The Next Move
Morning broke in a burst of rain, but now the day looks like a picture in a story book: plump white clouds piled like snow in a porcelain blue sky, green hills streaked with yellow mustard flowers, a road curving in the distance. Everything is shining.
Each day is an invitation, a declaration, a teacher, and a dare. Having been granted yet another chance, what shall I do with it?
My head is spinning with new ideas and anxieties. I’d like to render them useful somehow, but there’s been a lot of input in the last week or so, and I’m slow to process.
For example, I heard an intriguing interview by Ezra Klein with historian Steven Hahn, which helped me to understand that the crisis we are experiencing in American politics today, as monstrous and unfamiliar as it may seem, is not in fact new. Hahn investigates the roots of the MAGA movement, describing it as “illiberalism” and explaining that it’s a way of thinking about the world that has to do with the embrace of inherent inequalities: about hierarchies of nation, race, and gender, and a desire for cultural and religious uniformity.
He continues: “Illiberalism is also a particularist idea about rights — meaning you don’t carry your rights with you. You may have them where they are, but you don’t have them all the time. And it’s an idea of marking internal as well as external enemies and the use of exclusion or expulsion as a way of dealing with this — thinking about the access to and maintenance of power with the legitimacy of political violence. And as much as anything, it’s about the will of the community over the rule of law.”
Remember Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote about his observations of the America he saw during his travels there in 1831 and 1832? I recalled that he was struck by the young country’s robust individualism, but I did not know that he also zoomed in on the racism, the narrow-mindedness, and the tyranny of the collective, concluding that it was likely — or certainly possible — that the United States could move toward a despotism, where people would be willing to give up their rights out of loyalty to a strongman. Hmmm.
Hahn provides examples from throughout American history, preceding the European colonization of North America and including the removal of the indigenous people from their lands. He talks about Andrew Jackson’s use of deportations and expulsions and his defiance of the courts, the chilling and persistent idea of white supremacy, the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, the rampant racism after slavery was ended, and many other examples woven through our history that sound disturbingly compatible with the current administration.
I’ve also begun reading a book called Fever In the Heartland by Timothy Egan, about the expansion of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s in the Midwest and its plan to take over the country, led by a maniac named David C. Stephenson, who sounds eerily familiar right now.
I’m not naïve. I’ve always recognized that our nation is a flawed, organic entity with cruelty, injustice, and bloodshed in its DNA. (But I also believe in the ideals toward which it strives, and I have seen many reasons for hope.) Reviewing our history through this particular lens, however, helped me understand the origins of the current MAGA movement in a broader context, and knowing it is not so much new as it is a reassertion somehow makes it seem a less indomitable foe. It’s a monster we’ve met and beaten away before.
Certainly, we are seeing a version exacerbated by the control of the media via the internet and the unprecedented scale of lies and propaganda, but I began to get a welcome sense of…we can do this.
As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote decades earlier:
From the apprehensive present, from a future packed
With unknown dangers, monstrous, terrible and new—
Let us turn for comfort to this simple fact:
We have been in trouble before . . . and we came through.
Concurrently, and perhaps ironically, this was also the week I re-read The Great Gatsby, somewhat in observance of the 100th anniversary of its publication. I’d read it in high school, I suppose, but I remembered it only vaguely and it took me by surprise. The writing is luminous, often lyrical, but the story is disturbingly resonant with current times in its portrayal of wealth and decadence. “They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Think of all that destruction and intentional chaos. Think of purposeful organizations dismantled, vital programs terminated, workers devalued and abruptly out of jobs. I’m an ordinary citizen in touch with regular folks. The pain is real. The worry is making people ill.
Maybe this is not the tone to take in a blog called “Still Amazed”, but it is meant as a steppingstone to a more constructive stance. If we see what is happening as a mindset that has been present in our country since its inception, escalating periodically, and shockingly apparent now, perhaps we can better understand how to quell it.
But I’m not just reading and listening to podcasts. I still believe that any constructive actions we can take within our own communities will be part of the antidote. If we are to weather and transcend the assault, we are called upon to be our best selves, as tired as we are, and even small gestures make a difference.
So I ventured out with the local school kids this week, assisting with a field trip focused on geology. Working with young people feels hopeful and future-oriented, and helping them to key into the natural environment is crucial, for they will be its stewards, going forth. I discovered that I’m very rusty, though, and it was hard. And although kids are kids and there are certain constants, I am beginning to sense that this generation may be very different from the kids I taught thirty years ago. (The insidious and addictive influence of relentless digital input is certainly a factor.) The lucky children here have relatively easy access to the miracles of the outdoors, but maybe they still need to "touch the grass" more often, as the phrase goes, and better understand the fortifying and precarious wonders of the world.
And so my head is also filled with thoughts about these precious young people and what is inevitable versus what we can change. The role of shepherdess appeals to me, a gentle guide, sometimes flummoxed. (But instead of a staff, I’ll carry a sword to vanquish cynicism and fatalism.)
There was a poetry reading this week too, and the room was filled with kind, caring souls. People still thirst for poetry and find sustenance in it.
And I’m working with friends to organize a gathering to help strengthen community and raise funds for Democracy Forward.
We are weary, but we’re doing what we can.
It rained again, and it rained again, and the greenery is bejeweled with sparkling raindrops. A watery kind of light brightened the hills, and the sky, exploding into a garishly gorgeous sunset, announced that the next move is ours.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours.”
― William Stafford