Tag Archives: current-events

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Latent cruelty

This has all been building up for a while, I know, but the last few weeks have seemed to be particularly offensive and painful to watch in America.

Reading John Pavlovitz’ latest blog post today seems to have crystalized in my mind a few things that have been bubbling around there for a while, too. He calls it The Trump Effect, and he lays out the development of it pretty clearly. It’s been remarked on before by others and I’ve certainly been thinking it since it began to surface during the T-thing’s administration, as racism and white supremacy began to be expressed in new and more open ways, violence increased and the quality of the national conversation began to decline daily. The slide away from truth and accuracy and decency in his daily rants had its effect.

There are lots of examples, and Pavlovitz relates some of the most egregious, but to me its in the essential failure of basic human compassion in the face of this raging pandemic that it is most clear.

How people can equate the simple discomfort and slight inconvenience of wearing a mask with putting other people–and other people’s children–at risk of serious, life-threatening disease has just been beyond me to understand. But seeing it as just another expression of the crass, stupid insensitivity to others that is at the heart of the Trump Effect helps me to understand it. It somehow makes these people feel empowered, self-righteous, justified in their own petty hatreds to be pretending that refusal to wear a mask or get vaccinated is somehow an exercise of their rights as an American.

So it’s not enough just to not do it, they have to proclaim their heroic stupidity and even harass others who are wearing masks and getting vaccinated. It’s so remiscinent of something…. what is it? Oh yeah. Nazi rallies. Book burnings. Klan rallies. Lynchings.

All these are of a piece. People venting their anger and fear and seeking justification in some kind of twisted version of “rightness.” Pavlovitz lays it clearly at the feet of Trump’s monstrous venom.

Though certainly not created then or by the man, for the first time in America’s history the latent ugliness in people was revealed and validated and celebrated by a sitting president—it was officially normalized. And what we’re experiencing now; this staggering, insensitive posturing in the face of so many people’s suffering, is the late-ripening fruit of something that has been set into the bedrock of half our nation. It is the malicious entitlement that MAGA was designed to nurture from the beginning.

JohnPavlovitz.com

If you’ve followed the rise of fascism in America over the past few decades, which has been documented by many including the guy on Orcinus, you know this strain of “americanism” has been festering under the surface, held in check by the sense of decency and fair play that is–at least I believe it is–a stronger, more truly American trait, but developing under cover of various rationalizations and facades. Trump’s legitimization of that strain is what has allowed the racism to swell along with all this other petty hatred. The whole development, of course, has been facilitated and exacerbated by the ease of vicious communication made possible by the internet and social media.

So now we are facing fascist America. Big Time. Trump’s America.

{Post script: My brother was one of the 599 people who died of of COVID in Florida yesterday, so this is all very personal to me. He was a victim of the anti-vax conspiracy theory wackos, didn’t get the shot, didn’t go to the hospital when he got sick. They kept him alive for weeks, but it ravaged him so that he eventually succumbed to a cardiac arrest.]

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Pro-lifers really aren’t

A great column that goes far to explain why these Christians have pushed to such extreme positions on abotion, and showing just how un-Christian it really is. And how anti-life they really are.

The Easy, Selective Morality of the Pro-Life Movement
John Pavlovitz
The Easy, Selective Morality of the Pro-Life Movement
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Election challenges

The Orange one’s fascist

project to challenge the election

A final nail in the coffin of the Orange one’s desperate attempt to convince the world that he was cheated out of his throne just came from a district court judge in Michigan.

We all know, at least those of us still capable of rational thought, that it was a massive scam and an international disgrace, but the judge does a great job of laying it out.

It probably won’t convince those who drank the Orange Jim Jones’ coolaid, but it is at least confirmation at the highest level that this is nothing short of an illegal insurrection.

According to the National Law Journal report (rerun on law.com‘s Daily Report Aug. 25), the judge censures a group of lawyers–one of whom is Georgia Attorney Lin Wood–for their actions in the election fraud challenges. The whole group has been referred to their licensing states for potential disbarment.

“U.S. District Judge Linda Parker issued the orders in response to motions for sanctions filed by lawyers for the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan over the quickly rejected election challenge.”

The Law Journal

Those sanctioned are part of conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell’s team. The judge says the group showed bad faith in trying to use the judicial process to frame a public narrative for which there was no evidentiary or legal support.

“This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process,” Law Journal quotes Parker from the opening to her opinion. “It is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election. It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated. This is what happened here.”

It’s a pretty strong condemnation of the whole effort.

Parker also said that the election challenge “was never about fraud—it was about undermining the people’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”

This is all so clearly a fascist project aimed at pushing such a big lie that people believe it simply because it’s normal to think that no one would say such outrageous things unless there was some basis in fact.

It’s a tactic borrowed from the playbook of Hitler and Mussolini and has no place in our national process. These people should be disbarred, humiliated and prosecuted. Everything they stand for should be exposed to the light of public scrutiny and revealed for exactly what it, and its inspiration, is: a deceitful attempt to grab power.

The judge continues:

“But when viewed collectively, they reveal an even more powerful truth: Once it appeared that their preferred political candidate’s grasp on the presidency was slipping away, plaintiffs’ counsel helped mold the predetermined narrative about election fraud by lodging this federal lawsuit based on evidence that they actively refused to investigate or question with the requisite level of professional skepticism—and this refusal was to ensure that the evidence conformed with the predetermined narrative (a narrative that has had dangerous and violent consequences),” Parker said.

She goes on to explicitly show that the free speech these charlatans have claimed in their defense is not the same as that offered on public forums, because they were presenting affidavits to a court, which are required to reflect the truth, not speculation, conjecture and guesswork.

She specifically notes that lawyers presenting a case in court are not the same as journalists and are held to a higher standard of truth.

The judge wrote:

“It is not acceptable to support a lawsuit with opinions, which counsel herself claims no reasonable person would accept as fact and which were ‘inexact,’ ‘exaggerate[ed],’ and ‘hyperbole. Nor is it acceptable to use the federal judiciary as a political forum to satisfy one’s political agenda. Such behavior by an attorney in a court of law has consequences. Although the First Amendment may allow plaintiffs’ counsel to say what they desire on social media, in press conferences, or on television, federal courts are reserved for hearing genuine legal disputes which are well-grounded in fact and law.”

Four other judges around the country have recently passed down similar decisions related to Powell and other lawyers involved in election lawsuit cases. I hope these judicial responses put this foolishness to rest at last.

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Blithering idiots

Yes, that’s a bit of an angry, unkind and vicious name-calling for a title!

I won’t try to defend it as justified, but I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to characterize what is happening with folks in our community, and, it seems, the nation as well. Much of what I see from folks who have been sucked into the “orange experiment”–as someone has dubbed the past few years–just seems to be blithering. Talking for effect and pandering to people who’ve abdicated their rational responsibility to critical thinking, evaluation, sorting through things for themselves. And not really making a whole lot of sense. That’s what I mean by blithering.

And they could fairly be called idiots in the sense that many of them just don’t really know much at all about what they’re blithering about. They haven’t bothered to look into the history, the scientific facts, even the reality of current reports floated on social media and propaganda masquerading as news sites, such as Fox News. They just take what someone they have decided to admire says as truth and repeat it without thought.

Locally we have just seen the impact of such blighted thinking on our school board.

The superintendent — responding to the CDC call and the obvious spike in COVID cases in our state and our county — had announced that masks would be required and caution would be exercised as school opens next week. Then the semi-republican echo chamber began to react to the idea of mask requirements, ranting and roaring about “standing up for our rights” and government mandates and other such phrases that have been put out to manipulate them. This week, the board held a special meeting and said the superintendent couldn’t mandate masks and school would be normal.

I want to call each of the four who voted to do this and ask, “Have you looked at the recent data?” Our county has seen rates go up by a factor of six times in the last few weeks, and the state has quadrupled its rate. We had four people in the hospital last week, this week we had 12 and in the past few days there have been 16 hospitalized. This is a tiny community and that’s a significant change. The curve is now going nearly straight up on that graph.

It is literally incomprehensible to me that people think that being asked to wear a mask in public is some kind of effort to exercise government control over their lives. They have long accepted that we expect kids to meet certain standards when they come to school, that we stop at red lights, that we follow laws and reasonable standards of behavior on the roads that make things work for everyone. That’s what this is. Not some violation of rights. The constitution doesn’t mention the right not to wear a mask

And then we have the true fascist, Florida governor DeSantis, who has ordered that any school district who does mandate masks will lose funding. So, being asked to wear a mask is infringing on someone’s rights, but the governor dictatorially mandating what a supposedly independent school board does is defending freedom? It truly boggles the mind the degree of twisted thinking, propagandized mentality required to think that way.

People who blast out about “standing up for our rights” by refusing to mask up or get vaccinated are somehow imagining themselves as some kind of hero. It’s really sad when there are so many places, so many issues that we truly need to stand up for our rights about, and these folks just don’t notice those things. Things like the blatant racism in our community, the inequity at the heart of the economic system, the injustice that is visited on poor or even middle class people every day by our legal system, homelessness and PSTD in our veteran population, hungry children and other issues that threaten to undermine the functioning of our democratic way of life — why are these people not worried about “standing up for our rights” on these issues?

I don’t blame social media for this turn of events, but it does seem to be making it worse. It gives people a platform to easily and freely spout un-researched, ill-considered notions that are absorbed without reflection by a numbed audience, all full of self-congratulatory blithering and self-righteous ignorance.

Candidates for local political office are “announcing” on social media platforms, reducing the political process to some kind of debased level of unhealthy posturing and attacks beyond even the low levels we’ve been seeing in TV political ads.

It’s all pretty discouraging to see. Especially as the pandemic threatens to once again disrupt daily life to an intolerable degree.

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The climate

In support of my thoughts on the seriousness of the climate change/global warming situation, I’m posting a link to a recent news report from the LA Times. I hope the link works for everyone. If not, Googling “Summer of disaster: Extreme weather wreaks havoc worldwide as climate change bears down” will likely turn it up.

The report links all the recent increasing extreme weather to global warming, and it gives the scientific explanations for how those things are connected. It’s a bit more in detail than my simple notion that heat powers everything, but it bears that core notion out pretty well, I think.

A seminal paragraph:

The scenes of desperation and devastation in Zhengzhou added to a portfolio of disasters this year that have raised the specter of irreversible climate change as never before and offered glimpses of what it means to live on a warming planet where human survival grows more fraught.

LA Times July 21

There are lots of similar reports out there, though your climate denier friends and Congressmen have likely not read any of it. Sorta like the mental blinders that the folks wear who want to claim Jan. 6 Capitol rioters were just a bunch of tourists…

The link:

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-07-21/extreme-weather-worldwide-climate-change-disasters

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Longleaf Dream (2000)

“Only the rarest of characters have genuine insight into the future or the past, and those seem crippled with grief at what they see.”

Barbara Kingsolver, 1992

I wake to moonlight and wind, old pines soughing in the night.

Three A.M. moon bright through my window, alive through the needles.

I sigh with the trees; I want to sleep but moon and pine song draw me out.

My dreams turn to memories of lost landscapes: the wiregrass prairie, Longleaf’s domain, stretching forever, covering coastal plain.

Like imagined lost lovers grieved for in the night, I grieve with the pines the loss of their mothers, fathers, lovers and friends, the loss of a world rampant with life, our birthright traded for a mess of porridge.

Tears slide slowly down my cheeks, and my chest aches with unreleased sobs.

What madness is this that comes in the night? How can I explain?

Who would believe?

:That I suffer the loss of the old growth forests like the loss of a child;

:That I feel the pain of what has been done like a blade in my chest;

:That sitting here in the moonlight, I feel the the attacks on the long-lost landscape as attacks on my body, as a deep abiding pain, an ache of heart and chest and head;

:That I am “crippled with grief” at what I see, immobilized by rage at what has been lost, at what cost… and at what gain.

How to explain?

Hobbling through life, heart bursting, lips frozen in a silent scream.

But the sweet moonlight pours over me yet like honeysuckle scent. Tears of crystal grief sparkle.

The pines’ sad songs are soft lullaby, and at length, I sleep.

In dreams, I walk along in moonlight down ancient corridors of pine!

(From a journal sometime around the year 2000.)

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How’s the weather?

We who live in the sunny South don’t really worry a lot about the weather, unless we farm or garden.

An old Southern comic, Brother Dave Gardner, made a career out of saying, “Hot, ain’t it!” That’s probably the most common weather-related conversation and concern around here, because it does usually get pretty dang hot here in the summer! So far this year, though, we’ve had a fairly moderate summer here in Southeast Georgia. Of course, as I told my wife today, there’s still August to go. It’s been fairly consistently in the mid 70s overnight and hits 90 during the day, but none of that 97-and-hotter stuff that we often get in July. It has been a little humid, off and on, as we’ve had stretches of too much rain punctuated by stretches of not enough, as is often the case. But even the humidity–“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity!” is another common weatherly observation–has not been unbearable yet.

All of which is making many of us Southerners wonder just what is going on. As well we might wonder, given the extremes of weather we’re seeing in lots of other places. I’m a bit of a weather geek, probably because I was a pilot for a few years (during my stint in the U.S. Air Force), and weather is one of the major things you learn about and worry about as a pilot. I took a class in climatology long ago during my preparation for teaching social studies, and that added an edge to my interest in what is one of the most engaging and complex aspects of life on the planet. So, I probably pay more attention to stories about weather, and the actual stuff going on in the atmosphere around me, than most folks.

Which brings me to the real subject here:

hat is going on?

While we’re sitting down here enjoying a fairly mild summer, the folks out in Oregon where I once lived are experiencing heat waves, drought and vicious, terrifying forest fires fueled by the drought and heat. All the northwest is suffering record heat, billions of organisms in the ocean along the northwest coast are dying, and forest fires are raging out of control.

The largest of the Oregon fires is said to be creating its own weather, the heat causing cloud formation and wind. Its smoke is traveling across the continent, polluting the air in New York City. Hundreds of fires are going on from California to near the Arctic Circle, and the firefighting infrastructure is overwhelmed. The consequences of all this seems guaranteed to be dire, thought we don’t yet have an idea of the extent of it.

At the same time, floods are ravaging populations in Asia and other areas of the world, as well as in the U.S. The warming water all around the world (most alarmingly to me right here in the Gulf of Mexico) are giving rise to surges of nasty bacteria that eat humans. (Maybe related, maybe not, but yet another alarming development surfacing as we begin to learn to cope with the COVID pandemic, is a number of strains of resistant fungi in hospital and nursing home environments.)

How can all these diverse and seemingly contradictory phenomena be explained? One of the basic things that I learned about weather is that all the various weather phenomena are powered by heat. It creates the airflow that moves everything around and carries water up into the atmosphere to fall down again as precipitation, and it interacts with the earth’s rotation to create the destructive storms that seem to also be on the increase in recent years. Heat is literally the engine powering everything that happens in the atmosphere.

And, of course, all the data shows that the earth and its atmosphere are heating up. So as there is more heat, even an amount of heat that creates a few degrees of increase in average temperature, all the extremes are pushed further and further. This is the simple, easily understood fact at the basis of the climate science behind global warming as a threat to the stability of our climate. There’s a lot more to the science than that, I’m pretty sure, but that much of it I can understand without being an expert.

That is why even the cold-weather storms and record cold temperatures don’t prove that global warming isn’t happening. They are the result of the extremes of up and down increasing. It’s a simple formula: more heat produces more extreme weather.

Maybe, as the climate-change deniers would say, we don’t have enough data or understanding of the complexities to know what the root causes of this heating up are, and certainly there are a lot of forces interacting there, including the likelihood that we’re still coming out of the last ice age. But we do understand that some things that we are doing are making the situation worse. We need to stop doing those things as expeditiously as possible. Maybe we can’t change the course of this overall process, but, if we can slow it, maybe we’ll have time to prepare to deal with the worst consequences of it.

As a father and grandfather, I reel at the prospects of a degraded natural environment for my progeny, indeed for the human race as a whole. As the natural world suffers, so do we. Our quality of life, the quality of our health and well-being, the quality of our relationships, even the quality of our spiritual lives is directly and materially affected by the conditions of the rest of the world.

We must begin to make choices that reflect these realities. We neglect and deny them at our own peril.

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Prison as intersection

The Florida prison strike, dubbed #operationPUSH by its organizers, is bringing a level of national attention to conditions in our prisons that I haven’t seen in a long time.

People who generally don’t give a thought to the issue are becoming aware that people in jails and prisons live under truly inhumane conditions. The practice of using prison labor to do work both public and private is being recognized for what it is: slavery.

Some people are even beginning to be willing to consider that we as a society should discuss ways to better solve the issues of poverty, crime and violence. As it becomes clear that most of our jails and prisons actually increase all those things, we are beginning to see that incarceration is not a positive element in society or even a “necessary evil” — the position most people tend to retreat to when faced with the facts about how horrible prison really is.

Intersections

The prison strike itself is bringing some clarity to my mind about a lot of these issues — issues I’ve been concerned about for a long time — because it’s helping me see the intersectionality of the issues. The question of using incarcerated people to do public work, from cleaning up roadsides to building facilities, is one thing (though I’d argue even that is a form of slave labor), but when it comes to leasing prisoners out to private interests, the moral ground is clear. We are enslaving them.

So I begin to see that when you step into a prison, you step into a place where many — perhaps most? — of the crucial issues of American society intersect. As with the original feminist idea of intersectionality, which describes how “people are often disadvantaged by multiple sources of oppression: their race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity markers,” as a discussion on YW Boston  frames it, the incarcerated are often at the crossing of many vectors that keep them pinned down, locked up, and caught in a cycle of poverty and crime that they can’t break out of.

This “convergence of oppression” can be acute for an incarcerated  individual.

Toxic Prisons

Prison, and the system that creates, supports, staffs and fills it with inmates, is likewise a point where we can observe many of the toxic factors in our society coming together to create an environment that is soul-destroying and life-wrecking for its individual victims and ultimately corrupting for the society at large.

In brief form, this is what we do: we take people who the economy — which is itself racist, classist, sexist, ableist, etc. — has forced into criminality in order to survive, run them through a legal system that is biased in every way against them and dooms them with its confrontational model, lock them up for being poor, of color, and under-educated, and them put them to work for either the state that did this to them or private interests that are the reason the state and its enforcement apparatus exist.

So in this system, this process, we can see all the racist, sexist, ableist, classist elements of society come together to make it nearly impossible for an individual with several strikes against them to avoid getting caught up in this web. Those individuals who do avoid it usually have some unusual element, some person, some stroke of luck, some quirk of character, that sets them apart and provides the impetus that propels them beyond entanglement in its sticky strands.

Almost all of the current social and political issues are involved in one way or another in the operation of this system. By looking deeply into how it works in general and how it may impact any particular person, we begin to illuminate all of the issues that our society must deal with in some reasonable time frame, else it will descend into some kind of dark, near-feudal social order that gradually abandons all the ideals of an egalitarian, humane society.

Slavery By Another Name

I’m beginning to read a book I’ve had for some years that is helping me see and understand the origins of this system.

Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name is a detailed historical account of how the system of laws, law enforcement and incarceration we now take as normal arose in the South after the Civil War to deal with two things: the economic chaos that white folk found themselves in after the freeing of the slaves deprived them of cheap labor, and the fear of these freed slaves taking over the government and economy of the South.

As I read this book and think about what’s going on around me, I plan to write further on the subject. It helps me to grasp it all, to make sense of it. I hope it may help others to understand what we have done, what we are doing, and most importantly, what we must now do to rectify the sins of the fathers.

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Finding peace in trying times…

These times do try our souls, as Thomas Paine said. Ole Thomas would have been aghast at what’s going on in our world today!

One of my Buddhist mentors, Maia Duerr, has a beautiful response to the general malaise and the current insanity in her Full Moon newsletter today, noting that the recent horrendous tax bill is is just more of the same, another example, certainly a more extreme one, of the power that greed, anger and delusion hold over our society.

She also says, as I’ve been saying for a while now, and just mentioned recently, that the wisdom of our indigenous cultures is an important source of help for all this insanity.

I felt a bit better reading her thoughts. She offers some positive suggestions for dealing with the stress it brings. Maybe others would also benefit from hearing her perspective on things:

This full moon snuck up on me… feels like the past 28 days went by so quickly! Have you felt that too? The quickening of time, along with the shortening of days…Feeling into the preciousness of each moment we have here in this crazy mixed-up world

Yesterday I awoke to the news here in the U.S. that the Senate passed a horrendous tax bill. As one friend said, there’s all kinds of evil written into it. The full ramifications likely won’t be known and felt for some time, but they will be huge. No doubt this is a further redistribution of ‘wealth’ of a certain kind upwards to those already have it, and a further marginalizing of those who already live at the edge.

This isn’t new, though. It’s an intensification of what has been there all along, no matter which political party is in power. The seeds of greed, hatred, and delusion have grown into fully toxic monsters.

And yet the medicine is also here, hidden underneath the toxic overgrowth. I look to my Indigenous sisters and brothers for a blueprint on how to live a life that is in right relationship to each other and the earth… they’ve had generations of experience in doing that, and learning from mistakes. I look to teachings of simplicity and renunciation in my own tradition of Buddhism for similar gifts.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s not a matter of finding the best new technology. The way through this is what has been there all along… to not take more from the earth than we can give back, to respect each other, to be kind to each other, to respect earth and water and sky. And yet the way will be full of challenges and pain and suffering as we reckon with all this.

I think a lot of another friend’s gentle yet persistent warning — soon we’re going to need to feed each other. What will that look like? How can we get there, together? How can I opt out of this system that has caused so much harm to people and creatures of all kind and the planet we rely on for life? How can I be part of a community that truly cares for each other, and mindfully walks on this earth?

I don’t have the answers. I know it will take greater effort and creativity than I’ve given these questions in the past, and greater commitment on my part.

In the midst of all this, I’m trying to observe a 7-day at-home version of Rohatsu, the intensive sitting meditation retreat that Zen Buddhists do during this first week of December. I’m taking this as a time to slow down, stop, and sit with all these questions.

Nature is by far the best medicine during times like these. … I want to share this short video from a recent journey I took to a beautiful place near Santa Fe, Diablo Canyon. I invite you to take a half a minute to simply notice what you feel as you watch this video. I hope in the coming weeks you’re able to make time to visit a place that speaks to your heart and soul. If you do, I’d love to hear about it and even see pictures! You can always reach me by replying to this email or writing to me at maia@maiaduerr.com.
Maia offers a full range of consultation and teaching around these themes. Her website has links to most of those resources, and you can can sign up for the Full Moon newsletter. It’s always a joy and a solace.
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Revisiting “Between the World and Me”

And have brought humanity to the edge of

oblivion: because they think they are white.

–James Baldwin

[This was first posted in 2015, but the current social climate has persuaded me to re-post this, and perhaps some other pertinent posts, as a response to what I hear out there.]

In his 1984 essay “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,”* James Baldwin laid the creation of the racist society that threatens our very existence at the feet of those waves of European immigrants who left behind their separate national/cultural identities to come to “America” and become white.

In his new work Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates picks up where Baldwin left off, explicating the idea, describing in heart-breaking personal detail this deeply rooted cancer, and painting a richly textured vision of what it’s like growing up black in America today, the America of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Written as a letter to his adolescent son, this book pierces to the heart of the moral bankruptcy that is being revealed in greater detail with each passing news cycle.

To say this book is profound, deep, pivotal is almost understatement. This book is a samurai sword cutting off the head of the monster that has arisen from the festering evil pit of “white supremacy”. It makes as clear as seems possible exactly how and why this situation has come to pass, exactly how horrendous it is, and lays out a vision of what just possibly could be a way through to a future for humanity.

Coates articulates so clearly the perspective, the experience, the human tragedy of Black America that it seems to me that anyone who reads this book would experience at least a crack in the armor of hate and apathy that perpetuates this evil situation. He allows one to get inside – as nearly as possible via the writers’ craft – how it feels, the fear and insecurity, the anger and loathing that permeate our streets. With the added dimension of the father’s deep sadness and fear for his son, that most deeply human quality of love and instinct for protection, he buries his message deep in the heart.

Tony Morrison says this book is “required reading” and that Coates fills the intellectual void left when Baldwin died nearly 30 years ago. Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I believe it could open the hearts and minds of even the most mean-spirited, small-minded, low-life racists and haters, and if it could truly become required reading for our next generation, we might have a chance.

As you feel Coates’ love for his child, this so-familiar human emotion, his deep humanity comes through, and you understand in this deeply visceral way that his color, his appearance, his “race” is such a small and superficial aspect of who he is that one can only see, however dimly, what an absurd notion is “race.”

But this book goes far beyond debunking racism, far beyond a simple diatribe on the evils of racist white society. It provides a deeply honest inquiry into what it takes for one man to be free, a lyric anthem to the meaning of the struggle, and a truly profound vision of humanity at its heart.

Coates also makes it clear that the black people of America are not the sole victims of the flawed vision of life, which he calls The Dream, but that this habit of thought, this conception of the human role on the earth is creating a violent, authoritarian nightmare that is laying waste the people of the earth and the Earth itself.

“The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands.” [p. 98]

“The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.”[p. 111]

“Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of human beings but the body of the Earth itself.” [p. 150]

Coates’ vision for a transcendent future is not an overly hopeful one. But it likely is the best we have. “I do not believe we can stop them,” he says of The Dreamers, the “white” power elite who are destroying black people and the world. He goes on, speaking to his son, Samori, who is named for the late 19th century Guinean who resisted the French colonial powers:

“…because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom…. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.”

If we who call ourselves white can step off this stage, shed this absurd notion of whiteness, abandon the destructive pursuits of the ill-conceived ‘dream’, and learn to struggle, to find the meaning in the struggle alongside those who have suffered so much and know its lessons, then perhaps there’s some light at the end of that long dark tunnel we’ve made. Perhaps we’ll find our way together to a new story that includes everyone and everything.

[*For a PDF of Baldwin’s essay, visit Collective Liberation]

Click to access Baldwin_On_Being_White.pdf