You're Not Giving Up. You're Letting Go.

A meditation on politics and causes.

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The title for this essay comes from Earnest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a book I hadn’t thought about for years. It’s worth rereading, especially now. It reminds me just how many books you read in your teens or 20s that you don’t truly appreciate until later in life. Now, in my 40th year, I understand what Hemingway was getting at. Whatever else you might have to say about him as a person, he nails what many of us are feeling now, so I’m going to talk about it.

Here we go:

You might remember the basics: An American named Frederic Henry winds up driving an ambulance in the Italian Army during the First World War. That world and its ideals inspire very little in him.

From the beginning, Henry cringes at words like “glory” and “patriotism.” And yet, he carries out his duties. Then he gets hit by a bomb while eating a cold macaroni lunch in the trenches, with the other ambulance drivers.

During his recovery, he meets the love of his life, a beautiful nurse named Catherine. For once, he feels something, a sense of connection with someone else. She’s also recovering from loss. In just a few weeks, they start a family. It doesn’t matter to the institutions. They don’t care about his injuries or his health, or his future. They send Henry back to the front anyway, knowing he’ll likely die.

He walks into a total mess.

Days later, Henry gets caught up in an embarrassing retreat as the German army starts to break through the Italian lines. It’s a real shit show. Nobody does their job. Nobody listens. Nobody follows orders. Honestly, there aren’t many orders to follow anyway. Everyone, from commanding officers all the way down to ambulance drivers and engineers, start running scared. They refuse to help each other when their vehicles break down. They leave little girls stranded on back roads. At one point, terrified soldiers simply start shooting each other.

The retreat breaks down into further chaos as soldiers begin executing their officers on sight, blaming them for everything gone wrong. Understandably, Henry deserts. He understands something critical: If this is how his own side treats each other, there’s nothing left to fight for anyway.

He grabs Catherine, and they escape to Switzerland.

“The war seemed as far away as the football games of someone else’s college.” That’s how Henry feels, watching the insanity from afar.

It’s exactly on point.

This isn’t the story of a coward who abandons his post. It’s the story of a reasonable individual who gets fed up with the massive incompetence and indifference of the people who are supposed to be his allies, supposed to be on his side, who are instead trying to kill him. Henry has already gotten blown up once. He’s already done everything he can do. His own team doesn’t want his help. They don’t want to listen to him. They just want him to shut up and drive the ambulance. They just want him to follow orders, even if they get everyone killed, even if it makes the love of his life a widow for a second time, and forces her to raise a child in a post-apocalyptic world, all by herself, with nobody to count on.

And for what?

A cause?

The story means so much more when you read it in light of the historical context, and when you think about its relevance today. When you come to understand the real Woodrow Wilson, the one described in John Barry’s The Great Influenza, you don’t see a great man. You don’t see a defender of democracy. You see a card-carrying eugenecist warhawk, a reckless tyrant who just might’ve been responsible for catalyzing the 1918 flu pandemic with his abhorrent public health policies and exclusive focus on not only winning the war, but completely annihilating the German Empire and securing American dominance around the world.

For Wilson, the war was personal. He wrapped his vendetta against Germany up in a moral crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.”

Does that sound familiar?

Why was it so personal?

Wilson was shocked and enraged over the 1917 Zimmerman Telegram, in which Germany proposed an alliance with Mexico, promising to help them reclaim parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—all lost to the U.S. during our territorial and largely unlawful expansions during the 19th century.

Germany wanted to promote Mexican sovereignty against American imperial expansion, and that enraged Wilson. More than anything, even unrestricted submarine warfare, that fueled his aggression.

It wasn’t about protecting democracy.

It was about protecting empire.

In many ways, Woodrow Wilson got us involved in a war that had almost nothing to do with us and cooked up reasons for American intervention in Europe, in order to promote American imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, all while pushing eugenics at home and completely ignoring all the warning signs leading up to the 1918 pandemic, and continuing to ignore said pandemic as it unfolded. As a bonus, historians widely acknowledge that Wilson “indirectly” helped create the brutal post-war Germany that enabled Hitler’s rise to power.

Henry was serving in the Italian Army, but Hemingway’s critiques apply broadly. The Italian Army’s flaws provide a metaphor for the futility of global politics and warfare in general. When you understand all that, you start to understand why someone would desert the army and start thinking of a world war as “the football games of someone else’s college.” You’re not fighting for anything. You’re not saving anyone. You’re just helping the corrupt leaders of one side or the other. In that sense, you’re better off getting as far away from it as you can.

All of that describes how many of us might feel after reading story after story about:

• The Ellison family taking over yet another media platform

• The head of the FBI spending his days blackout drunk

• Judges undoing state referendums, against the people’s will

• Wars and genocides that continue regardless of what we do

• Climate disasters already baked into a collapsing ecosystem

• A public constantly distracted by superficial headlines

• One hollow political promise after another

• Trump’s latest meltdowns

We start to feel more and more like Frederic Henry, sent off to fight for causes that don’t help anyone but a handful of individuals at the very top, who push those causes for the sake of ulterior motives. We’re told to follow orders that don’t make sense. We’re expected to help allies and comrades who don’t want our help, who don’t listen to us, who abandon us and their values at the first opportunity.

Our allies talk a big game, but they flee from every moment that requires them to endure the slightest hardship or risk. They run scared. They refuse to help. And then when we manage to survive their incompetence, they want to blame us for everything. They want to drag us off and execute us.

It’s more than a sense of futility.

It’s more than a sense of indifference. It’s a sense of having done everything you can, and watching the communities and institutions you sacrificed yourself for shrug you off, while telling you it wasn’t enough, while sending you back to the front, but not with a better plan, not with better tools, not with any promise to make your next sacrifice worthwhile or even valued.

Maybe that’s how you feel.

You’ve stopped caring as much, but not because you feel unaffected. You’ve stopped caring as a matter of self-preservation. Often, it feels like nobody cares if you care. Nobody wants to hear your opinion. Nobody wants your solutions. Nobody shares your cause. Nobody thinks you matter.

They just want you to adopt their cause. They want you to adopt their solution. They want you to follow their plan. They want you to put your life on the line for it, even if they’re not. When their plan fails, they’re going to flee. They’re going to leave you in the broken-down ambulance in the ditch. If you manage to make it back in one piece, they’re going to shoot you anyway.

So, why bother?

It’s not giving up, it’s letting go. There’s a difference.

When you give up, you admit defeat. You do nothing. When you let go, you simply make better decisions about where to focus. You make the decisions for yourself, and you stop joining causes simply because they sound noble at the time, or because they make you feel good about yourself. It’s maturity.

I’m not here now to tell you what to care about. I’m here to name a feeling. If you’re thinking that there’s actually no “good guys” in these struggles we’re in, if you’re feeling like you can’t even count on your own party or your own friends, if you feel like everyone is giving all their time and energy to the wrong things, if you feel like it’s time to bail, to grab who and what you care about, and leave everything else behind as if it’s the football games of another college, maybe you’re not wrong. Maybe you’re not giving up. You’re evolving. You’re becoming wiser.

Maybe you’re not a coward. Maybe you’re not indifferent or privileged. Maybe you’re not insulated. You’re not jaded, just seasoned.

Maybe it’s time for you to stop listening to what everyone else thinks you should do, and to start doing what you know is the right thing. Not the right thing according to politicians and political parties. Not the right thing according to cable news networks. Not the right thing according to slogans and viral posts on social media. But the right thing for you and your family. The right thing for your community, however you define that. Maybe you don’t even know what the right thing is. If so, it’s worth taking some time to figure that out.

If you want to vote, then do it. If you want to protest, then do it. If you want to yell at your senators, then do it. But if you’re starting to feel like you’re getting blown up for no reason, just driving the ambulance into one ditch after another, only to make it back and be shot anyway, by your own side, it’s fine to take some time out. It’s fine to find your own cause, and to put your time and energy there.

If the enemies are breaking through the lines, but your own side is too busy shooting each other to do anything about it, are you a bad person for bailing? No, I would say you’re not. You’re not giving up.

You’re letting go.