Talia Lavin: Hopeless and Hopeful

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Talia Lavin
@swordsjew
I wrote about @ChristaBrown777's long lonely effort to expose Baptist predators and the difficulties of not going numb

theswordandthesandwich.substack.com
Hopeless and Hopeful
Women like Christa Young offer inspiration in a time of despair
9:25 AM · May 31, 2022

https://theswordandthesandwich.substack.com/p/hopeless-and-hopeful

The person I’ve thought about most over the past week is a woman named Christa Brown.

It’s been a bad few weeks. A bad few years, really. But the past few weeks have really put the cherry on the shit sundae, and doused it in shit syrup too. Kids gunned down at school, and a racist massacre in a supermarket, and an entire religious denomination—the Southern Baptists, America’s largest Protestant sect—dutifully covering up an astounding amount of child sexual abuse, despite very loud and very brave survivors hollering at their doorsteps. The million covid deaths benchmark met and exceeded with no fanfare and no memorial. Lots of people who write and talk for a living cantilevering simple ideas into complicated arguments, taking things as clean as rage and grief and sullying them with deflection, with sophistry. Becoming numb to death is an art form we’ve perfected in the United States, a country on permanent Lidocaine. Trying to traverse the landscape of American politics unaided is a bit like crossing the moors with a wooden leg. You could break your last limb. It’s treacherous terrain.

I’m sick of it, and writing about it makes me sick. And it’s my job, to sit in the small of the night and peer out at other people’s suffering, and try to sum it up in a way that might make people care. Every week, twice a week. And Tuesdays, in particular, are for summing up the state of the bad ground. It requires examining things. Research. Contemplation. Enough anger to inspire an ulcer with a soupçon of cynicism and a dollop of polysyllaby for panache.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for control of my own womb to be taken from me, the ticking-down of the judicial calendar. I’m watching the far-right movement I’ve been tracking for years succeed beyond its wildest dreams, somehow managing to amass mainstream political power and inspire massacres at one and the same time, two hideous prongs both pointed at the throat. And the weeks go by, and I write about one piece while the rest of the grim puzzle locks into place and I try to find a corner. Everything feels out of control, slick-trousered on the greased slope downward. Nothing out there but tar.

And I keep thinking about Christa Brown.

She was raped by a Southern Baptist youth minister at 16, and spent over a decade publicly and privately lobbying the denomination’s governing body for accountability, for transparency, to gather and publish a database of rapists in ministry.

*snip*