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The Five of Wands card from the Modern Witch Tarot. Five people stand in a group, each facing another person, who is not necessarily facing them. Each person is wielding a large wooden staff in a pose of combat. Two of the people are wearing face masks. |
What is citizenship for?
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On July 22, 2024, the Sun moved into the first decan of Leo, that ruled by Saturn, the lord of difficult lessons that can take a lifetime to learn. Leo is the solar sign, and in the domain of self-expression and instinctive confidence, Saturn’s gifts can feel more alienating than affirming to bear. I always think about that feeling when I look at the Five of Wands–why, I wonder, would I look upon an image of all-around conflict and want to do anything but avoid it? As a Libra Rising with a loudly debilitated Mars placement, my first instinct when involved in a conflict is not to engage with a healthy application of personal power, but to people-please myself into an early grave.
Saturn is also the lord of death, and the hard truth is that how we choose to respond to conflict–which I also think of as the dilemmas inherent to power struggles–does have life or death consequences.
The text I read and wrote on for this decan is a story by one of the writers who has most meaningfully impacted my adult life, N. K. Jemisin. Her short story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” is not a single defined answer to the painful questions that arise from the topic I raised. It’s a response–and yes, the story is definitely a response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, but I find that the story carries a living energy of responsiveness to continual moments of urgent, existential grief that have more to do with the world we live in today and tomorrow than with Le Guin’s original text. Maybe this is the singular gift of “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”--that the story’s organic responsiveness echoes its call to the reader to use our privilege to be responsive to harm, as opposed to using our privilege to merely broadcast our disapproval of harm.
Thanks to the powerful, dynamic ethics and philosophical catalyst that Jemisin created in this story, I have been thinking of the Five of Wands and Saturn in Leo in the terms of collective struggle and creative expression as inseparable from conflict.
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The engine of Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” is bound to that of Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. You can read both stories at the links below:
- "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin
- "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" by N. K. Jemisin
Jemisin’s story contains moral substance as substantial and sharp as a blade, all on its own, but the horror that occasions the very making of such a spiritual sword may only come to light when we are willing to confront and criticize our love of the original “Omelas”. The question Jemisin has woven and welded and forged and wielded is:
What is more horrifying to you–the total societal rejection of those who commit grievous harm despite having the power to choose otherwise, or the continued existence of grievous harm upon our most vulnerable people? Which outcome are we more willing to endure?
And why?
Jemisin writes about the cost of a world in which oppression does not exist, not because the utopian world passively happened to work very well, but because certain people choose to actively protect the world from the harms of oppressive actors, and refuse to suffer their harms within society:
"A citizen of Um-Helat has listened, on equipment you would not recognize but which records minute quantum perturbations excited by signal wavelengths, to our radio. He has watched our television. He has followed our social media, played our videos, liked our selfies. We are remarkably primitive, compared to Um-Helat. Time flows the same in both worlds, but people there have not wasted themselves on crushing one another into submission, and this makes a remarkable difference. So anyone can do it—build a thing to traverse the worlds. Like building your own ham radio. Easy. Which is why there is an entire underground industry in Um-Helat—ah! crime! now you believe a little more—built around information gleaned from the strange alien world that is our own. Pamphlets are written and distributed. Art and whispers are traded. The forbidden is so seductive, is it not? Even here, where only things that cause harm to others are called evil. The information-gleaners know that what they do is wrong. They know this is what destroyed the old cities. And indeed, they are horrified at what they hear through the speakers, see on the screens. They begin to perceive that ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root, and grow until it buckles and cracks the foundations of our humanity. “How could they?” the gleaners exclaim, of us. “Why would they do such things? How can they just leave those people to starve? Why do they not listen when that one complains of disrespect? What does it mean that these ones have been assaulted and no one, no one, cares? Who treats other people like that?” And yet, even amid their marvel, they share the idea. The evil . . . spreads."
The speaker of “TOWSaF” shares at the end of the story that the very fact of our horror at the ruthless consequences described in the story is necessary to inspire us to even imagine a world in which no person is treated as less important than another.
"And now we come to you, my friend. My little soldier. See what I’ve done? So insidious, these little thoughts, going both ways along the quantum path. Now, perhaps, you will think of Um-Helat, and wish. Now you might finally be able to envision a world where people have learned to love, as they learned in our world to hate. Perhaps you will speak of Um-Helat to others, and spread the notion farther still, like joyous birds migrating on trade winds. It’s possible. Everyone—even the poor, even the lazy, even the undesirable—can matter. Do you see how just the idea of this provokes utter rage in some? That is the infection defending itself . . . because if enough of us believe a thing is possible, then it becomes so.
And then? Who knows. War, maybe. The fire of fever and the purging scourge. No one wants that, but is not the alternative to lie helpless, spotty and blistered and heaving, until we all die?
So don’t walk away. The child needs you, too, don’t you see? You also have to fight for her, now that you know she exists, or walking away is meaningless. Here, here is my hand. Take it. Please."
What horrors of moral consideration must we struggle through in order to stop seeing ourselves as separate from the child trapped in the cell behind the walls of the wealthy who have allowed them to be tortured–not once, not ten times, but every day for years on end?
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On the last day of this decan, I felt for the first time that I could put words to this terrible sensation of detaching and severance that I have been feeling over the past half-year–a severance not of my connection to other people or to humanity, but to the concept of global citizenship that I had up to now taken for granted.
I can’t stop thinking about my naturalization ceremony in 2010. How I signed my name to a document stating that I would join the United States military if called upon; how I, a fully grown adult, signed my conscious allegiance to citizenship of this country which is responsible for the genocide of children who have been trapped in a concrete cage the size of a city.
I can’t stop thinking it: What is my citizenship for?
I cannot embrace my citizenship to this nation-state, but neither can I responsibly “reject” it. My citizenship affords me privilege that I cannot ethically look away from if I could otherwise use it to protect, care for, or honor the people who do not have access to such privilege.
As a result, I have decided that my citizenship is for leveraging my personal power in service of the most marginalized people of our world. My citizenship is to be examined, inventoried for any ounce or leap of privilege that I might redirect towards the protection, care, and honor of the people I know to be my siblings in humanity.
Nothing more–and surely, nothing less. This is what my citizenship is for. I will stay and fight, and I will not look away from what oppressive bullies are doing to those who have less power, resources, and privilege than them.
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Closing questions:
What is a story about a time you had to learn the limits of your personal power?
What is a story you would like to tell about learning the gifts of your personal power?
When your power collides with that of another, and you feel disempowered, what is one thing you learn?
When your power collides with that of another, and you feel empowered, what is one thing you learn?
What do you have to teach us about staying in the fight?
Links and other reading:
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