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It has been a difficult week,
although not surprising. Not for me and those in my circle anyway. Didn’t you
expect this sort of thing would happen? Haven’t you expected it ever since
Election Day 2016? If anything is surprising then it’s how many people just
woke up to it now, at the tail end of the destructive cycle. If anything came
as a surprise it was that we went so long before this particular version of
hatred and violence happened. I am also surprised that so few people died in
the mayhem. I keep hearing people say that they are heartbroken, and I ask
myself when my heart broke because it sure wasn’t this past week. How long ago
was it? I would say that my heart first broke when I was eight years old and I
saw images of children of African descent engaging in peaceful protest as part
of the Civil Rights Movement being beaten against the wall with powerful water
cannons in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 at the order of Bull Connor.
My heart broke decades ago when, as a child, I began to understand the kind of country I live in, the kind of world I live in, the level of hatred out there. My heart broke when I saw injustice right before my very eyes on TV. My heart broke a long, long time ago. What I feel this week is outrage. What I feel this week is fury. And, if I’m being honest, I feel some measure of smugness because I can say that I knew this is where we were going to wind up when I wept in my husband’s arms on Election Night 2016. This is where I have said we were going to wind up. And yup here we are.
The image from Wednesday that disturbed me most was the Confederate flag flying inside the capitol rotunda (carried by a rioter), and it did not break my heart. There were a great many disturbing images to choose from, but that one hit me hard; and yet I was outraged by that image, not broken-hearted. When I dug deeper, I discovered that the portrait in the background in that Confederate flag photo is a painting of Senator Justin Morrill, an abolitionist from Vermont who helped frame the Fourteenth Amendment (adopted in 1868), which granted rights to those freed from slavery. The fact that he had his watchful eye on that flag from his perch in history settles me and gives me hope. It reminds me that the best of what we are walks alongside the worst of what we are. Both at the same time. Thus, on the same day as that display of violence, hatred, and anti-democracy, Georgia, a state as deep in the South as the Alabama of Bull Connor, made a tectonic shift and voted to send a man of African descent (minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church no less) and a Jew to the Senate to represent a former slave state. I am reminded by these juxtapositions that change happens thanks to the enormous hard work and commitment of folks like Stacey Abrams.
America is a country filled with those juxtapositions. White supremacists waving Confederate flags and signs with swastikas storming the capitol are a part of this country. Native American protestors peacefully demonstrating to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline from endangering the delicately balanced ecosystem and poisoning the water are a part of this country. Racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic Americans who believe they have the right to demand control of the government by force live in the same country where the Wall of Moms stands peacefully to protect Black Lives Matter protestors, to protect the future of our children and grandchildren. I won’t delve too far into the injustice and double standard of the demonstrably tender way the police treated so many of those violent and destructive white anarchists rioting because of a threat to their beloved entitlement compared to the police brutality experienced by peaceful Black demonstrators protesting racial injustice (or even walking to the store to buy a snack). We all know that if the people at the capitol on Wednesday had been Black, they would have been face down on the concrete with a knee on their neck in an instant. The National Guard descended on Portland faster than they were called out to quell the violence in DC on Wednesday. This is in plain sight and much has been written about it (see Michelle Obama’s statement).
Certainly humans pose the greatest danger to one another, this country, and the planet. Humans are the most predatory, destructive creatures on Earth. And yet we are also creatures capable of extraordinary and boundless love for one another and for the splendid other creatures who share the planet with us. We are capable of tremendous gratitude and appreciation for the beauty and magnificence of this world of ours, of its inhabitants. This is who we are and who we always have been. We are imperfect creatures struggling to transcend the worst in ourselves to become the best in ourselves through an ongoing process of evolution. I mourn the death of the MAGA-follower Ashli Babbitt along with that of Police Officer Brian Sicknick. No one deserved to lose their life in that madness. Ashli and Brian were each someone’s child, someone’s friend, someone’s beloved.
My heart broke when I was eight and I realized what horror people are capable of but I have lived my life with that heartbreak and have worked to transcend that realization, to salvage a love for the wonder and magic of our world from the wreckage of human failing. I choose love over hate every single day. My email address is jazznkugel – that’s us, my husband and I, the marriage of a Black and a Jew. I rarely think about the larger ramifications of that because he is simply the man I love, not a cog in a social construct. Every day I live a celebration of the possibility (now the reality) of a Black and Jew going to the Senate to represent Georgia. Change happens.
Below is a photo taken in November 2016 of a Native American woman protestor kneeling in prayer at the Dakota Access Pipeline while police sprayed her with water in freezing temperatures. Many protestors were sprayed with water and suffered hypothermia as a result. They can beat us but they cannot change our hearts.
Mní Wičóni. Water is Life.
