The Scarlet Tanager

Naming the Hard Truths

I have a knife in one hand, and a clove of garlic in the other, and I’m yelling, “Bedros! Bedros! Get out of there! Bedros, you hear me, scram!”

Bedros is a little red squirrel. I had seen him running away from my garage, so I quickly closed it and sealed the space under the door. Later, while pulling clothes out of the washing machine, I heard him scrabbling, trying to find his way in. I dropped my wet pajamas. I had read that red squirrels do not like garlic, so I dashed to the kitchen, grabbed some garlic and the first knife I could find, and ran out, flailing my weapons. As I chastised him, trying to get him to scurry away, I smeared garlic across the edge of the driveway while he looked on from a distance of three feet, waiting for this crazy city woman to stop her caterwauling and move away from the front door of his new digs.

Bedros is so impossibly cute, it was easy to want to keep him as a tenant. But my practical self had no desire for the kind of destruction I knew he could wreak on my house in upstate New York. This is why I named him: somehow, doing so made him easier to deal with—I could call out the danger. I could articulate the hard truth: that Bedros would make for a bad pet, no matter how cute he is, no matter how much I might want to do the easy thing and just let him move in. 

It’s something I’ve been trying to do in all areas of my life lately: name the hard truths. Others close to me would love, like Bedros, to have me stop my caterwauling. However, now that I’ve begun to understand what happened to us all in 2020, I cannot do so, and I am struggling with the idea that so few are willing to call out what is happening right before us. I keep tripping over my own bewilderment: how could so many on whom I had long counted to speak truth to power, to illuminate the moral way, have fallen silent? How could so many take the easy way out, labeling instead of naming, and not seeing the difference between the two things?

A couple of hours after I evicted Bedros, I got a message from my husband that a good friend of ours, age fifty and with no prior health issues, had died of a heart attack. He turned out to be the first of four acquaintances to pass away in a similar way in the space of two months. I screamed at the words on my phone for a while until that devolved into tears. Later in the day, as the tears kept coming back unbidden, my younger daughter asked me, “Are you grieving, Mama?” She needed to name this emotion she saw gripping me. I thought of how, as a toddler, when she saw the shadow of tears or distress on our faces, she would cup her hand to our cheek and ask stiltedly, “Are? You? Happy?”

The impetus to name everything around us is one of the things that makes us human. But I fear that we are not using our capacity for naming as much as for labeling, categorizing, and thereby dismissing. I fear that the way in which we are slapping identifications onto ideas and people is, in fact, a way of un-naming them—if naming is associated with the sacred task of imbuing meaning.

My daughter and I took a birding class in Central Park. Previous to that class, I’d noticed birds—somewhat—and had certainly enjoyed their calls that somehow manage to de-emphasize the groans of traffic behind them. But it was only after a passionate naturalist had called our attention to the audacious pine warbler hopping on the rock, or the yellow-bellied sapsucker at the top of the oak that I began to really see birds. And so when, outside of the class, we spotted a patch of red burning the landscape and accosted a birder who enthusiastically named it for us, the scarlet tanager became more than a name to check off our species identification list. The scarlet tanager became for me a symbol of the magic of discovery, the beauty of noticing. That scarlet tanager was a gift that the landscape had offered up to us. By naming it I had made it present and given it significance—and therefore power—within my own existence. 

I stood in the kitchen preparing dinner and my nine-year-old came up to me wearing a red and white polka-dot wool coat and carrying baubles she’d found in drawers around the house. She said she was a Patchwork Girl, and she’d come to fix what I needed fixed. I cottoned on immediately and bemoaned the sorry state of my leaking water faucet (flicking it on as I said so), so she tinkered for a while and then issued me an invoice and went on her way while I continued chopping onions. I loved the fact that she wasn’t a girl who had recently found employment repairing broken-down things. She was a Patchwork Girl, and inherent in this identity were the work ethic, the will, and the role that she decided were assigned to all big girls in her imaginary world. In order to feel the power of her character within her own game, she needed to name herself. (Come to think of it, she and her best friend will spend up to half an hour negotiating names for the characters they play in their imaginary world before they can move on to the game.)

A friend I was checking up on—after an operation that was supposed to be simple turned complicated—told me that though she didn’t agree with me, she loved me. I told her we agreed on many things, just not on the whole Covid thing (this friend has had four Covid injections to my naught). She said, well, in any case, we were all crazy. I responded, with a laugh, but in all seriousness, that I considered myself eminently sane. She could dismiss her own fears and ideas as crazy, if that was the humorous thing to do, but I wasn’t dismissing myself for her comfort. Others do that often enough; if there used to be a time in our country when those who think outside the mainstream were respected, it is gone now. To speak up against the ugliness of the present narrative earns you a tolerant condescension at best. Mostly, it earns you censorship. (And if you’re in Canada or Australia, the freezing of your accounts or internment in a quarantine camp. If you live in Shanghai, you get to be locked in your home with little access to food for several months.)

But let us go back to naming and the difference between naming and labeling. Someone close to me accuses me of being a conspiracy theorist, which is considered an insult in this country. As a conspiracy theorist, you believe crazy ideas, like that the Covid virus was not actually zoonotic in nature; that the Covid injections might lead to serious health problems, like myocarditis and Guillain-Barré Syndrome; that the push for Covid “vaccines” might lead to vaccine passports which could be a useful way for the government to keep tabs on the health information of its populace and could lead toward a social credit system. Calling someone like me a questioner would have been closer to naming, rather than labeling. The role of questioner implies the active work involved in the role of analyzing things before forming an opinion. In contrast, the moniker “conspiracy theorist” contains the double dismissiveness of both “conspiracy,” implying, in today’s parlance, a non-truth, and “theorist,” implying a lack of hard fact. This same person, at some point, called me a “radical,” thereby distancing me from the norm, associating me with a violence of thought or a kind of disregard for what others think. But the word “radical” comes from the Latin word “radix,” as in, trying to get to the root of the matter—something I’ve thought of many times as I unearth invasive roots from my garden, and then, into the cleared space, transplant my seedlings, their roots straining for the dark soil.

When I think of what my favorite writers have done for me—Baldwin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Eliot—I realize that they have unearthed truths about human nature, explored the root of the matter, without categorizing. They make me into a black gay man or a spoiled aristocrat or a raving petty bourgeois, and I am all of it at once. They don’t give me answers so much as stir in me the questionings that are the (shaky) foundation of living. Without those questionings, those strivings to understand, my life is empty. 

What my erstwhile political mentors—Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Michael Moore—used to do was to dig out the uglier truths from below the lines of the mainstream narrative, naming the injustices and hypocrisies we needed to see in order to understand the real toll of the wars our society was engaging in, so we could question where we stood as a people. But those three characters, and many others, have fallen into the shortcuts of labeling, and I struggle to understand their fall. The same people who rightly named the horrors of the Iraq wars, the dangers of the Patriot Act, and the horrific powers of the military-industrial complex, are, by insisting on excluding from society anyone who hasn’t received the injections, fully supporting medical apartheid, which is to the benefit of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex. They rightly call out one form of ugliness while supporting another.

As I find myself bemoaning the abandonment of the values I hold dear by those whom I used to admire, I find myself officially unable to label myself with any of the terms I used before. If leftism is adhering to the dictates of Big Pharma; being an environmentalist means fighting environmental problems through carbon tax solutions rather than through a true respect for species diversity and a limiting of pollution; if being tolerant means going along with new norms that threaten the well-being of our children, then I am not the tolerant, leftist, environmentalist I thought I was. 

Imagine the dilemma of a mother who has always prided herself on being open-minded, sitting on the subway with her child in full view of a slew of Okay Cupid ads. Those ads, meant to be entertaining and promoting of “tolerance,” show people in various states of hyper-sexualization. (Two people exchange tongues that are long and phallic; several people are in a groping pile-up of bodies; a man has his head stuck up a woman’s shirt.) I am not a Christian conservative who will advocate for abstinence until marriage; I am no fan of patriarchal models of society. But I am in love with the idea of love, of the sacredness of the joining of bodies as a physicalizing of the joining of spirit and heart. For my nine-year-old to be exposed to this debasement—“making love” becoming an objectified physical meeting of bodies—troubles me. When my child is out of the androgynous part of childhood (between five and ten years), I want her to be able to start forming her sexuality buoyed by the sense of mystery and magic that has always defined our obsession with love. I think of reading Gaskell’s North and South or Eliot’s Middlemarch and the elation I felt at the inevitable but slow, progressive, excruciatingly beautiful lead-ups to the first kiss between the protagonists. I will keep to myself where my imagination took me after either book ended chastely. But my fantasy was all the more beautiful for the strength of the love I imagined, thanks to the steady building of that sense of mystery and desire. The ads in question are ugly to me because they label the act of making love as nothing more than sex between different players. The naming of love between people is a form of exultation. Removing the mystery of our connection as humans and reducing it to transactional displays is a form of un-naming. It robs us of the richness of connection.

A good friend and I have a game of never answering “Me, too” to messages we exchange. Though we are both strong women (and she herself is the survivor of some horrors inflicted by men) we eschew that term, which to me is part of the movement to label rather than name a problem. While the Me Too movement brought up some important issues around the violence against women, it served to categorize women and men into very disparate groups, labeling the latter as automatically guilty if accused, and the former as victims. Other movements have done the same thing, framing one group as guilty and the other as victimized, to the detriment of both groups. Labeling one group as predatory or privileged, and the other group as weak is another form of un-naming the sacredness of the individual. Ascribing negative characteristics to a whole group, with the fallacious intention of protecting the opposite group, takes away our responsibility and our freedom to respond to each other as individuals. It has always been so, no matter who the vilified group. By being so in love with categories that we see a white man as a white man first rather than an artist with a complicated and rich heritage, for example, is a desecration of the idea that we are meant to explore our connections as individuals rather than be collectivized. 

I am a recovered labeler. I would see a certain political banner and assume the worse. I was fully guilty of being in the mindset of a friend who recently waved to the hills of Republican Pennsylvania and said, “That’s where all the scary people live.” The only problem is that those “scary people” are people I’ve come to know, and many are stewards of nature; they are people in interracial marriages; they are people who have saved this writer from disaster (flooded basement, frozen pipe) with generosity and ease; they are people who buy local and have a strong sense of family. I no longer care that our voting records do not align and that we have very different pastimes. My daughters and I have had many discussions on the nature of friendship. And while our closest friends are also philosophically in tune with us, we deeply value those friendships that are based on other interests or terms and that make us practice staying in harmony in spite of sometimes dissonant views. 

As someone who was always very political, I was mildly distressed when I realized that my older daughter was distinctly uninterested in politics (though she is incredibly opinionated about art and food). I am now beyond grateful that she eschewed labeling herself part of any party, especially before she was old enough to have fully understood the structures of government and history. I have come to realize that her purposeful stance on the outside of politics has permitted her to forward her ideas in discussions without adhering to the rules of a label. To be a good liberal or a good conservative she would have to subscribe to certain views. Without taking on any labels, she can believe what her sense and her intuition dictate. And this has led her to bring up “controversial” ideas in class, in defiance of the conformity of her peers. Her teacher, praising her for her willingness to bring up disparate ideas, nevertheless cautioned her to be careful about not being too forceful in her dissent. All I can say is that I want her to find herself in the company of people who will want to argue, forcefully, about the virtues or problems of political correctness, the definition of what constitutes art, and whatever other topics fascinate her, (the superiority of Korean cuisine to French, for example) and be allowed to argue with vehemence and passion, sometimes spewing things that are countered so that they can be thought out better, the ideas refined; I want her to have arguments in which she and her fellows make mistakes in their thinking and fight things out verbally in order to figure out how to name things for themselves. Even if they come to different names, different definitions, the exercise of researching their own ideas on the topic will lead to a better respect of the terms defining the opposing side. I want her to be able to argue with people who are willing to answer her arguments, who do not resort to labeling with accusatory terms as a way of skirting the actual issue. We see this constantly in our society—questioning a prevailing narrative can find you accused of being transphobic, racist, anti-semitic, anti-science, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, without the issue you might have brought up ever actually being addressed. This rush to label rather than engage in dialogue is tragic and, in my opinion, reeks of intellectual and emotional laziness.

I worry about the young people—flooded with the hormonal confusion that makes the most grounded teenager think her nose like Baba Yaga’s and the pimples on her forehead visible from the cockpit of a 747—who are quick to label their angst defaults of nature and paper themselves with different pronouns, add prefixes like pan-, a-, and metro- to the sexuality they’ve never even expressed, and demand adherence to these labels by those around them. I worry about the parents who are unwilling or too afraid to dig into the origin of this angst and would prefer to go along with these new tags, for laziness or fear of being themselves labeled anti-whatever. I worry about a generation subjected to the normalization of insanity: that parents should have less authority over their children than the state, that nature is precious but should be meddled with, that men can be women by simple proclamation. 

My favorite retort to the craziness of gender politics came from a beloved teenager in the throes of menstrual cramps. “You can’t claim the privilege of calling yourself a woman if you’ve never had to suffer this!” A name must be earned. And as a woman and someone in love with the power of creation and particular intuition that are the general purview of women, I do agree that it is an honor to call yourself a woman, one that must be earned through enduring the hardships imposed by nature. I also believe that while every individual is different and some women are more “masculine” and some men more “feminine,” I do perceive a general difference in the way women process the world, and whether it is nature or nurture, I celebrate the fact that overall, women are endowed with an emotional intelligence that is different from men’s, an interest in connecting with others that is particular to our sex. Equality does not mean sameness. I feel that this new relativism of gender is a betrayal of feminist gains. In a world where it is perfectly acceptable to claim that a man who decides to call himself a woman has the right to use the women’s restroom, thereby penetrating a space that should be a safe one for the sex that is biologically more vulnerable; in a world where a “man” can be pregnant, making moot the millennia of rituals celebrating girls’ transformation into womanhood and then motherhood; a world where on a birth certificate, a parent can ignore the obviousness of a baby’s genitalia and claim “other” as a gender; in such a world it is absolutely acceptable to subject young women to biological violence at the hands of the state. The menstrual dis-regulation that even the mainstream media has attributed to the mRNA injections mandated upon thousands of students and workers is just not as problematic in a society in which there is no longer anything sacred in the noun “womanhood.” 

None of this means that I have any issue with transgenderism—the purview of an incredibly small minority of people who feel like they were born into the wrong body. A close friend transitioned, and is as precious to me as ever; the daughter of another good friend has clearly wanted to be a boy from early on, and once she is an adult, her parents will support her in whatever choice she makes. My issue is with a society that wants to claim that such a thing is the norm and therefore undermines the differences between the sexes that we should be celebrating. I take issue with the fact that my daughters have been censored for using the “wrong” pronouns for people who were obviously biologically female or male. If a child is told that they are no longer able to ascribe names to what they perceive, but must be informed of the correct label by outside authorities, they are effectively being disempowered by society, their own power of language diminished. My little one used to call Black people dark-brown people; she would be distressed that her own skin was too light and her hair too light for her to pass as a plausible Native American when she was obsessed with indigenous cultures and themed all her imaginary play upon them. In this politically correct or woke world, I would have had to caution her about referring to anyone’s appearance (as if children don’t clearly note every single physical aspect of everyone they see; they just don’t attribute moral values to them) and been wary of cultural appropriation in her passion for Indian heritage. This same kid is a tomboy—a tree-climbing, soccer-playing, bow-and-arrow-wielding girl who wears boys’ hand-me-downs, delicate earrings and necklaces, and spends hours quietly reading on the couch. This kid is a girl, will one day become a woman, and whatever her interests and attributes in the future, the delicacy of her features, the quality of her listening, the sensitivity with which she addresses others’ emotions are the most feminine parts of her, and the latter two are the most essential. She will love whomever she wants, embody whatever names she chooses (such as artist, athlete, mother, wife to a man or a woman), but I never desire for her to be confused and compelled to slap a label upon herself because she does not deem herself sufficient or exceptional enough otherwise.

I have to wonder if so much of the equivocalness of the discourse in our society, whether it be related to gender or the environment or anything else, is a way of confusing us so that we don’t have the wherewithal to see, name, and fight the ugliness descending upon us. A generation of young people who are not allowed to name the fundamental basics of sexual identity, a generation that is told that true health depends on genetic modification, is a generation that cannot be expected to find its true north. A generation that labels funding a war morally acceptable rather than a descent into widespread destruction, a generation that no longer even understands the concept of privacy and by extension cannot name censorship when it slaps one in the face, is a generation that will happily let the power structure label everything for them, thereby controlling the narrative, defining the story we live.

My dissident friends—my freedom-fighter friends, as a close friend says—are not afraid to name the horrors that face us, because naming a thing is a way of seeing it more clearly in order to fight it more effectively (and, yes, I’m thinking partly of Bedros here). When I started to delve into the truth of what was happening to us in 2020, I felt terror before such ugliness, but also a sense of strength. As I parsed through the data and named the cognitive dissonances, I was able to say, no, woman, you are not crazy. You find yourself looking at something unimaginably horrible, the world’s largest, most terrifying, and most destructive red squirrel, but you know where you stand—against it—and you have an idea of what you can do to counter it. Name the ugliness and you can name its opposites—love, freedom, free will, individual responsibility, tolerance, the celebration of tradition, community, family, spirituality, and the absolute sacredness of the human body as a part of the natural world that holds us and that we must support. 

I understand the fear that many have in regard to naming the horror. Not only is the Goliath huge, making us feel helpless in contrast, but once you name the horror that you must stand up against, how far do you go in fighting it? What sacrifices must you make? What sacrifices must you ask your children to make? Ostracism could be the least of it. But if you don’t name it, you have done worse than labeling; you have named yourself as a part of it.