notifications

This week a friend was telling me how in New Zealand, sperm donors are way more regulated than they are in the U.S. or many other countries—so much so that donors have to jump through a bunch of hoops to be considered, and their donation isn’t allowed to result in more than a certain number of children. When donors fill out their paperwork, they can opt into different levels of notification: do they want to know every time one of their sperm fertilizes an egg? Every time it is implanted? Every time a child is born? Would they like to know the child’s name? Would they like to receive a picture of them? Or, would they like to uncheck those boxes, and never hear about any of it again?

It stuck with me. Not the sperm donor thing, but the notifications. A barely perceptible flick of the finger on a screen, a cluster of pixels, and you’ve made a choice—not between you and the fact of a thing, but you and the knowledge of the thing. Nothing has changed, technically. You just won’t know, either way.

Around 2003 or 2004, Amy Goodman spoke at a little event in my hometown about war journalism. It’s hard to capture, even in my own memory, the precise tint and tone of the early days of the Iraq War. I was just starting high school, having watched the towers fall on TV when I was in eighth grade, and the rush to war was so all-encompassing and full-throated that I’m still not sure how to describe it. It transformed adults around me. Three years before, I’d been holding a bake sale for women in Afghanistan, my teachers smiling and nodding vaguely at my “charity.” Now, the American flags were snapping out over everyone’s front doors, fresh from their plastic packaging. Teachers were speaking casually about the “violence of Islam.” Political leaders were seriously calling French fries “freedom fries.” I make fun of the white hippie culture of my hometown quite a lot, but to be honest, I’m grateful to have been around a lot of passionate war resisters in those days, too—they were my inoculation against the idea that war was inevitable, necessary, or justified.

I’ve forgotten plenty of details from what Amy Goodman spoke about that day twenty years ago, but one idea lodged in my fifteen-year-old brain. She compared American media coverage of U.S.-involved wars since the war in Vietnam, and showed that there was essentially a sharp decline in how much the average American viewer could see the human cost of war. TV stations used to play coverage of soldiers’ caskets arriving home—but more and more, even reading the names of casualties was rarely a part of nightly reportage. Anyone who lived through the decades after this point knows about the way the Iraq War never seemed to end, but did seem to disappear from public view. But the war did go on. Thousands upon thousands of people died. Eight trillion dollars got gulped down the throat of a conflict fewer and fewer people seemed to understand or even justify. I don’t pretend to be an expert in literally anything that has to do with international relations, or war, or government, but I do know what it felt like to experience that particular transformation in the American conversation as I grew up: the fervent, loud froth of war, followed by less and less noise, until there was silence, and somewhere out of sight, people kept dying.

Twenty years after watching the invasion of Iraq play out on my television screen, everyone I know is glued to their phones getting updates from Gaza. I watch a reporter collapse onto the floor when they tell him his family is dead. I watch a little girl run alongside a stretcher with a body on it, a white sheet stretched over, and she screams, “Mother, wake up!” in a language I don’t speak. I watch a doctor standing in front of two rows of body bags, eyes wide and blank with terror, pleading with the camera. I listen to the dark recordings someone made on their cell phone, the roar and thunder of the bombs landing somewhere out of sight.

Propaganda and misinformation flies everywhere. There’s a flood of images scorching your brain, but where are they from, and who posted them, and why? Journalists and movement builders and religious leaders start making these brave and harrowing efforts to pull clarity out of the noise. Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief at Jewish Currents, wrote an open letter about the chaos facing organizers and activists just one week after October 7:

When I was fifteen years old, I believed that if only people could see pictures of what was happening, they would understand the horror. They would want it to stop. They would make it stop. On some levels, maybe this was right. Much has been written about how the Black Lives Matter movement was galvanized not by new information about police violence, but by newly recorded and unquestionable video evidence. People like Darnella Frazier risked their lives to record some of the most horrifying footage of our century, to resist the coming denial of what the police had done, to make the truth undeniable.

But we’ve all seen by now that the videos and the photographs alone don’t change things. It takes movements and building and timing and strategy and courage and money and so many other things, a constellation of things it would take years to name, on top of the interpretations—what this suffering and violence means to people, who they empathize with, who they are loyal to, and what they believe needs to be done in response. Meanwhile, like Arielle says, the “images coming across our screens” scatter across and within communities, fracturing out with different meanings.

Then, on Friday, of course, we heard that Israel had knocked out cell towers and cable lines. Gaza went dark. Reporters with foreign SIM cards managed to make garbled calls out to the rest of the world, and get off a final few tweets that ended in some version of I don’t know when you’ll hear from me again. The notifications continued, but now they were days old footage, they were updates with no updates, they were another confirmation that we couldn’t know what was happening in the dark. But of course, we knew. We knew what must be happening.

Yesterday, thousands of us marched in London (per usual, numbers seem way underreported — it was likely closer to a half million, one of the biggest protests in London since the outbreak of the Iraq War). I didn’t check my phone anymore, but I did listen to people around me: chanting and sometimes crying and sometimes laughing, moving steadily through the heart of London. Like every protest I’ve ever been to, most of the chants and calls were led by young women, always somewhere between the ages of 16 and 25, usually in gaggles of friends, clasping hands. Every time I see that pattern — now playing out even in another country — I imagine a long line of sixteen-year-old girls through the history of time, discovering how loud their voices can go, leading the people behind them, boisterous and beautiful. No news was coming out of Gaza, but the crowds were calling out to them, out into the dark.

I know that people subscribing to a newsletter about darkness and literature do not come to me for political affairs analysis, and I wouldn’t be able to offer that, anyway. But every day I believe more and more that darkness and literature and justice are knotted together in ways I may never understand or untangle. I think that what it means for the world to witness a genocide in this way, and what we do in response, shapes our souls, but also the entire fabric of the world. It changes what words mean. It changes what history means.

Within a few clicks, I can see across the world into a genocide. A few more, and it’s gone. Whether or not I can bear the details, whether or not they are broadcast, the horror remains the same. What does it mean for me to have been notified? What do I let in? Enough to be altered into the person these times demand me to be. I hope.