Love in the Time of WTF/Being A Teen Climate Activist Right Now
Special double issue! Happy Valentine's Day
Hello friends.
So, it’s Valentine’s Day. And, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the stress of these times is domino-ing into, and pinballing around, our intimate relationships.
To that point, I recently had occasion to tell my big kid about the time I got Dad arrested.
Speaking of protest, join me this Monday for Not My President’s Day. Find a protest near you!
Picture it. The hot, grimy summer of 2004. President George W. Bush lied to get us into war with Iraq, sparking huge protest marches that he dismissed as “a focus group.” To celebrate his re-coronation for a second term, he planned the Republican National Convention for New York City to remind everyone of 9/11.
Mass protests were planned. As a 23-year-old reporting for the Village Voice, I got assigned to post quick updates from the streets in a new format called a blog—to my understanding, the alt-weekly’s first.
On Friday of the convention weekend, there was a Critical Mass protest bike ride. I posted up at the beginning, in Union Square. Adam and one of our roommates agreed to ride along and report back to me from the finish, in Times Square.
There, he got nabbed, along with some 1,800 others over the course of the weekend. He spent 36 hours in various holding cells eating bologna sandwiches and having cockroach races. He eventually shared in an $18 million cash settlement—the largest ever protest class action lawsuit in history, brought by the NYCLU against the NYPD. (Did the NYPD stop using excessive force with protesters? Nope.)
Maybe surprisingly, this is a warm memory for us. Adam never held a grudge. He learned from the experience. He bonded with people in jail. I thought it was super hot that he had taken this risk for me and for the cause. I still do.
Why this story? Well, when things get really stressful out in the world, like they are right now, there’s three patterns that crop up in our intimate relationships:
We try to block out the world, together;
We face the music, together;
or we take out the stress on each other.
The third option can feel like the most common. Therapist
writes brilliantly about this dynamic in her newsletter.In this post she talks about how groups, including families, “tighten up” in response to stress. Collectively, we can lose tolerance or flexibility.
And in this recent piece for Slate, she names some “overfunctioning” behaviors: Where we try to control the people close to us, because we can’t control events in the big picture.
Let me ask you a question I’m asking my clients right now: Over the next year, whom are you going to exhaust yourself trying to manage? Because anxious humans often try to think about how other people can be more mature and step up to meet the moment. We become overinvolved with other people’s responses to challenges and less involved with our own.
Whew! Personally attacked.
Smith didn’t go there, but I want to speak to the gender dynamic of this. Research shows that women are more anxious about climate change. I found when reporting The Stolen Year that women were generally more anxious about the pandemic, and took more precautions.
A lot of this had to do with our “kinwork,” our heightened awareness of interdependence, the care responsiblities we tend to take on, the fact that we’re often default responsible for our own health, our children’s, and even our partners’.
Women, too, are less likely to be Trump supporters. Women’s rights are being directly attacked right now; cis white men’s rights are not.
So, chances are if you’re a woman in a heterosexual couple, you are the one more audibly, consciously freaked out right now about the coup, climate change, bird flu, abortion access, and allll the things.
Esther Perel points out that if you’re in an intimate dyad for a long time, it’s natural for each of you to assume one end of a polarity. The more one person freaks out, the more the other one tries to calm them down, or shut them down. Result? Again: conflict, and less purposeful action.
Kathleen Smith’s advice is to take more responsibility for your own feelings and impulses. Be more vulnerable and self-aware. Ask for support instead of poking your insecurities out at your partner, your kid, and the group chat.
Blocking out the world together can also be adaptive, if it’s used strategically. If you’re managing to disappear together into a gooey chocolate love bubble for Valentine’s Day, enjoy!
But what about facing the world together? If you are the more worried one, my stance, which I landed on back on ‘04, is to be warmly demanding. I want a relationship where we are nudging each other to do a little bit better, a little bit more for the world, even though it can be uncomfortable at times.
Your partner doesn’t have to match your energy, all the time, in all things, but they have to be a partner. If you’re going to the protest, maybe they can put the kids to bed? If you’re calling Congress, can they pick up dinner? Try to get yourselves on the same side, working in the same direction, because action relieves anxiety. And joint adventures are good for the soul.
Being a Teen Climate Activist Right Now
Liora Pelavin (NJ) and Hope Adelson (FL) are high-school-aged leaders of the Jewish Youth Climate Movement. I’m a new board member of their parent organization, Adamah. I got on Zoom with them to hear about their journey toward spiritually engaged climate activism and their newly launching campaign, Underwrite Earth, (Petition link) which targets the insurance industry.
Lio: My family has done a lot of activism. My grandfather and my mother are both rabbis and climate activists. Covid started when I was in 6th grade, and that’s when I really tapped into activism for myself. I found protests to attend on Instagram.
Hope: The winter of my freshman year, my synagogue took a group of us up to DC for 4 days. We sat in classes and learned about social justice issues in the world. I was like, super, fascinated and kind of horrified, but also really motivated to do something. I wrote a speech. I got to lobby on Capitol Hill. It was so much fun.
Lio: JYCM is mobilizing a base of young Jews who understand what the climate crisis is and what Judaism says about it. [And] I came to JYCM to do mass mobilizing. We did our research and we decided that insurance should be our niche.
Hope: And we’re both juniors, so we have time to take this on. So I was like, heck yeah, let’s do it!
Lio: I think your everyday person still, when they think about the way fossil fuel projects are getting approved in this country, they only really think about the banks and the government. And so we want to try to introduce this third pillar, especially with the fact that a lot of people know some insurance company brands, right? We want to introduce Liberty Mutual, AIG, Chubb and let people know about the projects they’re approving.
Hope: Every week, from now until Passover, we're gonna put out content with someone new—baking influencers, rabbis. So this is like op-eds, Instagram posts, videos, podcasts, art, songs.
Lio: I come from an activist family. This is a lot of my emotional energy. Not just climate, but, like, ICE is driving around my town. I'm always trying to call my representative to yell at him. I’ve organized a lot of stuff around Israel-Palestine. Abortion rights. WIth JYCM, I'm with really like-minded peers who understand what this emotional weight of our world is.
Hope: What does it mean to have a Jewish organizing space? I think it's because we just connect on a different level that I don't really get with any of my other friends—not because my other friends, like, suck or anything. I'm always excited to go on each meeting, even if it’s a Zoom after being at school for 8 hours. These people are my best friends, even though they live so far away. We have our morals and our beliefs that are rooted from the same place. And I think that is really powerful.
Increasing scary, Anya! From a husband of 51 years!