Something to Believe In

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This is the most dismal Fourth of July that I can remember, and I turned 75 last month.

Not only are we suffering a vast resurgence—for our very own fault—of a mostly preventable disease. Not only have our leaders lied to us, our president reportedly 18,000 times. Our most public scientists—scientists!—also lied to us earlier. Our own Surgeon General and our chief public epidemiologist (Anthony Fauci) downplayed the importance of masks in February and March, instead of leveling with us that supply was tight and first responders needed priority.

Politicians and economists can argue and debate. But anyone who shops at Wal-Mart or on Amazon.com knows how far we’ve fallen. That mighty retail duopoly mostly sells stuff made in China.

Whether you shop that duopoly or the Home Depot-Lowe’s duopoly for home maintenance and repair, you know how much is made abroad and how few things we still make at home. Inevitably, you start to wonder whether a nation that can’t make its own pandemic masks—let alone coffee machines, grills, hand tools, hardware and home appliances—has what it takes just to keep itself healthy and defend itself, let alone manage the world.

Many now understand how China duped and cajoled our enthusiastic plutocrats into selling our factories and millions of jobs offshore. They read how China is now crushing Hong Kong, expropriating the South China Sea, and setting its sights on Taiwan. And they wonder some more.

Is the caricature of a Mafia capo now in the White House the product of a movement or a “Hail Mary” pass? I think it’s more the latter. Trump’s own slogan gives him away: “Make America Great Again.”

All his Red-Hat minions know in their souls how far we’ve already fallen far from grace. They knew in 2016. They had so little faith in our trajectory or our system that they went all in on a man without experience or character.

It’s hard to believe that they really think more white supremacy is just what we need, considering that bigoted white leaders have led our decline so far. It’s more credible, I think, to see their adulation of our modern Antichrist as a Hail-Mary pass, aimed out of bounds, with no receiver in sight and nothing to believe in.

Of all the pundits I read regularly, erstwhile “conservative” David Brooks has the most relentlessly sunny disposition. He can find a silver lining in a record thunderstorm just about to spawn tornadoes. I call him the “Pollyanna Pundit.”

But today his sunshine ran out. In a column evidently intended for our Fourth, entitled “The National Humiliation We Need,” he offers this as his peroration:

“I had hopes that the crisis would bring us together, but it’s made everything harder and worse. And now I worry less about populism or radical wokeness than about a pervasive loss of national faith.”

When the Pollyanna Pundit sees no sunshine, you know it’s gonna rain.

And yet, and yet . . . Another generally sunny pundit, Tom Friedman, recently gave us a recipe for success. “Respect science,” he wrote, “respect nature, respect each other.”

It’s hard to respect science when pols spin and twist it relentlessly, like a nose of wax. Then non-scientists have a hard time knowing what it says, let alone what it means. It’s hard to respect Nature at a personal level when our personal survival depends on our artificial, manufactured world—from Covid-19 tests, through ventilators in ICUs, to our fertilized and mechanized supply chain from farm to food bank.

But one thing we all can do—without much effort or any expense—is respect each other. Friedman is onto something there.

Dr. King once said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I’ve been waiting to see it bend all my 75 years. I’ve seen Jim Crow. I’ve seen the backlash to the mid-sixties civil rights laws, and Nixon’s Southern Strategy based on bigotry. I’ve seen Dr. King’s assassination and the backlash to the backlash. I’ve seen the backlash to Obama’s good presidency and precedent-breaking health insurance, and I’ve seen the enormous wave of backlash that tossed Donald Trump up on the shore like a rotting dead whale.

But I’ve never seen anything like the righteous backlash to George Floyd’s murder by police. The slow, hard slog toward racial justice for nearly all of my life left me speechless at the speed and force of our nation’s apparent deathbed conversion. Not just the usual suspects, but the whole of us seemed to rise up in protest and condemnation: pols of both parties, the mainstream media, celebrities, news anchors, and millions upon millions of ordinary people of all races.

Will it last? It will if we will it. And that’s exactly what we must do so survive, let alone thrive. That’s what we should ponder, on this most dismal Fourth, if we want our nation and its credo to carry on.

Lincoln said it best: “A House divided against itself cannot stand.” For the last several years, the evil and misguided have tried to divide us. Racists, bigots and white supremacists have. Putin and his trolls and spooks have. Pols of all stripes have tried to divide us to win elections and to suppress rival votes. Trump, of course, has made division not just his chief campaign tool, but a way of governing and of life.

Yet at the end of the day, none of it seems to have worked. The plutocrats took our factories and our jobs and sold them to China and Mexico. They drained our brains to work abroad. They killed and maimed our selfless warriors in endless, pointless wars. They rigged our economy so badly that 40% of us couldn’t afford $400 to meet an emergency, even before the current pandemic. And Zuckerberg replaced his soul with algorithms to assist them willingly for profit.

But in the end none of this could divide us, because we won’t forget.

We will recall the heroes and martyrs who bent the arc of freedom and justice for all of us: Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. King. We recall the soldier and pols who led and served us well: Colin Powell, Carol Moseley Braun, Susan Rice, Barack Obama. We know the pols who, even at this terrible moment, are bending the arc toward justice: John Lewis, James Clyburn, Barbara Lee, Sheila Jackson Lee, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Hakeem Jeffries, among many others. We recognize the pundits and scholars who enlighten us and help us recall, including Ta Nehisi Coates, Eugene Robinson, Charles Blow, Jamelle Bouie and Nikole Hannah-Jones. And we remember entertainers without number, including Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis, Jr., BB King, Little Richard, the Supremes, the Temptations, Jerry Lee Louis, Wynton Marsalis, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Morgan Freeman, Forest Whitaker, David Oyewolo, and Oprah Winfrey.

People who are Black are deeply woven into our history and culture. They spurred us, despite our recalcitrance and our original sin, toward whatever measure of liberty and equality we have. And they did so with brilliance, creativity, insight, humor, poignancy and dogged but polite persistence. Those still living are still doing so, patiently, reliably, persistently.

Throughout the entire painful, foot-dragging process, they remained steadfastly loyal to this nation and its ideals. So did the Japanese-Americans in our most-decorated 442d Brigade, who fought valiantly for us in Europe while their families were Interned here at home, and the Tuskegee Airmen and many others who fought for us in World War II, only to come home and step back into the role of second-class citizens.

As a result, “they” are “us.” They have made themselves so through voluntary and involuntary contributions for just over four centuries. And as more and more of us learn their sad history, more and more of us come to understand our non-white fellow citizens as our equals in every way, often superior in valor and patience. That, I think, is why so many of us reacted with so much outrage to the murder of George Floyd.

So while you watch the fireworks and listen to the stirring martial music, think beyond the moment. Think of what really made us great, and can again.

We are the last, best hope of mankind not because we are the strongest, richest, most productive or wisest nation of all. If nothing else, our present pathos proves that. We are the shining city on the hill because we invite others to join us and to become part of us, no matter how long the arc or how difficult their journey might be.

That’s our contribution to our species and our only durable claim to fame. Science and industry may pass us by, as we succumb to the ineluctable consequences of having less than 5% of the world’s population. But in a world riven by tribalism, our credo “all . . . are created equal” is the hope of mankind and will remain so. That promise alone still attracts willing newcomers to us, despite all our many troubles.

We have a way to go before all are treated as equals. But that’s our goal. As our Supreme Court’s building inscription proclaims, we stand for “Equal Justice under Law,” even when we don’t in fact achieve it.

If we recapture that spirit this fall, we will make America great again by our own faith and righteousness. If not, no amount of wealth or firepower can save us, let alone the Dow’s rise. So the recent, widespread popular movement toward that end, in the name of George Floyd, is something to celebrate, just as another popular rebellion was in 1776.

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