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It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true: but the writer who is out-of-country, even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form.
Salman Rushdie, "Imaginary Homelands" (LRB, 1982)
It is really, really easy to fall into the error of seeing more opponents than allies. Social media algorithms make this easier, because they prioritize engagement, and rage clicks count.
It's not healthy.
There's lots of people on all sides of this issue, and it's not clear cut what perspective has the numeric advantage.
Just look at the comments under any post from Doctors Without Borders that comments on the situation in Gaza. Full of people calling them "doctors without morals" etc because they dare to care about civilians in a war zone.
I know it's easy to think that "your side" has it worst. Please, resist the urge. There's more than enough hurt and anger to go around.
Palestinians are having dog shit thrown at their homes, in America, for having a Palestinian flag visible from the street.
Synagogues and Jewish community centers are being vandalized with nazi imagery, in America, for existing while Jewish.
We're all hurting. We're all angry. No one is having a good time. Try to see the people you disagree with not as horrible, evil monsters, but as people with a different perspective. You may not be able to engage with them in constructive ways, but you can hold space for shared humanity.
We have more in common than you might think.
In Quaker writings the phrase 'joined to the Lord' seldom appears without the corresponding phrase 'and to one another'. To be joined to the Lord results in being joined to one another, and being joined to one another results in being 'joined to the Lord'.
Howard Brinton, Friends and Their Spiritual Message
Gratitude JournalSOLAR ECLIPSE!!!
Watching the sunset eclipse yesterday was amazing. I was at work at my retail job, but not only did my boss provide eclipse glasses for those who didn't have them, he didn't care that we went out periodically to look at it as it slowly got closer and closer to totality.
When totality was minutes away, we all abandoned our posts and stood outside the doors and watched. We saw groups of employees at the nearby McDonald's and Taco Bell doing the same. One of our shift leads showed up over an hour early to join us.
Some customers joined us as well. One who had already made his purchase but didn't want to get in his car. Another who had just pulled in with his wife said, "I should be smoking a joint for this" and proceeded to light one up. (Not currently legal in Texas, but it was a fucking solar eclipse, man! Who cares??)
I got some pics during totality, but my phone decided to "fix" the no light issue. It was actually nighttime dark when I took these pics (note the bright planet off to the right):
Here it is zoomed in:
My husband was able to adjust his phone settings, so here are some of his pics:
Not kidding: DARK AS NIGHT! At 1:45 pm!
When totality happened, the folks from the other stores and restaurants all cheered. It was just so incredibly amazing to share this experience with people. It's like, what do all humans have in common? We love celestial events like this, and for 10 minutes we can all attend together, totally enraptured by this heavenly occurrence.
I was still all abuzz from it well into last night, and this morning, too. This was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, and I'm so lucky that I live in the path of totality.
(My in-laws are in the path of totality for the next one in 20 years. I'm planning now to be there.)
4/9/24
Glenn Loury: The Case for Black Patriotism
Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave and great abolitionist, in a famous speech of 1852 titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” asked America whether he had a share in the nation’s civic inheritance. Douglass was cautiously hopeful that America might be faithful to its founding principles and grant liberty and equality to his people. But he had to plead with his audience to consider the gravity of the times; he had to indict his country for not standing up to its own ideals.
Today we stand 170 years later. Douglass’s criticism of America remains fashionable, but many Americans seem to have forgotten what it was about America that Douglass wanted to be a part of. When we talk about race and America, we must ask whether the standoffishness exemplified, by, for example, the “America ain’t so great, and never was” posture popular on campuses and in newsrooms, truly serves the interests of black Americans. The narrative we blacks settle upon about the American project is fundamentally important. Is this, basically, a good country that affords boundless opportunity to all who are fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of American citizenship? Or, is this, basically, a venal, immoral, rapacious bandit-society of plundering white supremacists founded in genocide and slavery, and propelled by capitalist greed and unrepentant racism?
I wish to make the case for unabashed black patriotism—for the forthright embrace of America by black people. Our birthright citizenship in this great republic is an inheritance of immense value. Our Americanness is much more important than our blackness.
Of course, there is some warrant in the historical record for both sentiments. African slavery flourished at the time of the founding, true enough. And yet, within a century of the founding slavery was gone and people who had been chattel became citizens of the United States. Should equality before the law have taken another hundred years? Should my ancestors have been enslaved in the first place? No and no. But we must not forget that slavery had been commonplace since antiquity. Emancipation, the freeing of slaves en masse as the result of a movement for abolition—that was a new idea. It was a Western idea, brought to fruition in our own United States of America. It would not have been possible without the philosophical insights and moral commitments cultivated in the West during the Enlightenment—ideas about the essential dignity of human persons.
The founding of the United States of America was a world-historic event by means of which enlightenment ideals about the rights of individual persons and the legitimacy of state power got instantiated for the first time in real institutions. The United States of America fought authoritarian fascism and communism in the Pacific and Europe in the mid-twentieth century. Our democracy, flawed as it most surely is, has been a beacon to billions of people. On our shores, we have witnessed since the end of the Civil War the greatest transformation in the status of an enserfed people that is to be found anywhere in world history. Some 46 million strong, we black Americans have become by far the richest and most powerful large population of African descent on this planet, and it’s not even close. We have access to more than five times the income of the typical Nigerian, the richest nation in all of sub-Saharan Africa.
I am a descendant of slaves and I came up in the 1950s and 1960s on Chicago’s South Side; I didn’t have an easy upbringing, but I was a beneficiary of the civil rights revolution, which made possible for me a life that my forebears only dreamed of. I became an economist and Ivy League college professor. I am a product of the Enlightenment, and I am an inheritor of its great traditions: Tolstoy is mine. Dickens is mine. Newton and Maxwell and Einstein are mine.
We Americans, of all stripes, have a great deal in common, and our commonalities can be used to build bridges, undergirded by patriotism, between black America and the nation as a whole. We all want the same things. We want a shot at the American Dream. We want each generation to do better than the ones that came before it. Connections among groups in America could be stronger if we focused more on the things we have in common than on the things that divide us.
Those who make their living by focusing on our differences believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the American project. They’re wrong.
They betray the legacy of Frederick Douglass, and we should resist their divisive rhetoric. It is easy to overstate the racial problems facing our country, and to understate what we have achieved.
Join me in valuing the American tradition at FairForAll.org
A whole system of oppression can exist within a single word.
George Packer ("How America Fractured Into Four Parts")
