In conversation with Page, Schulman explained that the speech was approved by Kelly’s partner and friends and delivered in the spirit of the political funerals during the thick of the AIDS pandemic; she wanted to dispel the fantasy of suicide as any kind of solution. She took questions from those in the audience who had felt wounded or angered. What’s striking in the transcript is the lack of defensiveness on the part of Schulman, who might have felt unfairly criticized (most of her critics had not even known Kelly), or those who objected to the language of the eulogy. Emotions were not used as excuses to escalate the conflict or leave it entirely; instead, the people in the room seem to move closer together.
“The emergence of conflict does not have to mean that someone is bad or to blame,’’ Spade counsels in “Mutual Aid,” “and the more we can normalize conflict, the more likely we can address it and come through it stronger, rather than burning out and leaving the group or the movement and/or causing damage to others.”He offers some practical strategies, including: “Remember, no one made us feel this way, but we are having strong feelings, and they deserve our caring attention.”
This, I must admit, is much of the same language I use with my toddler. Are we so lost that we need such instruction? It can seem comical, but where do we see conflict modeled well? Not skirted or turned incendiary? Such modeling is so rare that I remember specific instances — for example, the dialogue between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde printed in Essence magazine in 1984. “Jimmy, we don’t have an argument,” Lorde says. “I know we don’t,” Baldwin responds, to which she replies, “But what we do have is a real disagreement.” They do not allow each other to find false commonalities or to cocoon themselves in injury away from finding, even provisionally, a common language. At the crux of their conversation is how to speak of the differences between them — openly, productively and without a sense of competition. “Truly dealing with how we live, recognizing each other’s differences, is something that hasn’t happened,” Lorde tells Baldwin. “When we deal with sameness only, we develop weapons that we use against each other when the differences become apparent. And we wipe each other out — Black men and women can wipe each other out — far more effectively than outsiders do.”
It’s tempting to attempt a thesis here, to tie the decline of social endurance or conflict endurance to social media, perhaps, or the pandemic. In their new book, “Conflict Resilience,” the legal scholar Robert Bordone and the neurologist Joel Salinas make a case that our social muscles are profoundly atrophied. Bordone, who negotiates conflicts between corporations and governments, describes being increasingly called in to oversee conflicts among ordinary people and families who could not resolve even minor differences. The authors offer case studies and simple tips to develop conflict endurance, of holding discomfort in the body: “Building muscle for conflict holding, like building muscle for your arms, quads or calves, is a process, not a one-and-done event.”
Have we gone from a world of no-contact deliveries to a world where familial disagreements increasingly go the “no-contact” route, where there is an “epidemic of estrangement,” in the name of avoiding conflict and pain? But to read these accounts of solidarity is to realize that these calls have been part of every era, every movement.