May 15, 2024

My family found their way to Salem fifteen years ago. Coming from a rural upbringing in the Willamette Valley, Oregon’s capital is a place that always felt big but whose downtown streetscapes had all the trappings of a cozier nineteenth-century Italianate style. It’s also the namesake of one of the more notorious pieces of short fiction by grand dame of Oregon letters Ursula K. Le Guin. (Omelas, the place from which the ones walked away, is Salem backward with an O-twist.) In the language of the Kalapuya, the original peoples of the mid-Valley, this is a place known as Chemeketa. The meeting or gathering place.

So it was that this spring—as with more than a hundred cities around the country—Salem residents gathered to grapple with the crisis happening in Gaza some 7,000 miles away. 

At the center of our community conversations has been Salem’s Human Rights Commission where I have served for more than two years. We joined places as different as Seattle and Atlanta, or a community perched in the hollows of southern Vermont, where much has been noted about the diverse local governments adopting ceasefire resolutions. Now, as the ink of our own city’s resolution dries, I’m left to reflect on the place of local language in national discourse. 

Our experience began in early April when the Mayor approached us regarding the siege in the Gaza Strip that has continued to unfold on the world stage for more than half a year. A catastrophe plainly accessible to anyone with a mobile device and a tough stomach. Crafting language, however defined, was the Commission’s task. 

Concerns about any public process that mapped language onto an international disaster that persistently cracks the United States’ vision of the world left me with a sense of foreboding. I was raised in an oral tradition with stories that encompass the intimate to the legendary. The central value of naming and placing words in an ecosystem of relationships is at the core of my family’s way of life. And to enter the Commission room on April 17, with loose instructions and a cursory guess about how such a diverse group of city advisors might approach the task, felt daunting. 

What stories were going to be told and tossed out? I did the only thing I knew to do. I thought on far-away family.

In the hills of my people’s ancestral lands, the scorpions crawl out of their caves after the watery swelter of heavy rain. My grandmothers made life in those distant upland landscapes for centuries: harvests, open-air markets, prayerful conversations with the sky pleading for rainfall. Rain that would feed our crops and invite those scorpions out from their cavernous slumbers to play. My memories of these lands, strong and formative though they remain, are today undeniably old. The hills and scorpions of my childhood have been supplemented with stories of gunfire in our community. Stories of aunts suspended in prolonged illness because casual violence, state intimidation, and cartel cruelty, were rendered routine. Harsh murmurs of a slain cousin were met by stories of newborns and neighbors wailing in the night. 

I reflected on how over time the stories we tell, and the language we use, shape who we are as well as our sacrosanct relationship to precious places. 

In the months since early October, as the waters of atrocity continue to come down in deluge, like so many other Indigenous folks, I have laid awake at night dreaming with the youth. Nineteen thousand new orphans in half a year born out of collective punishment that rhymes of losses closer to home. 

Back in April, I was sensitive to the fact that these distilled truths habitually get muddied by our political rhetoric. Our thirty-second, couple-hundred-character attention span, and cliched ideologies. Misunderstanding the uncomfortable role of social protest, for example, or getting the difference between war and annihilation wrong, does more than inflame distrust in the social fabric. Muddled thinking produces more than just alternative facts: it creates alternative worlds. It also allows a celebrated novelist—one whose writing I have for years enjoyed—to pen stylish whataboutery on language as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as every one of Gaza’s twelve universities lie in ruin.

So the language-making process began. The Commission went on to meet three times over three weeks and held some six hours of public discussion on the question we were called upon to consider. In the course of its public engagement, the Commission performed outreach to faith communities, received more pages of public input than it ever had before, well over one hundred members of the public attended the sessions, and nearly half provided spoken testimony.

Our pocket of the valley, though diverse in perspective, asked again and again, how do we process breathtaking violence? And each time, the public centered on a concern for decency. 

A grassroots petition sprung up and gathered more than three hundred signatures calling for a resolution. This coalition, supportive of a resolution process, was affecting in no small part because it was a medley. There were folks born before 1948 who had traveled to Palestine, there were college students for whom this was a new, impassioned cause. There were Jewish youth and elders, a Unitarian minister, and devout Muslims. Palestinian youth living in diaspora. Older Palestinians raising families. One gentleman was living in Salem while attending law school. Another woman had just exited homelessness and professed pride in having this public conversation be her first. 

There were also members of the community who solemnly communicated their trepidation. Others who asked us not to move forward with any language, regardless of intention, out of concern for what they perceived to be the well-being of the Jewish community. There was a rabbi who branded the Commission as being party to a shadowy network of global jihad. Most of the people who took issue with the idea of a resolution asked a necessary question: what does the City, and therefore the Commission, have to do with foreign affairs? In one person’s testimony, we were told authoritatively that the process we were undertaking flew in the face of the U.S. Constitution. 

I considered that they may be right. Our day-to-day work was important: advocating for our unsheltered neighbors, changing city code to more fully serve marginalized communities, public-facing resource fairs, and resolving complaints of discrimination that reached the Mayor’s Office. And this did somehow feel exterior to that project.

One major obstacle to common vocabulary was the use of the word genocide. Proponents of its use invoked its apparency in the events that were unfolding. The destruction was industrial. And the hateful, anti-Palestinian rhetoric of some members of the Knesset and the Cabinet of Israel only served to establish intent. Others dismissed the idea altogether. Associating the concept of genocide with the actions of the State of Israel, some suggested, was categorically antisemitic. 

It is necessary to be specific about the questions and concerns articulated by a few members of local Jewish communities. Namely, Why a resolution? Why does this issue matter in Salem? Why ‘genocide’? What are your credentials? Did you know anything about Israel/Palestine before today? When put in practice, these questions seemed to confound the public process by placing expression, especially terminology invoked by the public in testimony, in a tug-of-war with harm. In particular, the charge of antisemitism, as levied by a handful in the community, struck me as a mechanism of self-defense that had roots in legitimate generational anxiety regarding public conversations on issues they did not feel others had license to speak about—or in a way sensitive to their worldview. Serious concern about public conversations where there were unknown actors. Where there was no established tradition of interfaith or cultural conciliation—even in the many months after October 7. Where trust, that is, had not been established. Similarly, Palestinian Americans approached the Commission with fears of being erased, dismissed entirely, or treated unseriously. Most communicated profound distrust even of local government entities when faced with what they saw as the totalizing and numbing non-concern with the rights and conditions of the Palestinian people. An orientation that saturated the federal government and national conversation.

Collective and selective aphasias immobilize and inflict social injuries in our communities.

Another rabbi, whose sincerity and thought-provoking commentaries I appreciated throughout, lamented what he thought was the divisive nature of a resolution. He insisted that if a resolution process was to be explored at all, then months of coalition-building was necessary, and the language-crafting process could no longer move forward. Besides, he reminded us, the City had already waited six months. While everyone involved agreed that building community was an essential part of the work we do at the local level (indeed, the Commission reaffirmed its commitment to such a practice in the resolution), Commissioners felt the urgency to exercise their advisory role when asked, especially now that residents had turned to their city. Personally, I maintained that resolutions and coalition-building were important and complementary, albeit independent commitments. He and the Commission ultimately recognized that it was possible to take steps toward building community while also denouncing hate and atrocities.

Discomfort—perhaps even graduating into anxiety—is a tense and strenuous but common part of many public processes. On this issue, I am left unable to imagine a public process, whether in my community or any other, that would not be fraught. How are local entities, for example, to weigh the apprehension experienced by one group over the dismay felt by another over the choice to remain silent?

In the Commission’s letter to our elected leadership, we acknowledged that a resolution process on issues of foreign affairs may, at first, appear extraordinary. But by the end of our public engagement, the Commission concluded that it was justified. Salem taxpayers collectively subsidize (to the tune of $2 million) the actions of a foreign government that in the judgment of the United Nations, and a majority of the international community, is committing egregious violations of the rules of war, including genocide, against the Palestinian people. The Commission held that these issues were intimately entangled with the experience of community in Salem. And that a necessary precondition to harmony, locally or otherwise, was the recognition of the situation's dire reality. The centering of human life and dignity. The language presented for their consideration, we argued, was a serious effort on the part of the Commission to telegraph Salem’s core value of compassion: promoting peace, standing against bigotry, and celebrating our cultural diversity.

While local mistrust ate away at the language-making process, the issue at hand was ultimately about our purchase as taxpayers on the lives of people far away. In that exchange, it was important that a public body feel free to use the most accurate language available in describing the conditions and circumstances of the world. If we could not imagine or articulate a present, then we were prohibited from putting language to a future, and would be eventually rendered unable to materialize it. And at a local level, even if we could not agree on what constituted the right language, we at least needed to still be having the same conversation—something that in Salem, like communities everywhere, we are still working on. 

Before the Commission began its work, I had no idea who in Salem, a place whose very name makes allusions to peace, would even be paying attention or care about far-away families. Though not always easy, it has been a privilege to do the necessary work that public service expects of us: hearing from everyone who hopes to express themselves; consistently meeting with community leaders; fielding feedback that sometimes scorched from its intensity; and attending to peace and understanding (a bottom line, occasionally disregarded by members of the public, that needed reinforced). Fundamentally, elevating difficult dialogue into the public arena, while striving to center the importance of language and respect among peoples, has been the most generative product of the resolution process I experienced. And given my early doubts, it felt like a relief.

As local leaders, we are still left to contend with the role that local governments ought to play in adopting resolutions amid national and international calamities—even the ones that we pay for out of pocket.  Intense public processes, regardless of the merits of a resolution, can be prohibitive. And what, after all, does it matter if we are starting hundreds of conversations around the country if these efforts are thought to be merely symbolic?

In the United States, outside of voting or running for elected office, there are few ways for individuals to directly influence decision-making. For local governments to materially communicate their values at the federal level, certainly in areas not immediately within their authority, there are fewer mechanisms still. As a representative republic, our democracy is precious and vital—and in practice, not unlike a virtual exercise. That is to say, there are numerous dilution points between you and the political class. An average congressional district, for example, represents 700,000 voters. On any given day, the neighborly district resident is not coming face-to-face with their congressperson. Likewise, Israel’s actions in Palestine are not itemized in the ballot box. Voters are left to pick between their moral commitments and the promise of forgiven student loans, or else risk an alarming embrace of unencumbered homegrown white nationalism. College protests are scrutinized as juvenile obscurantism and mobilizations that shut down heavily trafficked bridges are made to appear out of touch. So, with this understanding of civic participation, and our relationship to it, how else do we as local leaders expect to serve our constituencies?

We could remain silent or point residents elsewhere. But something that our experience in Salem taught me was that silences, vacuums of vision, breed distrust and resentment.

Folks want to hear from their elected officials. When people experience uncertainty for any one of many reasons, they should expect to be taken seriously by leaders who are also their neighbors. And as the last half-year has demonstrated, residents will approach us. What formal role other than engaging in a public process, embarking on those challenging community discussions, do we have to play in an unfolding national conversation when they do? 

Having not been a part of the more than one hundred resolution processes across the nation, I cannot speak to the intention of each council. I suspect, however, given that I don’t believe Salem to be a dazzling outlier in the American consciousness, that the point of these resolutions is not to bring about some amorphous undertaking by which cities take the reins of moral superiority. Or even necessarily dictate foreign policy. But instead, as proximal polities, we are interested in capturing the spirit of our neighbors. It is to all of our benefit that communities allow for painful conversations and let them mature.

When our taxpayer dollars are involved—when heart-wrenching loss is met with disproportionate, indiscriminate, and heinous violence—communities need to be able to exercise their best language to call upon leaders in a position to make a change to do what is within their power to enact that change.

By now, it has taken over two hundred days for more than one hundred cities to name a truth that was unambiguous to the world community not long after Israel’s retaliation began in response to the brutal and anguishing Hamas insurgency on October 7. The inspiring capacity of ordinary folks of all backgrounds across the United States to organize themselves, and their representative governments, around decency serves as a reminder of our responsibility as humans with heart to either make the circumstances that leave people carrying these catalogs of blood and memory as few in number as possible, or else make the burden of carrying them lighter through solidarity. It is an impulse that seems to fade the further you get away from the heartbeat of neighborhoods and wade into the seas of shibboleth. 

Solidarity, in part, begins with the language we do, or don’t, use. As we sit here together, the Israeli right-nationalist leadership recently rejected an agreement, again becoming the obstacle to peace it often blames on others, and marches into the last receding corner of refuge that is Rafah. To my fellow city leaders across the country: our imperative—to hold conversations, denounce genocide and call for a ceasefire, but also refute Palestinian misery as an American value—our imperative for the language of peace only grows.

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