when being good means being bad to each other

moral injury is an empire problem

Moral injury has been (aptly, wisely) coming up in the conversation about the US-Israel genocide in Gaza recently. If you haven’t heard about it, moral injury is what happens to us internally when we’re asked to or forced to do things that go against our morals and values systems and/or our beliefs. It often comes up in the context of the military, because people in the military are often asked during what we so sanitizedly call “conflicts” to do things that violate their moral code. People have also been (accurately) describing this experience as soul loss — a great primer was going around from Steph Kaufman Mthimkulu + Slow Factory recently. All ways of describing the things that happen to people who align themselves with domination.

I think a lot about moral injury and soul loss in my work with white people, particularly white people who live on land our ancestors stole. And I have thought about it nearly every day over these past five months, as I watch settlers take other people’s land, as I watch all markers of a people and a culture get destroyed, as I watch Palestinians die over and over, every time I open social media.

I think about how colonialism has robbed people of any sense of relationship with land other than taking, owning, destroying in order to make sure no one else can have it. I think about the thousands of tons of heavy metals and poisons the earth in Gaza has experienced over the past five months. I think about how my ancestors helped cause the little ice age by participating in a genocide that killed the people who cared for the land here on Turtle Island, and how my people have been ruining things for most people in such a short, violent, time. I think about the ancestors who didn’t participate. I think about myself, carrying all of these memories and stories. All of this responsibility. And behind all of these stories I think about the lurking violence of colonialism — that our ancestors were only able to be convinced to carry out such violence because their ancestors had experienced some version of it. I feel simultaneously so much rage and compassion at my people, and at myself.

Many of us are watching in horror as the good/bad worldview of colonialism plays out in real time again — which is, that if a group of people are labeled bad by the people in power, then anything and everything can be done to them by the “good guys.” That to be good under the terms of empire, is actually to be disconnected from any sense of humanity, any sense of connection other than the one supplied by these systems of domination.

To be good on empire’s terms is to enact horrifying violence while preaching peace, democracy, and “it’s complicated.” Many of us are feeling that dissonance in our bodies these days in ways we might not have before, when we didn’t literally see the violence that was being done to ordinary people in such an intense way, anytime we opened our phones. And the dissonance has both societal and internal levels — because, as it turns out, we are not good either. Or if we want to play with the logic of the binary, in order to be good on the terms of empire, we have to be bad to each other, entangled as we are in the systems that rain down so much death, and then more death.

And all of this to say, that to live in the world that colonialism and capitalism have built, that creates and concentrates so much suffering onto some people so that other people can have ease, is to carry with you some level of moral injury all of the time. As Kelly Hayes says in her brilliant Some Notes From Fascism 101: “y’all… we live in the imperial fucking core. There are no clean hands here. I am a Native person whose ancestors experienced genocide and whose land was stolen, and who organizes for collective liberation, but given the structure of capitalism and imperialism, I am still living at the expense of a lot of fucking people. I want to change that math, but to do that, we are going to need each other. “ (I really want everyone I love to read this essay.)

I grew up in a very small fundamentalist-ish christian church, filled with people who were trying very hard all the time to be good. As a young closeted queer person I deeply believed so much of the inflexible dogma I learned, including that queers go to hell, as do people who get abortions, as does pretty much anyone who doesn’t fit into the fetishized narrow categories that made up what it meant to be a  “good person.” And when I started to get a little space away from that community, in college and after, I became aware of the level of damage that had been done to me and that I had participated in doing to myself — my soul, my authenticity or whatever words we want to use for that part of ourselves we can feel but need a lot of words to describe, and (equally important and not an afterthought) to a lot of people around me. Because moral injury, and soul loss, are terms that get at the totally untangle-able bond between us as people. I really don’t think it’s possible for something to only happen to you or for something to happen in isolation. It’s always in context, always in relationship. We are always being done to and doing.

When I came out of that religious world, I was really fucking angry and depressed. I was carrying the moral injury before, I just hadn’t known it, or been able to admit it to myself, or had the space to look at it. (It’s probably possible to be morally injured and actually not know it, but in my experience part of us knows what is happening to us, what we are tangled up in.) And when we have been mostly unaware of the injury, and then we become more aware of it, we have to do some really intense heartbreaking work of tending to it, and to our grief about it. (The brilliant Rachael Rice recently held space for a really real conversation on this: watch Gate Six: For Harm Done (That Cannot Be Undone).)

Part of what systems tell us is that if we go along with their violence, they will protect us from the consequences of the actions we undertake on their behalf. And while empire does plenty to protect people who do harm in the name of empire, I really don’t think it’s true that we can escape the somatic and spiritual consequences of the violence we enter into for empire’s sake. And all of us are taking many, many actions on behalf of/that help sustain empire (yes, even those dogmatic, morally pure leftists, of which I am more than occasionally one). Our increasing awareness, and the attendant grief and rage and shame, means we’re finding cracks in the systems within and around us. It means we’re still human, not robots for empire.

I keep having this experience where anytime I say or write anything, I don’t want to end on a hopeful note. It feels false, because the silent second half of any sentence I write is…and the genocides are still happening. I think maybe we are living in the nonbinary place between and around hope and hopelessness, these days and in the days to come.

Sending you much care from in between the creeks, where I sat on a rock that’s older than colonialism today,

Kali

Not to be constantly bombarding you with classes, BUUUUUT: I’m going to be holding space to talk about the binaries of empire starting at the end of this month - six Wednesdays where we’ll look at nonbinary ways to resist empire’s dominant and dominating approaches to our world, ourselves, and each other. I don’t have all the answers, but I do have lots of observations and opinions. It’s pay what you can, you can pay at any point during the course including after, and I’ll record the sessions. Feel free to send me a message on here if you have any questions about it.