In “The fantasy and the need for solidarity”, Schulman devotes a long section to a transcription of a public conversation with the writer Morgan M. Page in Montreal in 2016. The catalyst was a controversy. Earlier that year, Schulman praised a friend, Trans Bryn Kelly. She deliberately included details on Kelly’s state of mind, the suicide method, seated with the body. According to Schulman, she was bitterly criticized by many of the Trans community for what they supposed to be a thug effort that seemed designed to make her own points instead of celebrating Kelly’s life.
In a conversation with page, Schulman explained that the speech had been approved by the partner and the friends of Kelly and pronounced in the minds of political funeral during the thickness of the AIDS pandemic; She wanted to dispel the fantasy of suicide as any kind of solution. She took questions to those of the public who had felt injured or angry. What strikes in the transcription is the lack of defense on the part of Schulman, who could have felt unjustly criticized (most of his detractors did not even know Kelly), or those who opposed the language of praise. Emotions have not been used as an excuse to degenerate the conflict or leave it entirely; Instead, the people of the play seem to get closer.
“The emergence of a conflict should not mean that someone is bad or to blame”, “Spade advises in” Mutual Aid “,” and the more we can normalize conflicts, the more we can remedy it and make damage to others “.
I have to admit it, it is roughly the same language that I use with my toddler. Are we so lost that we need such an instruction? It may seem comical, but where do we see conflicts? No skirt or become arsonist? Such modeling is so rare that I remember specific cases – for example, the dialogue between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde printed in Essence magazine in 1984. “Jimmy, we have no argument,” says Lorde. “I know we don’t do it,” replied Baldwin, to which she responds, “but what we have is a real disagreement.” They do not allow themselves to find false common points or cocoon in an injury far from noticing, even temporarily, a common language. At the knot of their conversation is how to talk about the differences between them – openly, productive and without sense of competition. “To really face how we live, recognizing everyone’s differences is something that has not happened,” Lorde told Baldwin. “When we only deal with similarity, we develop weapons that we use against each other when the differences become apparent. And we strive – black men and women can fade – much more effectively than foreigners. »»
It is tempting to try a thesis here, to link the decline of social endurance or the endurance of conflicts on social media, perhaps, or the pandemic. In their new book, “Conflict Resilience”, the legal scientist Robert Bordone and the neurologist Joel Salinas lend to know that our social muscles are deeply atrophied. Bordone, which negotiates conflicts between businesses and governments, describes to be more and more called upon to supervise conflicts between people and ordinary families who could not resolve the still minor differences. The authors offer case studies and simple advice to develop conflict endurance, to have discomfort in the body: “Build muscles for conflict holding, such as building muscles for your arms, quads or calves, is a process, not an event to one and to-faster.”