Editor's note: This was written before a special counsel was appointed to investigate the Trump administration's involvement with Russia, before the U.S. stock market crashed and while Roger Ailes was ailing in the present tense. Perhaps consider it as a historical document, from a more innocent time: yesterday morning.
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An African American couple at the grocery store on Sunday. Her t-shirt reads, "Nevertheless she persisted." His says, "Young, black and ambitious."
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“People gave up bowling and turned to politics," Ohio Governor John Kasich said recently. "My suggestion to the country is they go back to bowling. And turn off the cable TV.”
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I remember having to read James Baldwin or spend a weekend with Uncle Randall to get a political perspective startlingly different from my own. I remember it feeling intellectually refreshing. Now, I'm weary of looking at the Grand Canyon every morning, between the housewives sharing their divergent views on CSPAN.
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Over email in April, a dozen middle-aged white guy are planning their happily mindless annual golf outing for August. A political panic breaks out. What if the trip is ruined by talk of politics!?
"I'm firmly in the 'No Politics' camp for this trip," says one. "This trip should be about comradery and stepping away from the stresses we have in life. If someone feels like talking about politics and world events is a good way to unwind, then they probably think hitting themselves in the nuts with a hammer is a good idea as well. To each his own, but I kindly request that form of enjoyment be relegated elsewhere."
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You and I can't forever ignore the American heartbroken, and we can hardly expect them to think more kindly of us through their tears of rage. This nation won't begin to be heal until a leader emerges who can speak to the Trump voter as well as the Obama voter. But we can't afford wait that long to restore sanity by wresting control of the country from millions of real savages. They got the guns but we got the numbers.
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The country is in two. First step isn't to make it one. It's to make it many, again—like back when speakers stood on soap boxes, in places like Chicago's Bughouse Square, as Studs Terkel remembers: "Communists, anarchists, Wobblies … old religious people—Moody Bible 'sky pilots,' they were called. A woman singing hymns, someone selling books on sex hygiene."
Like the good old days, in the Great Depression.
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(Studs Terkel, who died a few days before Obama was elected president, and said, “I’m very excited by the idea of a black guy in the White House, that’s very exciting. I just wish he was more progressive!”)
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I realize that the above points of view contain a number of contradictions. Sort it out for yourself (as we all must). But if you take only one message away, I guess it would be the one about them having the guns but us having the numbers.
do I sense some kind of burn-out brewing here….
Yes.