DEFYING AUTOCRACY
Let us ring in the new year with a new commitment to keeping the peace, rebuilding the trust and defying the gravity of autocracy.
I went to see the Ringling Circus show at Paycom recently. What a delight, ringing in the holidays with captivating acrobatics that seemed to defy all gravity! Swingers, dancers, clowns, tight-ropers, drummers, cheer leaders, singers, bikers and a flying cannonball lady performed breathtaking acts of bodily virtuosity in what looked like normal human bodies (except for the dancing dog-robot). Joining everyone around, I howled and hollered, childlike in awe out of sheer admiration for the artists’ strengths and skills.
What amazed me most was the universal trust, concentration, balance and imperceptible communication visible in each performance. Notably, there was no solo performer! Everything happened in a team approach, even as part of crew work, down to the tech support. What appeared effortlessly culminated in the acrobats’ mutual reliance that requires enormous amounts of focus, group cohesion, clockwork orchestration skills — and, again, trust.
In all of this, the ability of blind trust was the performers’ most important asset for defying the gravity. Teams get to know each other really well in endless hours of training, coordination, rehearsals and repetition. They never skip regimens of practice that prepare routines where failure isn’t an option. A total observance of cooperative values around us makes the difference between life and death.
In my relish of the great circus show, I came to see it as a fitting analogy for us as a nation. America could learn a lot from acrobats — most importantly, regain trust in each other in a society polarized by extremes.
I saw the tightrope as a cool symbol for our democracy. We now hear voices arguing it should be cancelled. Indeed, it’s been a wobbly act since 1776 (sadly so, inequitable for some of us) but we’ve been able to get by at least with the very basics of trust.
Our struggle to become a “freer” country has been a hard one through endless returns to negotiating the balance, attaining social cohesion (no matter how flawed), and tireless sweats at communication. I thought no group other than acrobats could inspire us better on how to prevent the deep fall. After tightrope dancers easily coordinated their balancing acts above, the trapeze swingers seemed to cross the air like stratoliners in slow motion. Correctly interpreting their cautioning against gravity allows us to see the values added to daily life in a democracy. One moment of inattention could thrash lifetimes of hardearned progress.
The coming year will be a relentless one on the tightrope for America. We should be in awe of our democracy. Billions of oppressed people around the world envy us for it (they’d probably tell us, we’ve come close to zero-gravity already). The acrobats show us the beauty of the interplay of balance, trust and communication. But they will also tell us how lack of trust and unity will unforgivably plunge us tumbling down a hole.
Let us ring in the new year with a new commitment to keeping the peace, rebuilding the trust and defying the gravity of autocracy. Imagine the darkness if we fall. And then let us finish the election year with a strengthened democracy that will keep us shining the light for the world.
Michael Reinschmidt is a social sciences adjunct instructor at the University of Oklahoma.