At 8 years old my grandparents took me to see
Ghandi w' Kingsley when it debuted and I watched transfixed and reverent. This was the first time I remember feeling respect, thinking
this is a great man.
At 16 as a junior in high school I read Dr. King’s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and still today, as a student and teacher of literature, I have read no work with so profound and prodigious a righteous humility as this. There, logic and compassion united in an unimpeachable notice not only of the truth and worth of its cause, but of what our best nature can, must be.
At 21 as a freshman in college I read Thoreau’s "Civil Disobedience" and glimpsed not simply how noble it is to decry the hatred and hypocrisy of entire societies that would silence and oppress the god-given humanity and dignity of others, but how imperative it is to do this with a calm temperament and principled spirit that will not let justice be muted.
It is only today, at 35, that I am realizing how not only essential
but so very difficult it
really is to emulate the tremendous labors and examples of these tremendous individuals and so many other courageous women and men like them who have given me and us such a paramount and exigent inheritance.
We have all been hearing and witnessing what’s been transpiring in the election these past two weeks. If for any reason you have not, you must make yourself aware; must educate yourself not only as a citizen but as a moral human being so that you have no illusions regarding the severity of the trials this country is facing, and of what it even more so at stake here; must assume your responsibility to know, face, and help overcome the challenges that we are facing at this our most pivotal and critical point of our generation, if not our country’s history.
A small sampling of video clips bares what we are up against:
(
I’m posting a range to show how pervasive this has been becoming both in and out of the campaign)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBmO6YAszGUhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjxzmaXAg9Ehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itEucdhf4Ushttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkFG1ebuKZUhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOU9xZ4zcsshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsjybbvd__ohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyGH-n93r5Uhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGngj_35D_shttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ykBr3SO6sghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQBr7JKhvI4http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiESklGDuH4http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41yS81RXKIshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJghQMq49dwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMCl49x8BfYhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woNYeyOQnuIhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvXf9AUHTqMhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rUAFUoz3jchttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1223813017-2rdB8NEqPARuMI2br4F01w I watch these in shock and disbelief and my instincts
react---they want to make my brain seethe and blood boil. Not simply because it is happening but how readily it is happening and how widespread the contagion so directly is.
Inasmuch my immediate gut reaction is disgust commingled with ire, abhorrence, revulsion, resentment, distress---and most of all nausea from and ill will towards the perpetrators of such hatred, cruelty, bigotry, and greed.
It is a pain wrought by the circumstances we find ourselves and our country, and therefore our shared fate, engrossed in.
But, just like these circumstances, this pain and indignation are not new: they have been there beneath the surface our whole lives, skulking around the various shades between our consciousness and subconscious and unconscious experiences, festering like a cancer of the psyche and nerves.
We have grown up knowing this anger and pain, feeling them in response to the senseless violence and bigotry that we have all our lives witnessed infesting not merely the dregs of society, but some of its most core institutions and venues, figures and characters.
For some of us more or less than others, this experience is like a crucible---at sometimes in the depths of our selves, restrained but constrained, repressed but impressed---at others right
here, scratching grating or tearing at the surface of everyday consciousness, incessant and relentless, torrid and riotous.
.
Like many of you, throughout my adult life I have wrestled like Jacob with the erratic degrees of this crucible, but
never so acutely or painfully as I have these past two weeks witnessing, as it appears, the full force of their cruelty and abusiveness begin to emerge.
And a sick sense warns it is just beginning.
So I have been getting more and more angry, I want to hate what is so plainly wrong, perverted, and abhorrent.
And it is exactly here that I to am just beginning, just beginning to realize what it means to face evil head on, what it
really meant for Thoreau Gandhi MLK and countless countless others to have faced and still face the most destructive element--germ--virus of the worst of human nature----
Not simply to face it, but to take a stand against it. Not simply to take a stand against it, but to do the most essential and difficult work of effecting progress beyond this evil----
This is why I—we—must not simply , but learn by and inhere as and take forward their consummate example:
If I hate them I am like them. If angry, I am like them. If I war with them I hurt my country, my fellow man with them. Just as much I hurt myself with them.…
We must not forget or neglect that we are and must be better than that, or else everything we strive for is compromised, menaced, threatened. Violence only begets more violence, whether that be physical, emotional, psychological, or social. The same is true for hatred, anger, bitterness, malevolence, discomposure, condescension, disdain, hurt.
And most of all, the same is true for the sources of all these in feelings, gestures, and affectations of conceit, grief, pride, and fear.
Emerson, Thoreau’s mentor, wrote “
it cannot touch me”, and I’m beginning to understand that this is what he and the others meant, in both the declarative and the imperative senses: it
must not touch me and if I achieve this and you and you and you achieve this, becoming
we achieve this, only then can we transcend the infirmities of immediate evils and experience and declare that
we—not I or you individually, but we in our common solidarity and stake—will not be touched by these.
Only then healing begins, then progress begins.
.
I write so deliberately and urgently because we all knew this was coming, yet who among us are still shocked and disturbed by the ugly and menacing face that it is taking? I have been exceptionally angry these past two weeks, have written and spoken nauseously about what has been transpiring all around us, have felt like the walls are closing in even though I have not once wavered from my faith and strong belief that the truth and what’s right will prevail in this election.
Because this is about more than the election.
Right now we are at a,
the critical juncture in our shared history and future. At this moment how we proceed is vital, is everything. With as much as we are up against, everything depends on how we face the challenges that are arising so intensely and exactingly before us.
If we give into the visceral reactions I’ve been describing, we will not succeed, we ourselves will frustrate and thwart the very change we want to bring. Instinct is not always the better nature, and particular challenges call for a higher character within.
This is what I’m finally learning from the three seminal figures in our lives and history of Thoreau, Gandhi, and MLK, and from the thousands and millions of other either like them or following their examples. Righteousness must have patience, discipline, and humility to achieve the best of and for ourselves. To achieve this dignity humanity deserves, strives for, demands, we must have dignity ourselves.
…
At 31, four years ago, now as a teacher myself, I heard Obama attest to exactly this in what is still the most important and transformative speech I’ve heard delivered.
In the four years since and the past year in particular, I have been learning from this great man every time I hear and read him. Like his precursors, his patience and buoyancy and conviction are more than sincere inspiring or even purposeful---they are the foundations upon which change and progress must be built, without which these cannot be built. Foundations as much in the individual as in what we feel and work for in common, towards the vision of the fierce urgency of now. It’s an example that I must constantly remind myself of, the renewal of the most crucial vow: Stay positive, stay dignified, keep believing, and keep working. Only the audacious, determined, and composed hand can steer the ship through the tempestuous maelstrom of the impending storm.