Excerpts of a talk your editor gave at Congregational church in New York 20 years ago.
Sam Smith, 2004 - Empires and cultures are not permanent
and while thinking about the possibility that ours is
collapsing may seem a dismal exercise it is far less so than
enduring the frustrations, failures, damage and human casualties
involved in constantly butting up against reality like a boozer
who insists he is not drunk attempting to drive home.
Peter Ustinov in Romanoff and Juliet
says at one point: "I'm an optimist: I know how bad the
world is. You're a pessimist: you're always finding out."
Or as GK Chesterton put it, "We must learn to love life
without ever trusting it."
Happiness, courage and passion in
a bad time can only be based on myth as long as reality does
not intrude. Once it does, our indifference to it will serve
us no better than it does the joyriding teenager whose assumption
of immortality comes into contact with a tree.
But this does not mean that one
must live in despair. There are other stories - true stories
of real people - that can lead us elsewhere.
Like the former LA narcotics detective
I know who learned to face danger while investigating corruption
and the involvement of intelligence agencies in the drug trade.
He had two bullet holes in his left arm and one in his left ear.
He said he had borrowed a trick another cop had taught him; when
in danger he simply considered himself already dead. Then he
was able to move without fear.
Such an ability to confront and
transcend -- rather than deny, adjust to, replace, recover from,
or succumb to -- the universe in which you find yourself is among
the things that permits freedom and courage. This man, with Buddhist-like
deconstruction and Christian-like rebirth, had taken apart the
pieces of his fear and dumped them on the ground -- a mercy killing
of dreams and nightmares on behalf of survival.
I grew up with someone like that.
Ann had come to our house during World War II as a nine year
old child from Britain. It hadn't been easy for her to get to
Washington in July of 1940. Sixty years later she wrote me about
it:
I set sail in the Duchess
of Atholl in convoy. There was a slight skirmish with a submarine.
I remember feeling the ship shudder as depth charges were dropped
but we were unscathed and pressed on, though I remember seeing
icebergs and wondering. My mother told me we might well be sunk.
If I was dragged underwater, not to struggle. I would come to
the surface naturally, then not to strike out to England or America
but float on my back, as I had learned at school, until I was
picked up.
Within two months, no more British
children were sent to America because the Nazis had started torpedoing
the ships and even machine gunning the children in the water.
After the war, Ann came back and
lived with us, becoming a virtual sister. She would marry man,
quite a bit older, who had been a young doctor during the Battle
of London. The doctors were given colored tags to attach to the
feet of air raid victims. Each tag represented one bed and each
color one hospital in London. When the tags were gone so were
the beds. Think about that when you worry about your flu shot.
Ann was one of the first people
I thought about as I watched the World Trade Center go down because
she had learned to face the grim with stolidity but the rest
of life with passion and pleasure. I was in my home when it happened,
six blocks from another intended target, the US Capitol, and
I recalled how much I had learned from her, even as a child,
about getting through the bad times.
To view our times as decadent and
dangerous, to mistrust the government, to imagine that those
in power are not concerned with our best interests is not paranoid
but perceptive; to be depressed, angry or confused about such
things is not delusional but a sign of consciousness. Yet our
culture suggests otherwise.
But
if all this is true, then why
not despair? The simple answer is this: despair is the suicide
of imagination. Whatever reality presses upon us, there still
remains the possibility of imagining something better, and in
this dream remains the frontier of our humanity and its
possibilities
To despair is to voluntarily close a door that has not yet shut.
The task is to bear knowledge without it destroying ourselves and to
challenge the wrong without ending up on its casualty list.
"You don't have to change the world," the writer Colman
McCarthy has argued. "Just keep the world from changing
you."
Oddly, those who instinctively understand
this best are often those who seem to have the least reason to
do so - survivors of abuse, oppression, and isolation who somehow
discover not so much how to beat the odds, but how to wriggle
around them. They have, without formal instruction, learned two
of the most fundamental lessons of psychiatry and philosophy:
- You are not responsible
for that into which you were born..
-
You are responsible for
doing something about it.
These individuals move through life
like a skilled mariner in a storm rather than as a victim at
a sacrifice. Relatively unburdened by pointless and debilitating
guilt about the past, uninterested in the endless regurgitation
of the unalterable, they free themselves to concentrate upon
the present and the future. They face the gale as a sturdy combatant
rather than as cowering supplicant.
In Washington we have a neighborhood
known as Shaw where for decades just such a form of survival
thrived. It has been a particular interest of my historian wife. Until the modern civil rights movement and desegregation,
this African-American community was shut out without a vote,
without economic power, without access, and without any real
hope that any of this would change.
Its response was remarkable. For
example, in 1886 there were only about 15 black businesses in
the area. By 1920, with segregation in full fury, there were
more than 300.
Every aspect of the community followed
suit. Among the institutions created within these few square
miles were a building & loan association, a savings bank, the
only good hotel in the Washington where blacks could stay, the
first full-service black YMCA in the country, the Howard Theater
(opened with black capital twenty years before Harlem's Apollo
became a black stage) and two first rate movie palaces.
There were the Odd Fellows, the
True Reformers, and the Prince Hall Lodge. There were churches
and religious organizations, a summer camp, a photography club,
settlement houses, and the Washington Urban League.
Denied access to white schools,
the community created a self-sufficient educational system good
enough to attract suburban African-Americans students as well
as teachers with advanced degrees from all over the country.
And just to the north, Howard University became the intellectual
center of black America. You might have run into Langston Hughes,
Alain Locke, or Duke Ellington, all of whom made the U Street
area their home before moving to New York.
All this occurred while black Washingtonians
were being subjected to extraordinary economic obstacles and
being socially and politically ostracized. If there ever was
a culture entitled to despair and apathy it was black America
under segregation.
Yet not only did these African-Americans
develop self-sufficiency, they did so without taking their eyes
off the prize. Among the other people you might have found on
U Street were Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston, laying the
groundwork for the modern civil rights movement.
Older residents would remember the
former neighborhood with a mixture of pain and pride -- not unlike
the ambivalence found in veterans recalling a war. None would
voluntarily return to either segregation or the battlefield but
many would know that some of their own best moments of courage,
skill, and heart had come when the times were at their worst.
Last summer, I
went to Umbria, a section of Italy north of Rome remarkably indifferent
to 500 years of its history, where even the homes and whole villages
seem to grow like native plants out of the rural earth rather
than being placed there by human effort. It was as if I had been
transported back several centuries while still being allowed
to take along a car and my Diet Coke. I hadn't felt such stability
for a long time, certainly not since September 11.
Yet the Umbrians have been invaded,
burned, or bullied by the Etruscans, Roman Empire, Goths, Longobards,
Charlemagne, Pippin the Short, the Vatican, Mussolini, the German
Nazis, and, most recently, the World Trade Organization. Umbria
is a reminder of the durability of the human spirit during history's
tumults, an extremely comforting thought to an American these
days.
We don't have to go that far back,
though. Consider the increasingly cited novel, 1984. Orwell saw
it coming, only his timing was off. The dystopia described in
1984 is so overwhelming that one almost forgets that most residents
of Oceana didn't live in it. Orwell gives the breakdown. Only
about two percent were in the Inner Party and another 13% in
the Outer Party. The rest numbering some 100 million were the
proles.
It is amongst the latter that Winston
Smith and Julia find refuge for their trysts, away from the cameras
(although not the microphones). The proles are, for the most
part, not worth the Party's trouble. Says Orwell:
From the proletarians nothing is
to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation
to generation and from century to century, working, breeding,
and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without
the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is
. . .
As we move towards - and even surpass
- the fictional bad dreams of Orwell and the in many ways more
prescient Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, it is helpful to
remember that these nightmares were actually the curse of the
elites and not of those who lived in the quaint primitive manner
of humans rather than joining the living dead at the zenith of
illusionary power.
This bifurcation of society into
a weak, struggling, but sane, mass and a manic depressive elite
that is alternately vicious and afraid, unlimited and imprisoned,
foreshadows what we find today - an elite willing, on the one
hand, to occupy any corner of the world and, on the other, terrified
of young men with minimal weapons.
In the wake of September 11, this
trend became even more prominent. Our country's policies and
budgets have been strongly skewed in the interest of protecting
New York and Washington (and the natural resources and economic
machinery that support their activities). There has not been
much mention of a terrorist threat to St Louis or Des Moines,
at least in the national media. After all, St. Louis and Des
Moines are in the countryside that is filled with persons who,
if left to themselves, will, in the words of Orwell, "not
only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping
that the world could be other than it is."
This is not to say that St. Louis
or Des Moines won't be a target, only that it is far from what
the war on terrorism is really about, which is to defend those
things, people, and places that the elite hold most dear - starting
with themselves. Six blocks from my house, for example, they
are building a bunker for congressmen at the cost of $1 million
a member, congressmen already guarded by the most expensive police
force per capita and per acre in the world. A friend who works
a block away must go through several roadblocks a day. But walk
east just a bit towards my house and nothing has changed.
Strange as it may seem, it is in
this dismal dichotomy between countryside and the political and
economic capitals that the hope for saving America's soul resides.
The geographical and conceptual parochialism of those who have
made this mess leaves vast acres of our land still free in which
to nurture hopes, dreams, and perhaps even to foster the eventual
eviction of those who have done us such wrong.
Eric Paul Gros-Dubois of Southern
Methodist University has described Orwell's underclass this way:
The Proles were the poorest
of the groups, but in most regards were the most cheerful and
optimistic. The Proles were also the freest of all the groups.
Proles could do as they pleased. They could come and go, and
talk openly about whatever they felt like without having to worry
about the Thought Police. . .[Orwell] also concluded that the
hope for the future was contained within this group."
As a Washington native I often find
myself thinking of part of my city as occupied and robotic, and
part still free and human. I roughly define the free portion
as that having buildings I can enter without having to prove
in some direct way that I am not a terrorist. While the occupied
city encompasses much of downtown Washington, the consumptive
fear of those in power is so concentrated on their own safety
that they leave the better part of us alone.
I'm not so naïve as to think
that the government or its enemies couldn't at any moment suddenly
expand their interests. Still, upon leaving Washington I'm quickly
struck by the question: where did the war on terror go? The further
I get from this supposed democratic apex the more I feel as if
I'm in a democracy again.
There is nothing new in this. Almost
all great changes in American politics and culture have had their
roots either in the countryside or among minorities within the
major cities. From religious 'great awakenings' to the abolitionist
movement, to the labor movement, to populism, to the 1960s and
civil rights, America has been repeatedly moved by viral politics
rather than by the pyramidal processes outlined in great man
theories of change promulgated by the elite and its media and
academies.
Successfully confronting the present
disaster will require far more than attempting to serially blockade
its serial evils, necessary as this is. There must also be a
guerilla democracy that defends, fosters, and celebrates our
better selves - not only to provide an alternative but to create
physical space for decent Americans to enjoy their lives while
waiting for things to get better. It may, after all, take the
rest of their lifetimes. We must not only condemn the worst,
but offer witness for the better. And create places in which
to live it.
We have, as in all authoritarian
regimes, become increasingly dependent upon those who hold us
down and back. But the potential is always there, even under
the worst circumstances.
We tend to discount the importance
of unplanned moments because of our fealty to the business school
paradigm in which change properly occurs because of a careful
strategic plan, an organized vision, procedures, and process.
During the past quarter century when such ideas have been in
ascendancy, however, America has demonstratively deteriorated
as a political, economic, and moral force. In reality, many of
the best things happen by accident and indirection. While it
may be true, as the Roman said, that "fortune smiles on
the well prepared" part of that preparation is to be in
the right place at the right time. In other words, it is necessary
to create an ecology of change rather than a precise and often
illusory process.
The beat generation understood this.
Unlike today's activists they lacked a plan; unlike those of
the 60s they lacked anything to plan for; what substituted for
utopia and organization was the freedom to think, to speak, to
move at will in a culture that thought it had adequately taken
care of all such matters. To a far greater degree than rebellions
that followed, the beat culture created its message by being
rather than doing, rejection rather than confrontation, sensibility
rather than strategy, journeys instead of movements, words and
music instead of acts, and informal communities rather than formal
institutions.
The full-fledged uprisings that
followed could not have occurred without years of anger and hope
being expressed in more individualistic and less disciplined
ways, ways that may seem ineffective in retrospect yet served
as absolutely necessary scaffolding with which to build a powerful
movement.
One of these ways, for example,
is music. Billie Holiday was singing about lynchings long before
the modern civil rights movement.
Another way is found in the magic
of churches. During the 1960s I edited a newspaper in a neighborhood
75% black and mostly poor in which I came to assume that churches
were the sina qua non of positive change. We had over a 100 of
them in a two square mile area and you just came to rely upon
them as part of the political action, including the Revolutionary
Church of What's Happenin' Now and the Rev. Frank Milner, part-minister
and part-taxicab driver who would come to community meetings
in an outfit complete with clerical collar and a metal change-maker
on his belt.
How important one church can be
is illustrated with a little known story from Birmingham Alabama.
Responding to Rosa Parks' mistreatment, sleeping car porter E.D.
Nixon called up a young preacher and asked if he could use his
church for a meeting. The minister said he would think about
it. A few days later, Nixon called back and the minister agreed.
E.D. Nixon's reply was something like this, "Thank you Reverend
King, because we've scheduled a meeting at your church next Monday
at 6:30 pm."
It is for such reasons we must learn
to stand outside of history. Quakerism, for example, prescribes
personal witness as guided by conscience - regardless of the
era in which we live or the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
And the witness need not be verbal. The Quakers say "let
your life speak," echoing St. Francis of Assisi's' advice
that one should preach the gospel at all times and "if necessary,
use words."
There are about as many Quakers
today in America as there were in the 18th century, around 100,000.
Yet near the center of every great moment of American social
and political change one finds members of the Society of Friends.
Why? In part because they have been willing to fail year after
year between those great moments. Because they have been willing
in good times and bad -- in the instructions of their early leader
George Fox -- "to walk cheerfully over the face of the earth
answering that of God in every one "
The existentialists knew how to
stand outside of history as well. Existentialism, which has been
described as the idea that no one can take your shower for you,
is based on the hat trick of passion, integrity and rebellion.
An understanding that we create ourselves by what we do and say
and, in the words of one of their philosophers, even a condemned
man has a choice of how to approach the gallows.
Those who think history has left
us helpless should recall the abolitionist of 1830, the feminist
of 1870, the labor organizer of 1890, or the gay or lesbian writer
of 1910. They, like us, did not get to choose their time in history
but they, like us, did get to choose what they did with it.
Would we have been abolitionists
in 1830?
In 1848, 300 people gathered at
Seneca Falls, NY, for a seminal moment in the American women's
movement. On November 2, 1920, 91 year-old Charlotte Woodward
Pierce became the only signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration
of Sentiments and Resolutions who had lived long enough to cast
a ballot for president.
Would we have attended that conference
in 1848? Would we have bothered?
Or consider the Jewish cigar makers
in early 20th century New York City each contributing a small
sum to hire a man to sit with them as they worked - reading aloud
the classic works of Yiddish literature. The leader of the cigar-makers,
Samuel Gompers, would later become the first president of the
American Federation of Labor. And those like him would become
part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the politics,
social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century America.
While Protestants and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions
of politics, the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately
came from native populists and immigrant socialists. It is certainly
impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement,
or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left.
These are the sort of the stories
we must find and tell each other during the bad days ahead. But
there is a problem. The system that envelopes us becomes normal
by its mere mass, its ubiquitous messages, its sheer noise. Our
society faces what William Burroughs called a biologic crisis
-- "like being dead and not knowing it." Or as Matthew
Arnold put it, trapped between two worlds, one dead, the other
unable to be born.
We are overpowered and afraid. We
find ourselves condoning things simply because not to do so means
we would then have to -- at unknown risk -- truly challenge them.
Yet, in a perverse way, our predicament
makes life simpler. We have clearly lost what we have lost. We
can give up our futile efforts to preserve the illusion and turn
our energies instead to the construction of a new time.
It is this willingness to walk away
from the seductive power of the present that first divides the
mere reformer from the rebel -- the courage to emigrate from
one's own ways in order to meet the future not as an entitlement
but as a frontier.
How one does this can vary markedly,
but one of the bad habits we have acquired from the bullies who
now run the place is undue reliance on traditional political,
legal and rhetorical tools. Politically active Americans have
been taught that even at the risk of losing our planet and our
democracy, we must go about it all in a rational manner, never
raising our voice, never doing the unlikely or trying the improbable,
let alone screaming for help.
We will not overcome the current
crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like
those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The
freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The
plays of Vaclav Havel. Unitarian church basements. The pain of
James Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of
Gandhi and King. Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions.
People coming together because they disagree on every subject
save one: the need to preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle
poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies
and simple suppers.
Above all, we must understand that
in leaving the toxic ways of the present we are healing ourselves,
our places, and our planet. We must rebel not as a last act of
desperation but as a first act of creation.
