“Find what you love and let it kill you,” was not supposed to apply to countries run by authoritative regimes. It’s said to be by Charles Bukowski, though the attribution is not fully proven. The full quote is,

“My dear,

Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.

For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

Falsely yours, Henry Charles Bukowski”

It popped into my head when my husband sent me the NY Times article about Alexei Navalny’s death. Bukowski was talking about letting art consume you. Navalny was killed by his efforts to create a less corrupt, free Russia.

Navalny would be asked in interviews: are you afraid of getting killed?

“If they decide to kill me then it means we are incredibly strong and we need to use that power and not give up,” he once told CNN. “We don’t realise how strong we actually are.”

“You have to use this strength,” he said in a recording explicitly about what Russians should do if the government kills him.

I think we all knew what was going to happen to Alexei Navalny. He knew when he returned to Russia after being poisoned that his fate was to be a martyr to this cause. He would be murdered by Russian authorities with a favorite weapon: plausible deniability. He just happened to die, you see, context or situation be damned.

Just because it was predictable does not mean it is right, or unimportant. It does not mean you weren’t hoping for something else. The internet let people witness in real time what happened in silence through the Soviet Union, through the disconnection of space.

I spent a couple of summers in Russia in my early 20s and still remember a bit of the language. It’s a beautiful place with lovely people, a rich culture, and a horrific government. The American government is hardly perfect, but I do not think my fellow Americans who have lived their whole lives here understand what it is to live under a curtain of ruthless, unaccountable power.

Navalny knew.

Those of us who value democratic, due process of laws view his imprisonment and death as unjust. Those who know what Russia is like right now saw this as inevitable but hoped for different. Nadya Tolokonnikova wrote stanzas about the government’s habit of killing dissidents the night before the news of Navalny’s death. Her lines are full of anger and grief. Addressing Russia, “I loved you,” she wrote over and over, lamenting her exile, the way the government has regarded her. In direct contrast to Bukowski, she ends her poem with, “I wish I had never loved you at all.”

No one should ever have too much power. It becomes a type of contagious poison. Everyone needs some. You need the ability to self-determine your life. You need the ability to be part of the effort to guide a collective future. Shared fates require shared decisions. That’s the best way to be.

But too much? It seems to foster a disconnection from reality, a ruthless self-interest, a logic of choices that forgets the collective well-being. When power gets concentrated in the hands of a few, the negative consequences of decisions are increasingly worn by people who did not have a say in what they were. You can be insulated by the pain you cause, instead of experiencing it right with them. The Ukraine war is blowing Russia’s men to bits, for an example. The United States has an economy mostly focused on concentrating wealth, and never mind the impact on worker’s wages, decreasing value of products, and the impact on the environment. The people making the decisions are far away from those working, consuming, and living in the world of those decisions.

If you have too much power, you can insulate yourself from the consequences of bad choices. They could be bad because they were failures or bad because they were evil.

I’ve followed Alexei Navalny on Instagram for a long time, reading his dark humor, love letters to his wife, and descriptions of life in the colonies. I also follow Nadya Tolokonnikova (of Pussy Riot), who as far as I can tell has fled Russia, and a few others who are less famous. Opposition has been bleak. It takes a lot of bravery, faith, and hope to live life towards a goal like that. It was foreseen, and yet in my chest and in my gut, I too grieved.

There are so many ways for human beings to organize themselves and live. I deeply hope that those in my country will respect Navalny’s death as a warning of what awaits us if we do not safeguard our own democracy. We have a society rich in its own injustices. Those need to be changed. We also have something precious in our flawed, tenuous democratic republic. We must not lose it.

“Another world is possible,” is both a rally cry for hope and a cautionary tale.