The Weight of Knowing

Ignorance is bliss for a reason

I’m back from traveling (which is why there was no post last week), and I’ve been thinking. Quite a lot.

For those who don’t know me personally, I live in the U.S. and recently spent ten days in Italy. I left excited for beautiful scenery, good food, and learning about my family history. I came back with a weird taste in my mouth (and no it wasn’t from the airplane food, although that sh!t sucked).

While in Venice, we visited the Doge’s Palace, a Gothic landmark in the Palazzo San Marco. Before leaving the courtyard and heading up the stairs to enter the many rooms of the palace, we chatted briefly with a security guard who asked where we were from. When we told him America, he mentioned that he had traveled once to the Southwest, specifically because of knowing and liking John Wayne.

Then, when describing Westerns, he used the phrase, “cowboys versus Indians” before stopping and correcting himself: “Native Americans.” He rolled his eyes and launched into an unsolicited rant against “woke culture,” “cancel culture,” and even the Me Too movement. “Thumbs down to all of it,” he said. I stopped listening and didn’t wish him a “buona giornata” as I went up the stairs.

That conversation stuck with me. Why was this man so upset about American efforts to acknowledge historical wrongs? He’s in Venice, for crying out loud. Why should he care? Does he know about America’s long and varied history with trying to cover up history? Does he know why the term “Indian” when referencing a Native person is considered harmful? Heck, do most Americans even know?

That brings me to the crux of this ramble: there’s a lot going on right now. I’m growing up in a time like no other, where we have unlimited access to everything in the world all the time. You can be scrolling your feed and go from Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover discourse to children dying in Gaza in a matter of seconds. It’s everything all at once, and somehow feels like nothing because we’re all too numb.

Many days, I think to myself: I wish I could just throw my phone in the lake. I’d chuck it, hear the splash, watch it sink, and walk away. Like Andy at the end of The Devil Wears Prada. She had enough of Miranda calling her, so she tossed her phone into a fountain in Paris. How freeing it looks. No more added appendage to your hand, no more constant worrying if someone will text or call you and you might miss it, no more doomscroll.

But…then what? Do I want to be disconnected? I still want to know what’s going on. I like being involved in my communities and standing up for what’s right. In a twisted way, I relish the never ending fight. So is ignorance really bliss?

This note from jericho came up on my feed on Substack, and it stopped me in my tracks:

This note has haunted me the entirety of this past 4th of July. I’ve thought about it almost every day since I first read it a couple weeks ago.

When you start to peel back the layers and look into the underbelly of history, too much is too ugly. You start losing faith in everything; humanity, government, religion, institutions, leadership. All the things that you once considered pillars and beacons of truth as a child suddenly turn out to be manned by the same imperfect, sometimes ignorant people you went to high school with. You hope you never have to see those people again after senior year before you remember that they have to grow up with you.

When celebrating 4th of July this year, it was hard not to think about this monster the country has morphed into since January. It was hard to feel patriotic when I thought about the rollback of rights for women and femmes, the criminalization of queerness, the cruelty towards immigrants. It bothers me so much that these issues only matter to people once it affects them, because these are my friends, my classmates, the people who are closest to me. It made me sad that I don’t feel pride when looking at the flag. It’s difficult to hear “All Summer Long” by Kid Rock and not think of him shooting up Bud Light beer cans. It was hard to read Anne Lamott’s post about celebrating 4th of July and not get frustrated because of course, she’d be able to go to a No Kings protest as a white woman who is notable and has influence. Meanwhile, my friends of color would feel unsafe because of the fear of being literally kidnapped, and can’t leave the country to visit family because they might not be able to enter again.

It would be so much easier if it all disappeared. I could move to a cottage, maybe in the south of France or the lush, green hills of Ireland, and I’d be able to forget about everything, toss my phone, feel at peace, breathe. At least for a little while.

But I know I’d still feel unrest. Because I do want to know what’s happening. I want to stay awake. I want to keep asking: what can I do? How can I help? How do I live in this world without turning away? How will my future children live in this world?

And so the cycle begins again.

I don’t have answers. At least, not all of them. What I do know is that retreating into a bunker will not make anything better. The weight of knowing is heavy. But learning how to hold complexity instead of fleeing from it is better than pretending the weight doesn’t exist.

Because this bastard child of a country, this hodgepodge of belief systems and peoples and tongues, is also what makes it beautiful. America isn’t just burgers on the grill, pick-up trucks and shotguns, and bald eagles cawing into the Western wind. It’s also Spanish tapas, Black Church Sunday barbecues, and Muslim bean pie. It’s Vietnamese pho simmering in a Houston kitchen, and Korean hotteok sold in Los Angeles. It’s powwow drums echoing through the Great Plains and a Yiddish lullaby in a Brooklyn apartment. It’s drag queens lip-syncing in small-town bars and farmworkers in the hot sun. It’s floating between English and another language, a mixture of the two around the dinner table at my house, and countless other tables around the country.

It’s also the legacy of cotton fields and internment camps, of boarding schools that stripped Native children of language and long hair, of redlined neighborhoods and Central Park being built in Seneca Village. That’s in the soil too.

I want to believe it can be better.

Humanity can be ugly. But would a person panning for gold give up on the muddy surface? That tabula rasa, that blank slate of goodness, has to be in us somewhere. Doesn’t it?

Maybe that’s the only way forward. Facing the world as it is while still finding ways to believe in what it could be.

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Thank you for reading this week. This definitely felt like a tangled up ramble in my head, so seeing it written out makes me happy. I hope you liked it, and if you didn’t, that’s okay too. That’s the great thing about writing! It’s all subjective.

I hope you’re taking care of yourself. I appreciate you <3

- Lillian