While we're here

Like many of you, I have spent much of the last several days in stunned disbelief. Not because I didn’t suspect this might happen, but rather because my yearning for a less hateful outcome was so strong, so visceral that the news hit me as a personal failure.

I haven’t known where to turn or to whom I can safely bare my soul. I’ve been snappy with folks who deserve better and suspicious of casual comments. This morning – intentionally my first with WiFi access since November 6^th – I checked out the news and Facebook posts. My sense of horror swelled and threatened to overwhelm as I read of minorities being harassed and threatened. I had to stop reading the accounts of assault, invective, spewing of ignorant hatred (yeah, I know, as if there’s any other kind).

My shock was gradually overtaken and replaced by the realization that this wasn’t something that ‘happened’ on November 8^th or even within the scope of a single election cycle. One candidate did not create the unreasoning hatred, selfishness and stupidity that has been unleashed upon us. Or I should say, among us.

The crowds of braying asses had to have been out there, waiting. Held back by a more reasoned majority until just the right moment for all the wrong people to step forward and lead them. The candidates did not create the bigots and perverts who now tear hijabs from strangers’ heads and tell Hispanic kids to ‘go home.’ They did not create the mob. They merely emboldened it.

The ones who write epithets on doors and then slink away have been with us all the time, lurking in dark corners, needing only figureheads to bring them out into the light of day. And along came Trump and Pence – and frankly, Cruz and Ryan and McConnell and Conway and Giuliani, et al – to provide them with a Nuremberg at which to rally. And rally they did.

But as much as I despise this President-elect and his gay-hating, woman-diminishing batboy, I can’t place all the blame for this catastrophe on the people who voted for them. I don’t understand it, and I will never be able to fully trust anyone who is willing to admit this affiliation. But neither can I whole-heartedly damn them. Because although it’s on them that they voted for these wannabe despots, it’s on all of us that some of them (please gawd, tell me it’s many of them) simply felt they had no other direction to turn.

Those of us who care about equal rights, an even playing field for minorities and immigrants and women, and just basic civility handed this election to Trump just as much as the haters pushed him over the top.

This election exposes a failure of citizenship. Democrats put forward a very deeply flawed candidate who proved unelectable even in the face of a demonstrably evil opponent. We could have done better.

We should have done better. We didn’t. We took the easy path of the known face and the existing machinery. And we lost.

More than that, many of us who are old enough to know better simply failed to engage. The non-voters, the sheer number of citizens content with the label ‘bystander’ to this train wreck is the knife that cuts the deepest.

So, I decided I would turn away from the news and the social media firestorm but then I noticed something. And it gave me hope.

Look at who is most outraged, who is posting and responding to posts. Look for those with tears in their eyes, tears of frustration and rage and fear. And be glad and hopeful. They’re our children.

I thought back to the Sixties when I was a young white boy in a lower-middle-class family comprising both emerging liberals and couldn’t-quite-overcome-their-upbringing bigots. I thought of the incomprehensible newsreels of neatly dressed black people pummeled by truncheons, pinned to walls by high pressure streams from fire hoses, bitten by German Shepherds cheered on by grinning cops.  I recall my dad, who was not what you would call a liberal by today’s standards, being berated by one of the other ushers at our church for suggesting that Mr. Harkins join their number. I recall with great clarity the Harkins and Loving families of Lake Hills in the Sixties although I could name relatively few of the other families. The Harkins and Lovings stood out and came to reside in my long term memory because human brains manage by exception. And those two families were exceptional – they were the only ‘Negroes’ I knew before moving to California for high school.

Speaking of my dad, I recall him frantically waving down another driver to prevent two little black girls from being run over and then sobbing in relief as the oncoming car screeched to a halt just short of tragedy. But I also recall him laughing along with racial stereotypes in jokes with his friends. My dad was a product of his background but trying his damnedest to be better. So when there was no time to think, when those little girls ran out into the street or Mr. Harkins needed a lift to the hardware store, it didn’t occur to him not to act. That’s the Dad I choose to recall as my mentor. The other parts of him I forgave long ago just as I beg the forgiveness of my children for my own darker corners.

In the Sixties, it was mainly young people who forced change. And it was a tough fight. Not just for those like Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney who gave their lives for the cause, but for those millions of young people who made lesser stands in smaller venues but were nevertheless part of the movement. Mike, who stood up in church to defend the preacher who spoke out against VietNam was part of the movement. As was the young man who put flowers in gun muzzles. And yes, the girl who brought home the non-white friend to meet her parents and even – make that especially – the ones who in odd moments simply frowned and said “That’s not funny” to the racist joke.

I remember watching the smoke from the burning of Watts from the top tier at Dodger stadium. I was a twelve-year-old bystander in flood tide pants but even then I wondered what would make people burn down their own neighborhood. And I remembered. And I like to think I learned.

So, how do my memories of the Sixties relate to our current national shaming? Directly, I would say.

We thought we’d won when the troops came home from Vietnam, when the schools and city buses were integrated and a woman’s right to control her own reproductive destiny was secured. We cheered the lions like Martin and Thurgood and we thought, yes, we are moving forward. And we were.

But what we didn’t realize then was the difference between progress and completion. And we left the work incomplete. We outlawed the worst of the Klan’s activities but left much of the hatred intact to arise again under other banners. We elected candidates who were good enough but failed to find true leaders. And so we ended up with Hillary instead of Elizabeth.

We can do better, and we will do better. The reason I know this is that my daughters are as disgusted with the failures of my generation as was I with the failures of the Greatest Generation.  

Progress has been made and so we have a better educated, more worldly class of young people than we ourselves could claim to be. Witness: while I can name and picture the one black kid in my high school in the 67-68 school year, my daughter’s minority friends are too numerous to recall individually. And although I’m not sure I even had a minority friend over as a kid (maybe Deborah Loving who I really liked  but probably not because my buddy kind of had a crush on her so that would have been weird in ways unrelated to race) I can’t recall any grouping of my children’s school mates that was uniformly pale. In my daughters’ generation, being non-white is unexceptional.

Thanks to the Internet, our kids’ generation is amazingly connected and this gives them two distinct advantages: 1) they can share information and organize actions in ways and at speeds we would have considered fictional because in our day, it would have been; and, 2) the bigots, creepers, bullies and bloviating a-holes just can’t keep their mouths shut (as always) but now that means they self-identify on a wide stage.

My daughters and their friends are already studying, buckling down, making plans, preparing to sally forth and that’s as it should be. This is their fight. Not that we geezers won’t lend a hand. But the current disaster is a product, at least in part, of our generation having been too self-satisfied with the progress we made.

And as I said above, progress is not completion.

There can come a day, and I believe there will come a day, when the denizens of ‘white-is-right’ and similar camps will be forced back into the suppurating pustules from whence they sprang. But it will take a lot of courage and hard work and even once they’re defeated, we will need to post a watch. Because hatred arises from fear and ignorance and those are two ills that seem to be DNA-embedded in the human race.

We have to start now. Can’t wait for two years or four years or someday. Have to start now.

I will wear my safety pin because while I can’t tell the good guys from the bad on the basis of appearance, I can at least self-identify as a safe harbor for those who might need it. And I will seek out opportunities to be my better self - visibly, audibly so.

We have to start now. Because we can only do it while we’re here.

 “And I won't be laughing at the lies when I'm gone
And I can't question how or when or why when I'm gone
Can't live proud enough to die when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here”

Excerpted from “When I'm Gone” by Phil Ochs