OUTSIDE IN

Confronting the otherness of the “other”

The other day in Starbucks, a friend saw a young man using a swastika as his screensaver. She called him on it.

“It's just a joke,” he said.

It’s possible he didn’t know what the symbol meant, which is differently troubling, even as many young Germans are flocking to “patriotic” rallies punctuated by chants of “Deutschland, Deutschland” and wearing their hair parted in a way reminiscent of Hitler’s.

Can the part in someone’s hair be menacing? Can it be symbolic? What about a swastika on a computer screen? And what symbols does the Left have, other than pink knitted caps with pointed ears? More than symbols, what new leaders do we have?

That sounds despairing, but, if anything, the protests last weekend created a sense of euphoria. Women—no, people—from Amsterdam to Nairobi to Warsaw gathered peaceably, congenially, often in freezing rain. Many had children with them, and the Internet even issued warnings about how to keep very young children safe during the rallies.

Many of our daughters were energized, mobilized, really for the first time.

My younger daughter even resurrected her “future is female” t-shirt. Whether that slogan is predictive or merely symbolic is hard to know these days.

Once, these are girls might have responded only to a sign like this:

Now they are writing editorials for the school newspaper about the impact of repealing Obamacare.

Last November, many of us brought our daughters to the polling booths, certain they were witnessing the apogee of waves of feminism. (Although I’m not sure which wave of feminism we’re on.)

They sat beside us watching the election returns, silently, as a huge swath of red, like a bloodstain, overtook the middle states.

They weren’t exactly connected to Hillary, these girls. They were connected to the idea of her. She, too, was a symbol, and she even dressed like a calligraphic figure.

They liked her because we liked her.

Are they afraid because we are?

My younger daughter—the one with “the future is female” t-shirt—was born the month before 9/11. When I took her to New York that November, a National Guardsman at the airport offered to help, as I juggled a suitcase and diaper bag and her. Before I knew it, he had lifted up her baby carrier, with her nestled inside, and slung it over his arm. In the other, he was holding a bayonet.

Her childhood, and that of her friends, has been dominated by uncertainty. They sometimes worried about going out to the movies or the mall. But at least they’re learning to speak up. In Hillary Clinton’s scabrous ad, the one showing children listening to Trump’s diatribes, not a single child talks back to the screen. Now we have children with signs saying

Meanwhile at the rally in Dresden, 20-somethings in suits and ties were chanting “We are the outsiders,” even as the crowd was predominately white, educated and prosperous. Tellingly, the most violent xenophobia in Germany occurs in places where people have never even seen an immigrant.

The fear of the other is abstract.

The “other” arrives, with the ghostly intensity of a hologram, reflecting back our own uncertainty. Confirming our shared existential condition, an elemental loneliness.

It’s that aloneness that we fear above all.

So it was cheering to see crowds thronging the streets of so many cities, forming rivers of pink, like arteries streaming blood to the heart. Pink, the color of health; the color of hope (If hope is the thing with feathers, it’s probably pink, no?)

But what can all these protests accomplish? At the moment, it’s far from clear.

What is clear is that something is happening. Something dynamic and improvisational and collaborative. If it’s true that the greatest number of suicides occur in the least populated places, then it is intimacy, density, that keeps us safe. And it is our mutual dependence, our porousness, that will save us. That will bring all of us, outsiders, in. We must weave together our hopes, our fears, our fates, in a mesh more intricate than any knitted cap. That’s the only way we’ll stay warm.

“Most art is created out of a condition of winter,” Wallace Stevens said.

Maybe most revolution is as well.