paulmuses

My anxiety had morphed from a prison guard into a companion

Have you ever resisted a thought, feeling or urge?

It’s a fool’s game we cannot win.

Two weeks ago I was sitting in the backseat of a Piper Archer single engine airplane as our pilot Aviv taxied to the runway at the Beverly, Massachusetts Regional Airport.

Aviv is my partner Rebecca’s son-in-law and an excellent pilot. The day was perfect for an afternoon round trip to the Sanford Seacoast Airport in Maine along the Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine coasts.

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Beverly to Sanford

Belted in, I

Thought: This plane will crash and I see body parts and scattered wreckage.

Felt: Tense & nauseous from tightened stomach muscles.

Had the urge: to Unbuckle my seat belt, grip the door handle, and get out.

Thought, feeling, urge: bang, bang, bang. Maybe my stomach tightened and then I thought and saw a crash image. Or the urge to escape preceded both. No matter.

All three descended instantaneously and unbidden, the moment before we ascended.

As Aviv guided us to 2000 feet, I grabbed with my left hand the pocket of the pilot’s seat. When the plane tilted left, I leaned right.

As the plane leveled, Aviv took this picture. I won’t tell you what I thought as our pilot was snapping, yakking and flapping. I put on my Eddie Haskell smile.

My left hand grasped the slivered pocket as if it was Linus’ security blanket.

I saw none of the coast from Beverly to Sanford. I did not join Rebecca and Aviv’s chit chat.

I was consumed and controlled by anxiety. The image by Bhargov Buragohaim that begins this essay represented my experience on that Saturday’s first leg.

But I was not helpless. About 15 years ago I was diagnosed with OCD, an anxiety disorder. I will write about my OCD in a future blog. For now, I want to share insights from my journey of recovery that might help you, whether you suffer from anxiety or are occasionally anxious.

After Aviv’s gentle touch down in Sanford, we had 30 minutes to enjoy and appreciate the earth. The picture below, with another security blanket in my left hand, was taken after I had reminded myself that I control my reaction to anxiety.

I wanted to enjoy the return view from 3000 feet. Yes, that right, our compassionate pilot told us another 1000 feet would smooth out the ride. Yikes, but…Higher-up means a better view, right.

And I wanted to be a better companion to Rebecca and Aviv.

Sanford to Beverly

Here is what Recovered-Paul said to Anxious-Paul, as we hung around the Southern Maine Aviation Airport.

You grew up thinking you could control what you thought and felt. This was a cognitive mistake. 1000s of thoughts move through us everyday. Feelings come and go, often without rhyme or reason. Remember: Our thoughts and feelings are outside our conscious control.

For much of your adult life, you let thoughts and feelings bully you. Remember in 2009 when you walked along the cliff in Northern Ireland and had the thought “I could jump off.” You stayed away from cliffs the remainder of that trip. Not easy as you were the leader of the group. And you ruminated about what that thought might mean, even though you had no genuine suicidal symptoms. Remember: Our thoughts and feelings are unruly and we should not take them literally.

On the flight over, you did three things that anxiety loves because it craves attention. You gripped the seat pocket, looked down at the floor, and neglected Aviv and Rebecca. These were compulsions you engaged to lessen anxiety. Your security blankets. They worked but with a cost. You missed the visual and social experiences. Remember: If in control, anxiety chips away at your life.

Compulsions never work in the long run. They keep you attached to anxiety and detached from the world. One of your OCD symptoms was checking whether the stove top burners were turned off. Today, you check once, maybe twice instead of 30 times. You retrained your brain by refusing to give in to the compulsion to check.

The exposure and acceptance of the anxiety that came from not checking was not easy but ultimately successful. Paul, on the second leg, don’t hold the seat pocket, look out the windows, and chat with Rebecca and Aviv. Accept the anxiety. Remember: You’ve learned to train your brain to ignore the noise of your thoughts, feelings and urges.

*

I like Recovered-Paul more than Anxious-Paul. He’s more alive. And less afraid. No, that’s not right. Recovered-Paul is still anxious and afraid. Including ascending to 3000 feet. And that steep left turn to line-up the Piper with the Beverly runway.

The radio squawked about another plane ahead. Aviv looked, Rebecca scanned, and Paul spotted.

My anxiety had morphed from a prison guard into a companion.

And I’m not alone

Last night…

I’m attending my undergraduate college and know I have two courses to complete.

Do you have a dream like this? You must finish something or can’t find something.

I’ve had this dream 100s of times. Last night, something was different.

I received a grade plus sheets of paper, different sizes, clipped together, with comments, and a number. I could not read the comments but the grade was clear and stark.

79/100. In America, that is a C+. A passing but average grade. Maybe below average today.

But there was no number for the one class I had to complete. Inside my dream, I hoped but knew the number wouldn’t be there.

I’ve stopped grading students but can’t stop grading myself. And I’m not alone.

Mickey Mantle* dreamt he couldn’t find Yankee Stadium. 536 home runs were not good enough.

Even The Mick didn’t couldn’t stop judging himself. Maybe The Babe didn’t either.

Why do we need perfection? Completion?

Why isn’t good enough

Good enough.

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*From Jane Leavy’s The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood.

They tell us something about their owners

At 72, a public convenience is now a private necessity. Even when a water closet wasn’t needed every hour, I recall being fascinated by the markings outside and the wall hangings inside.

For example, when I was 24, and after a few beers, I followed the bar restroom arrows to a dark corridor, with two doors. One had a picture of a gun; the other a holster. I stood between the two doors, puzzled. A guy brushed by me and with no hesitation pushed through, well, you guess which door.

A couple of days ago Rebecca and I were driving country roads in southern Iowa and northern Missouri. The day before she had ridden her bike on these roads and had stopped in Rick’s Country Shoppe to use the bathroom. With no money, Rebecca thanked the counter person and said she’d return another day to buy something.

That’s one reason we were at Rick’s. After filling our gas tank, I used the bathroom and took some pictures of the wall hangings. Yesterday I read Robin Christine Honigsberg’s fine essay on the memorable art around us. And I thought, bathroom pictures can also be memorable.

The other reason we returned to Ricks is the sign pictured below. Rebecca told me it lessened her guilt about not being able to buy something.

How often I have slinked out of places with a Benjo, without buying something. Or, on a few occasions, had someone hurtle “toilets only for customers.”

The sign’s owner offered more than a guilt-free privy. She gently reminded us of a currency always available.

Rick’s Country Store now joins the gun and holster bar in my loo memories.

Kindness is found in the strangest places. And is always contagious.

“We need to be touched by something better within us”

“My favorite movie is South Pacific,” said Deb, among the reddest of the reds. “That’s my favorite movie too” chimed this bluest of the blues’ whose heart began to melt, just a bit.

A problem and a solution

I belong to a small group of reds (Republicans) and blues (Democrats) who have been meeting once a month on Zoom for a year. We call ourselves Braver Summit, an 18 person off-shoot of Braver Angels. Braver Angels, with a membership of 10,000, was created in 2016 in response to America’s descent into poisoned politics.

The title of this blog is Lauren’s reason for joining the Braver groups. Lauren is blue-leaning and in an email conversation she said:

As a blue-leaning person in a red-leaning family, I often have found myself having challenging, reactive, and unproductive conversations. As someone with a psychology and counseling background, I honestly felt ashamed. I was desperate to find a better way.

Red-leaning Peter, co-founder of Summit along with me, writes:

This is personal for me. I have two sons. My conservative political leanings offend their liberal leanings and so our relationships have been deeply compromised by political difference.

I met Peter at the first Braver Angel’s workshop I attended. This blog’s subtitle is the heart of Braver’s philosophy built upon Abraham Lincoln’s plea to America’s southern states at the end of his first Inaugural Address in 1861:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chores of the union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln, from the Avalon Project, Yale Law School

I joined Braver Angels and helped found Braver Summit because I did not like who I had become when faced with someone on the other side. Red friends had become enemies. That’s not good for me or my country. Echoing Lauren, I thought “there’s got to be a better way.”

Braver seemed a path to a better America and a better me.

What Braver Summit does

We begin each Braver Summit meeting with an ice-breaker, something simple, and unrelated to politics. At our April meeting, when red-Deb said South Pacific, blue-Paul forgot Zoom queue etiquette and hollered me too. More important, he saw something he and Deb had in common. Yeah, a small thing, but a reminder that politics is only one part of who each of us is.

After the ice breaker, we build each of our monthly meetings around exercises that focus on listening and finding common ground. For example, we asked group members to come to the April meeting prepared to describe three things they feared about the other side. Each side convened to come up with their top three fears, while the other side was muted and listening.

Then the reds (blues) were tasked to develop responses to the blue-fears (red-fears) while the blues (reds) observed. Our group of 18 then came together to talk about what each of us had learned. On that April evening, I learned my red friends fear an authoritarian left. They learned we blues fear an authoritarian right.

Over the past year, Braver Summit has had sessions on abortion, race, war and January 6th. In June and July, we will tackle gun violence.

A year of living dangerously

It’s not easy to listen to the other side. That’s the Braver part of Braver Angels. My stomach still tightens before every meeting. What’s the angel side? I asked a few members to describe why they want to stay in our group.

My relationship with my sons remains strained. I now have a new perspective on it all, though. I have taken to reading both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal daily, to keep a broader view of issues and ideas.

Peter, red-leaning

I am amazed at the places in my life where the concepts of Braver Angels unexpectedly appear. I attended a virtual Yom Kippur service at Central Synagogue in Fall 2021. During the sermon the Rabbi shared about two people who ‘were willing to sit in the discomfort of dissent and even doubt…because they knew their debates were in the service of something bigger than themselves and only by listening to opposing views could they arrive at a conclusion that transcends either of their original positions.’ (Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, September 15, 2021)

Lauren, blue-leaning

I learned that, after getting to know the people, it is easier to appreciate where they come from. Seems pretty trite. Now a goal might be to listen better to complete strangers.

Mike, red-leaning

Me? Now, when Deb’s face appears, I see a kindred spirit who happens to be on the other team. But the game needs both of our teams.

Clockwise or Counterclockwise?

*

Last week Rebecca and I started off for Trout Run, an 11 mile bike trail around our home in northeast Iowa. I said let’s do clockwise” and Rebecca nodded.

When we got to the entrance, she went left and I went right.

Later, and being curious, we talked about why we went opposite ways. I went right because I observed an imaginary clock in front of me and so headed toward 1:00. Right, from my point of view, was clockwise.

Rebecca went left because she saw herself in the center of the clock looking outward. Left, from her point of view, was right and clockwise.

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are – or as we are conditioned to see it.

Steven Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

The next time you disagree with someone ask two questions: What do I see? What does she see?

You might be surprised by the anwers.

I wish the world was a better place, for all.

I wish no one believed 2 + 2 = 5.

I wish bad things would stop happening to innocents.

I wish Yahweh and Jesus and Mohammed and Devi and Buddha and Kant and…would convene and write across the earth’s sky in every language what is truly right and what is truly wrong so we would at least know the Blasphemers.

I wish no one’s heart was stone.

I wish no one’s mind was wracked.

I wish those who have been hurt would stop taking their hurt into the world.

I wish all leaders were good people.

I wish all caregivers cared.

I wish the content of one’s character mattered more than anything else.

I wish for strength for those who need it today and tomorrow.

I wish for more hope than despair.

I wish I had answers.

I wish I knew what to say.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a Luther College Recognition dinner honoring two faculty who were retiring. Tributes to both included former students who wrote about how this person had changed their lives. This is a story of how a faculty person’s life, my life, was changed by my Luther colleagues.

I retired from Luther College in 2018, on the small island nation of Malta. Over the next two years, I applied and was accepted for two Fulbright Scholar awards* to teach about American democracy in Romania. Nothing about the Paul Gardner who arrived at Luther College to teach American politics in 1985 would have predicted these endings.

The Endings

Did you know that 48 Romanian lei buys two tornados?

Last week I used my Romanian Banca Transilvania card for the final time. Although Rebecca and I returned from Romania in January, I wanted to keep alive one tangible link. The bank branch that issued the card in 2020 anchored one end of our Timișoara neighborhood so the card always triggered memories of our two Romanian journeys, in spring 2020 and fall 2021. Nostalgia, however, doesn’t buy ice cream. But a credit card backed by 48 lei does and was just enough for two tornados from Decorah’s Whippy Dip.

I placed the worn-out card on top of this map in a fat folder labeled Two Fulbrights in Romania. We used the map so often it refolded itself. Artifacts, memories, photos together with occasional Facebook, email and Zoom conversations with Romanian friends pointed toward a cumulation of something special. So does the hollowness in my stomach.

I’ve just finished Troubled Water, a terrific travelogue by Jens Muhling, about his one year journey around the Black Sea. At the beginning of the book, Muhling writes “Journeys seldom start where we remember them starting.” When I read that line, I thought of this picture of Rebecca and me in Romania’s eastern Carpathian Mountains. If I could get a mountain-peak view of where our Romanian Fulbright journey began, what would I discover?

The Beginnings

Muhling’s 2018 sojourn started in Russia but began decades earlier under his grandmother’s dinning room table. He heard stories about a distant relative who commanded part of Catherine the Great’s fleets in a Black Sea battle against Turkish gun boats. From that imaginative Romanian mountain top, I see that our Romanian odyssey started with an application for a Fulbright Scholar award. But it began in the summer of 1999, in Nottingham, England.

Richard dropped me off in Nottingham’s city center and said “when you finish exploring why don’t you take the bus back to our house.” I was in Nottingham to direct Luther College’s year-long program located in this north-central English city. Richard was the previous year’s director and would spend a few days showing me the ropes. I remember standing on a busy corner with a house address in one hand and a bus timetable in the other. And feeling overwhelmed. One year later, on the day before David, the next year’s director was to arrive, I walked from that city center spot to the director’s house, without map or bus schedule.

Two years later, August 2001, Mark faced me across the breakfast table at the Imperial Hotel in London. Mark was the director of Luther’s study abroad office and later that day would join another Luther group touring England. I had come to London and Ireland to spend four days scouting locations for a January 2002 three-week course study course with students. “What’s first on our agenda?,” asked Mark. I looked at him and said “I really have no idea.”

Over the next decade and a half I would learn to lead, plan and execute five January term study-away courses, in 2002, 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2015. And in the spring of 2018, in my last semester before retirement, Rebecca and I would direct Luther’s semester program in Malta.

Little Jens under his grandmother’s table could not imagine that decades later he would travel around the Black Sea. And write about it. Adult Jens looking back sees a seed beginning to take root, from his grandmother’s stories. These stories helped enlarge his vision for what he could do, for what he could be.

Luther College is full of Johnny Appleseeds

When I arrived at Luther College in 1985, I had never traveled outside the United States. Leading, planning, and executing a study abroad experience for students, let alone myself, was outside my imagination. Yet Luther College was full of Johnny Appleseeds, planting one seed after another. Richard and Mark would eventually be joined by Norma, Jim, Harland, Steve and Deborah. The latter five had done Fulbrights and their gift of Fulbright stories expanded my vision of what I might do.

My Luther-life ended in Malta. My academic-life ended in Romania.

Without Luther colleagues planting and pointing, these endings do not make sense.

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*The Fulbright Scholar program sends 400 American citizens to 130 countries each year to teach or do research. In spring 2020, I received a scholar award to teach courses on American Democracy at West University in Timisoara Romania. COVID drove us home after only 33 days and so I successfully re-applied for fall 2021.

I need a seat to get from A to Beat

“Would you like our seats,” offered a young woman to Rebecca and me on a crowded London Underground Tube in January 2018. With a nod, her partner seconded the invitation. I had a pole and Rebecca a strap-handle so we said “Thanks but we’re OK.” “Are you sure?” she replied. “Yes, we’re sure. But thanks anyway.”

Two weeks later the other shoe dropped. Another young couple and this time on a crowded bus in Malta, a densely populated island country in the Mediterranean. Again, we politely declined and again were taken aback. Rebecca was born in 1951 and me in 1949 so we knew we were older. But our genes had given us cover. It was a shock to know that even our disguised-selves looked old enough for priority seating.

A second aha moment followed a week later on another packed Malta bus. Our destination was Dingli Cliffs. We boarded in Valleta, Malta’s capital city, for the one hour and 18 minute trip. Rebecca found a seat. I stood, for 78 bone-rattling minutes. And thought, for the first time, “I need a seat, to get from A to Beat.”

Please offer me a seat

A few months before the couple in London offered us their seats, Transport for London began a Travel Kind Campaign. One part of the campaign was a new Priority Seating sign posted in all London buses, trains and trams. Instead of the older signs with symbols of elderly, pregnant or disabled, this sign asks passengers to widen their vision for who might need help to get from A to beat.

And to prepare passengers to be asked to give up their seat. Transport for London has a Transport Accessibility link that describes the resources available for anyone that needs travel help. It includes this statement: “All buses, Tubes, trains, and trams have clearly marked priority seats for anyone who needs them. If one isn’t available, ask if someone will give up a seat.” For those travelers who might be reticent to ask, they can apply for a Please Offer me a seat badge.

Londoner Amanda Jacobs who has a musculoskeletal condition explained why the badge is so important to her.

The badge is so important to me personally because when someone looks up, sees I need to sit down and offers me their seat, I can relax and not worry about being injured and unable to live a full life for several months – just because I couldn’t get a seat on the bus, train or tube and had to stand up. Such a relatively small action by a fellow passenger respecting my needs can therefore have a hugely beneficial influence on my life for months to come.

From Transport for London’s web site

Personal autonomy

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life – to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you ant to be.

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal, p. 141

Toward the end of our four months in 2018 directing Luther College’s Malta program, I admitted to myself and then to Rebecca that I dreaded some of our weekend bus trips visiting Malta sites. The Dingli Cliffs trip intimidated and influenced what I felt I could and could not do. I was tip-toeing toward the recognition that, like Amanda, to be whole, to live a full life, I needed help.

The signs of our time

A few days ago Spotify delighted me with a song I had not heard for decades, Signs, from 1971, by The Five Man Electric Band. The song was a lament about how America’s signs excluded people, with its thematic line: “Sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside.” 50 years later, whether in London, Malta or America, many of our institutions’ signs waive whatever membership card may have been required in the past.

Instead, these signs welcome those who may have been excluded in the past. They seek, in Atul Gawande’s words, “to maintain the integrity of one’s life.” What has changed is not the goal of personal autonomy. But who gets to make that claim.

Democracy

Democracy is not a state. It is an act.

John Lewis, just before he died on July 17, 2020

When Jackie Robinson resisted Major League baseball’s no black player rule in 1947, he joined millions of his compatriots who had acted throughout American history to repair America’s broken equality promise.

Baseball’s whites only sign was one breach among too many. Democracy begins not with Congress’s or Prime Minister’s but with the people and how we should think about them. And not just about people as voters but people and the games they play. Or can’t play.

This is how I make sense of Jackie Robinson’s impact on America.

The Promise

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among the are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Thomas Jefferson, America’s Declaration of Independence, 1776

America began with a promise about equality. Differences that mattered in Europe – class, gender, race, religion – were to give way to the only thing that was to count in public life: the dignity of each human being.

The Breach

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary…The blessings in which you, this day rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me…This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

Frederick Douglass What to the slave, is the Fourth of July, 1852

In the beginning, America broke its promise by excluding most people from public life. But these exclusions ruptured the promise. So they had to be built upon ideas that served as rationales: those without property were not responsible enough to rule; women were best suited for the household; Catholics were too beholden to the Pope, and blacks were inferior to whites.

Bad ideas succored self-interest and power.

Resistance

The most significant sports story of the century. Baseball and Jackie Robinson have taken up the cudgel of democracy.

A sports reporter about Jackie Robinson’s first professional baseball game, 1946, from Kostya Kennedy, True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson, 2022

America’s equality promise instructed resistance wherever inequality was found. African-Americans resisted America’s home-grown tyranny. Sometimes with white allies, slaves, former slaves, and the ancestors of slaves: fought, organized, wrote, preached, marched, boycotted, protested, rallied, lawyered, prayed, freedom-rode, and died. And migrated, away from terror, toward better lives. From 1890 to 1960, six million black Americans migrated from the American Jim Crow south to Detroit, Chicago, and Pasadena, California. In 1920, one year after Jackie Robinson was born, his mother moved the family from Cairo, Georgia to Pasadena.

Two decades later Robinson strode into America’s consciousness on April 18, 1946 when he played his first professional game as a member of the Montreal Royals, a minor league club affiliated with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Robinson powered, finessed and thought his way to four runs for his victorious team. After homering in his second-at-bat, he bunted safely twice, stole two bases and intimidated two pitchers into balks. 51, 873 fans doubled Newark, New Jersey’s Roosevelt Stadium 25,000 seat limit and saw what one newspaper called The Robinson Experiment.

In 1949 and in his second major league season, Robinson lead the Brooklyn Dodgers to a National League pennant. He topped the league in stolen bases and batting average and was named baseball’s Most Valuable Player. Baseball, mid-20th century America’s national pastime, was a public laboratory of meritocracy. Robinson’s productivity assaulted the lie of black inferiority that America’s whites’ only barriers were built upon.

Democracy as an act of imagination

Democracy begins as an act of imagination about people.

E.E. Schattschneider, Two hundred million Americans in search of government, 1969

America’s Declaration of Independence’s equality promise is built upon an act of imagination about people. It asks us to ignore differences that have always mattered. In favor of what Schattschneider calls the preciousness of each human being.

I imagine that you are like me. You want to be happy. You want to be free. You want to realize your potential.

I imagine all the Jackie Robinson’s who could have played in the major league. Or the Ketanji Brown Jackson’s who could have been a Supreme Court Justice. Or the Barack Obama’s who could have been President of the United States.

The heroes of American democracy are not our presidents or generals but our resisters.

America started with a promise about equality. It immediately broke that promise to most of its inhabitants. That breach had to be repaired. Much of the repair work was done by the excluded many. In 1946, Jackie Robinson joined that illustrious group of resisters.

Resisters know what it is like to be invisible. Thus, they help us see not only them but each other.

Sidney Poitier died on January 6, 2022. His slap of a white man in the 1967 Oscar winning film In the Heat of the Night made a big impression on a 17 year old white kid who was just opening up to the world’s possibilities. The 2022 Academy Award show will always have Will Smith and Chris Rock. I have Virgil Tibbs and Eric Endicott, the 1968 Oscars, and a handshake.

Last fall I taught Romanian students about America democracy, from the perceptive of the black freedom movement. The students watched Spike Lee’s Malcom X and BlackkKlansman, Ava Duvernay’s Selma, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave and the two scenes from Heat I will describe.* These scenes, with some context, helped students understand America. They portrayed an America that has struggled, still struggles, to become a better home for its African-American citizens.

The slap

“Got a name, boy,” barks Sparta, Mississippi Sheriff Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) at Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), to jump start the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. Tibbs had been arrested by a deputy who earlier in the evening found the body of an important businessman. Searching for suspects, the deputy encountered Tibbs who was sitting in a train station waiting to return to Philadelphia, PA after visiting his mother.

In his decaying office, Gillespie grilled Tibbs who eventually produced a homicide detective badge tucked inside his wallet. Tibbs called his police chief who ordered him to help with the investigation. The chief told Gillespie that Virgil was his best detective. This sets in motion Heat’s plot. In a small 1960s Mississippi town Poitier’s black Tibbs worked with Steiger’s white Gillespie to solve a murder.

The murder victim was Philip Colbert who wanted to build a factory in Sparta. Tibbs asked locals whether Colbert had enemies. One pointed him to Eric Endicott, owner of Endicott Cotton Planation. He said Endicott believed his company would lose workers, black workers, to Colbert’s new enterprise. Gillespie and Tibbs visited Endicott on his property by driving through a cotton field of black field workers. They found Endicott inside a greenhouse tending his precious orchids.

“What’s your favorite flower?” Endicott asked Tibbs. “Epiphytics” said Tibbs and explained why. Endicott responded with this flower needed special care “because, like the negro, they need care and feedin’ and cultivation,’ and that takes time. That’s something’ you can’t make some people understand. That’s somethin’ Mr. Colbert didn’t realize.”

Earlier in the film Tibbs observed a root substance on the brake pedal of Colbert’s car. So he asked Endicott whether Mr. Colbert was in this greenhouse last night. Endicott was offended at Tibbs’ impertinent question and slapped him across the face. Tibbs reciprocated with a backhanded slap.

When Gillespie did nothing, Endicott told Tibbs “there was a time I could have had you shot.” I have been awed by the power of Poitier’s reciprocal slap. Not only the physical act. But the assertion of equivalence, the momentary dismantling of a racial hierarchy. Look at Endicott’s expression after the slap.

Larry Gates, the actor who plays Eric Endicott, gave the viewer a visceral portrayal of what the Endicotts’ of America were beginning to lose and what the Tibbs’ of America were starting to gain 50 years ago. Losers, however, often strike back.

The 1968 Oscars

On Thursday, April 4, 1968 James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King jr. The 1968 Academy Award Show was scheduled for Monday, April 8. On Saturday, April 6, Gregory Peck, President of the Motion Pictures Association, decided to postpone the Oscar ceremony until April 10, one day after King’s funeral. Bob Hope, emceeing his 17th Oscars, quipped to the audience about the postponement that “it didn’t affect me, but it’s been tough on the nominees,” and “any delay really snarls up programming.”**

On April 10, In the Heat of the Night won best picture and Rod Steiger best actor for his portrayal of Sheriff Bill Gillespie. In his acceptance speech, Steiger says: “I would like to thank Mr. Sidney Poitier for the pleasure of his friendship, which gave me the knowledge and understanding of prejudice in order to enhance this performance. Thank you and we shall overcome.”

As the audience applauds Steiger, Bob Hope returned and introduced Sidney Poitier who will present the next award. In Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris described the moment: “Poitier’s appearance immediately after Steiger’s victory gave the night its emotional climax. Waves of applause, whistles, cheers, and bravos greeted him as he walked to the center of the stage.”

The handshake

In the Heat of the Night was the film that most helps me makes sense of the America of my lifetime. The slap scene represented a changing of the guard. Those who have been pushed aside were beginning to assert themselves. The Civil Rights movement was the nonviolent and political version of this thrust. Gillespie, Hope and James Earl Ray were losing their grip on the country. Loss was hard. Gillespie responded with learned prejudice, Hope with lame quips, and Ray with a bullet.

In the film’s final scene, Gillespie carried Tibbs’ suitcase from the squad car to the train and in parting says to Virgil “take care, you hear.” Virgil turns, smiles, and says “yeah.” In between these vignettes was a handshake.

I am not naive about America. Every forward movement toward extending the Constitution’s blessings of liberty to all has been met with fierce resistance. Those losing power never give it up easily. After Tibbs’ slap, Endicott will send his thugs after Virgil. Even the 1966 filming of Heat butted up against the reality of racism in 1960s America.*** Poitier said he would not go “south of the Mason-Dixon Line” because of an incident with the Klan he and Harry Belafonte had a year earlier in Mississippi.

So Sparta, Illinois became Sparta, Mississippi. The Endicott plantation scene, however, required two days in Dyersville, Tennessee. Poitier, Steiger and a small crew had to stay at a Holiday Inn outside of Dyersville because the main hotel was “whites only.”

That “whites only” America was a different country. Gillespie changed just as America has changed. That handshake was a sign of hope, of the change to come. Smith’s Oscar slap down of Rock was remarkable. What was not remarkable was the presence of two black men on the Oscar stage. Or the Oscar winning film Coda about three deaf members of a family, each played by a deaf actor. Or the remake of another Oscar nominated film, West Side Story, where all the Latino parts are played by Latinos and not, like the 1961 original, white actors in brown face.

For my Romanian students, I used the black freedom movement as a lens through which to see America because I wanted them to see the struggle, for democracy-in-action and not just in words.

Struggle was defined by loss and hope, the slap and the handshake.

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*In a future blog, I will write about the course I taught in Romania.

**From Mark Harris’ Pictures at a Revolution

***From Norman Jewison & Steven Galloway “In the Heat of the Night at 50,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 5, 2017