‘We Are Living Through Overwhelming Times' – Afua Hirsch On How Not To Be Paralyzed By Inaction

Elle

4 days ago

'When we said 'Summer's gonna be fire', we didn't mean literally!' This is my teenage daughter's take on current world events, delivered as usual in under a dozen words, and accompanied by an eyeroll.
There is nothing new in our tendency to use humour as a coping mechanism for the sense of imminent catastrophe may be imminent – it's called gallows' humour for a reason. Even if the carousel of these particular protagonists - Israel, Iran, Trump's America, Putin's Russia - seem to be constantly inventing new and unwelcome surprises.
When I first entered the world of news reporting, I did so with a certain naivety. I believed that everything happening at that moment was of great importance. I felt a duty to investigate, share and follow it closely, and that doing so could make a real difference. The more informed we are, I reasoned, the better decisions we can make. We need information because we have agency – at the ballot box, in the pressure we put on our leaders, in our acts of protest, boycott and outspokenness.
Of course this is true. I recently watched my friend Misan Harriman's powerful documentary Shoot The People– a journey into protests that changed the world, Black Lives Matter, the movement against apartheid, the present mass mobilisation of ordinary people for Gaza. I studied the reactions of the audience, and many were learning for the first time how powerful and impactful protest can be. You have to learn about protest to understand what it is. It should not be a last resort; it should be in our bones. 'We need to remember that the struggle is a never-ending process,' said Coretta Scott King. 'Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.'
This generation has a lot to fight for. I still respect and depend on reporters who bring us minute-by-minute information about the heady developments in the world. But I have also learned that we all have our own role to play. Not only is it OK to engage in your own way, but it's also a responsibility. We need to know the wrongs being committed so that we can hold those who commit them accountable. And so that even if it's not our own experience, we can have the empathy and humanity to - as Clarissa Brooks said after the murder of George Floyd - 'sit with what it means to see, participate and be an oppressed person in a world that feeds off of your body.'
Part of the change we need is also imagining a better future. Imagination and slavish adherence to the news cycle often pull in opposite directions.
It's hard to talk about this without feeling narcissistic. Civilians are dying and living through atrocities, and we worry about the impact just hearing it might have on our own mental health. Injustice gnaws at our sense of peace, and we worry about how to express solidarity on our platforms without facing what can seem like a lose-lose outcome; silence is complicity, protest is performative.
A lot of high-profile people I know wrestle with this. They want to speak up, but they are afraid for the consequences for their career. This is not an irrational concern, looking at what has happened to their peers. Melissa Barrera, an actor who was 'quietly dropped' after sharing social media posts that talked about Gaza. The band Kneecap were removed from the lineup at the Scottish music festival TRNSMT after the police claimed they were a safety risk. Kehlani was dropped from a scheduled performance at Cornell University after a stance she described as anti-genocide. And American universities – including my own, The University of Southern California - that allowed protests about Israel's war on Gaza, even as they were heavily and oppressively policed, have been met with a barrage of punitive measures, including the removal of crucial federal funding from the American government.
The intentional impact of these sanctions is to scare people into silence. And in many instances, it's working. But unlike the media landscape when I was growing up, where a few platforms could gatekeep which voices had airtime, now we get to choose our influences. Instead of following celebrities who seemingly stand only for protecting the status quo, we can choose to follow artists like Paloma Faith, activists like Greta Thunberg and Rima Hassan, political candidates like New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, whose triumph as the Democratic candidate for arguably the most important city in the world is a reminder that power can and must change hands.
We are living through overwhelming times, in substance and form. The proliferation of platforms, the infiltration into all aspects of life of AI, the constant feeds, alerts, bulletins and content is more than either the human brain or our hearts can handle. Add in the nature of that content; the devastating images of every single story from Gaza, the fear of nuclear conflict in Iran or Russia, and we are justified in feeling paralysed. Paralysis is the opposite of action, overwhelm is the opposite of clarity. If there's one thing we can do, it's to reject anything that makes us feel helpless and embrace anything that makes us feel our power. An older, seasoned, but never jaded journalist I know, who hates the limelight as so many of the best people do, always says, 'disobedience, protest and speaking out isn't optional. It is the only way to use the miracle of having been born.'
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