The Theater of Solidarity

Thursday, April 24, 2025

(on instrumentalized compassion, false demands, and the true recognition of the forgotten)

There is a scene repeated on city sidewalks every day:
A smiling young person in a bright vest approaches a passerby —
“Do you have a moment for human rights?”
“Would you like to support our cause?”
“We only need a small monthly donation to make a difference.”

But the passerby is often another young person.
A student. A precarious worker. A body already stretched thin.
Already giving everything just to survive.

And that is the perversity:
This version of solidarity doesn’t confront power.
It extracts from the exhausted.
It targets those who have the least, not those who hold the most.
It is not solidarity — it is the simulation of solidarity.

Behind the scenes, many of these street fundraisers are under contract.
Paid by numbers.
Trained to scan for guilt, for kindness, for internal conflict — and intercept it.
They are not evil.
They are used.
Just like the passersby they approach.

This is not a critique of compassion.
It is a rejection of instrumentalized compassion.
Of compassion turned into transaction.
Of guilt redirected toward the poor, rather than the powerful.

Because while these organizations harvest emotion in the streets,
the truly forgotten — the ones without clean narratives or photogenic causes — remain invisible.
The homeless. The mentally ill. The broken.
The ones who do not speak in polished slogans.
The ones who smell. The ones who scream. The ones who cannot be converted into monthly subscriptions.

They are not absent.
They are deliberately bypassed.
Because their complexity resists marketing.
Because their suffering cannot be simplified into a pitch.

So what does real recognition look like?

It does not begin with asking for money.
It begins with seeing.
With remaining.
With walking past someone on the street and meeting their eyes without fear or pity.

It means not flinching.
Not looking away.
Not offering coins to make oneself feel lighter.
But instead, holding presence. Holding weight.

Real recognition is non-consumable.
It is slow.
It does not demand applause.
It is not a product.

And it begins with a question turned inward:
Am I willing to stay with what discomforts me, without needing to fix it? Am I willing to witness, without extracting meaning or redemption? Am I willing to carry someone else’s existence without making it about myself?

Because if not —
then what we call solidarity
is just another form of capture.

APPENDIX: ON RECOGNITION WITHOUT ABSORPTION

(for the ones who want to see without being taken)

It must be said clearly:

Recognition is not submission. Compassion is not availability. Lucidity does not mean letting oneself be breached.

There is a particular discomfort many feel when approached by homeless men — especially women, queer beings, those whose bodies have been trained to accommodate fear, to shrink under pressure, to give when they wish to remain intact.

This discomfort is not prejudice. It is not lack of care. It is the wisdom of the body, the sharp intuition that says: This person is hurting, yes. But this person is also projecting their need onto me in a way that echoes the very dynamics I have escaped.

Some men, even in brokenness, reach not toward their peers, but toward women — seeking softness, seeking gaze, seeking to provoke fear to extract a coin, a glance, a reaction. They do not turn to each other. They continue, even in exile, to expect something from the ones who have already been taken from.

And this must be recognized too.

The presence of pain does not erase the possibility of violence. Being discarded by the system does not absolve one from reproducing its structures. A broken sword can still cut.

So what does ethical recognition look like, here?

It looks like this: I see you. I know you were failed. But I do not owe you my softness. I do not owe you my fear. I do not owe you an energy that was already stolen from me a thousand times before.

It is possible to hold dignity for another without sacrificing one’s own.

Recognition does not mean dissolving boundaries. It means seeing someone fully — including the traces of harm they still carry, and sometimes, still wield.

And this too, is an act of care: To protect what is soft and whole, so that it may continue to exist in a world that does not yet know how to hold it.