As she addressed the Democratic National Convention.
Michelle has good company. My partner Rebecca hates politics. Probably you do as well, at least if you are in America, in 2020.
I agree. There is so much ugliness in American politics today: the way our politicians treat their opponents; how everything, even the wearing of masks, is politicized; why so many problems go unsolved because America’s political institutions don’t seem up to the task.
I would often tell my students that looking closely at a society’s politics is like walking through a sausage factory seeing, really seeing, how sausage is made. If we did this before we ate sausage, most of us would not eat sausage. Sausage would have the popularity of the America’s Congress or its politics.
I love sausage despite having toured a sausage factory. ‘Are you kidding, that’s what goes into that succulent, grilled, tangy wonder splashed with mustard that sits perfectly between two fresh, soft bun slices.’ Yuk & wonder of wonders!
By now, you’ve guessed my little secret. I love American politics despite the ugliness of seeing it up close. I hold both the ‘yuk factor’ and the ‘wonder’ in my head, heart, and gut at the same time.
It’s easy to conjure up an image of a sausage. What about politics? To me, an image of a crowd of people protesting is my ‘sausage’ image of politics. Why?
Politics as it has evolved through human history – especially politics as it practiced in modern democracies – is this wondrous human creation that enables large groups of people to work out their differences peacefully. Below is a Tea Party rally on the left and a Black Lives Matter protest on the right. I support one and you might support the other or neither or both.
Seeing the images together is the wonder of politics. Politics is necessary because We, as in “we the people”, are naturally divided. Our divisions come from our freedoms, to think, believe, and want different things. From these freedoms come the formation of different interests. How do we work out our different interests peacefully? Politics gives us the rules, institutions, and leaders to enable a nation of 330 million to live in relative harmony, despite our differences.
That is an amazing accomplishment. More so as America has grown not just in numbers but, gloriously, in the number among us that we consider fully a part of the WE, in WE THE PEOPLE.
That’s the sausage to me, when I think about American politics. The expansive WE, which makes politics more divisive than ever, is at the same time its great beauty.
Of course Michelle Obama hates politics. How could she not? At the same time, she is fully included in the American politics of today, as much as me or you.
Somehow America’s imperfect politics made that possible. As it grinds along, it will make other ‘impossibilities’ possible as well.
A few days ago I received a letter* from my father who died at 3am on March 1, 1993. The letter is dated Friday, January 22, 1993 and is written to Sister Marilyn Thomas, BVM, my dad’s sister-in-law, known to her family as Fawny, short for Florence.
Except for a few references in the four page letter to “terminality” and “tumor metastasis,” one would never know my dad was dying. The letter is full of references to what is going on in the world, from the tragic death of Iowa basketball player Chris Street, to the election of Bill Clinton, and the wars in the Middle East.
And he foretold the future, with this description of how long Fawny and her sister Dody would live. “It looks like God may have provided a yellow brick road for you to live nicely on into your 90’s, past your mother [who died at 94], and possibly/probably Dody with her walking exercise, so you two have each other’s company for a long time yet.” Dody, on the left, would die in 2017 at 96 and Fawny, on the right, completed her earthly journey last year at 103.
In this section of the letter about how “nice and fortunate” it would be for my mom and her sister to have long lives together, my dad added the words that form the title of this essay.
FOR ME, ENUF IS ENUF.
The sinus cancer that had been diagnosed in the spring of 1984 and that had been caged longer than his doctors had predicted was now on the hunt and it was time for my father to die. He knew it and accepted it; “enuf is enuf.”
Like many of you during this COVID-time I have been dreaming more than usual. Many of my dreams are set in and around my childhood home, with one or both my parents in the dream, silent and in the background. Each is materially gone, but still part of me. If you have lost a loved one, you probably know what I mean. What does it mean for a parent to still be with me?
If you were to have asked me, before I read my dad’s letter to Fawny, what life lesson he taught me, I would have said “my father taught me how to die.” And this letter reinforces that lesson. Paul Gardner senior fought his cancer relentlessly until his body and mind told him ‘no more.’ He accepted this impersonal verdict – one that looms ahead somewhere out there for each of us – with dignity.
There is another lesson contained in this letter, one that is even more valuable to the living-me. My father had such a big heart. Dying, his condition “slowly getting worse,” yet the words, sentences and paragraphs in this four page letter are all about the world and others. Not just a big heart but an open heart. Toward the end of the letter he writes the following.
I THINK THAT GOOD LIFE AND HAPPINESS SHOULD BE AS EXTENSIVE AS POSSIBLE FOR THE HUMAN RACE, AND AS REASONABLE AS POSSIBLE FOR ALL OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM.
In The Heart of Christianity Marcus Borg describes a closed heart as
Insensitive to wonder and awe. The world looks ordinary when our hearts are closed.
My father’s heart was open and because it was open it was big. He not only knew how to die but he knew how to live. This letter-gift from my still-with-me-father is that we die as we live.
How to open our hearts? Borg, again in The Heart of Christianity, says one way is through thin places, or places where the world of spirit intersects with the material world. Neither Paul Sr. nor Paul Jr. was or is traditionally religious.
However, my father taught me to be open to the world’s mysteries. One of those mysteries, perhaps even a thin place, is how a letter written 27 years ago enters my life at the exact moment I am open to its messages.
A few months before he wrote this letter my father had cataract surgery. Let me give him the last word in this blog, as he described how before this surgery he had not realized the world had gotten so dull. Now, he said,
IT’S ACTUALLY BEAUTIFUL
*Thanks to Linda and AJ Thomas for archiving this letter and many other Thomas’ family memorabilia.
I have tried to keep my conscious political biases out of my blogs and will do so again in the future. However, I believe the American presidential election of 2020 is about something bigger than Mr. Biden or America’s Democratic Party. This appeal to vote for Joe Biden is an appeal for American democracy itself. Toward the end of the blog I address those who will vote for President Trump. My major message to them is I will choose not to heap upon your shoulders all of offenses I see in Mr. Trump.
Elections for national offices in modern democracies are all about building a national coalition of voters. I believe the coalition that is massing toward a Biden victory in November includes the following groups.
Republican never-Trumpers (George Will ++++)
Republican not-Trump-again-after-COVID or George Floyd or a combination of things.
Republican-leaning-Independents, in either category 1 or 2.
Progressive Democrats who are still angry about Sander’s defeat & very skeptical of Biden.
Liberal Democrats who liked Warren & are skeptical of Biden.
Moderate Democrats like me who wanted Pete and are comfortable with Biden and relieved it is Biden, to be honest.
Democrat-leaning-independent, in categories 4, 5, or 6.
The above coalition may not be a governing coalition. It may only be an election coalition. What do I mean? I am a liberal to moderate Democrat and have significant disagreements with my progressive Democrat friends about Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and defunding the police. However, there is much common ground among all the categories of the Democrats on the general idea of using the power and resources of the federal government to reduce poverty, racial inequalities, and the ravages of global warming. Democratic members of Congress backed by some combination of groups 4 – 6 will find governing-coalition-building difficult but not impossible.
The Republicans who vote for Mr. Biden identify with the Republican Party for reasons that will make it difficult for them to support many of the policies a President Biden will favor. To expect otherwise is to not understand and respect those reasons. Republicans want a smaller domestic national government, fewer regulations, and lower taxes. Many will oppose the judicial ideology of Biden nominees to America’s highest court, especially on abortion and religious liberty issues.
A President Biden and a Democratic controlled House and Senate (if these should come to pass) will need to be politically prudent in considering the policy preferences of the members of their election coalition and the impact of these preferences on the other side of the political aisle. Losers and how they are treated are just as important as the winners in a democratic society where winners today could easily become losers tomorrow.
I have studied and taught politics for most of my adult life. I am comfortable with the positive role politics plays in modern democracies. When politics is working properly, a society is able to work out its conflicts in a peaceful fashion. Losers today can be winners tomorrow. Consensus is only necessary on the democratic rules of the game. It is not necessary on most of the policy issues that divide Americans. In fact, to expect consensus is to expect agreement on worldview and that is an anti-democratic proposition. The key always is to manage a society’s disagreements and the central management tool are agreed upon democratic rules of the game.
The groups listed above disagree on many issues but generally agree on the democratic rules of the game. Indeed, it is the breaking of those rules by President Trump that primarily accounts for the never-Trump phenomenon among so many Republicans.
What is at stake in the presidential election of 2020 are those democratic rules. With another four years of President Trump, those rules might be gone forever. Without those rules, the American democracy is lost.
To my friends who plan to vote for President Trump
I do not consider you the enemy and I hope you think the same of me. I know many of you will vote for him despite his personal and governing flaws. You do not want to risk the policies and Supreme Court nominees a President Biden will present to the country. I have never believed politics or even friendship requires agreement. And I respect your political choices and assume you come to those with the best of intentions.
This is a difficult time in America. So many people are angry; so many feel their voices are not heard. At the same time, more voices are heard, expect to be heard, even demand to be heard, than ever before. Many question ‘whose country’ this really is. You have your questions, I have mine.
If you and I end up on opposite sides this fall, let’s choose to treat each other more kindly than we have in the past.
I have eaten at a Whitey’s ice cream shop hundreds of times, but the trip I describe below prompted this reflection about the ruthlessness and humility of time.
The most memorable trip to my favorite ice cream store was not even about ice cream. Or not only ice cream. Even now, five years later, I hold in my mind two images. One, my all time favorite food item, a Whitey’s chocolate malt and two, well, please read on.
It was February 2015 and Rebecca and I were taking five Luther College students from Decorah, Iowa to Bloomington, Illinois to attend a Human Rights workshop at Illinois Wesleyan University. My hometown of Davenport, Iowa is halfway and we decided to stop, at one of the Whitey’s locations, on 53rd street. The students in the van were in their own little worlds, some chatting, others with ear buds, when I drove into the parking lot and maneuvered the van forward into a parking space.
Whitey’s Ice Cream on 53rd street, Davenport, Iowa
One by one the students noticed the sign and then came a spontaneous burst of commentary: “I don’t believe it;” “it’s 2015;” “Whitey’s, seriously? “oh my God” & “how could they name it Whitey’s?” Rebecca and I looked at each other, dumbfounded, for a moment. I had been going to Whitey’s for decades and so knew its history. I explained to the students the Whitey’s name came from the original owner who was nicknamed Whitey because of his blond hair. The name dates from the 1930s and when the business was sold in the 1950s the name stuck. All five students listened politely but skeptically and decided to eat next door at Subway.
A few days ago I shared this story with a Davenport friend who replied in an email:
“Those students have a great perspective – just as we did at that age.”
Bingo, that was it! My friend put words to why this visit to Whitey’s had stuck with me. Whitey’s has always meant something more than just a great chocolate malt. In my memory, family times in a Whitey’s or the long-gone Iowana Dairy in Bettendorf, Iowa or Decorah’s Whippy Dip where I would take my 90 year old mother when she visited were always comfortable and free from everyday family-tensions.
These malt-musings full of nostalgia were on my mind as I drove into Whitey’s in 2015 only to be interrupted by the ruthlessness of the student comments. In response, I wanted to say to them what I am saying now to you.
How dare you? Let me have, let me hold onto, the innocence of my past. Don’t complicate my memories with your interpretations.
My friend’s words quoted above triggered two concluding revelations. One is a memory fragment of the family room of the house I grew up in, with an orange couch and yellow’ish’ shag carpet, as it was the summer of 1970. My father Paul, Uncle Al and cousin Jim are sitting around a table. Jim and I are in college, he at Loras, me at St. Ambrose.
It is about a month after Kent State where four students were killed and nine were injured by the national guard. We are arguing about Vietnam, race relations, poverty, and the Kent State shootings. I threw every negative judgment about America I could at my father and uncle, eventually stalking out. I was the angry and immature version of the students in the van, in a different place and time. In my mind, ruthlessly dismantling their world.
Now, I am old and I am them, my father and uncle. Not exactly, of course. I am a Democrat; they were Republican. But this Whitey’s reflection is about more than politics. It is about the ruthlessness and humility of time, what it does to all of us.
This brings me to the second revelation, urged on by my favorite stanza from my favorite Bob Dylan song, The Times They are a changing:
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
Time is ruthless because the ‘times are [always] a-changing.’ And it suggests humility because yesterday’s ‘sons and daughters’ are today’s ‘mothers and fathers.’ Even Dylan’s language, ‘mothers and fathers,’ for example, would be interrogated by many today.
My Whitey’s story is now a more complicated one. It contains a dose of the old and a portion of the new. And if I apply this lesson to many other parts of my personal and public life, if I can lend a hand to whatever new is coming, at least in conversation, then my adversaries may stop seeing me as the enemy.
We are Here for such a short time. So much happened before we were born. And more will happen after we die.
Rebecca and I this COVID -19 summer have been in Houston babysitting four-year old Irene, one of Rebecca’s six grandchildren. ‘What will Irene be like when she is 30?’ we asked ourselves the other day. ‘We likely won’t be here’ one of us said, meaning not Houston-here but Here-here. That conversation prompted this thought:
What will I miss when I die?
I will miss knowing how real stories turn out. For example,
The stories of family, friends and Irene
The story of Luther College, my professional home for 35 years.
The story of America
Wouldn’t it be a kick to catch a cosmic-glimpse of Irene as a parent in 2050, the Luther College course offerings of 2070, and the two paragraphs on Donald Trump, America’s 45th President, in an American history book written in 2120.
What’s truly humbling about getting older is seeing today what seems obvious but was not obvious, just a few history-moments ago. I will truly miss the actual-worked-out-in-real-time stories of family and friends, Luther College, and America because there is too much I do not see today that will be obvious at some distant or not so distant time. We know too little about how our world will change to know how any of these stories will turn out, unless we are here.
I will use one example from my life to illustrate this phenomenon, how what is obvious today was not obvious yesterday?
Gender Equality in Sports
I attended Assumption High School in Davenport, Iowa graduating in 1967. Looking through Assumption’s 1967 yearbook*, I was mildly surprised to see no ‘girl’s’ sports teams, only a Girls’ Recreation Association that organized intramurals. I say mildly surprised because I thought I remembered a girl’s track team. It turns out there was no track, tennis, golf, volleyball or even basketball, for girls. Ironic for basketball, as Iowa and a few other states in the 1920s and 1930s pioneered girl’s six on six person basketball but it was mostly played in small towns and not in large city high schools.
Gender inequality in high school sports would begin to change in 1972 with the passage of Title IX, a law that “prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any education programs or activities that receive federal funds…” Looking at Assumption’s current athletic’s web page, it shows 11 boys and 10 girls sports teams plus competitive cheer leading and dance programs.
Assumption’s boys and girls sports’ teams have won 51 state championships since 1970. The past decade, boys teams have won 9 and girl’s teams 16, including the 2016 state championship girl’s soccer team.
What is amazing to me is that no one I knew in 1967 ever asked why the girls did not have athletic teams.
Others asked, I am sure. Feminism was in its second phase but not yet mainstream and had certainly not filtered down to my little world in Davenport, Iowa. Soon after my graduation from high school, like many others, I would begin to question America’s war in Vietnam and its racial inequalities. ‘Seeing’ gender inequities in sports and other areas of American life, while obvious today, was not ‘seen’ by me and too many others in 1967.
What is it that I do not see today that others will see as obvious at some future point in time, when I am no longer here?
Rebecca, Irene and I walk Bray’s Bayou almost everyday, with Irene asking ‘why’ to almost everything we observe, from the tracks on the path to the masks on people’s faces.
I think about an imaginary conversation along Bray’s Bayou in 2086 between a 70 year old Irene and Rebecca and Paul’s spirits. Irene is telling us about the late 21st century and our spirits ask over and over again, not why, but ‘wait, what**?’ As in, ‘you’ve got to be kidding.’
Why did we not see that?
*Thanks to Mary Ann Ricketts who pointed me to the yearbook link on the Davenport Assumption web site.
**The first and most essential question in a great little book Wait, what? by James E. Ryan.
Jeremiah Chapman is a high school baseball player at Charles City High School, in northeast Iowa. On June 27th, Charles City was playing Waverley-Shell Rock in Waverly, also in northeast Iowa. Chapman is the only black player on the Charles City baseball team. Throughout the game Chapman, who plays center field, heard taunts from a Waverly-Shell fan section in the outfield bleachers.
The first taunt was ‘Colin,’ after Colin Kaepernick, the black former quarterback of the San Francisco Forty Niners. Kaepernick became famous and infamous in 2016 for kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality against African-Americans. In a speech in 2017 in Alabama President Trump said of NFL players who kneel.
Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!
The second taunt was ‘you need to go back to the fields to do your job.’
Then came the third taunt.
‘You should have been George Floyd.’
Jeremiah’s story was posted by a Facebook friend a few days ago and I have heard from several other friends who are familiar with the story. Response by these friends fell into two categories of questions.
Some asked, how can this be in America in 2020? We’ve come so far, haven’t we? America ended slavery, at a cost of 600,000 lives. We ended legal discrimination with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Barack Hussein Obama was elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2012.
Others asked, how could this not be, in America, regardless of the year? Racist taunting is simply a softer version of something that is a natural part of America, as its history of slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the killing by American police of unarmed black men like George Floyd. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts this view of America this way.
“Racism has been part of America’s cultural DNA since before the ink dried on the Constitution. Dominant in some and recessive in others, it’s a gene that has mutated over time yet remains part of the inheritance weighing us down, one generation to the next. The damage it has done is systemic and goes all the way down to the cellular level.”
And this is only the African-American experience and says nothing about historic inequities regarding women, Native Americans, Asians or members of the LGBTQ communities.
How should we think about race or reform of any kind in America, in light of the George Floyd and Jeremiah stories, that put human faces to the still significant racial inequities in the areas of criminal justice, wealth, education, and, as COVID – 19 reminds us, health care.
Professor Timothy Snyder, an American historian that specializes in Central European history and the holocaust, suggests that in analyzing any contemporary situation it is necessary to see how it “represents both change and continuity.”**
Recall my friends’ responses to the Jeremiah Chapman story. The ‘America has come so far’ is the change story. The ‘America is naturally racist’ is the continuity story. Let’s apply this continuity and change template to Chapman story as reported in The Courier.
Continuity
Racist language, apparently without condemnation by other fans, like the killing of George Floyd and all the other racial inequities in America in 2020, are linked to a long American history of racist ideas and policies in the service of powerful white interests.
Change
Jeremiah Chapman described the taunts to an umpire and the umpire asked Jeremiah if he wanted him to stop the game. Umpires now have the authority to stop games under these circumstances.
The Waverly Shell Rock School district confirmed the incident, is continuing to investigate, and issued the following apology.
This behavior is unacceptable. We make no excuses, because there are none. We do wish to make a sincere apology to the Charles City School District and community and, in particular, the young man towards whom these comments were directed.
The Charles City School District said the incident has been investigated and corroborated by sources. The superintendent put out the following statement.
The overwhelming evidence was it absolutely happened and unfortunately it wasn’t the first-time racial remarks have been heard at visiting games.
Racist taunting at America’s sporting events, including high school sports, is a constant. However, in 2020 these expressions of racist ideas are treated differently than they would have been even a decade ago. Game officials can stop games, school districts take these incidents seriously, and bar perpetrators from games. America’s media puts these stories front and center for all to see.
Just as America’s police keep killing unarmed African-Americans but now are being fired, charged with murder, and, perhaps more importantly, this social fact is recognized by a majority of Americans as a genuine problem. And athletes and others all over America and the world are now taking a knee. In the picture below, the entire Des Moines Roosevelt High School baseball team takes a knee during the National Anthem before their first game, June 2020.
The most productive way to think about race in America today is to hold its racism and antiracism in tension, through America’s twin stories of continuity and change.
Seeing only continuity leads too easily to cynicism and hopelessness and these scourges favor the status quo.
Seeing only change leads too easily to self-congratulations and innocence and these scourges also favor the status quo.
Think about Jeremy Chapman. Its hard enough playing center field and being 17, under the best of circumstances. Imagine words as vile as ‘you should have been George Floyd’ spat at you when you were 17. For Jeremy, America is better than it was but not as good as it can be.
What can you and I do today and tomorrow and the next day to move America closer to that “more perfect union” described in the Preamble to the American Constitution?
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
*This quote is taken from a story in The Courier
**Thanks to Fulbright colleague and Professor Bill Issel for the Timothy Snyder change and continuity idea, from Snyder’s Black Earth.
My dad died on March 1, 1993, of sinus cancer. He was 71. Paul Gardner was a Coast Guard medic in World War II, a chemical engineer with Bendix Corporation who worked with the space program in the 1960s, and in retirement the owner of PJ Gardner’s Fine Breads.
Selling PJ Gardner’s Fine Breads
I remember my dad through stories.
The Paper Route thief
It was early Friday evening late enough in the fall of 1961 to be dark out, when the phone rang. Mrs. Tate – I don’t remember her first name because I probably did not know it as in those days kids NEVER called adults by their first name – who lived across the street and two houses down, had called and spoken to either my mom or my dad. She was a teacher at McKinley School just up the street where years earlier I had attended kindergarten. Her kids were older and so I only knew her as a teacher and one of 44 customers on my paper route.
As a paper boy – if there were paper girls, I did not know any nor did I ever see any on all the Saturday mornings when the paper boys from throughout the city gathered to pay their bills in the basement of the Davenport Times and Democrat office building in downtown Davenport, Iowa – every Thursday evening I went around to each of my customers collecting their weekly fee. I had collected from Mrs. Tate the night before and she was calling to tell my parents that another neighborhood kid, Johnny, had tried to collect from her and another of my customers. I gathered from my dad that Mrs. Tate knew Johnny and his brother from school and by neighborhood reputation.
Johnny lived on Belle Avenue, only about three blocks away, but to this 12 year old boy Belle Avenue was another world. I had wandered over to Belle a couple of times but never down the part of the street where Johnny lived. The houses were smaller and the kids tougher, with dirt under their fingernails. My dad told me what Mrs. Tate had said and that we were going to walk over to Johnny’s house to talk with him. I don’t remember what we talked about on the way over but I do remember what my dad said on the way back.
Johnny’s house was small, with a dark and small entry way where I waited while my dad went into the kitchen to talk with Johnny and Johnny’s dad. I remember my dad coming back to the front part of the house alone and we started back home.
We walked in silence up Belle Avenue to East Street and then down East Street to Jersey Ridge Road and then started back up East Street to our home. As we started up the street, my dad said: ‘Johnny is the way he is because of the way his father is.’ He might have said more but it is those words I remember.
In “A thief, a rat and two silences,” I wrote about one of my own episodes of stealing and how my mom and dad dealt with this. This episode had occurred a few months before the Johnny incident. I believe my dad took me to Johnny’s house for the same reason he took me to the police station. The police station showed me where the Johnny’s of the world end up and Johnny’s house and dad where they come from.
Looking back from my current vantage point, I could say that my dad’s messages were simplistic. Perhaps, but they were perfect for that 12 year old kid. In a nutshell, character is not formed in a vacuum. Come to think of it, not a bad reminder for the 70 year old that kid grew up to be.
I would like to offer you two personal stories of racism, as honest and truthful as memory and prudence allows, followed by a personal reflection about how I grapple with what can only be labeled my own racist tendencies. Ibram X. Kendi’s vulnerable, honest and clear-headed thinking about racism in How to be an antiracist, including his own racist tendencies, offers an invitation. I am not alone. Nor, perhaps, are you.
STORY #1
It is early Sunday morning January 2002 and I am standing in the middle of a large group of people in London outside Harrods Department store, waiting for it to open. With the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda attack against America fresh in my mind, I am thinking a bomb outside Harrods would be a perfect opportunity for a terrorist organization. I glance around the crowd and my eyes search and lock on a light-brown-skinned-bearded-young-man. Almost instantaneously, a thought-stream competes with this eye movement.
Here I am in London with a group of Luther College students studying conflict and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. We have just spent two weeks in Northern Ireland reading about and discussing the Irish Republican Army, the Ulster Volunteer Force and other terrorist groups. Among many things, we learned the Provisional Irish Republican Army had set off bombs outside Harrods in 1973, 1974 and in 1983, with the 1983 attacking killing six people and injuring 90.
After this episode, I recall immediately reflecting upon my paired reactions. My first reaction, without conscious thought, pointed me to a Mohammad and not to a Michael. My second reaction, itself an interrogation and with conscious thought, countered my first with reasoning that rejected picking a Mohammad instead of a Michael. And upon further reflection, I rejected the selection of either Mohammad or Michael solely on the basis of their religious identity because I knew most Muslims and Catholics rejected the terrorist tactics used by Al Qaeda and IRA.
STORY # 2
It is two days ago, a Saturday afternoon in Houston and Rebecca and I decide to take up her son Jonathan’s offer of his car for a blizzard run to the nearest Diary Queen. Our navigator maneuvers us through about 10 miles of Houston streets to a familiar DQ storefront. As we share the small snicker’s treat in the parking lot, we start to look around the neighborhood.
Lots of people walking around & busy street traffic make clear to us we are in the middle of a minority neighborhood in Houston. Two men in a dark SUV park next to us, exit and walk toward a run down looking barbecue place. I can feel my anxiety rising just a bit. Rebecca suggests I not get out of the car to put our trash in the receptacle. Almost in defiance to our paired anxieties, I exit the car to do just that. We then back carefully and slowly out of our parking spot, ease onto Old Spanish Trail Street, and are soon feeling more at ease in one of Houston’s upscale neighborhoods.
Like the earlier episode outside Harrods in London, this episode prompted reflection, another interrogation, of our own and each other’s feelings and thoughts. Once back at Jonathan and Suzanne’s, we recapped our adventure including the location of the Dairy Queen, on a street bordering Houston’s 3rd ward. “3rd ward,” Jonathan exclaimed, “that’s George Floyd’s neighborhood.”
Rebecca and I looked at each other, not knowing quite what to say. We had both been sickened by what had happened to George Floyd and fully supported the protests and the need for police reforms. Now there was a person, a person likely killed because of his race, to put with our experience, and to add to the interrogation of our responses to that experience.
George Floyd mural in Houston’s 3rd ward
Reflection
Two episodes, a couple of decades apart, with a common element. An almost instinctual feeling there is something wrong with this group or that group. I don’t know any other way to describe it. Where does it come from? Nature, nurture, or some combination. It seems part of the human machinery. What group or groups humans designate as ‘wrong’ varies by society and culture. So it isn’t only my problem, but it is ALSO MY problem.
Kendi defines a racist idea as “any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.” He continues that to be antiracist is
“To think nothing is behaviorally wrong or right — inferior or superior — with any of the racial groups. Whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or negatively, not representatives of whole races. To be antiracist is to deracialize behavior, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behavior is something humans do, not races do.”
How do you and I become an antiracist? I don’t think that is the correct question. Rather it is how do we manage our built-in racist instincts? James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time offers what is really the only first step, for you and me, and for America, that will help us manage this individual and societal scourge.
Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.
I manage my built-in inclinations to see something wrong in the persons of some groups by interrogating my reactions, with as much awareness and honesty I can muster. This is only done through an act of will. I need others as well, to call me out. This ‘calling out’ at the societal level is currently being done by the millions of protesters throughout America.
I cannot change what I do not face nor can America change what it will not face. Let the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich’s reaction to the George Floyd killing and the outpouring of emotion across the country and the world, be the last word, for now.
Its deeper than you thought and that’s what really made me start to think. You’re a privileged son of a bitch and you still don’t get it as much as you think you do. You gotta work harder. You gotta be more aware. You gotta be pushed and embarrassed. You’ve gotta call it out.
After the 9/11/01 Al Qaeda attacks against the USA that killed 2977 and injured more than 25,000, I developed a course on terrorism titled Terrorism and Democracy. I thought I would teach the course one or two times but it turned into a popular course that I offered every year until I retired in 2018.
From 2002 through 2015 I lead five January term three-week study groups to Northern Ireland to study the conflict between Catholics and Protestants that included terrorist attacks by groups acting in the name of each community. The 1998 Omagh bombing by The Real IRA killed 29 and injured 220. These trips together with my own study encouraged me to include a unit on terrorism in Northern Ireland in Terrorism and Democracy.
In 1995 in Oklahoma City Timothy McVeigh parked a truck full of explosives outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that when detonated killed 168 people and injured 680 others in what was until the September 11th attacks the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history.
Even without the Oklahoma City attack, American history provided ample examples for my course of violence against innocents in pursuit of a political goal, the definition of terrorism, including the 4743 lynched between 1882 and 1968. American domestic white Nationalist terrorism has killed more Americans since 2001 than Islamic jihadists.
Whether perpetrated by Al Qaeda or ISIS, the Irish Republican Army or Ulster Volunteer Force, America’s home grown lone actors or domestic terror groups such as Aryan Nation or The Order or Klu Klux Klan, terrorism is the logical end point of fanaticism. Of the 50 books I used over the almost twenty years I taught Terrorism and Democracy, the author and book that offered the best insight into fanaticism was the late Israeli novelist Amos Oz’s How to Cure a Fanatic.
To Oz, the essence of fanaticism is
Righteousness entrenched and buttressed within itself, righteousness with no windows or doors, is hallmark of this disease.
Terrorists driven by fanaticism are not interested in argument. They are not interested in you or I as persons. They see us solely as instruments. They want change now and are willing to kill to get it. They pretend to be altruists, knowing what is good for you and I but not interested in our point of view. Oz is surely right when he says fanaticism is an “elemental fixture of human nature…a bad gene.”
Fanatics and fanatic groups live and operate at the margins for good reason. Fanaticism is a purely defensive reaction to the world. The fanatic has to give up too much of what truly makes us human. As Oz suggests, fanatic asks us to shut all the windows and doors so that we can stew in his/her little world.
How to cure the fanatic? Oz offers several solutions but the one that resonated the most with my students and I was the power of curiosity and imagination, primarily focused on how others live. Literature and film are especially good at this. I started watching international (we called them ‘foreign) films as a college student, after being introduced to Ingmar Bergman’s films.
To this day, I love exploring the lives of others, in other places, through film. The 2006 German film The Lives of Others that won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film shows that even spying on others can lead one to not only an understanding of their lives but to a change in behavior by an officer of the East German Stasi, a cog in the fanatical East German state that terrorized its citizens.
On one of the Northern Ireland trips, a former IRA member spoke to our group and stated that he began to change his perspective when he learned more about the actual lives of Protestants in his community, especially the fear their culture would be swallowed up by a Catholic state. This fear, of losing one’s culture, was exactly why this former IRA foot soldier joined the IRA. A window in his righteousness had opened.
There is a line in Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” that expresses this: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” In my life, I am continually looking for the cracks, the doors and windows, of the world I fashion in my mind.
Fanatics, and the little fanatic that lives in all of us, live small, pinched-up lives. Their simple, black & white, no argument worldview asks too much from this complex, grey and conversational world.
About a year ago Rebecca and I walked through two condo construction sites in Decorah, Iowa. We never worried that what happened to Ahmand Arbery who also walked through a construction site in Georgia might happen to us. That a call to the police dispatcher would be picked up by two white men with a loaded shot gun who would come looking for us, engage, and gun us down.
Christian Cooper (left) Amy Cooper (center & right)
A few days ago on Decorah’s Trout Run bike trail I was almost run over by a biker on an E-bike. This particular biker had done the same thing to Rebecca a week or so before. E-bikers are able to go faster and so they have to pay particular attention to bike trail etiquette. Rebecca and I talked later about flagging this guy down the next time we saw him to remind him to follow the trail rules clearly stated on signs.
We never worried that what happened to Christian Cooper in New York City’s Central Park might happen to us. That the Decorah e-biker might respond to our request the way Amy Cooper (no relation) responded to Christian Cooper’s request to follow the park rules, by calling 911 with the words “an African-American man is threatening my life.” It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to consider how this situation could have resulted in Christian Cooper’s death. Especially given what would happen to George Floyd in Minneapolis one week later.
On Monday night in Minneapolis, a shop employee called police on George Floyd for alleged fraud. Floyd died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a police officers knee. Twice as a young boy I went through episodes of stealing items from a local drug store, caught both times. Once as a young man I was part of a group drinking illegally along a country road when two police cars appeared behind our car. Stupidly, we thought if they didn’t catch us with the beer in the car they couldn’t charge us so we started throwing the beer cans out of the car and I can still remember the cans bouncing up against the patrol car.
Whether as a boy, a young man, or an old man, I never thought I could die as a result of these or similar incidents. The more I think about Ahmaud, Christian, George, the more I realize I am
