And why do I feel guilty for voting against genocide?

by Don Pelton

By “voting for genocide” I mean voting for Harris or Trump (both candidates who support Israel’s project in Gaza, no doubt with more bombs yet to come). And by “voting against genocide” I mean voting for a candidate who explicitly opposes Israel’s project in Gaza (such as Jill Stein). Our votes are social transactions that have ramifications far beyond anything we consciously will. A vote against a dangerous fascist-wannabe like Trump that has the unfortunate side-effect of also being a vote for genocide — is a vote for genocide nonetheless.

I struggle to understand the answers to these questions. I have to admit that I’ve wanted to write about this for awhile, but I’ve been afraid that whatever I say will sound like “virtue-signaling.” And maybe that’s true to some extent. But my best defense against the charge of virtue signaling is that  for most of my life I’ve considered extreme empathy and sentimentality as excessive softness of character, if not ouright weakness, no virtue at all. Crying is often embarrassing.

A few years before his death in his early seventies, my father and I stood talking during a family picnic at Foothills Park in Palo Alto. Reminiscing about his life, he said “It seems like only yesterday I was a little boy, and now I’m an old man.” As he said these words, his eyes filled with tears. I moved forward to hug him, but he gently pushed me away, apparently embarrased by his softness. I’ve inherited that softness.

Weeping is in my DNA. It often comes unexpectedly in the presence of beauty, such as Pavarotti singing Nessun dorma or Itzhak Perlman playing the Adagio from the Brahms D-major violin concerto. Or reading DH Lawrence’s poem, “Piano.” More often it  happens when I’m overcome by the terrible products of the dark side of human nature, such as the Holocaust or the 21st-century holocaust we are seeing now in “real-time” in Gaza, a monstrous genocide.

Deep empathy is so powerful that it sometimes becomes true grief.

I grieve for the Palestinians.

The Politics of Grief

The poet Robert Bly, in his work with the “men’s movement” (an offshoot of feminism) often spoke of grief in ways that surprised me:

“Grief is the doorway to a man’s feelings.”

“What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.”

“As I’ve gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.”

For Bly, grief had political implications. Nowhere was this more clear than in his great anti-Vietnam-War poem, “The Teeth Mother Naked At Last,” which begins like this:

The massive industrial-scale war machines of Bly’s poem (“engines burning a thousand gallons of gasoline a minute”) in horrific relation to the diminutive “huts with dirt floors” is exactly like the disparate scale of Israel’s US-supplied two-thousand-pound bombs dropped on tents in Gaza where the Palestinians have been viciously and deceptively told to flee “for safety.”

This is an extermination campaign. How can we not grieve?

I ask.

But the answer is multifaceted. More is at play than just the rarity of deep empathy in human nature.

Also in the mix is the corporate media environment in the United States, which effectively works to deprecate both the all-too-bloody imagery of genocide, as well as the identity of its perpetrators. Corporate media have evolved in a “fitness landscape” (to use evolutionary terminology) that favors (grants access) to media that — however consciously or unconsciously — support the dominant narrative of the ruling parties (rigged to stay limited to Democrats and Republicans, and none other … the so-called “duopoly”). What is that dominant narrative?

The dominant narrative depicts the United States as the “exceptional nation,” the benign and benevolent hegemon dedicated to the “rules-based order,” the system designed to achieve world peace (if necessary by force … the U.S. military).

In other words, the media short-circuits empathy by hiding its trigger images from view — murdered women and children, starving Palestinians, pediatric amputees. In short, the politics of grief is … to suppress it. This has the additional effect of assigning less value to Palestinian lives than to the lives of Westerners. So, unconscious racism is at play here too.

On the other hand, images and depictions of possible fascist futures abound. No wonder that the fear of a new Hitler dominates our collective consciouessness. It has an element of truth to it. The dominant narrative is pounded repeatedly into our brains, and works to some extent on an unconscious level. We vote within the mental landscape dominated by the conventional narrative, where fear is the primary force.

But the whole truth is much larger than the ambitions of a pathological narcissist, a wannabe fascist.

What is the “whole truth” and how do we find it?

Chris Hedges once said “I survive the degradation that has become America — a land that exalts itself as a bastion of freedom and liberty while it tortures human beings … because I read books.” In fact, Hedges often speaks of the necessity of reading books if we really want to understand the world we’re living in. This is one of the main reasons — along with his discipline as a journalist — that I trust him to speak the truth as he understands it.

The point is to broaden our sources beyond, say, just CNN or MSNBC, or the New York Times for that matter. It helps to look at alternative media, to get away from the mainstream, where propaganda (AKA “the official narrative”) dominates.

Here’s who I tend to trust: Academics like Professor John Mearsheimer, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the late Professor Stephen Cohen, seasoned diplomats like Charles W. Freeman, George Kennan, former intelligence professionals like Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson, Colonel Douglas McGregor, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and others active recently in speaking our about the Ukraine War and Gaza.

There’s no one that I trust 100% of the time in all matters. Each of those experts has special areas of expertise on which I tend to listen to them more attentively. The point is to attend to a diversity of opinions and sources. This gives us the best chance to be free of the dominant narrative (AKA “propaganda”), which — in corporate media — tends to adhere too slavishly to government interests.

Knowing the Whole Truth and Voting With Our Whole Selves

Once we have done the hard work of digging beneath the official narrative, then — to be full citizens — we are called upon to respond to the “whole truth” with … our whole selves. What does that mean? We  should bring our whole selves — our grieving hearts as well as our fearful but anayltical minds — to the task of being good citizens.

Millions of us seemed to vote primarily from our fearful minds.

I probably voted more from my grieving heart this year than from my fearful mind, but my fearful mind still carries some guilt.

I don’t know exactly how to resolve that conflict. I’m still working on it. I want, like Bly, to bring grief into relation with the society we have, however that’s done. I suspect it has something to do with balancing heart (empathy) and mind (critical faculties).

One could make the argument that moral sentiment should preempt political sentiment.

At the very least, we shouldn’t allow our vote to violate our deepest core values.