2023: The year the monster showed its face.

What is seen can never be unseen.

I’m once again fighting an infection as I sit down to write an end-of-year retrospective. That’s alright; I’m used to it. But there’s always the temptation to read illness as some kind of sign, especially after a year like this one. “As without, so within,” the mystics used to say.

“Without” in that sentence means “outside,” of course, not “in the absence of.” That double meaning gave George Harrison his spiritual pun, “within you and without you.” But a more down-to-earth Bob Dylan lyric comes to mind: “Either I’m too sensitive, or else I’m getting soft.”

It’s neither, really. It’s just the rent I pay for living in a body with a compromised immune system. The “within” will be fine once the antibiotics and steroids kick in. The “without” — not so much. I have never dreaded writing about a year as much as I do now. A year filled with doubt, fear, and grief.

We can’t know how the story ends, not yet. That’s been true for some time, but this year was different. It was the year the monster showed its face.

Dr. King spoke of that monster, the one that’s born

when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

The triplets aren’t three beings. They’re the three heads of a single creature with many arms: social, ecological, imperial, even spiritual. We knew about this monster years ago. The people we admired, like Dr. King and Malcolm X, talked about it. It was debated, protested. Then it was forgotten. Soon, people doubted it was ever real.

But it is. It has shown its face in the destruction of Gaza.

Condemning Hamas is easy, since we’ve never funded it (except indirectly through Netanyahu). But we’ve funded the immiseration and murder of Palestinians for generations. We told ourselves pretty lies about it. We dressed the monster in a Sunday bonnet and called it beautiful. But this is the year it showed us its true face, eye to eye and nose to nose.

If I’m lecturing anyone, it’s mostly me; it’s too easy to think of one’s own complicity as inevitable, or to change the channel when the creature appears. (“Gazan Refreshed After Taking Weekend To Unplug From News,” says the ever-trenchant Onion.)

Biden’s $105 billion supplemental spending package has many pages, but only one face: war. It tries to meld scattered conflicts around the globe into a single struggle, a fight for freedom and democracy against the forces of oppression. But these wars aren’t connected by anything except the drive to maintain an empire through brute military force. Freedom and democracy are the first things it demolishes.

Wait. There is another connection: race. Nearly all of the “enemies” targeted by this package are non-white: Palestinians, Chinese, migrants from Mexico and South America. (The president would have us believe he’s funding the southern border reluctantly, and maybe it’s true, but he’s carried over many of his predecessor’s policies on immigration.) The only exception to this non-white rule is Russia, but our discourse has demonized Russians as another species of sub-human, with violence in their DNA and hatred in their souls.

Taking inventory of myself at year’s end: I’ve tried to be kind. Really, I have. I realize that sometimes we feed the creature and don’t even know what we’re doing. Sometimes even the monster doesn’t know it’s a monster.

But now — now we’ve seen its face. What is seen can’t be unseen. We become ill, individually and collectively, if we try. We see that sickness every day on the cable news . There’s a terrible price to be paid for denying your own eyes. Like the saying goes: pay now, or pay later.

I could conclude with a cheap writerly trick, one where we realize we’ve see the monster’s face because we’re looking in a mirror. But I won’t, not this time. Yes, the monster is ours, but that can change. It’s from us but not of us. Because we’ve created it, we can also destroy it.

Guilt and despair are cheap escapism. Action works better. The monster gets a little smaller every time we take to the streets. It gets a little smaller every time someone performs the simple act of calling the US Capitol switchboard (202-224-3121) to tell their elected officials they must stop supporting this madness. (It’s easy: give the operator your zip code and you’ll be connected to your senators and representative.)

It’s not enough, not nearly. Not while children are dying every day, in Gaza and around the world. But it’s more than nothing — and more than nothing is more than you think.

There’s an upside to seeing this monster’s face, however hideous. We know it’s real. We know what we’re up against. That’s illumination. That’s how light rises from below, until — finally, after long years of darkness — we see that we have the power to fight monsters.

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