Dayenu

Where does love come from, if not from death?

The DDT article took all the reserve energy I had been gathering since the reset that was Covid in January. I thought, So, that’s what’s wrong! It’s what’s been wrong all along! When I was growing up, Los Angeles was the primary production site of DDT in the United States. For decades, after DDT was used on beaches to kill mosquitos, after it was sprayed, spread and sold, 2,000 barrels per month of acid sludge waste containing DDT were dumped off the California coast. Now, 25,000 decaying barrels of DDT have been found resting in toxic sediment more than two inches deep: the actual total of these barrels is closer to 500,000, spread over an area the size of San Francisco. Cables and fishing lines stir it up; feeding whales ingest and spread it: California gray whales feed by scraping along the ocean floor with open mouths. They filter the sediment, swallow their meal, and spit out the silt. When my parents took me to the beach as a child in 1950’s Los Angeles, we swam in DDT. A lifetime later, when my children were born, they swam in that DDT, too. Children in Los Angeles swim in it now.

People filled those barrels of DDT. People dumped them in the ocean. People kept secrets. Now, people count the rusting containers where our poisons are hidden. I feel heartbroken, cheated – if nothing else, cheated of the delusion that it was better then, that our lifetimes so far have been a quasi grace period in the Earth’s slow dismantling, that my immune system and the immune systems of my children were somehow spared the worst of the toxic exposures swamping us now. It’s a selfish, reflexive response. I cringe to admit it.

In exchange for delusion, truth is a threadbare shawl: there is no comfort in the recognition that DDT has contributed so profoundly to the high rates of cancer in humans and the scourge of cancer and herpes in sea lions. Still, knowing now about the presence of those barrels of DDT – and, by implication, all the stealth poisonings that occurred then and since, helps to explain the foreboding I felt as a child: I saw it in the looks on the faces of the pines, the magnolias, the jacarandas and carob trees planted along the sidewalks of the neighborhood I grew up in. It explains childhood nightmares and the recognition that, by the time I was in fourth grade I was clinically depressed because, deep down, I felt futureless. Unprotected. Sold to the highest bidder, because the adults around me refused to acknowledge what we knew as children in the 1950’s: the Nazi holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unforgivable failures of leadership and conscience that crossed an uncrossable line. The unrest of the 1960’s wasn’t ideological, it was visceral, a collective, spontaneous cry of outrage and despair. The so-called failure of boomer activism wasn’t a failure of ideals or even of political strategy, it was traumatic resignation in the face of betrayal.

The moral abdication of our leaders belies a truth about ordinary citizens: in a pinch, it’s always the regular folks who come to the aid of neighbors in trouble. Though there are horrendous individual crimes and cruelties, in my experience, most people go out of their way to help others. Something terrible happens when those helpful people become elected leaders because the political system rewards greedy bullies hungry for power. Greed has destroyed whatever authentic democracy we once might have had – greed borne of disconnection from the Natural World and, therefore, from each other.

The barrels of DDT now live in my imagination. Next to the barrels is an image from another article a few days later, of the Skyvan airplane that was used in Argentina to ‘disappear’ people over the South Atlantic ocean. Odd that the plane was built in Belfast, during the time of Ireland’s protracted ‘Troubles’: under duress, dissent and descent become indistinguishable.

Of the five planes thought to have flown these missions, only one survives. After decades of searching, it was found in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The mother of the woman who wrote the story was on that flight, on December 14, 1977. In the article are two black and white photographs: in one, we see the exterior of the plane, parked on a runway under a foreboding sky. It looks beleaguered, alone and ashamed. The other photo is of the plane’s interior. The steel floor gleams, burnished by bodies and boots. There are windows eye level to the place where seats ought to be – windows that the doomed dissenters never gazed out of because they were lying naked, tied up and drugged, on the bare metal floor. People administered beatings and drugs to the prisoners. People tied them up and falsified flight logs. People opened the hatch and pushed them out of the plane. What happened to the souls of those tormentors? They are links in the chain of repression that is also a refusal to protect, a refusal hiding in thin air, where it remains, still hovering over us. It is a pushing away of those who disagree with our assumptions, and an embrace of the losses required for conformity. 

Another silence appears in the odd juxtaposition of the moment. It is a recording made in a science lab that makes the cries of drought-stricken plants audible to humans. Humans are hard-wired to resonate with Life. We sense invisible connections; we feel the joy and pain of beyond-human Selves. Now, our sensory intuition has been confirmed.

When something happened that my father disapproved of, he used to say, That sound you hear? That’s me, not saying anything. The corollary is, That sound you don’t hear? That’s Earth calling us out. Calling us in.

This full moon marks the first night of Passover. I will go to a women’s seder. In it, we will read the Jewish story of liberation. We will say prayers and sing Dayenu – a Hebrew word that means it would have been enough. It comes from a thousand-year-old song intended to help us count our blessings. “If He had brought us out of Egypt, that would have been enough, dayenu!” It also works as an all-purpose chant, whispered to oneself to mark the torments and extinctions that have overtaken us. You see how it is now? The disappearance of birdcalls, dayenu. Dayenu, clear-cut forests. Vanishing ice, dayenu. The Pacific gyre, brimming with plastic, dayenu. Dayenu, drowned refugees and children in cages. Black people shot by police, dayenu. Poisons that saturate land and sea, dayenu, dayenu, and the encyclopedic dayenu of Indigenous human experience going, going, gone. For me, one of the hardest things about Passover is pretending that Jews in Israel have remained true to the call to welcome strangers and care for those in need. The traditional incantation, Next year in Jerusalem! curdles in my throat.

Between the DDT and the Skyvan are stories of book banning in order to erase the words that some would forbid us to speak about gender, guns, race and reckoning. The banned books pile up. Libraries empty and go dark. Language itself smolders in the flames of hatred. The DDT, the airplane, the banned books are efforts to erase what they – we – don’t want to face. Ninety years ago, on May 10th, 1933, university students across Germany burned books written by Jewish authors. Are bonfires of verboten ideas what’s next for America?

Erasure is the desperate strategy of despots. It is a tactic borne of denial, the unwanted offspring of grief. There is a story, attributed to the late Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, to the effect that, if world leaders were to gather together to speak about what they love most and what they grieve, it would bring an end to war. Not another shot could be fired.

Silencing is different from choosing to remain silent, different again from not being heard. The drowned voices of the future have joined the chorus of prohibition. I see the barrels and the airplane. In between are piles of banned books, themselves the pages of a book sandwiched between two covers – one in the air and one in the sea, seeking to silence the words and prohibit the ideas the books contain.

In addition to floods, recent storms in California and around the world have brought gale-force winds and tornadoes – winds that contain the cries of desiccated plants, desperate humans and the suffering Selves of all realms. It is a chorus of distress that flattens what we have built with our machines, our plastics and our poisons.

Ask not for whom the wind howls. It howls for us.