Pat Taub
GUEST POST by TOM SANTULLI
“We make meaning most readily in times of confusion and despair when life as we know it has ceased to make sense.” ~ Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sachs (1933-2015) neurologist and writer/philosopher in 2015
Watching the chaos and suffering unleashed in this country and abroad by Trump – maniacal narcissistic amoral bullying – and his toadies, despair is my first reaction…
Posters condemning Renee Good’s murder by ICE officer, Jonathan Ross, blanket Minneapolis
fear, sadness follow on quickly,
anger percolates up,
like a frail old man, I shake my fist… impotent, frustrated.
The useless question: ‘how could this happen?’
I lash out: ‘I’m embarrassed to be an American!’
Then, taking a breath, I remember Martin Luther King: “… only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
Martin Luther King, delivering his “I Have A Dream” speech, Washington, DC, August 23, 1963
With clearer eyes I look again to Minneapolis:
thousands terrorized, hundreds injured, untold numbers ‘disappeared’ by the inhuman antics and tactics of masked… Americans
Yet, I also see
community growing,
community caring for one and other,
community protesting,
community taking upon itself to bend NOW the ‘long moral arc of the universe toward justice.’
Neighbors paying their respect to Renee Good at a memorial on the site where she was murdered,
It’s happened in Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago, and on smaller scale across the country; we hear that Portland, Maine, will be next.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King, from Birmingham Jail, reminding us, prophetically, that once again it’s one’s moral responsibility to act in community and break unjust laws, to take direct action rather than waiting for relief to come through the courts.
Then I look beyond Minnesota, to what community can mean to others: the lonely, the homeless, the aging, the ill… to more of those our culture increasingly views as less worthy, as “other:”
“… what people [with mental illness] needed, especially people who were unhappy, depressed, was to have them [find stability] by showing them where they fit into things…” (from founders Agnes and Will Gould of Gould Farm in the Berkshires, a mental health facility.)
And I look further, to the Palestinians
‘the image that will not go away’ (Edward Said, 1986)
facing unspeakable hardship decade after decade,
still, they live in the continuous process of honoring their history while putting together new communities however fragile, through narrative, through lived experience, and through memories of lives, home, homeland.
Gazans reduced to living in tents at the mercy of high winds and rain
What unites these moments, and the others many living things experience today?
Elimination of the “outsider.”
It always begins with ignorance, prejudice and fear; mockery, contempt, brutality, domination, subjugation, and, increasingly, extinction inevitably follow.
So, I ask three questions:
Are we again living in a time when one group – with its wealth, prejudice, ignorance, overwhelming force – will isolate and subjugate another?
Is tribe being chosen over community?
And if the answer is ‘yes’ to both, am I ready to address these challenges, to “own’ them?
James Baldwin is often quoted: “… Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
What precedes it in his NYT 1962 article, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” is visionary, ominous, demanding:
“We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake America into what we want it to be. Without this endeavor, we will perish.”
Tom is thankful for everything beautiful in his life, especially all that he didn’t earn or create, and for dogs, for flowers, and for the crossing guard beneath the window cheerily greeting children on their way to and from school and helping the elderly get across the icy road.
