You don't have any solutions to adoption! I knew it!
My adventures swimming with the sea lions.
Before I muted my viral-not-in-a-good-way tweet last week, I was most surprised by the many sea lions who wanted to let me know that not only was my tweet deranged, but that I was critiquing a non-issue without offering them any solution. It was apparently this last part that really made people big mad.
If you missed it, I here’s the original tweet:
This tweet set off a bunch of growling and barking sea lions all over my twitter feed. Sea lioning, for the uninitiated, is internet slang for people who engage in a specific type of trolling, presenting bad faith arguments and endless demands for evidence of claims in the guise of “just wanting to have a debate.” (See also: “I’m just asking questions.” except that the questions are just a lot of whataboutism. It’s disingenuous because sea lions ignore evidence and purposefully misdirect the conversation, trying to provoke the target into an angry response. Sea lions refuse to be convinced by any amount of evidence, assuming that the target’s expertise on the subject is somehow inadequate.
The sea lions on my twitter feed that day insisted that adoption is not in itself an issue and if it is, there’s no possible alternative course of action that we could try . In my thread (or a related thread, I can’t remember because I have muted all of those tweet threads), I suggested that if people wanted solutions to adoption, that they should use their imaginations and think of some.
“You’re demonizing a bunch of people who just wanted to give a child a home and you have no solution other than telling people they should use their imaginations to invent better systems!” barked one sea lion (my paraphrase).
(If imagination is not the vehicle through which we solve problems, I’m not sure how else we’re supposed to arrive at new ideas?)
People also seemed to read way way into my tweet and began to attribute lots of weird ideas to me.
“You’re telling me that you think I should have been aborted?” demanded another sea lion.
(????? In my original tweet, I said that people were having a hard time understanding an idea.)
When I talk about adoption in public spaces, sea lions often appear to demand that I provide solutions and alternatives for adoption as if I am personally responsible for the creation and functions of these systems. They often present their demands for solutions as an ace-in-the-hole type rhetorical device, a “Gotcha!” type question that will stump me and prompt me to acknowledge my wrongheaded thinking. Taken to its logical extreme, these demands for solutions suggest that we should never raise the specter of complex social problems without already having predetermined solution to them.
As tiresome as I find it when other people demand that I do the thinking for them, I’m more astonished when I suggest supporting families in crisis as a potential first step further upstream than adoption, how many people disregard this suggestion as unworkable or impractical. It’s as if I haven’t spoken (or written) at all. The refusal to actually hear and acknowledge a potential solution says a lot about how many people would prefer NOT to solve complex social problems of child welfare and how invested they are in seemingly simple feel-good solutions that involve adoption. Anecdotally, based on various interactions I have had with people about family preservation as an important alternative to adoption, people would prefer the faceless legal option of the state violence of child removal or relinquishment to the messier task of engaging a collective rethinking of how to keep children within their families and where that’s not possible, what to do next.
My arguments (and it’s not just my suggestion, lots of people I know have made this argument) around supporting families in crisis bring out yet more barking sea lions, like this one.
This sea lion tweet (alt text: a tweet that reads “So what do we do? Close the state home and send legions of orphans in to the street so they can sing and dance like they’re in the cast of OLIVER?”) demanded that I take personal responsibility for providing a solution for a collective issue, one different than the one I’d originally raised.
But here’s the thing. Adoption isn’t an individual issue. It is instead a collective invention of systems and practices and requires collective thinking and imagination (yes, that mythical idea generator I am always recommending to other people) to find new ways forward. But some people really like our current the status quo in terms of adoption. It works for them because they don’t have to think about adoption as either a problem or take part in helping create new solutions. It allows them the freedom to do nothing. In insisting that there’s no possible solution a problem that they deny even exists, they tacitly (and in some cases loudly) endorse our current dysfunctional systems and underlying assumptions about what kinds of families children should belong to and to which they shouldn’t.
"It allows them the freedom to do nothing" perfectly encapsulates the assumptions of so many people whose default response to any big, systemic problem is to throw their hands up and declare it is inherently unsolvable, thus any ideas or actions toward solving it are pointless. It's the ultimate cop-out. Thanks for putting it so plainly, Lisa. I'm proud of you for pushing back in the face of these folks who uphold oppressive systems like adoption.
Thanks for dwaling with those sea lions and being here!