"Together"

A group of New Yorkers trying to erase swastikas from the tube windows one early morning; an illiterate old man who carries firewood to a children's library of his own making in a tiny Anatolian town; Lebanese protesters singing 'Baby Shark' in their thousands to send a baby who had been stuck in the traffic off to sleep; residents of Hong Kong taking their friends from the hands of heavily armed police; Chilean women standing up to police brutality through dance; Irish school kids organising to stop the deportation of their Nigerian friend. 

These moments, Ece Temelkuran points out, get shared on social media because they move us. They move me, anyway. When I watch such moments, those parts of me rise, calling, "Yes, that's us! That's humanity! I want be counted among such people. I want us all to be counted among such people."

In a very short book, Temelkuran tries to cover a huge amount of ground, geographic and philosophical. She draws on her lived experience as a journalist and person living in political exile. She dilates back and forth between detailed, minutely rendered scenes to truly big ideas. Basically, though, she is trying to patch together or distill (in keeping with her abundant use of metaphor) those words and concepts that do still move us, in spite of political disappointment, disillusion, defeat. Words like "together".

Some arguments, questions, and topics in Together:

• "Most of us do crave being part of a real story" (e.g. a war)
• Can we love romantic partners who are not moved by or at least curious about resistance?
• Dignity
• While reality may seem scary through our screens, we are more able to deal with it than we imagine
• A movie in which an Italian town defies the Nazis, not by heroism, but by people behaving like 'sheep' and joining in a very practical human chain to evacuate their wine (The Secret of Santa Vittoria, 1969)
• Choose attention over anger
• Social media platforms are not a Greek agora but someone else's private garden
• "The collective-female, acting as a single body, has already been activated to respond to the greatest ever attack on all that is feminine: an attack on our rivers and our soil. From Canada to the Amazon rainforests..."
• Successes of the planned economy in Turkey before the 1980 military coup
• Friendship
• Love

I like that Temelkuran isn't offering a grand thesis in a bloated several hundred-page book. This is not a master plan that some government or organization needs to get behind to save us all from fascism and nihilism. It's a bunch of experiences, observations, and fragments cupped in two hands and held up with urgency to say, "Look what you can choose right now. What are you waiting for?"