Bouleverize me
There’s a French word I love that I use sparingly because of the weight of its meaning. “Bouleversant” runs the gamut, from overwhelming to shocking, upsetting to heart-wrenching, deeply moving to downright shattering. It’s a word that can be full of overblown drama yet laced with quiet tumult.
From the moment I first learned it, I pictured the hapless subject of Edvard Munch’s “Scream” lost in one of Paris’ grand boulevards, with the ornate Second Empire streetlights completely upended against a blazing orange sky.
What one finds bouleversant, sadly, varies from person to person. One would think that some things are just simply beyond the pale that every single person with a heart and a conscience would be appalled by them.
Such bizarre creatures
But we humans are such bizarre creatures that three years into a genocide in Gaza, there are still those who defend mothers being burned alive in tents while their children watch, immobilized by fear.
There are still those who shrug while our country is being prostituted—again—to curry favor with the waning empire that is America (and the so-called liberal world order). While our forests are being stripped bare—with the approval of the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources—to enrich illegal loggers and the politicians who protect them.
And while our farmers plod on—day after day, flood after flood—in a desperate attempt at food security, only for the Philippines to emerge as the world’s number one rice importer.
And there are still those who are furious at the burning of a city hall in Limoges, considering it a tragedy—an affront to the glories of European civilization for which France has always served as a vanguard. Yet they express no outrage when a young student is sexually abused by riot police during a perfectly peaceful and legitimate protest for the right to decent education.
There are those for whom property damage is a greater crime than the steady erosion of human rights, a form of state-sanctioned violence in itself. Yet even this outrage is selective: Where are the cries of indignation as Lebanon’s southern region—with its historic mosques and Christian churches and monuments dating back to antiquity—is being pulverized by Israel on a daily basis?
A desensitizing mentality
All this Western bullsh*t about detaching ourselves from material things and focusing on our spiritual growth, on “who we are inside,” is just that: bullsh*t—served to us by white people who profit from our wholesale gullibility as they shamelessly appropriate from Eastern cultures.
Peak capitalism, in other words. An overarching philosophy of profit over people. It’s such a desensitizing mentality that really is so bouleversant in the way it has succeeded in glorifying the ultimately hollow achievements of the ruling classes—with the compliance of a pliant media—while demonizing those who dare defy them.
Hence, the framing of the young students in Paris rising up against their government as terrorists-in-the-making who have fallen under the unpatriotic spell of leftists and Islamists instead of concerned citizens holding the State to account.
Hence the focus on luxury stores being vandalized by professional agitators (and some plainclothes policemen among them) and not the everyday violence experienced by everyday people who ask for a life of basic dignity.
Hence the increasingly repressive and militaristic attempts of those in power to curtail absolutely valid protests and any form of resistance.
What threatens the status quo
The powers-that-be know that to succeed in organizing is to succeed in reinforcing the sense of community that bonds people together. That strengthens the voices of those who have been muted. That gives agency to the disempowered. That threatens the status quo.
The status quo insists it wants peace. Their definition of peace is acquiescence—silent capitulation to the power of capital, in essence. But I hope their world of imperial delusions is bouleversé soon.
Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
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