I had been planning on writing yet another article decrying the afflictive double standard and dog whistle politics<\/a> of the term \u201cterrorism.\u201d Saturday, thousands of Muslims in Cologne, Germany marched<\/a> to protest Islamic extremism<\/a>, and I wanted to express how ineffably tired I am of having to march with a \u201cLove & Unity\u201d sign to prove my humanity\/innocence\/possession of a heart, but when Muslims are the victims instead of the perpetrators no one has \u201cLove & Unity\u201d with us. But it\u2019s been written again<\/a> and again<\/a> and again<\/a> and again<\/a> and again<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then on Sunday, 47 year old Darren Osborne drove<\/a> a van into a crowd of Muslims leaving Ramadan night prayers at a London mosque, killing at least one person and injuring near a dozen others. Witnesses say Osborne shouted<\/a> he wanted to \u201ckill all Muslims\u201d and that he did it as retribution \u201cfor London Bridge.\u201d The CNN headline read, \u201cLondon van hits pedestrians in Finsbury Park<\/a>,\u201d all mentions of the deliberate targeting of Muslims curiously omitted. News outlets lined up pundits to say they \u201cweren\u2019t sure\u201d if it was terrorism or not (no mention of hate crimes either), but they all took a few moments to spout a few glib words on \u201cdiversity.\u201d No word yet if Trump will respond by tweeting some blather about his Muslim Ban.<\/p>\n

Of the entire incident, what struck me most is that I\u2014\u00a0 I didn\u2019t react. Other than a frisson of anger at the hypocrisy and a few twangs of grief at lives lost… I feel almost… unperturbed. Logically, I feel where the overwhelming sadness and despondency ought to be\u2014 where it has unfailingly been in the past\u2014 but none of its symptoms have manifested. Instead, I just feel dispassion. And that worries me. I don\u2019t ever want to be the type of person who shrugs or turns a blind eye to someone\u2019s pain.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m coming to realize this isn\u2019t really the onset of callousness and cold-hearted antipathy. If I feel rather impassive at the moment, it\u2019s not because I\u2019m losing my capacity for empathy, it\u2019s because over the last 6 months or so, I\u2019ve developed a (questionably healthy) defense mechanism to The Era of Trump and realized that sometimes the best thing I can do for my mental health is accept occasional apathy. And I\u2019m also realizing that maybe, just maybe, it\u2019s not peculiar to me\u2014 that this defensive quasi-cynicism exists as a sort of distinctive facet of the collective consciousness of people of color (if such a thing exists) post-Trump.<\/p>\n

The night of November 8, I remember the insidious feeling of dread creeping over me, slowly giving away to a consumptive panic when I realized it wasn\u2019t just a fluke or a grand karmic joke, it was really happening<\/em>. The man who began his campaign by saying \u201cMexicans are rapists,\u201d earned bonus points for calling for the \u201ctotal and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,\u201d and couldn\u2019t even be stopped by hot mic recordings when he bragged about grabbing women \u201cby the pussy\u201d\u2014 that <\/em>man was going to become the most powerful person in the world. I remember my eyes being glued to the electoral college tallies in the same morbid sort of way you can\u2019t look away from a tragic accident. I remember my brain being a jumble of panic as once-worst-case-scenarios suddenly seemed inevitable, images striking me of my grandparents being unable to return to the country even with Green Cards, of my parents\u2019 citizenship being revoked, of my siblings being rounded up for internment camps. I remember questioning the next morning if I should leave my apartment, afraid what his 60 million voters would now feel emboldened to do. I remember feeling like each and every one of those voters had looked directly at me and told me I didn\u2019t belong in their country, and that knowledge squeezed like rubber bands around my chest so I couldn\u2019t catch a full breath of air or form a coherent sentence. I remember looking at the faces around me that were in various states of terror or denial as each of our private nightmares seemed to come to life, and no amount of hugs stemmed the tears. During lunch I usually worked on law school applications, but I remember that day just staring immobilized at the screen because I couldn\u2019t look that far into the future without drowning in waves of crushing panic again. I remember constantly feeling nauseated and bone weary, unable to eat or sleep for almost a week. I remember waking up every morning in the weeks after, terrified this would be the day a severed pig head, or racist graffiti at the very least, showed up in front of the apartment I shared with another hijabi woman. I remember the only time the panic truly drowned me and I gave into the terror was a little over a week later when there was a suspected hate crime on campus, and the night I found out I remember how I struggled to bring my voice to lower than a shout and how the only words I could formulate were a torrent of curses as I practically yanked my hair out in frustration. I remember vowing never to return to that bone-crushing panic again, and I remember the dispassion taking over ever since.<\/p>\n

So if I say that I felt impassive in the face of Sunday\u2019s London attack beyond my angry huffs and frustrated sighs, understand it\u2019s just because at this point I can\u2019t afford to allow something which is, in the grand scheme of things, relatively small to pierce my armor of dispassion. You have to understand that over the last six months I saw hate crimes against Muslims spike after the election<\/a> to such a level that I was convinced I was next, but I couldn\u2019t summon more than an unaffected shrug at the possibility, adopting an \u201cif it happens, it happens\u201d sort of mentality. I saw a slew of Cabinet positions filled by alt-Right Neo-Nazis, racist conspiracy theorists, and Islamophobes, including one who said<\/a> Islam is a “vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people” that had to be “excised,” and all I felt was mild relief the man who called to \u201cexterminate\u201d<\/a> Muslims wasn\u2019t chosen. I saw a man motivated by extremist far-right views<\/a> kill 6 people in a Quebec mosque in a shooting rampage, but I couldn\u2019t summon an ounce of surprise it had happened, only that Trudeau<\/a> condemned it so roundly. I saw a British politician, after the London Bridge Terror Attacks, suggest<\/a> the internment of Muslims as a solution to extremism, and I couldn\u2019t summon more than a bitter, humorless laugh that that was really the solution he was proposing. For goodness sake, last month a man tried to harass me on the street and yell racial slurs at me as he drove by and, I swear to you\u2014 rather than sink into despair<\/a> as I did a year ago\u2014 I just cackled at him, wanting to tell him<\/a> he\u2019d have to do better than that if he wanted to scare me.<\/p>\n

After the grand upset that was Trump\u2019s election, nothing seems to faze me. Since then, I\u2019ve been able to summon copious amounts of anger and disgust\u2014 and grief in small doses\u2014 at the state of politics, but everything else has succumbed to a void of apathy. Each terrible piece of news has been met with a derisive woosh of air in an indignant exhale, but it all just felt inevitable<\/em>. It\u2019s the same frustrated, resigned air with which BlackLivesMatter activists greet every failure to indict police officers who shoot unarmed Black men unprovoked. We all expected it. It\u2019s the same fatalistic way Muslims square their shoulders when, despite all their prayers, the gunman turned out to be ISIS-affiliated after all. We all expected it. It\u2019s the same repulsed tone in which anti-deportation attorneys snarl \u201cof course, they did\u201d after they learn ICE tore up yet another family with their raids and forced deportations. We all expected it. It\u2019s not that we don\u2019t care, it\u2019s that if we broke apart after each time the world showed its hostility, there\u2019d be nothing left in us but desolate despair, abject terror, and bottomless grief. And then we wouldn\u2019t be able to make it through the day, let alone work to make anything better.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m not sure how I feel about my realizations about my own dispassion, even if I\u2019m not the only one to retreat behind defensive cynicism lest we bow to panicked despair again. Because at at some level, that despair we\u2019re avoiding is a sign we\u2019re still human, and embracing that grief is a reminder to never turn away from someone\u2019s plight in disconcern. I worry that this dispassion will stunt my capacity for empathy because that\u2019s one thing I never want to lose. But if the dispassion is the only thing keeping depression from crushing shoulders that cannot bear the horrors of the world, I\u2019m loathe to disavow its protection. How else are we to survive the unholy mess that is The Era of Trump?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had been planning on writing yet another article decrying the afflictive double standard and dog whistle politics of the term \u201cterrorism.\u201d Saturday, thousands<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":644,"featured_media":37246,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1988,255,1477,1606,384,1940,834],"tags":[3037,2966,3038],"yoast_head":"\n