Notre-Dame.

I have never been to Paris. I've never been in a financial position that would
allow me to visit Europe. Still, the photographs I saw of the fire at Notre-Dame
de Paris even as it continued to burn on Monday gave me the feeling that I was
watching a portal into human history collapse. An acquaintance noted on Facebook
that Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem had caught fire as well, and I said:

> Fortunately it sounds like this fire was more contained / caused less
> structural damage. Both of these incidents make me think of everything that
> was lost in the fire at Brazil's National Museum, though, and of Palmyra, the
> looting of the National Museum of Iraq in 2003, the extensive theft of
> Egyptian antiquities… Humanity keeps burning down the library of Alexandria
> all over again

But today I feel a little differently. after listening to Oberlin College
medieval art history professor Erik Inglis talk about the history of the
cathedral for WBUR's *On Point*. It's not that I feel that the potential losses
in this fire are any less important than they seemed on Monday. Inglis
understands very well the historical importance of the historical artifacts
involved. And yet in his voice I did not here the same quavering grief I heard
in the voices of onlookers interviewed outside the cathedral as it burned.
Inglis does not seem to view the fire as an ending, but as just another event in
the unending and ever more convoluted story of Notre-Dame. The cathedral, Inglis
says, is more "Process" than place. The original construction is said to have
taken about two hundred years, but it has never been static for long. The
beloved stained glass windows feared lost in the fire already had their panes
replaced with lighter, more in-vogue glass in the 1800s. Statues of kings once
considered integral to the cathedral were decapitated, or removed for their
safety, during the Revolution. The spire that collapsed on Monday to the horror
of the world was not "original" to the structure. We have arrived at another
episode in the life of the cathedral, but there is always another episode ahead.
The *process* of the cathedral continues, and this is more than we can say of
many of humanity's worthiest endeavors. The purpose of building the cathedral in
the first place was to raise the prestige of the Bishop of Paris. What it is
today is something vastly different; that is history at work.

* * *

Humiliation.

> "It's all relative to what your community expects of you, and what your family
> expects of you, and what you expect of yourself… And they’re sitting at
> their mom’s house with everyone laughing at them, and it’s a toxic thing."

This could have described me a few short years ago. I'm intimately familiar with
this situation. What's alarming is *who* is describing it. The above quote comes
from a co-founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party, cited a year ago
in [a *Washington Post* piece about how one recruit decided to join
](http://wapo.st/supremacistrecruit), published a year ago. Unlike many
superficial profiles of "alt-right" leaders like Richard Spencer that we saw in
2016-2017, this piece does not focus exclusively on its subject's clean-cut,
presentable side. It shows the ugly reality of his all-consuming obsession with
white-supremacist ideology and how that weighs daily on his vocally disgusted
mother.

When someone becomes a neo-Nazi, that doesn't render them deserving of pity, or
uniquely deserving of understanding. We don't owe it to Nazis to understand why
they became Nazis. But to some degree, we owe it to ourselves, because if there
is a critical point where people who "fall through the gaps" become more
susceptible to this kind of ideology, we must take action to ensure fewer people
end up there.

I was once "humiliated," as the TWP recruiter said, by my inability to become
financially independent and fulfill the expectations that my community had for
me, that my family had for me, and that I had for myself. I was never drawn to
white nationalism; I couldn't describe from experience why it appeals to anyone.
But I was just the sort of person that recruiter described, humiliated, white,
and tenuously identified as male at the time.

The period of several months between when I first dropped out of college in 2012
and when I got my first non-work-study job near the end of that same year was a
very volatile and vulnerable time in my life. I was housed, and adequately fed,
and convinced that I did not deserve it. Unlike the neo-Nazi unflinchingly
depicted in the *Washington Post* piece, I didn't hold back from applying at
local fast food restaurants that advertised they were hiring. I frustrated my
father by using all the gas in his minivan driving around local commerical
areas, filling out applications at any store with a hiring sign. I let him drive
me to ill-reputed temp agencies that never got back to me. I had dropped out of
school because of a looming mental health crisis, but in the short term, the
thoughts I had, that I didn't deserve to live, &c, only got worse.

Back in 2013-2014, when I was working at an unprofitable Target store in central
Massachusetts, begging to pick up unwanted shifts in an often futile attempt to
maintain more than 12 hours of work per week, constantly terrified that I'd lose
my job (in employee reviews I was told first that I was working too slowly, and
not covering enough ground, then that I had improved my pace but I wasn't
accurate enough, and eventually told that they couldn't give me a higher rating
because the store couldn't afford the pay raise that would accompany it), or
that I'd lose our appartment and my partners would become homeless while I moved
back in with my parents, or just worried that if I decided to buy a McChicken on
the way home from work my debit card would be declined -- under those
circumstances my mental health was still probably better, overall, than it was
when I first dropped out of college and was living unemployed in my father's
house. Because even as I struggled with my job, I had the sense that I had
something to live for. I didn't have that when I first dropped out of college.

Alienated, unemployed youth of all genders and ethnic backgrounds are caught in
a psychological crisis, a social crisis, and it is one of capitalism's many
failures of humanity that we allow this crisis to prevail. When those youth also
happen to be white and male, this crisis is also a tinderbox feeding fascism and
mass murder.