Tuesday, June 23, 2020

MUSINGS WHILE SHELTERING IN PLACE


June 22, 2020




Most mornings find me seated on the patio, steaming, fragrant, coffee in hand, and resting in my lap, Jill LePore’s THESE TRUTHS a History of the United States.  I alternate between reading and connecting with the world beyond words on a page-- watching for high flying jets tracing contrails across the sky (very few in these times), smaller planes arriving and departing from our local airport, the Embry-Riddle training planes circling the airport in lazy circles, bird song, the color of the sky, shape of clouds, purple sage pushing forth flowers, moles crawling tentatively from holes before popping back in, rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks foraging in our yard and quail, always quail.  But this morning was special, my first siting of babies, scurrying across the hillside beyond our wall, fragile yet brave as they perform their first reconnaissance of their new world.





And then I begin reading where I left off yesterday morning.  Within a few lines, I see the date June 22, 1860 exactly 160 years ago from today.  On this day the Democratic Party split in two—northern and southern factions.  And so began the dissolution of our Union--fragile from the start-- and the inexorable, or so it seemed, march to war. 
Stephen Douglas won the nomination from the northern faction of the Democratic Party and John Breckenridge for the southern faction.  The southern faction pro slavery and the northern against the southern push to extend slavery beyond the south.
Lincoln running on the Republican ticket of course won.  (Please note the Democratic and Republican Parties of the 1860’s are very different entities from their 21st century namesakes.) Six weeks later South Carolina seceded and the lower south all the way to Texas followed. In February 1861 the Confederate States of America formed with former Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis as president--“a man the Texan Sam Houston once called ‘as ambitious as Lucifer and as cold as a lizard.’”  

Lincoln won every northern state including all six states where the Lincoln/ Douglas (not Stephen but rather Frederick) debates took place and all four states in which black men could vote.

 

As I read these paragraphs I am struck by the similarities we face as our presidential election draws ever closer.  Like the 1860’s headlines proclaim our divisions, protests scream our differences, and social media explodes with violent rhetoric.   In the 1860’s, without radio, the Internet and social media, the speed of communications depended on word of mouth, newspapers and the fairly recently created telegraph system.  While speed and density of communications of those times were no match for today, still ideas did spread.  Citizens gathered by the thousands, standing for hours in the sun, to hear the Lincoln/Douglas debates, reporters reported, citizens wrote letters to family and friends, and in time diary entries would find their way into history books like the one I am reading.  But today the speed of dissemination of information is breathtaking.  The phone, radio, even broadcast and cable TV cannot outpace the Internet characterized by anonymity and intimacy by turns.

 

The information age has, like almost any construct, proven to be a double edged sword.  It serves both the ignorant and the informed, the stupid and the intelligent, the compassionate and the heartless, the criminal and the lawful, the bigoted and the tolerant, those who want to return and cling to the past and those who want to move into and embrace the future, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Three hundred pages into a 782 page history of our nation, I find on almost every page that if names and dates were changed I could be reading some action, some idea, some turn of phrase that has sprung forth from headlines just in the past few weeks.  The lack of logical thinking, the self-serving greed, the manipulation of facts, the suppression of free speech, the hatred, the short term thinking, the lack of empathy, continues unabated.  And if one looked only at headlines one would assume we’ve made no progress.  The promise of the fine words in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, written by flawed men remains unfulfilled.

Progress?  Yes, Of course.  But when citizens line up against one another, when the police and National Guard are called, when words fail us, when debate devolves into shouting matches, when our leader encourages violence, the breaking of the law, and sounds like a five year old when he speaks or writes, I have to wonder if the country that was built on high flying ideas, broken by slavery and blood, and rebuilt again by promises that in practice have left so very many of us without—I have to wonder—where will be on June 22, 2021?  Will our crumbling institutions continue to weaken while a criminal occupies the White House?  Or will we, like the survivors of our Civil War, awaken to the horrors of the past 4 years, elect someone with a brain, experience and compassion and find a year from now that we are healing?  Will we then recognize the opportunity we’ve given ourselves by casting a vote for progress and keep an eye on the future as we deal with the present, recast our views, open ourselves to our neighbors next door and in the next nation over and around the world?


In the distant past tribes came together in trade and created alliances.  That pattern has continued and yet we still remain so afraid of the Other.  America, under Trump, has withdrawn from the world.  He sits in the oval office pouting,
arms crossed, lower lip out, eyes narrowed and eyebrows lowered as he rants about anything that threatens his self-image.  He is incapable of a cogent thought, of speaking in full sentences with multi-syllabic words, of simply looking beyond the self.  


As I read the following excerpt today from Lincoln’s first Inaugural address, considered the most eloquent in American history, I could not help contrasting it in my mind with Trump’s performance in Tulsa this past Saturday.  Lincoln writes:

We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies.  Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.  The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Abraham Lincoln,  March 4, 1861 First Inaugural Address
 

As Lepore points out in the next line, “The better angels did not prevail.  Debate had failed.”  Even the date, March fourth/forth, seemed to presage the war on the horizon.  Words became weapons and too soon weapons replaced words on battlefields from North Dakota to Florida, from Pennsylvania to the New Mexico Territory.


                                                 Battle of Gettysburg

Today we are once again at war with ourselves and now we battle a faceless enemy, too small to see with the naked eye, but powerful enough to bring this nation to its knees.  Our misplaced pride in ‘rugged individualism’, our belief in a concept of freedom that says we may behave in ways that bring illness even death to those around us—these views combined with a president who foments violence among us and behavior counter to advice from public health officials account for protests across the country and almost 120,000 deaths from the virus.



 
      George Washington Wears a Mask 
          to Protect Himself and Others

If this failure of a president, Donald J. Trump, continues past Jan. 2021, we could be forgiven for thinking that the promise of 1776 has evaporated.

The Democrats of 1860 split in two, thus undermining any chance at beating Lincoln.  Thank God they did so.  But the Democratic party of 2020 must not succumb to any actions that favor the return of Trump to the White House.  Let’s make sure moving vans show up next January to rid the White House of this execrable excuse for a human.  Do not throw your vote away even out of principle.  There is too much at stake to get your panties in a twist.  Democrats and Independents, and every color of party out there, unite and vote Trump out of office.



I leave you with these words as does Dr. Lepore on the last page of her remarkable book…

If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster.  The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history
 but by hatred and vainglory.
--Reinhold Niebuhr
The Irony of American History
1952
Be Safe; Be Well
Gail Mangham  June 22, 2020


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