Broken-winged birds

This poem spoke to me earlier this week. It's Hold Fast to Dreams by Langston Hughes.

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die                                               
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

In two well-known Langston Hughes poems, Hughes writes movingly about hope and dreams. In the first, he advises us to hold fast to our dreams out of psychological necessity. Without dreams, he contends, life is nothing but a "barren field, frozen with snow". In Dream Deferred he is more direct, suggesting that one of the results of constant deferral of dreams is that we explode. Mr. Hughes might be on to something.

In the shadow of this week's horrors in Nice, France; last week's horrors in Dallas, TX; St. Paul, MN and New Orleans, LA; last month's in Orlando, FL and on and on, I've been wondering about broken-wings and broken dreams.

America is a fairly equal opportunity wing-breaker. We need to acknowledge this truth. Whatever the leadership, wings are going to get broken. It is the nature of the system that there will be winners and losers. Losers get their wings broken. Both American domestic and foreign policy tend to break wings. We break wings with our militaristic adventures whatever the stated reasons for them might be; by employing our democracy-at-the-point-of-a-gun policies; by propping up dictators; by 'fixing' the social safety net thereby almost rending it asunder; by demonizing the poor; by cavalierly letting folk fall through the cracks; by poisoning a city's water and jailing no one. Every one of these breakages is born of our legacy of White supremacy which blithely dismisses entire groups of people. We've been doing that since Christopher Columbussed up on these shores and claimed he'd ‘discovered’ it. Given that the Taino were here first, any claims of ‘discovery’ are hyperbolic at best.

The past lays the ground work for and sets the tone of the present. Generations of disdainful attitudes to Native people in particular and to people of color in general, neither disappear nor dissipate. I want to especially thank Congressman Steve King of NY for his unsolicited if, terrifyingly ignorant utterances, which serve to clearly prove my point.

For the five centuries immediately following the arrival of Columbus in the New World (bringing with him the church’s brand of White Christian supremacy which is still being promulgated by such as Cong. King. Thank you again Stevie), people of color around the globe have borne the brunt of the impact of that philosophy. In the wake of various conquering heroes - from Columbus to Vasco da Gama - millions of broken-winged people have been left staggering on a "barren field frozen with snow" per Hughes.

Today, rather than focus entirely on effects perhaps we should be focused on the causes of the violence, the brokenness, we see around us? I'd blame Columbus for the brokenness but he was merely a messenger and frankly, if I blame Columbus I might also have to blame Steve King and others of his ilk.

Columbus’ attitudes and actions sprang from Papal instructions. I’m inclined to ask what King’s excuse might be. Columbus and others like him unleashed a world of hurt on people of color. What we see in the world today is a long-delayed reaction to that hurt. That the First World pretends to be unaware of the hurts it has inflicted makes the injuries no less real.

We have no time these days for a study of causes. We fixate on effects. We have no time for a study of poverty or hopelessness, we'd rather fixate on how folk are being radicalized. We have no interest in broken wings or broken dreams only in how to break them further. 

We live in a time of near ubiquitous brokenness. We're all broken-winged in one way or another. We live in an economic and social system built on generations of exploitation and oppression and we have been entirely unwilling and unable (or is that "unable because we're unwilling”) to acknowledge that. It is not possible to participate in an oppressive system and not also be oppressed in some way ourselves, but more of that anon I suppose. Until we recognize our modus operandi, we haven't a hope of radically changing it; we haven’t a chance of pausing or ending the wing-breaking.

Whenever some one or two or three act out violently, I wonder about their wings; their dreams. Baltasar Gracián, a Spanish Jesuit writing in the 17th century, wrote. “Never contend with a man who has nothing to lose.” Perhaps he should have written, "Never create men who have nothing to lose"? Wings are being broken, dreams are being forced into deferral and all over the world we are leaving men and women with nothing to lose. In Dream Deferred Hughes suggests that one of the results of constant deferral of dreams is that we explode. We're there. Orlando, New Orleans, Dallas, Ankara, Iraq, India, France, Nigeria. We are there.

On any given day, in any given locale there's likely to be a conflagration of one type or another. Whether it is terrorism or urban violence or state-sanctioned violence, it's broken wings demanding healing. Rather than talk about the despair that our policies and actions have caused and continue to cause, we would rather talk about banning folk; building walls and labeling movements for justice as domestic terrorist organizations.

Hurt people hurt people I've heard. We are surrounded by a lot of hurt. There is, I fear, far more hurt to come.