Bubbles of comfort in the chaos

On doing what you can in a world gone mad

Yesterday afternoon, I was on my way to Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church in Minneapolis, where I’m performing in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. As I crossed Dunwoody on Hennepin Avenue and approached the Sculpture Garden, traffic slowed, then halted. 

There was a giant pro-Palestine protest spilling out from Loring Park, across the highway on my left. People filled the pedestrian bridge above that connects the park and the Sculpture Garden, waving flags and signs and shouting down at the motorists below. I sat in the stopped traffic for a while and took it all in: the signs, the flags, the throngs of people. 

Then I noticed that the stoplight ahead had cycled through several rounds of green, but we hadn’t budged. People started laying on their horns. The protesters on the bridge above and behind me—and lining the ramped walkway leading up to it—kept shouting. I was surrounded on all sides, trapped. The light ran through a few more cycles. 

I assumed protesters had blocked traffic at the intersection ahead and weren’t letting us move, but I couldn’t see past the stopped cars in front of me. People started getting out of their cars. I got out too. 

A man and woman got out of a black SUV a few cars up and stormed toward the intersection, turning occasionally to shout and gesture at the protesters behind us on the bridge. Doors flung open all around me. The man behind me, who’d been laying on his horn (perhaps in support of the protesters holding signs urging people to honk), left his door open and asked me to keep an eye on his running truck as he too rushed toward the intersection.

Groups of people ahead broke into heated arguments. I huddled with a woman who’d gotten out of the minivan right in front of me, and a young man from the car in front of her. The man was furious, practically in tears, screaming, “This isn’t peaceful!” He was on his way to work, where he was already late. He had bad acne, his face was red. He seemed to be hanging by a thread. 

I slowed my breathing, tried to modulate the vibrations of my nervous system and invite his to match mine, murmured little validations: “I know, it’s so frustrating, I know. Hopefully they’ll let us go soon.”

The woman was a case worker, on her way to the home of a client who was an acute suicide risk. The client’s mother had just died, and she’d indicated that she intended to hurt herself. “I should be there,” the woman told me. “She could be killing herself right now.” I touched her arm and held her eye. Even the angry young man got quiet. “I’m so sorry,” he said to her. For a moment, we formed a bubble of comfort in the chaos.

More people were stomping by. I suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable, standing there in the street. I got back into my car to call my stage manager—we were ten minutes from curtain and I didn’t know if I’d make it, though it was right around the corner. But then cars started moving. I hung up and drove. 

As I passed through the intersection, I saw men on ATVs on the median, brandishing the flag of Hamas. 

I made it to the church just in time to throw on my costume and go on, my heart still pounding. Between scenes, I checked my phone and saw an Instagram story from a friend who was at the protest. She said a car had just plowed through the protesters and shots had been fired. There was a jangly video of people running, a car speeding away.

After the show, I saw more videos that had surfaced online. The car in question was occupied by an old man with a handicapped hanger on his rearview mirror. He looked terrified as his car was surrounded by young men trying to kick in his windows. It looked like he had tried to edge forward through the protesters—no one had been hit or injured—before they mobbed him. I didn’t see or hear a gun at any point in the video. But I couldn’t see beyond what those filming happened to capture.

The theme of the day was confusion. I couldn’t see the intersection from where I was when traffic stopped. I couldn’t see the full context of what happened with the elderly man in the car. I certainly can’t see Palestine or Israel from here. I can’t do anything more about the situation there than I could about the protesters trapping me with hundreds of angry people (God knows how many of whom have PTSD, or guns, or somewhere to be that means life or death) on a stretch of road with no escape. 

Last night, when I was finally home, trying to calm down, I flashed back to 2003 in Burkina Faso. I was in a small village teaching people how to filter their drinking water so they didn’t consume Guinea worm larvae, and a couple of pre-teen boys were following me around, eager to hang out with the weird white lady. They were both wearing t-shirts depicting Osama bin Laden in heroic poses—like American boys sporting superhero garb.

I asked them if they knew who that was. They sure did. I asked if they knew why Americans might find those shirts disturbing. They didn’t. I tried to explain, but they looked confused. (To be fair, my French was pretty rudimentary.) They couldn’t see it from where they were standing—how this David who took on Goliaths could be anything but heroic. It was all abstraction, all storybook stuff: mythology and identity and imagination. 

But they could see me and I could see them, as we chatted under a tree. We were real to each other. We touched each other’s clothes and laughed and asked questions. 

Yesterday, the case worker and the angry young man and I were real to each other, though we couldn’t see all of what was going on around us. We filled it in with imagination and story—who was keeping us trapped and why—and we co-regulated. We brought each other into a calmer, more connected place, just for a minute. We took care.

I think that may be all we can do. Find the people we can see and touch and hear. Take care of them. Let them take care of us. The people a block or an ocean away are out of reach, the situations there out of our hands. But we’re right here. We can’t let our imaginations and abstractions and storylines about the world make us monstrous to those we’re standing beside. Our sphere of influence is small, but I have to think it matters to inhabit it with courage, calm, and care. The thing you can reach out and touch is the thing you need to tend with love.