Beyond Drift

It is hard to say which is more mesmerizing about our present cultural moment, the blustering neo-fascism of Donald Trump, or the state of the body politic which seems to be so receptive to it, encouraging him ever closer to the presidency. Like Bernie Sanders, he has charged forward riding upon our collective longing for authenticity, our pervasive fatigue with political double-speak and government by corruption, cronyism, and gridlock. 

Trump’s “authenticity” is a two-sided coin: his “solutions” will only lead to further division of race and class domestically and further war internationally—and they invite careful listening as a manifestation of our country’s unadmitted shadow, as Kern Beare writes in his brilliantly concise piece, “Listening to Trump.”

Some—I hope there will be enough who will back up their conviction with a vote—might say that Trump’s authenticity is consummately fake, the ultimate manifestation of reality TV, shallow celebrity culture, being famous for being famous.  But he would never have gotten this far without having given authentic voice to a strain of darkness in our past and present that will do us harm unless we keep bringing it into the light of self-reflection and repentance.

Shadow is a simple word that encompasses all that we refuse to consciously address, preferring to drift in a haze of convenient simplifications and half-truths. It is easy, especially in the midst of an intensely polarized political contest, to assert that it is my party alone that will restore the U.S.A. to unalloyed greatness. It is much harder to acknowledge our shadow side as manifested in the three great interrelated whirlpools of darkness charted by Martin Luther King Jr. back in 1967: materialism, racism, and militarism.

If these remain unconscious, we drift. As our black president finishes out two terms, those in congress who have opposed his every initiative drift in a sleep of latent racism. Our materialism has led to an uneven playing field and a drift of wealth and power toward the top. Mr. Trump is a prime example, even while he pretends to be a pal of the working class. As Nick Kristof wrote in the Times, materialist excess and racism are woven into his business history: “A former building superintendent working for the Trumps explained that he was told to code any application by a black person with the letter C, for colored, apparently so the office would know to reject it. A Trump rental agent said the Trumps wanted to rent only to “Jews and executives,” and discouraged renting to blacks.”

But the greatest whirlpool of all in which we drift in semi-conscious unease is our unchecked militarism. Racism and militarism are interwoven whirlpools, as we saw recently in the tragedies in Dallas and in Baton Rouge—African American veterans targeted the police with a military assault rifles and tactics—one of whom was in turn killed by police equipped with a military-style explosive robot.

And in all the presidential debates so far, there has been zero mention of the trillion-dollar proposal to renew all our nuclear weapons systems over the next 30 years—as if nuclear weapons were an authentic answer to the challenges of poverty, food insecurity, disease, climate change, or terrorism. What real human needs could we meet by the reallocation of just a few of those thousand billions poured into all our foreign bases and weapons?

The international community and the U.S. especially lack a vision for concluding both the war on terror and the nuclear balance of terror, relying instead entirely on overwhelming, world-deployed, fight-fire-with-fire military force.  If brute strength is not complemented by non-violent processes of reaching out and reconciliation, by adherence to international law, and by generous humanitarian aid, a violent backlash, as we have seen with ISIS, becomes inevitable.

There are people everywhere, not enough, but perhaps more than we may think, who have ceased to drift passively in these whirlpools of our times. People like peace activist David Hartsough, who recently led a group of citizens to Russia to establish friendly connections and overcome hardening stereotypes recalling the obsolete cold war of the last century. People like Len and Libby Traubman, who for 20 years have brought together small groups of American Jews and Palestinians to share a meal, trade stories, and put a human face on a seemingly intractable conflict. People like David Swanson, a one-man dervish who has put together a mega-sized peace conference to take place in Washington in September. Or Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza, the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is difficult to understand how anyone can argue that “black lives matter” is a racist statement when unarmed black people are being profiled and then shot by police at much higher rates than whites. Or Al Jubitz, an Oregon philanthropist who works tirelessly on citizen initiatives to prevent war. Or the police in Aarhus, Denmark, who fight terrorism by welcoming back young people who have been sucked into the whirlpool of ISIS. Or Paul Kando, a retired engineer in my small town in Maine who has come up with a comprehensive plan to gradually end our local and state over-reliance on fossil fuels in favor of a citizen-initiated transition to renewable energy sources.

The triple threat of racism, militarism and materialism always divides the world into “us” and “them,” the well-heeled and the needy, the Caucasian and the swarthy, the fully human Western European and the Muslim in whose distant cities death by suicide bombings does not merit the same media coverage as identical carnage in Paris or Orlando.

Michelle Obama’s moving speech at the Democratic Convention was so effective because it focused upon an issue that potentially unites us all, both conservative and liberal: what is best for our children? Children will not flourish without adults in their lives who have come to terms with their own shadow, with the deep truth that we are all human and imperfect. In The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn provided the precise antidote to Trumpian bromides that perpetuate division and encourage our continued drift: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

“No conflict has ever been solved with violence"

The inside of Obama’s head must be a fascinating place. Our first black President, clearly one of the most self-aware and brilliant minds that ever held the office, must not only walk a line between sympathy for black victims of unwarranted police violence and support for the risky work that police must do daily to maintain us as a society of laws, but also make wrenching, complex decisions about how best to put the enormous military forces at his disposal to constructive use in faraway lands.

Further, he presides over a gridlocked congress, subject to an apparent subliminal racism of its own, that has fought him tooth and nail, him and anyone else who thinks a few small gun law reforms might not be a bad idea at this chaotic moment in our history. At the same time, he meets with subordinates regularly to decide who may be worthy of assassination by drone somewhere in the lawless hinterlands of Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan or Iraq—what some have called extra-judicial murder. Sometimes the cognitive dissonance must be mind-boggling.

Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous Riverside Church speech of 1967, “Beyond Vietnam,” cataloged the ingredients of the toxic brew we must acknowledge and eliminate if we really hope to make America great: rampant racism, materialism, and militarism. America’s original sin, the slave trade and the tragic consequences that have unfolded from that sin, is far from resolved. Donald Trump’s rhetoric only drags us back into the dark side of our history, taking us further from the light of resolution.

Racism, materialism, and militarism are closely woven into our culture and with each other. When our militarism seeks out enemies to justify itself, they are frequently non-white (and since World War II except for some Serbs in 1999, when we actually attack and kill, none are caucasian). Our economic system, rigged to benefit a small number of the privileged, is fatally tied to the manufacture of bombs and fighter planes and missiles and submarines. Material greed is the motivational engine driving the contemptible lobbyists for the gun industry like the NRA and the equally contemptible politicians that lack the courage to pass common-sense gun regulation. The “chickens coming home to roost” element in the Dallas horror is inescapable. The shooter was a veteran who had been deployed to Afghanistan. Instead of trying to capture him alive, perhaps allowing us to learn more about whether his experience abroad affected his mental stability, a “drone” (robot-delivered) bomb was used to blow him up, a tactic associated with the military, never before with police.

One way we have avoided confronting ourselves has been to take on the strange and futile task of playing policeman to the whole world. What gives us the moral authority to play this exalted role? The events of this past week demonstrate how much work we have to do at home before we browbeat the rest of the world into arranging their affairs to suit our interests.

Erik Wilson, the black deputy mayor pro tem of Dallas, spoke the most important words this week: “No conflict has ever been solved with violence,” he told CNN. “It’s always been solved with conversation. And that is something that we need to focus on.”

If this country—if this planet—is to have a future beyond racism, militarism, and materialism, we and our leaders must embrace Erik Wilson’s diagnosis and prescription as something worthy of consistent application at home and abroad. What kind of conversation with each other and with our fellow human beings beyond our borders will give form to a shared vision of peace beyond our own “civil wars” and the endless war on terror? What example could we set here that might help Shia and Sunni understand that “no conflict has ever been solved with violence?”

There’s a huge upside to our situation: we are a free country; in fact, we are still the hope of the world, as we know because so many millions would give an arm and a leg to come here. We are free to face our pain, anger and fear, and our addiction to violence as the unworkable response to these emotions. We are free to name our challenges honestly, and to find new ways to meet them by deep conversation in our “civil public square.”

Whether we agree or disagree with the specific prescriptions of a candidate like Bernie Sanders, he has exemplified an integrity and moral consistency that speaks to many of us, especially young people. He has touched a longing in us, only intensified by this week’s horrors, to embrace a vision of authenticity and inclusivity beyond the reflexive violence of the wars at home and wars abroad that share all too much in common.