Jam the Machine

The daily defiance of joy

Thanks for reading unbound. This is for the time when you need to remind
yourself of your own agency.

Readers, the photos of Bunny Hat Boy—we all know that picture of five-year-old Liam—broke me. For two weeks, I’ve been in such depression that words have failed me.

Adding to my despair, I read my friend’s memoir, DUMB GIRL, of how she became an activist for gun violence prevention after a childhood filled with physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

To say DUMB GIRL was a tough (yet profound) read would be an understatement.

And then on top of all that came the latest tranche of the Epstein files. Files that depict an unimaginable, industrial-scale echo of my friend’s story of abuse. Abuse that was denied. Abuse that could have and should have been prevented for years. Decades.

To look away from this ugliness is to deny evil. To stay silent is to allow that evil to thrive. To accept is to legitimize that evil.

I say no to that.

With so many people demanding that we move on from “ancient history” and are actively minimizing these abhorrent crimes, I say no.

I say it is my duty to listen to the accounts of these trafficked girls. To hold the stories of these abused young women. To shoulder their pain.

I say it is my moral obligation to spotlight this moral rot in so many prominent men who are captains of industry and leaders of nations.

I say it is my responsibility to be a woman who refuses to look away from the utterly reprehensible, their despicable depravity.

Yet all this rot put my pen into paralysis.

But then, a sentence restored me and a story reframed my work ahead: to hold the pen today means writing moral clarity to uproot moral rot.

So we begin: a sentence and a story.

Photo by CJ on Unsplash

The Sentence
One of my Bible Study friends and I are reading Scot McKnight’s Revelation for the Rest of Us. His tenet: the Bible is filled with examples of dissidents from Moses to Abraham. A dissident, according to McKnight, is “a person of hope, someone who imagines a better, future world, and then begins to embody that world.”

What a sentence. What a call. We need to be dissidents who bring moral clarity in a time of moral rot. To be dissidents who embody what we want in the world.

That rings deep and true in me. Some of my earliest memories are of my parents leaving our home in the wee early morning to join in protests, marching and chanting for Taiwan’s democracy. In the days running up to the protests, I could hear them talk soberly about the possible retaliation, probable repercussions. Would they be allowed to visit their beloved home country ever again? Yet a dissident hope ran through them. So still my parents marched. Still they protested. Still they waved their posters.

A Story.
In his book, McKnight told the story about the poet Malcolm Guite who was photocopying some of his work when the copier quit working. The repairperson complained: “Your poetry is jamming my machine!”

That’s the work of the dissident: to jam the machinery of evil. And you know what jams the machine? Micro-rebellions. And joy.

Jamming the Authoritarian Machine

Authoritarians need economic crisis to oil the machine. Community support jams that machine. So does diverting our dollars to small, local businesses. My husband and I are sequestering some of our tithing budget specifically for community care: dinners, groceries, necessities for neighbors in need. Supporting up-and-coming artists and displaced journalists. In these small ways, we are jamming the industrial machine.

Authoritarians need social divisions to oil the machine. Neighborism builds relationship and teaches us to care for each other in small ways. You know what? Tiny actions of loving our neighbor jam the machine. So my hubby and I have recommitted to our weekly garbage pick-up around our neighborhood. We—profound introverts—engage strangers at stores and restaurants in small talk that reinforces how much common ground we have with each other. We bought our neighborhood grouch of a convenience store clerk a lottery ticket—and she beamed! For the first time in ten years that we’ve interacted with her, she beamed! And she was / is beautiful. We have trained our rejected service dog (can you say, rambunctious?) to do one small act of service: she now picks up our elderly neighbor’s newspaper and delivers it direct to the doorstep. Even our doggy is jamming the machine.

Wars and conflict oil the authoritarian machine. So peaceful protests, I can continue to do. Writing and calling Congress demanding that we do not go into needless wars—that may not stop the war machine, but it’ll jam it. I’m jamming it with my words!

Creating an “other”—a national enemy—is the hatred that keeps the authoritarian machine humming. Finding common ground, I will do. In fact, one of my friends and I reframed all our rabbit holes of reading this and that as fodder for future us to use in conversation, bridging us to someone else. Sharing a good laugh is the fastest way of seeing the humanity in one another. I may not be a political cartoonist, and I may not be a late-night host, but I can make people laugh. And then I’ll cackle inside myself, knowing I’m jamming the machine.

You know what really jams up that authoritarian machine? Survival. Stories of people like my friend whose memoir reclaimed her life with such irrepressible joy. Stories of people who are exercising their voices, declaring the truth at great cost to themselves. So, yes, I will uplift survivors. You bet I will sister you with my sorrow, and I will crone you with my ability to feel, remember, retell.

I am grateful that my heart has the capacity to be filled with rage—that my beautiful, powerful clarifying anger of menopause can and will see through moral rot with moral clarity.

Even enraged—especially enraged—our hearts are also cracked open for joy. Our effervescence, our light, our humor, the best of our humanity—all that fire will melt the forever winter of this administration’s discontent.

We will be spring. We will be sun.

And we will rain and storm with joy. And that is how we will collectively run this machine into the ground.

How are you jamming the machine with your personal micro-rebellion of joy?