In Our Hands

Here we are.  Finally.  On the eve of the most important U.S. presidential election since 1860, and I am overwhelmed with anxiety – with a bitter mixture of hope and dread.   Honestly, I am not sure what will happen on November 5^th and in the days that will follow.  I don’t know what white women will do.  And this historic election rests primarily with what they, in the end, decide to do.  No wonder I am anxious.  History doesn’t offer much confidence in this regard.

These are words I wrote at the end of my most recent book, We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For.  I reread them this morning to settle my stomach.

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The answer to the troubles in this country rests, as it always has, with the willingness of everyday people to fight for democracy. Not with the outsourcing of that struggle to so-called prophets and heroes but with the realization that the salvation of democracy itself requires, in part, “the creation of personal attitudes in individual human beings” that affirm the dignity and standing of all people. It requires that we understand that democratic flourishing cannot be “separated from the individual attitudes so deep-seated as to constitute character.”  We must be the kinds of people democracies require.

Hatred gums things up, gums us up. From the beginning, this has been so. It blocks the way toward others. It straitjackets the imagination and places us behind iron bars. I find that insight in the tradition, rightly understood…. Baldwin wrote in “In Search of a Majority” that “to be with God is really to be involved with some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you. I conceive of my own life as a journey toward something I do not understand, which in the going toward, makes me better.”

It is “in the going toward” that salvation can be found. That imaginative leap, which allows us to see beyond ourselves and to reach for another. To be vulnerable, to tend and to love, to rip off the mask that blinds us to the beauty of the human being right in front of us. To recognize the distorting and disfiguring effect of hatred and fear, and the exacting power of love.

No matter how vague the invocation of love may be, it remains the one force that transcends the differences that get in the way of our genuinely living together. In one of his last essays, “To Crush a Serpent” (1987), Baldwin recounts his journey with and through religion and, along the way, casts aside the hypocrisy of the white evangelicalism of organizations like the Moral Majority. He knows what it means to predicate a sense of self and national identity upon hatreds, fears, and grievances. The flames of such fears and the scapegoats that must bear the brunt of the hate are meant “to exorcize the terrors of the mob.” As Baldwin wrote,

Those ladders to fire—the burning of the witch, the heretic, the Jew, the nigger, the faggot—have always failed to redeem, or even to change in any way whatever, the mob. They merely . . . force their connection on the only plain on which the mob can meet: the charred bones connect its members and give them reason to speak to one another, for the charred bones are the sum total of their individual self-hatred, externalized. The burning or lynching or torturing gives them something to talk about. They dare no other subject, certainly not the forbidden subject of the bloodstained self. They dare not trust one another.

But the kind of salvation I’m talking about is not found in such tricky magic. Nor is it in some Heavenly bye and bye. “Salvation is not flight from the wrath of God,” Baldwin declares, “it is accepting and reciprocating the love of God. Salvation is not separation. It is the beginning of the union with all that is or has been or will ever be.” It is found in the going toward, evident in the politics of tending, and love is its carriage. 

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Even in a moment so burdened by the weight of the choice before us, we must have faith “in the going toward,” a faith that we can be better people together.  Even when the history of the country – with a past replete with moral failings and a present complicit with the death of innocents – suggests that such faith is misguided and folly, we must cling to the madness in order to release ourselves from the grip of alabaster ghosts. In “Moral Inhabitants,” Toni Morrison declared:

Our past is bleak.  Our future dim.  But I am not reasonable.  A reasonable man adjusts to his environment.  And unreasonable man does not.  All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man.  I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of “I” and choose the open spaces of “we.”

With such a past we cannot be optimistic about the possibility of a humane society, in which humane decision-making is the prime goal of educators, ever becoming imagined and therefore realized. We cannot be optimistic, but we can be clear.  We can identify the enemy.  We can begin by asking ourselves what is right rather than what is expedient. Know the difference between fever and the disease.  Between racism and greed. We can be clear and we can be careful.  

On the eve of a historic day, with our stomachs tied in knots, we can be clear: the future may be dim, but it is, as it has always been, in our hands.