Like many people I know, I’m caught in a panoramic response to the presidential election. One moment, I’m crying, another I’m agonizing over an anti-semite named as chief strategist and a racist touted as the incoming attorney general. I turn away from the news to compose myself and listen instead to the wind, consistent in its variety lately, only to return later to the world outside my windows and hear about a potential Muslim registry and how, according to one Trump advisor, the Japanese internment camps were a good model. Sometimes I go numb between the pulses of despair and bad news over how we can stand with those most threatened, and take care of ourselves and this beautiful and endangered world.
Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about the making and keeping “the beloved community” as cornerstone of non-violence. This is challenging enough with people we agree with, yet there is plenty of opportunity lately to showing that love. I’ve witnessed and experience immense tenderness in my community and beyond. The day after the election, at our local food co-op The Merc, I walked up to a friend, and we held each other without talking. People I see on the street or at the bookstore check in with each other. We gather in the shadows to find mutual kinship, strength, and courage.
It’s easy enough to soften our hearts and reach out to those who feel the same way we do, but what King meant by the term “the beloved community” is to build community with those who don’t think and vote the same way we do. As he said in a speech at a victory rally following the announcement of a favorable U.S. Supreme Court Decision desegregating the seats on Montgomery’s buses, “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.”
This work is so expansive, a climb up Mount Everest to where it’s hard to breathe, yet polarization is at the heart of the situation America is in right now. Reality itself is so splintered into all-encompassing separate and even opposite realities on so many issues that it’s as if we don’t occupy the same planet, country, even neighborhoods. As I was standing in line to vote 10 days ago (back in the age of innocence), I thought, “Here we are all together, and I truly don’t understand why some of these people won’t vote the way I’m voting.”
How can we find our ways into civil, respectful dialogues in which we’re actually able to drop our shields and swords? I find this very difficult because there’s so much we need those shields and swords for right now, but on a person-to-person basis, I applaud anything we can do to soften the heart-hardened polarization between us. I think of a friend of mine who called a state representative’s office about Steve Bannon. When the aide said the media was exaggerating Bannon’s history of racism and antisemitism, my friend read him Bannon quotes (the aide said, “Oh, I didn’t know that”), and they ended up having a conversation instead of a confrontation. Will one conversation change anything? Probably not, but dozens might, and multiplied across our country, millions will.
By reaching out to those we disagree with, I’m not in any way saying anyone should accept attacks (some already in process) on Muslims, the LBGTQ community, Native Americans, African-Americans, Latinos, Immigrants, Women, Jews, People with Disabilities as the new normal. Everyday, I read about swastikas spray-painted on synagogues, racist slogans hurled out of speeding cars toward people of color, and even a horrible incident in which a bunch of middle-school kids yelled at a Mexican-American kid, “Build the wall.” We need to stand with those targeted, and stand up for civility and peace.
The fact that these things are happening speak to a terrible truth: there’s so much hatred and fear of each right under the surface, even traces of it in the best of us. We have a great many gated communities in America whether they have literate gates or not; so many places that are racially segregated especially. Although I have friends, family, and colleagues of color, I can look around at a lot of places I go and see mostly white people. There’s a lot to learn about why we’re splintered in so many ways, and what splinters we may have to remove from our own ways of seeing.
I think of small rural towns where I give talks on books with Jewish content, often being the first Jew some people there ever met. With a safe space for people to ask questions, I continually encounter a healthy sense of curiosity. I think of how the gay marriage movement gained great momentum quickly because so many people in all walks of life knew someone who was gay, and how, a friend of mine single-handedly changed many people’s attitudes toward lesbians by chatting up her neighbors in a very conservative Kansas town.
This is a wake-up call for us to reach beyond our echo chambers and begin conversations, person by person, and to not to take “liberty and justice for all” part of our Pledge of Allegiance for granted. There’s a lot to do right now to show that we are not accepting such hatred as innate to our government and country, and many are already taking action: calling and writing legislators, donating to advocacy groups, organizing community meetings and events, facilitating development of meaningful actions, and writing, singing, performing, dancing, and others to put forth the vision and real unity we need.
It’s also a time to balance the sometimes impossible work of how to take good care of ourselves as a vital part of this beloved community but still do good in the world. Self-care as well as caring for each other is essential for the long haul, and we’re likely in the duration. Humor, health, breaking bread (gluten-free or otherwise), long walks, deep sleep, rallying around those in grief or crisis, listening deeply, showing up, and reinhabiting our individual bodies as well as our communities all are part of the mosaic we’re making out of the broken shards around us.
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