Putting Things Together

A friend is holding Teach-Ins and that resonates for me. What better things can we be doing right now but learning, sharing what we know, and challenging ourselves to make some coherent visions for what happens next in our lives? I jumped at the chance to borrow a nonfiction book called The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry. I was aware how much I was hungering for a deep understanding, not wanting to have shallow conversations or even passionate anger fests of what is happening and what fears are coming up for us. I didn't dream how fast my perspective would change and how valuable it would feel. I urge you to read the book. I'm only 31 pages in so I won't try to summarize or teach from it, but I'll just key into my excitement about what happened in my brain.

I grew up in Delaware, an elitist section of the Eastern Seaboard, where the duPonts settled to build their fortune, which as you might know was in gunpowder and land and is now in chemicals. I wouldn't know whether or not they had slaves...but they absolutely had servants and that is sometimes a euphemism. As people say about former slaveowners, they were men of their time. But as you will see in this book, the term "founding fathers" is a profoundly wicked and misleading label for the men who signed the first documents of our nation. All those historical sites back there, all those famous men, hide the truth that fractured my family and those of my generation. We want that truth. These businessmen and royalty were not heroes.

They certainly represented privilege, the people who surrounded my middle-class family, and I always felt like a poor kid in a rich school, but of course I was hardly poor. We had segregation and some bussing, mostly later after I was in college, but we had an African American "cleaning lady" for a time and although I tried to be a nice girl always, racism was there in me and the sexism was a big part of my life. I have three sisters and was raised Catholic. Part of the learning I know is past due for me is how to reverse the effects of my privilege and the isms that come up for me all the time. As a hippie I was able to shed some of it, at least the social aspirations of my youthful companions, but of course I still benefit from privilege and even though as a woman and now an old one, I get a little bit of discrimination, it's nothing like what I see so clearly all the time and want to work on.

I feel that my education went to the edge of the truth and then whitewashed everything like crazy. I thought I saw through a lot of that, but when I was in Cambridge, Maryland this summer, I could feel the racism all around me. We happened upon the birthplace of Harriet Tubman (not her real name, even) and had an amazing experience hearing legendary stories of her life from the descendant of one of the local "men of his time" who had unexplained ties to that life. He wasn't her owner, but a neighbor of his, I think. My feelings of horror at seeing the auction block where humans were sold, the store where she was injured in an incident, and the country in which she did her brilliant and courageous work were about the life and land I was familiar with. We spent a lot of time on the Chesapeake when I was a kid, and I have always been a naturalist. While my parents were sailing I was learning the plants and birds of the shores and rivers. I was not learning the history. I had no idea that Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina were places where the wealth was gained not from the watermen, like our guide in the Blackwater River and his family had found wealth, but more likely from the industry of slavery. I could feel how she carefully learned the land and the habits of the white men and was able to defy and run circles around them through her observations and strategy.

And that wealth of her owners came from not just the buying and selling of slaves, but the forced breeding of them. So yes, the wealth of this area was gained from the forcible rape of the captive women. In fact Thomas Jefferson himself actually wrote parts of the Constitution to protect his businesses and those of his fellow Virginians from the competition of the South Carolinians who were still importing humans from Africa. We could see that it was an important ship-building area, but those were not all fishing boats, were they? This is where my education rang a very loud bell and I resonated with a knowledge I felt internally. The last few days were part of my own unveiling of the shadows that cloud my deep understanding.

So I could then emerge from the intentionally spread confusion of our current political scene and see that the times we are in are not so different from the past. I can see that my first task is to fill in the gaps in my knowledge in a few key areas. I need to understand American history and world history from the original source information, not what is available in the whitewashed sources of TV and most print. I started re-reading Lies My Teacher Told Me and will look through Howard Zinn's People's History as well. I'll read some feminist literature I skipped. I'll spend a lot more time checking which Facebook links are helpful and which are designed to confuse and demoralize. I won't waste as much time as I have been on stupid TV because it feels comforting. It doesn't feel comforting any more.

It seems clear that being grounded, clear and strong in truth is going to be my position. When I take actions they have to come not from my woundedness and horror, but from my clear knowledge of what is right and from the vision of a more egalitarian, safer, and more just society for all people. I'll have to stop saying the stupid things that offend and divide, the well-meaning ways I try to connect, and work more with my abilities to see through masks and defenses to the inner conditions that drive people.

One example: I saw a man with a safety pin in his ear and remarked that it was a clever way to display his symbol of allied concern. It was obvious from his response that at least a dozen of us well-meaning supportive people had said the same thing. We wanted him to recognize our kinship but what he saw was our assumptions, and our lack of originality in how we will work with the new conditions. His presence at the Holiday Market and in my booth was not about his earring. Calling attention to merely that earring let him know that I did not see him for a full person but for my assumption about a symbol that connected us, and his response was to deny that facile attempt at connection. He was kind of saying, "No, I am not in your club because you think I am." We all want something deeper. He was shopping. I was inappropriate.

Facebook is helping us at the same time that it is deceiving us. There was a great article about how much the fake news and opinion pieces that were actually paid ads, drove the voting. We fell into that trap, most of us, and must first stop sharing the fake stuff and find the trusted sources that are out there, mostly the direct sources and the brave journalists and writers who have no master to serve. There's plenty available. We can all be more careful about what we repeat, and that includes the ways we amplify our fears instead of taking actions to be safer, smarter, and more connected to the reality we hold together. We can't allow the confusion tactics to manipulate us.

The Great Bankrupters are back. They will use tactics that are completely unacceptable under the previous rules of politics and shared reality, so we can't fall for them. We have to stay grounded, strong, and not get confused.

Work to learn. Strive to see and understand what is really happening in the big picture. We can do this together, and with the internet we have the same tools they have and much more at stake, which makes us much more determined and effective if we link arms and sit down. Do stay calm. That helps. Keep the faith. The hippies were right, and that's been proven. We have to continue to speak for our generation and to teach the children as we have been doing. It has been working. We won that election, but the dirty tricks to take us into the dark were temporarily effective. We can stand in the dark and still be strong. Never give up.

Today I read, rest, and restore, and tomorrow I just keep working. We're going to do this job and do it well. We have what it takes, what we've spent our lifetimes building. We have our communities. Reach for the peach, and keep it in your pocket. It tastes damn good, and it will ripen again as the year turns. Let's stay together.