Hope is not a lottery ticket
I subscribe to a newsletter about Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Belarus, and living in challenging times. The author, Darya Zorka, is a writer, poet, activist, and documentary translator. She has contributed to multiple films about Ukraine, including the award-winning documentary 20 Days In Mariupol. Her aim in From My Heart is “to bridge the gap between people’s hearts with words.”
She does so eloquently.
In response to yesterday’s horrifying slapdown of Volodomyr Zelenskyy by Trump and Vance in the Oval Office, Darya posted three things she wanted to say. Please read them in full on her Substack. I excerpt them here.
1.
I grew up with an abusive father who behaves exactly like Trump.… I know such people very well, and you cannot reason with them. The more you appease them, the less they respect you.
2.
What happened yesterday triggered all possible traumas that I carry inside. Usually, trauma causes a fight-or-flight response. But there is no more flight left, only fight.
3.
The last three years of the genocidal Russian invasion and the world’s hypocrisy and injustice ripped my heart into a million pieces. When I sewed them together, the heart no longer fit into my chest. Maybe that’s why I share it with you in this newsletter – to make you feel what I and millions of people affected by Russian aggression and abuse feel.
I too was triggered yesterday by traumas I carry inside. I started the day by writing a post about my hope that another kind of world will emerge from this chaos. Only after I hit “publish” did I read the news and watch the video. LW and I were driving to Terrace for the day, and she asked if we could please not talk about what’s happening in the world. Just for one day, a small reprieve.
So I carried it in silence.
I don’t usually talk about my trauma, certainly not on this blog. Believe me, I have plumbed its depths in therapy over the years. Most of the time, I can truthfully say it no longer defines me. Still, after 53 years, it can be triggered. Yesterday it was.
(trigger warning)
When I was raped the first time I was on my way home from a “date” if you can call it that when a man lures a child. He told me he was 28. Looking back with a grandmother’s eyes, I can see he was much older, probably closer to 50. I was 13.
He approached me in the park near my house after school. After flattering me and flirting with me for an hour, he asked if he could take me to the fall fair the next evening. I said yes. I met him at the park and walked with him to the fair, not on streets but on trails through the park. It was daylight. Walking home afterwards, it was dark.
At the fair he bought a heart on a chain. I think he paid 50 cents. The heart was stamped out of cheap aluminum, the chain the kind you used to see on bathtub plugs back then. It was 1972. He had the vendor engrave his initials on the heart, and he hung the chain around my neck.
In the dark next to the railroad trestle on the way home he knocked me onto the gravel. I was caught off guard. I couldn’t run because he pinned me down.
“Are you a virgin?” he asked.
I said yes. He laughed.
“Not anymore.”
When he penetrated me he slapped my face, hard.
“That was to take your mind off the pain,” he said.
That slap is what I saw yesterday when Janice Dickson of The Globe & Mail saw a heated exchange. When Andrew Roth of The Guardian saw a shouting match. When the headline writer for The Hill saw a spat.
I saw a rapist and a thug slapping down a shell-shocked freedom fighter: belittling him, blaming him, goading him while the entire world watched, knowing the bigger pain is yet to come.
Darya Zorka said today:
Please take this piece and do something to help the fight.
I offer my experience with trauma with a similar plea.
I hope everyone who watched the despicable ambush yesterday will stand up and fight. As Darya says, we can only defeat this menace together.
And, as Rebecca Solnit says, hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky…. Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.
This moment we are in is an emergency.
7 Responses to “Hope is not a lottery ticket”
Leslie, I cannot think of a clearer analogy to write about such a devastating abuse of power. It takes great courage to speak to this atrocity and be so vulnerable, and to make the personal political makes it so we do take a stand, have a voice and declare the that this violence is unraveling the world order just as your own young life was forever altered. Thank you
Thank you, Joan. It means so much to me that you are here.
Wow, you have described the moment(s) so clearly. I am so sorry for what happened to you and feel privileged that you have shared it. How do evil men like manage to exist in the world without anyone taking them down? I am at a loss as to what I can personally do about this current US bully and aggressor…as I helplessly watch this unfold day after day in horror and trepidation. I understand LW. My daily life has become polluted by this vile individual and I know we need to stand up and fight, but how?
Thank you, Diana. Since you ask: I think it’s crucial that we don’t give in to feelings of helplessness right now. Each of us needs to find and trust and SHARE our own gifts. I don’t even know what all of your gifts are, but I know you have a strong voice and lots of years of experience with the federal government. You have skills. You have chutzpah. You have networks. Reach out to them, and through them, to bring people together. We can’t fight this alone, and as Jane Fonda says, we need a big tent. xo
This post resonates so strongly on International Women’s Day! The way in which you share your own horrific trauma in a way that pulls us all together to look for ways to respond to bullying and abuse, attributes that are once again celebrated in this bizarre culture war.
And your writing is blossoming – its steadily growing beauty is the ground that makes this post (and your earlier ones) so rich. Thank you.
Thank you, Sheila. Your words mean a lot to me.
Thank you, Leslie, for your post. I have been thinking about how the personal intersects with the political and how this particular historical moment holds so much of our collective trauma. Darya is right, I think. We can’t escape this. We can only take it on, in ways that are possible for us. Will hope be enough? I don’t know. But every time we talk about the bullies, the rapists (and I am so sorry that this happened to you), the violence, the lies, maybe we are closer to being able to fight in a meaningful way. I don’t k now. But I’m trying to figure it out.