Last night I sat at our table between one of my children and my partner, staring into the small screen of my laptop. The computer was set opposite a rush-job Sedar plate, and on the screen were the faces of about a dozen folks I just adore. A Sedar is the celebration of a rush break out of slavery, so I didn’t feel bad about the partial nature of my preparations in this time of sheltering in place. I found a “short, progressive Haggadah” online and shared the link.

The segments of a Sedar raise questions about oppression and freedom, as well as about the role of storytelling and the importance of continuing to place ourselves in the role of our oppressed ancestors, in the stories we tell, and to live the struggle and the adventure as if it is our own. Last night, this was not hard. We’re literally in the middle of a plague. Handwashing is a key ritual in the Sedar, not once, but twice. This, the Haggadah explained, was a symbolic cleansing. But what if it wasn’t symbolic then, as it isn’t now?

Stories contain crucial information that we have to know and to pass down. That’s why, as Lisa Kron points out in her book Wired for Story, humans can lose ourselves in the pages of a book, the scenes of a film or show. How could that ability possibly benefit our survival (and yet how could it have lasted, if it did not)? We need story. We need to know not to pet the lion without learning it the hard way. We need to plan for pandemics we can’t wrap our minds around, rather than dismantling the departments in charge of just such global events. We need to address the climate crisis in the same way. And all of this will take hold in story–that is how we understand the world. Joan Didion’s near-koan, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” could not be more literal right now.

I started thinking about why we aren’t talking more about the looming climate crisis. I mean, amongst ourselves, when we talk about the future or about buying a car or voting, even, or personal investments. The Haggadah describes four kinds of children who ask four different questions. The wise child asks, What are these rituals and laws we celebrate to understand our story? The wicked child asks, Why is this important to you? Note, the pronoun makes all the difference–we are schooled that wisdom means including ourselves in community. The simple child asks, What is this? And the child who is unable to ask a question, naturally says nothing at all.

Each of these children requires a different answer on a different level. Just as each of us has different questions, and differing abilities to question, at different moments in our lives. The thing is to include ourselves and to ask in as deep a way as we can. To be the wise child or to move in that direction. And the responsibility of the respondents is to answer all the kinds of questions, and to use every one, even silence, as an opportunity to tell the story, to teach what must be learned.

How are we to move to asking about the climate crisis in polite company, to living out loud the problem and its solutions, and on what level? How can we create a powerful and far-ranging “we” whose project is to live the struggle, to tell the story, to survive? I wanted to begin by understanding our silences. Why is it that as a culture, so many urgent experiences are treated as secrets? I asked people via social media about other cultural silences, all those “secrets” many of us come to learn. 

Question: Climate avoidance (which is different from climate denial, because we know we are in a crisis but we keep sipping tea) seems akin to so many western denials. I’m crowdsourcing your examples of the things we don’t talk about (maybe until they happen to us and then we find out we are in a big club of other people to whom they happen). Death and Miscarriage are two examples. Others?

Crowd-Sourced Answer: Money. Mental illness. Misogynistic realities of work-life integration, lack of childcare, burden of domestic chores, unconscious bias which make it difficult for women to rise to the top. Certain illnesses. *IBS or Crones. Oh, incontinence! Anything having to do with going to the bathroom basically. Disability that is invisible. Sexuality of old people. Autism. Affairs. Domestic violence. Workplace sexual harassment. Envy. Cancer. Abortion. Infertility. The state our houses are usually in when we don’t have company coming over. Inheritance. Debt. Bankruptcy. Childhood sexual assault. Sexual assault in general. Grief. Dependence on substances, e.g. alcohol or sleep meds. The deep shame of poverty. Big relationship stresses. Infidelity. The myth of manifest destiny, which assumes man’s (read that white man’s) dominion over the earth, is killing us. It does not allow us to recognize our relation to other people or things, and it demands that we live in a state of constant acquisition. Age discrimination. Childhood baggage, bad parenting. Ignorance. Being depressed and overwhelmed by motherhood. Being in emotionally and verbally abusive relationships.

Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts above. Secrets are like feelings–silencing them doesn’t make them go away. Giving them voice allows us to move into and through them. To open up truths and seek solutions. Please consider this part one of an ongoing exploration of how to give voice to our fears, our hopes, our visions for the future and our pathways and plans to get where we need to go–together. Out loud.