I took a poll among my 157,000 Twitter/X followers on New Year’s Day to see what they were considering as New Year’s resolutions. There are only four options available, so I offered “Get healthy: food, gym; stop smoking or drinking; get politically active; volunteer somewhere.” The overwhelming winner was “get healthy” at 65.7%. Not many fans of quitting smoking/drinking at 8.5% and only 12.5% and 13.3% chose the final two options.
New Year’s resolutions are always fraught. Studies show that only 43% expect to keep going past February and statistically a mere 9% get to year’s end having followed through.
I am still mulling my choices for 2024, but committed to one: Reminding people every day on Twitter/X that Donald Trump is a rapist and that the Republican party has chosen — deliberately — a rapist as their titular leader.
Three days into 2024 and that resolution is already causing me blowback, but I don’t care: I feel obligated to call out the party that has deemed drag queens a greater threat to children than a former president who raped a woman in a department store fitting room and who jokes about grabbing women by their private parts — which is, lest anyone forget, sexual assault.
But I don’t want all my resolutions for the New Year caught up in Trump and all the awfulness he has visited on this country and on historically marginalized groups like women and LGBTQ+ people. Social media is a minefield and it’s easy to embrace its toxicity and engage in tit-for-tat trolling. That has spillover into our personal lives.
A few weeks ago, I posted this tweet: “One of the many ways that Trump harmed America was he made the country more rude and obnoxious. His constant vulgarity and pugnaciousness gave people permission to be awful. And sadly, not just MAGAs. Studies have shown we are all meaner and more hurtful to each other. Trump opened the door to that and the pandemic exacerbated it. It’s made life harder for many of us. Try to keep yourselves from behaving like that.”
To simplify: Be less toxic. Most of us don’t think of ourselves as toxic — we think that’s other people. And in certain contexts, like social media where anonymity and lack of inhibitions run rampant, that is often true. But we live in toxic times and pushing back against that is difficult.
And yet, the worst thing about our modern lives is the breadth of toxicity in them and that it is dangerous to our well being. It’s not a truism that all toxic people are cis het MAGAs — if only! Sadly, some of the most toxic people I have known personally were people who shared my far-left politics. And I myself have often been tempted to make — and resorted to — snarky comments that just made me look like an asshat instead of proffering a more calm, explanatory and journalistic response.
My mentor in my 20s and 30s was the great lesbian feminist theorist and poet, Audre Lorde. I refer often to things she taught me and excerpts from her voluminous work to rethink issues and restructure the way I write about the most pivotal issues of our time — racism, misogyny and classism, from which so many other isms devolve.
In 1982, Lorde delivered the address, “Learning from the 60s” as part of the celebration of the Malcolm X weekend at Harvard University for Black History Month. It is worth reading the entire speech, of course, both to examine how she wrote about Malcolm X and his Black political theory, but also how Lorde arrived at her conclusions, because hers was such a stellar, thoughtful and provocative mind. This excerpt stands out for me, separate from the whole: “There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living.”
What power in those words, what trenchant focus: “in our own living.”
Sans any resolution, I actively have worked in my social media and my personal life to be someone who is kind and supportive to others and have tried to develop that as parallel to my journalism. I start my Twitter/X every day with an affirmative message of caring and with a photo of something beautiful.
It’s a small thing, but a surprising number of people find it comforting — which is my intent. One of my models in recent years for excising toxicity from my life and striving to keep it at bay has been another Black lesbian theorist and philosopher, bell hooks, about whom I have written extensively.
When I think of people who bled toxicity from their lives, hooks comes to mind. It is a great sadness of mine that I was never able to meet and interview her, because with each successive year her work has resonated more deeply with me. As an architect of love language, hooks tells us in her many books and essays and poems that we must give of ourselves in ways we hadn’t contemplated and also to refuse to be victimized by people who claim to love us.
In her book “All About Love: New Visions,” hooks writes this amazing passage: “All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”
How much more clear could she be about eschewing toxicity and recognizing it for what it is? She’s telling us — and not just women, but anyone who feels this way — to run from abuse, to refuse to accept being treated badly.
The flip side of that, obviously, is to query whether we are the ones being toxic, abusive and cruel. We can see it so clearly in Trump’s Truth Social rants and his ugly racist speeches. But can we see it in ourselves?
In her book, “Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics,” hooks writes, “If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”
Extrapolate that to every queer and trans person, every person of color in white supremacist society, every poor, working poor, working class person in classist, capitalistic America. Toxicity is rampant in America. We can make a resolution to resist that, to write down and remember this quote from hooks: “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?” There is no year in which we will be more tested on how we access humanity in the midst of cruelty, war, genocide and inhumanity than 2024. But we have to try.