KEITH C. BURRIS ON HOW THE NATION CAN FIND ITS WAY BACK
It’s not over yet, this strange, sad, but perhaps ultimately teaching moment in our country’s history. And maybe it will not end in a neat and tidy way. But when next comes, what will it be?
Can we heal? If so, how? James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former secretary of defense, says we can. He points out that most of the protests have been peaceful and simply calling the country to be all that it has long aspired to be. He calls most of the protests “healthy,” and notes that they are constitutionally protected.
Barack Obama sees hope, too. He sees a new generation of civil rights leaders — fresh voices, new energy.
Neither man, I think, is blind to all that is wrong with this moment — George Floyd’s death; the many cops injured at the hands of cops haters this week; the looters; the instigators of violence.
But they see something good in the midst of all this, and I take heart at their optimism. Still, I think we need a healing
First, we need practical steps, like banning chokeholds and requiring constant training and retraining for police officers. Most good police chiefs want the latter and will tell you the former is unnecessary. This can be done individually in cities and states. With a push by that new generation of leadership, it can be achieved.
Second, we need dialogue. Some will see this as corny or a sort of 1960s idea. They are wrong. Old people, young people, black people and white people need to talk. Blue lives and black lives need to interact, not just on the streets but in living rooms and churches and synagogues. I am talking about formal dialogues, yes, like we created artificially in the 1960s and 1970s, because Americans have stopped talking to each other and listening to each other.
What has happened is that we are a 44%/44% country of blue versus red, in which each side or team has become incapable of seeing the other’s reality. One side sees America burning. The other sees it awakening. And neither can see, for an instant, what the other sees.
Liberals committed, first and last, to free speech and free thought scarcely exist any more. They have been displaced by the left and the woke, people sometimes terrifyingly committed to certitude. They are the reigning bully boys of this moment, though the bigots of the right will always be with us.
American conservatism and libertarianism still exist as intellectual movements, but as political movements they have been eclipsed by reactionary impulses and forces.
The only way to revive American political thought and to build consensus around certain goals — let us say rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure or the manufacturing base of the American heartland — is to talk. Not shout or demonize, but talk.
The third thing we need will grow out of dialogue — a national upsurge in empathy.
Can I feel your pain? No, but I can identify with it.
We know that some individuals, peoples and races suffer far more than others. But the capacity for empathy is rooted in the universality of human experience, beginning, and ending, in suffering. All human beings know suffering.
If I go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, I cannot possibly feel or understand all that a Jewish person can. But I can feel and understand.
A friend gave me a remarkable little book called “Black Misery” by Langston Hughes, the great African American poet of the last century. The book is a series of drawings by an artist named Arouni and they are of African American children who tell their stories of “misery” through Hughes’ bleak captions and aphorisms.
“Misery,” says a little boy, “is when you start to help an old white lady across the street and she thinks you’re trying to snatch her purse.”
“Misery is when the taxi cab won’t stop for your mother and she says a bad word.”
“Misery is when you see that it takes the whole National Guard to get you into the new integrated school.”
This was the last project Langston Hughes worked on before he died.
The good thing, maybe the best thing, that has come out of this current moment in our history is that a whole lot of Americans are more fully awakening to the reality of black children — and the reality of some of those children when they become young men and their parents have to have “the talk” with them and coach them about how to survive a traffic stop.
Traffic stops are also terrifying for many cops.
We need an ocean tide of empathy in the United States right now, and maybe that’s what those peaceful and constitutionally protected demonstrations were about — a modest swell to begin.
Finally, and most important, we need to practice humility — practice it even if we don’t feel it. Fake it until we actually do internalize it: Think about what we don’t understand and what we can never fully understand. Not feel too boastful about the empathy we do uncover and engender. We aren’t going to “solve” our problems, including bigotry and police violence, this year, or any year. But we can learn, improve and progress.
We can only do that, though, with a sense of our personal and political and systemic limitations and by practicing mutual respect and listening to each other. I don’t have the right to label you or tell you I know what is in your heart. Joe Biden hasn’t got the right to tell a black man he “ain’t black.” And Donald Trump should have left the Bible at home and gone into St John’s Church across the street from the White House and knelt in silence — praying for a harvest of charity in this country we all love.