Survival of the Fittest: the Trump Years

When next you hear someone claiming that "We will survive" or "I will survive" the Trump years because others have survived worse in the past consider this: 'we' certainly will survive but 'we' won't all make it to the other side. 

Here's how I know......

1. Thirty years ago, there was the piss poor HIV/AIDS response, and still we survived
HIV positive people survived Ronald Reagan's cavalier attitude to the early appearance of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Reagan himself is said to have laughed off the growing crisis and Mrs. Reagan turned her back on longtime friend Rock Hudson when he was diagnosed.

St. Ronnie and his administration laughed off the crisis, kinda like the President-elect laughs off climate change. The world was slow to recognize the gravity of the situation (then as now) or to begin working on treatment and prevention protocols. The greater 'we' certainly survived, but we haven't all made to the other side have we? The AIDS quilt is proof of that fact.

2. Thirty years later, there's Flint & Standing Rock, and we will yet survive
In Flint, as in Standing Rock, calls for a potable water supply have been shrugged off. In Flint, early alarms raised by pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Atisha were shrugged off as "data" (which apparently is a bad thing). It was more than twelve months before anything like an admission was forthcoming from the powers that be. That probably explains why there are now public officers facing felony charges.

Ultimately, the greater 'we' will survive the Flint crisis, but the children of Flint will not survive unharmed. Lead poisoning has lifetime consequences and we can be assured that they won't get the financial, emotional and/or educational support they will need. 

Thirty years from now, Flint's children will be struggling to find their way, Governor Snyder will be long gone, and we will all have conveniently forgotten what malfeasance and classist + racist Republican politics visited upon them.

So yes....
The greater 'we' will survive, but some of us won't make it to the other side: lives will be shortened, prospects will be dimmed or lost, families will be destroyed. 

We are entering an era of conservatism. Remember where the last one left us? 'Compassionate conservatism' my ass. There's an ox and a moron (oxymoron) if ever I heard one!

Did Black folk survive Jim Crow and slavery? Yes they did, but ask the good people at EJI (Equal Justice Initiative) how many people were murdered by mobs. How many lynching sites are they now trying to recognize? How many victims are they trying to remember and recognize? How many Neil deGrasse Tysons did we lose? How many Hadiyah-Nicole Greens?

Did Jews survive the Holocaust? Yes, they did, but ask any Jewish friend how many of their relatives didn't make it. How many Elie Wiesels did we lose? How many Anne Franks?

Did Native Americans survive the Trail of Tears? Yes indeed, but talk to an elder about the stories of loss. How many Joe Medicine Crows did we lose? How many Elouise Cobbells?

When we say "We will survive" we're also saying that a survival of the fittest approach is acceptable. It isn't; we're saying that entirely preventable human losses are acceptable. They aren't. 

Preventable losses are a criminal waste of human potential. We're in a compassionately conservative time. Brace yourself. This version of 'compassion' will leave some of us dead. We will not all make it. Sorry to be the harbinger of those sad tidings. 

The Bending Arc of History

It is said that the arc of history, though long, bends surely towards justice. (Theodore Parker)

This line is often attributed to MLK Jr. but it was Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister and prominent American Transcendentalist born in 1810, who used the above phrase in an 1853 collection of “Ten Sermons of Religion”. The third sermon titled “Of Justice and the Conscience” included figurative language about the arc of the moral universe: 1

In the sermon he says, 

"Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right [thing]*. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble." **

* Parker used the word ‘right’ to denote the right thing not the right wing, just to be clear. 

**All emphases mine.

As insightful as the arc of history metaphor is, there are some ideas in there that are open to misinterpretation.

First, Parker's language suggests that history's arc bends naturally. The phrasing seems to center the bending of the arc away from human actors. The sentence gives the – dangerously erroneous - impression that the arc bends, not that we who wish to see it bent, must act to make that happen. That's really misleading. Passivity bends nothing. Staying away from the polls wins no elections. Apathy achieves nothing. Disengagement wins no war.

The bending of history's arc does not occur without significant effort. We ought to know this by now. Shoulders - many, many, many of them - must be applied to the work, and there must be blood, sweat and tears shed along the way. The bending of history necessarily involves both victories and defeats, and at times it may even feel like more of the latter than the former. Yet overall, the arc may indeed bend, but only if we have the will and do the work to bend it. For history bends toward justice only if we fight tooth and nail against the will of those who would have it not bend at all.  And then when there are victories, we must fight harder still to hold the newly gained territory, because change is a threat to those comforted by the status quo, and they will fight with everything they have in them to reassert what they believe to be the natural order.

Parker also offers the idea that "[things] refuse to be mismanaged long". This idea has very little bearing on the truth. Perhaps where he stood in history this was the case, but it ain't the case today. I could write you a list, as long as my arm, of things that have happily been mismanaged for quite long, but I'll offer just one: racial justice in America. We've mismanaged that to hell and back. We still don't have it managed, and if the election campaign of 2016 is anything to go by, we probably shouldn't hold our breath that it's going to be managed any better, any time soon.

Not least of all, I must disagree vehemently with Parker's suggestion that "all America did tremble." When did this happen?  Parker, speaking in 1853, suggests that America had some collective epiphany that clearly has not occurred.  It had not occurred when Parker spoke, just two years after Chief Justice Taney asserted that "the Negro has no rights which the White man is bound to honor" with respect to the Dred Scott legal matter. It certainly had not occurred when the Confederate States seceded to preserve African enslavement and defended that course of action with a Civil War.  Surely it had not occurred when in the wake of Reconstruction White supremacists implemented Jim Crow laws and rained Domestic Terror (lynching) on African people.  It was evident that it had not occurred when millions of Americans expressed their hatred of the slogan and the notion that Black Lives Matter.  And it most certainly has not occurred, as evidenced by this year's awful incidents around the election.

So on this election day + a few, while the arc of history may seem (to liberals and progressives) to have returned to its original place, and while we seem to be careening back to an earlier, uglier time for people like me, I am working to remain optimistic about the overall direction of history's arc. I am choosing (or trying to) to believe that we can bend history. At the same time, I am also staying coldly realistic about what that bending will take. I accept that sometimes, even as the arc is bending, it will bend through dark and dangerous places and times (such as these may now be) and we won't all come through to the other side. MLK Jr, himself said as much and was then killed for his efforts to bend the arc. 

This last point is critical: we will not all see justice. Not every family survived the Trail of Tears; not everyone survived the Middle Passage; not every unarmed man, woman or child survives their supposedly  uncomplicated encounter with the police. We do not all come out the other side of these horrors, which is why these "My grandpappy survived Jim Crow, I can survive Trump" memes are ridiculous as hell. Your grandpappy survived so that you wouldn't have to! But let me not go down that rabbit hole. Some of us won't make it out of these next four years. Some with chronic or life-threatening conditions will lose their health care and it will shorten their life spans. Some will be diagnosed and unable to get care. Some will be harassed or brutalized by an increasingly out of control police force and there will be no justice. Some will lose homes, jobs, everything and will succumb to grief and despair, and give up. 

Whether the election of Donald J. Trump is whitelash or not I'm not sure, but here's the truth: the arc of history will bend if we set to bending. There will be setbacks and there will be victories but we must never stop applying the pressure that is required to bend history's steely arc. Right about now though, I'm taking a little break. I'll get right back to doing my part just as soon as I get up off the floor cuz this election done laid me flat.