How to Be a Lifelong Advocate (Part 1)
Thoughts on the anniversary of that chaotic Holocaust Remembrance Day seven years ago
Seven years ago this week, on a Friday afternoon, it felt—to me and many others—like the world tilted on its axis. It was Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2017, the first week of Trump’s presidency. And that was the day when we realized the full extent of what the next four years would look like.
First, a caveat: I call myself a bipartisan critic, and I hope that remains true for my whole life. I have publicly and privately been critical of people in power whose policies led to death and destruction of entire people groups. That includes: two horrific wars in Iraq that cost thousands of lives; not stopping the Syrian government’s blatant, chemical-weapons-grade attacks on its own people; not protecting the people of Afghanistan when the Taliban took over; not preventing the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians now; among many other examples. My firm, uncompromising beliefs are that civilians should never be casualties in war, and that there will never be a justification for turning away from genocide. Any leader who goes against those beliefs deserves deep criticism.
But this isn’t really a post about policies. It’s the first of a few I have planned over the next few weeks about perseverance in the face of chaos and injustice.
This post is about how to do this work for a long time without losing yourself.
Anyone who has advocated for victims of war or injustice for a long time can tell you, there was something different that began that week in 2017 when President Trump instituted the Muslim Ban. It was the sheer chaos of the situation that was mind-boggling. People were literally in the air flying to the US with visas that were legal when they boarded the plane and illegal by the time they landed. It was explosive, outrageous, cruel.
The cruelty was always the point, we would come to learn.
I had been friends with former refugees for several years. I had started writing about how the political rhetoric—from several politicians, particularly in Texas—was impacting my friends. I’d had my first national publication a few months earlier; I wrote about a thwarted knife attack at the school where most newly-arrived refugees to Austin learn English for the Washington Post.
That Friday night, my friend who had started an aid organization in Austin of Syrian-Americans helping Syrian refugees texted me. I tweeted out what he was telling me. It was real time information about people whose lives were absolutely torn to shreds in the space of an hour. Refugees who had spent years jumping through every single bureaucratic hoop to receive the rare privilege of resettlement, who had sold everything, who had no safe place to go, showed up at the airport only to be told the US had broken its promises.
That thread went viral, making it to Twitter’s Stories that day. The org I linked to at the bottom of the thread was overwhelmed with support and requests from editors to tell the stories of Syrian refugees. They decided to work mostly with me to write about what was happening. In many ways, my writing career took shape that chaotic afternoon—the relationships I had with people here in Austin meant they trusted me to tell their stories, and I felt a moral obligation (after many hard conversations with people here whom I love) to speak out as a mediator. Their identities had to be protected; I could center them and use pseudonyms, and let people who faced imminent danger and insurmountable obstacles to publication tell their own stories.
For me, that day was—of course, as it should be—about the people most affected.
I won’t tell all the examples of what happened because there are too many, but here are few: a man’s Syrian wife was on a plane to Dulles and by the time he landed, my extraordinary childhood friend had pulled strings and gotten the governor of Virginia and two senators at the airport advocating for her to stay. After days of uncertainty, she did; they later had a baby and messaged my friend to say their child’s life was because of her powerful work.
The family of Syrian refugees who were stuck at the airport that I tweeted about did make it to Austin months later, safe but further traumatized.
But most people were not OK. There were very few ‘happy ever afters’ to come from that awful afternoon. The repercussions of that day reverberated across bureaucratic systems, and are still being felt, by people who have been in line for decades hoping to receive asylum and safety.
Over the years, that damage has been extensive. The repercussions of that day and many, many, many others are almost impossible to quantify. Agencies that had been around for decades shuttered, including Refugee Services of Texas, which at one time resettled 3% of all refugees in the United States.
I mostly write about the effects of this kind of systemic damage on people. An Iraqi interpreter who had been promise resettlement got in touch with me to explain how the damage to the resettlement system kept his sweet family in constant, horrifying danger in Iraq. I think those are the most important stories to come out of a traumatizing day like that one. My body of work—books and articles and essays—is mostly centered on those narratives.
But in this newsletter, I want to focus on how to advocate for a long time. I want to lay out some strategies I’ve learned in seven years of writing full-time about wide scale injustice, plus the many years before that of being someone who cared and paid close attention to what was happening in the world.
For me, this work is also about going back in history to look at genocide and displacement and other large-scale acts that changed the course of history and impacted so many people. It’s exhausting, complicated, heavy, and hard, and it’s my life’s work.
(And I want to acknowledge the absolute privilege of being someone who came awake to these injustices—my upcoming book is about how personal and public history was presented to me and so many others in a way that hid the truths of what really happened.)
In these last seven years, I’ve watched and felt the depths of the burnout of so many people who care deeply about what is happening in the world. We are overwhelmed. I feel it now, in myself and in the profoundly compassionate people who cannot look away from what is happening in Palestine or other places around the world, but struggle every day under the weight of the stories we’re hearing.
Another awful anniversary this week: it’s been three years this February since the junta started a new, awful phase in the war in Myanmar, a war that never got the US national attention of Ukraine or Syria or Palestine.
So, how do we do this—advocating and paying attention, calling for change when something is not right, refusing to back down in the face of chaos and injustice—not just for a few days or weeks, but for a lifetime?
I’ll begin to answer that question in my next newsletter.