I have an historical memory.
I remember the assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy and the attempted murder of Wallace, the Vietnam protests (I was in several, tear-gassed once, whacked half-heartedly with a baton by a bored cop), the cities burning, the tremendous ferment and turbulence of all of it. I remember the rock n’ roll, the concerts, and reading, reading, reading, talking, talking, talking. It felt like living inside a lightning bolt.
I was two months away from 16 when the Democrats and Republicans staged their respective conventions and nominated Humphrey and Nixon.
I sat with my father and watched the Chicago police go mad. I subscribed to Ramparts. My father subscribed to FBI Monthly.
In every sense, I became a young man in 1968 and left my childhood behind.
Trump is much worse than Nixon in many respects but not all. Trump did not bomb Cambodia nor prolong the war in Vietnam and thus add to its mountain of dead.
Bush, because of Iraq, may be Nixon’s equivalent and actually more dangerous — a killer with whom you might want to share a beer. You wouldn’t say that about either Trump or Nixon.
Even though I am long lapsed and deeply ambivalent about all things religious, I am a Catholic, theologically: i.e, human beings are essentially pretty depraved but can sometimes be redeemed if the circumstances are right. My heart is bifurcated — part sympathizer to cops, part man enraged by cops. Someone who believes “men must be governed” and at the same time that the State will invariably act in corrupt and repressive ways. A man who has faith in the American experiment. A man who sees the monsters who have always lived inside that experiment.
My readings of history want to make me into someone who believes “the long arc of history bends toward justice”, but I don’t think I do. When I look at history, I see a great slaughterhouse run by maniacs with most ordinary human beings trying desperately to get out of the way and a good percentage very happy to engage in mass murder, even of their neighbors, when given the opportunity.
That’s why I have Camus’ quote as the banner on my site: “In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
We must choose.
Trump may be re-elected and unapologetic fascists like Tom Cotton are right around the corner, and he and his ilk have billions at their disposal.
Fox News abides.
The cesspit of the Republican Party will only become a more concentrated and more odious creator of a poison that has its own special American ancestry.
I want my historical pessimism to be wrong.
My public heroes are MLK, Lincoln, Crazy Horse, Camus and Philip Roth. Not because they are examples of perfect moral superiority, but because they never stopped trying to tell the truth, they never stopped learning, they were all aware of their flaws and were essentially humble in that respect, and they all struggled to stand with the victims of history and set their enormous talents to work for those victims.
I am greatly heartened by the last three weeks of marches. I want to believe that this time will produce substantive change. Hope is essential. There are good signs that a kind of tectonic shift has taken place, that the pressure of years of videos of police abuse in cities and towns all over America, and three years of Trump, may have produced a buckling of conscience, a rending of the heart of white America. How else to explain a 57% approval rating of Black Lives Matter, up 30 points since 2016? How else to explain the crowds of white, middle-aged men and women on the march and that 65% of Americans support the protests?
I remind myself that it took an especially egregious act of violence, a muder, to release all this pressure, to set all this in motion.
I wish George Floyd was alive.
I keep thinking of the relentless courage of Dr. King assaulted, beaten, jailed, his home bombed, death threats pouring in, weary as a person can be from trying to hold a fractious movement together, a small man at 39, working to help garbagemen when he was murdered. I wish Dr. King was alive.
All the martyrs…. Why are martyrs so necessary for awakenings?
I am a mess of contradictory beliefs but one who tries to be anchored by two sentences highlighted here in blue. Forget countries, flags, nation-states, corporations, tribes. What matters is each individual human being. What matters is life, in every respect, for all species, and its preservation.
What matters most in this moment is that this nation recognize black people as human beings and act accordingly.
That would be revolutionary.
