I HAVE LITTLE REASON TO CELEBRATE

I’m out of the country on this “auspicious” Independence Day. So, it looks like I’m going to miss the much ballyhooed Quarter Millennium celebration. It’s just as well. To be frank, I see little reason to celebrate. The United States that I was born into, that I spent most of my life loving, has not, for all practical purposes, survived.

You see, when I was born, the United States was experiencing what seemed to be the pains of a nation growing into its democratic trappings after long last. It was the convergence of the Civil Rights Movement, Second Wave Feminism, and a nascent Pride Movement. In fact, it was an era in which small “d” democratic movements were emerging from the proverbial woodwork, demanding that the United States, after almost two hundred years of struggle, finally uphold the principles upon which it was founded. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Of course, when the Founders penned and signed their names to this dangerous idea, ALL men was a much narrower category. I certainly do not need to elaborate. However, as a child, the notion that “ALL men” really meant “everyone” was already the understood framing. By the time I was celebrating the Bicentennial as a six year old, I was fully imbued with the manifest discourse that we were all free and equal. Everyone. White. Black. Brown. Man. Woman. Able. Challenged. Everyone had the same rights.

I also understood at that young age that this radical ideal was a work in progress. I learend that it wasn’t right to discriminate against people for the color of their skin, but there were still some people who did. I learned that girls could play baseball, but there were some people who didn’t want them to.

I don’t want to candy coat this. With every manifest message that discrimination was wrong, there were any number of latent scripts pushing me to do exactly that. This was especially true for my LGBTQ+ peers. Regardless, there was a sense that things were going in the right direction. A new world was being built, driven by democratic movements. This was an inspiration for me. I wanted to participate.

As it happened, I developed a deep love of history. When the time came I decided I wanted to serve my country by teaching history. As I read deeper and developed the curriculum I would later perfect, I was drawn to teachers like Professor Howard Zinn who took a more critical approach to my chosen field. I learned that for every great leader, great general, great statesman, there were innumerable, nameless, common people doing the work that made the great men great.

Furthermore, where there were evil, greedy or power hungry men pressing down on the people, there were thousands pushing back. Sometimes they did so in little ways, mundane acts of disobedience. Sometimes they got together and pushed back in great uprisings. Sometimes, these uprisings even worked to restore justice.

Contrary to the contents of my textbooks, I learned that democracy was not the grant of magnanimous and far sighted leaders bestowing justice on the people. Democracy was of the streets. I am free not because soldiers went off into some battle somewhere. I am free because thousands of people took to the streets and did battle against the autocrats right here in the United States. They stood shoulder to shoulder, often outgunned, and said “our rights will be respected or the system comes down!” And sometimes, they won. Democracy was not gained upon the actions of great men. It was taken in spite of them.

Some call this point of view un-American. I disagree. In fact, I can say with certainty that there is nothing more American than bringing the mechanisms of power to a grinding halt in the hope that one day, “all men” would be recognized as “everyone.” That’s the story I wanted to teach. That was my bias. As Professor Zinn elaborated in the first chapter of A People’s History, it is impossible to teach history without some underlying bias. It was, therefore, requisite for the historian to be open about the biases they bring to the table.

On the first day of class I informed my students that my bias was to teach history as the chronical of humanity’s quest for knowledge and freedom, and that knowledge and freedom were, in the final summation, the same thing. I taught that they were not just students of history, mindlessly regurgitating names and dates for the final exam (or the state mandated bubble tests). They were active participants in this chronical…and there was no way to avoid this truth. One ccold not opt out. Apathy or inaction was nothing more than tacit support for the status quo. Choosing not to choose was still a choice.

This was my life until recently. My country. My home. The nation I loved and dedicated my life to advancing in some small ways, especially in the classroom, was not perfect, but it seemed to be improving.

Then MAGA!

Of course, MAGA was not a new phenomenon. Historian Richard Hofstadter elaborated the “paranoid style” of American politics six years before I was born. Regressive forces were always lingering in the shadows. Even the six year old me understood this. But he thought they were largely defeated. Unfortunately, for most of my life, these ascendent forces were slithering their way into the light.

Years ago, as the Tea Party was a growing threat, I offered what I called the Dr. Moreau Theory of Republican Politics. The Republican establishment, dedicated to preserving and advancing the baronial privileges of the One Percent, would whip up the most monstrous members of the conservative movement during election time. They would offer conspiratorial blather about “those people” taking over, taking way their guns, encouraging their daughters to date black men and then giving them free abortions. After they served their purpose at the voting booth, the establishment would push the monsters back into their cages until next election and focus on tax cuts and deregulation.

It wasn’t long before the Tea Party Movement rattled the cages and pulled against the chains. Standard Republican kibble wasn’t enough for them any more. They wanted the red meat promised them. I feared all it would take would be a leader who could galvanize the monsters. After that? Well, if you have not read The Island of Dr. Moreau, I suggest you do so. It doesn’t end well.

In 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., paraphrased Theodor Parker in saying, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I used to teach this quote. In fact, I often used it as an essay prompt requiring students to challenge or support this notion. Most students supported it. When it came time to go over the essays I offered a counterpoijnt. The chronical of humanity’s quest for knowledge and freedom cannot be described as an arc, no matter how long. An arc is defined as having a consistent and predictable bend. Humanity’s great quest, and America’s foundational aspiration that everyone is equal, has never been a consistent bend toward justice.

Rather, it has been a tempestuous and labyrinthine odyssey full of obstacles and pitfalls, bandits and boobie-traps. I was fortunate to grow up at a time when many of the obstacles were cleared and the bandits fought off by the movements that came before me. It seemed the path was clear and nearing an end. Some really brainy folks even suggested that we were approaching the “end of history.”

Well, history has this way of kicking you in the nads when you take this journey for granted. It turns out that I was not born at a time when a new world was being born. Rather, I was witnessing the deceptive calm just before the old world starts dying. I enter my fifties during the resulting interregnum, in which the new cannot be born. As Antonio Gramsci preedicted, my children are coming into adulthood during a period of “morbid symptoms” better understood as “a time of monsters.”

Interregnum is not a time for celebration, even at the quarter millennium. I wish my country had survived, but it did not. Now is a time to treat the rot underlying the morbid symptoms that killed my nation, to fight back against the monsters. A new world will be born. That is the ineluctable process of history. the question is, will this new world be built by those who aspire to democracy, or by the monsters?

When I can be sure that the former option is the case, the I will celebrate.