my girls have to swallow their feelings to be validated?
Why shouldn’t the lesson be that when those boys see someone crying out for mercy that they offer it?
Wouldn’t we all be better for it?
In “Underland: A Deep Time Journey” Robert Macfarlane writes about plans the U.S. government has made to dispose of radioactive waste- byproducts of nuclear power and weaponry that include anything from tools to clothes to shavings from nuclear warhead manufacture and the most toxic and dangerous waste: spent fuel rods from reactors. So far, the best method they’ve determined for disposing of this material has been burial. Entombed in concrete deep in the earth, the waste needs tens of thousands of years to decay into a state of harmlessness. In order to deter future generations from excavating these deadly burial grounds, the Environmental Protection Agency created the “Human Interference Task Force.” “Among those invited to express interest in joining the panels were anthropologists, architects, archaeologists, historians, graphic artists, ethicists, library, sculptors and linguists, as well as geologists, astronomers and biologists.”
The panels have explored ideas ranging from constructing 50-foot concrete pillars topped with spikes to etching pictograms inspired by Munch’s The Scream into stone to building a durable instrument on which desert winds might play a minor D “the note thought best to convey sadness.” A linguist suggested the best way to protect our descendants from our waste was through the creation of an “atomic priesthood” that would pass down a myth or epic poem warning of the dangers buried in the depths.
It occurred to me while reading this how capable and creative humans can be. How, when presented with a challenge, we can examine it from all angles and devise schemes to overcome it. It also occurred to me how depressing it was that we had to expend so much mental effort on this task: Creating warning systems for our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren, et. al. for the toxic sludge WE stewed in our endless race for progress.
Last year I spent a lot of time thinking about legacies- inspired in no small part to listening to “Hamilton” on a near endless loop. What’s the thing we leave behind? The mark we leave? The echo that will reverberate from our time here? Macfarlane suggests that the anthropocene- a term describing the current geologic age, one dominated by human’s influence on the climate and the environment- will be a strata composed of things like nuclear waste and plastiglomerate (sand, shells, wood and seaweed held together by molten plastic). Much less noble than the foundations of democracy that Hamilton lay down. Thinking about the accumulation of plastic objects in our household alone, I’m embarrassed that history might have its eyes on us at all. Will our legacy really be this?
In “Braiding Sweetgrass” Robin Wall Kimmerer also explores the idea of legacy. To leave our planet in tact for those who come after, she recommends reciprocity: mutually beneficial exchanges not only between humans, but between humans and all denizens- animals, plants, trees, the earth itself. To embody this ideal, she recommends living as if native to the soil you’ve been planted in. “Becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”
Becoming indigenous feels essential at this juncture.
The more I think on it, living this way- in reciprocity, in mutualism with all that surrounds us requires earnestness. It requires the child’s heart my girls still cling to. The thing I know is still beating somewhere deep in my chest cavity. Obscured by all the other things. Quieted by years of staying in my lane, knowing my place, feeling shamed of tears or fury. It requires that each of us love the metaphorical cicadas floating in our pools. it requires that each of us demand justice on their behalf. Even when it feels futile and silly and meaningless.
Maybe those boys at the pool saw my girls’ tears and thought they were weak or overreactive. That they were being babies.
But maybe they need to be taught that crying takes fierceness. Those tears flow along the boundaries of present life and past life and hard truths. That where there is water there is life. That when you cry, you can grow. When you cry you know yourself better. You become acquainted with the contents of your own heart.
That when we allow ourselves to gaze down that terrifying abyss together, we’re all stronger. I’ve seen this over and over again in this season of loss. So many friends who’ve lost parents or siblings standing right up against their grief. The beauty fo their memories and reflection. The thin-ness of their connection to this plane and the next. How they seem to exist in an unreachable place. Knowing intuitively the need for earnestness. More than any of us.
“‘Weep! Weep!’ calls a toad from the water’s edge. And I do. If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Braiding Sweetgrass”
Those boys – their aversion to ugly things, their instinct to snuff them out- they’re children, too. I know this. They still giggle over fart jokes and dote on babies. They want to be seen and heard. They want the earth to love them back. It would be easy for me to dismiss them as inconsiderate little assholes. Adolescent boys with their raging hormones bent on both domination and assimilation. I don’t envy them at all. And I don’t hate them. I don’t wish them harm. My instinct is to take them aside. To eek out why ugly things deserve to die. To let them know I see their ugly parts and still see their humanity. That both exist in all of us. That it will be OK. That we can all start over. Maybe find a cat meme we can laugh about.
I got hung up last summer on the absence of a legacy. Like, no one’s gonna write any award-winning musicals about MY life one day with such classic hits as “Wait (A GD Minute) For It” and “The Story of the Vomit in the Laundry Room” and “It’s Never Quiet Inside” (you get the idea… OK… one more “Is that Fur, Sir?”). History might have it’s eyes on me, but on it’s conference call with the universe it’s like, “Yeah, we’re 99.9 percent sure we’re not going too need a Wikipedia entry for this one.” Which is fine by me, because by the time all that nuclear waste is dug up, I’m pretty sure there won’t be an internet.
I’m sorry. I feel as if the whole vibe of this post has gone off track.
Where were we?
Earnestness. Legacy.
The thing I want to leave behind is this: Love the earth. Even the ugly parts. And follow your tears. They will lead you back to yourself.
“What death means is not this- the spirit, triumphant in the body’s fall, praising its absence, feeding on music. If life can’t justify and explain itself, death can’t justify and explain it.”
– Wendell Berry