68

                I graduated from high school in 1968.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, watching the specials on MLK and RFK.  Fifty years- ago something changed in America – more accurately, something died.  The 60’s were turbulent, with civil rights, women’s rights and the war.  New music, new movies and a new sensibility was fueling a youth culture that was developing against a backdrop of riots and violence across a broad spectrum of society.  The fact that television had saturated the American culture meant we watched Viet Nam, Selma and the riots in LA, Newark and Detroit from a new vantage point.  There was plenty of racial violence in America before the 60’s, but TV meant we all got to see Bull Conner’s police dogs and fire hoses and the state police over the bridge in Selma.  America had been to war before, but now we watched old Cronkite crouched behind sand bags while a kid from somewhere in the heartland died on the national nightly news.

                In spite of all of the violence and turmoil, it felt like we were moving forward; it felt like we were winning.  There was a sense that America was about to leave its racist and misogynist past and become something new.  There was hope.  Dr. King was hope.  Bobby was hope.  California was hope.  Heading into 68 it felt like all those things were tugging us, reluctantly and slowly to be sure, in the right direction.  When Dr. King talked about bending the moral arch of history, I felt like I could see it on the horizon.  Some of the change was trivial. Wearing bell-bottoms and paisley shirts or growing your hair long (mine was ¾ of the way to my waist) meant nothing in the long run, but it felt like it was marking a new territory.

                In 68 the wheels came off – the empire struck back.  King and Kennedy – gone.  Nixon and Wallace on the rise.  A ‘secret’ plan to end the war.  Draft lotteries and bombing in Cambodia.  Kent State were just down the road.  The political system broke in 68.  It broke in Chicago, and it broke in November when Nixon, probably the most morally ill-equipped man to be president until Trump, rallied the ‘silent majority’ and won the presidency.  George Wallace appealed to the not so subtle racism in America and heralded the beginning of a Southern shift in American politics that catapulted racism and some virulent form of Protestant patriotism to prominence.  Nixon won following Lee Atwater’s ‘southern strategy,’ turning the old southern Democrats into Republicans.

                Somewhere in that mess we lost our hope.  Somewhere in the culture, even youth culture, we went from ‘all you need is love’ to ‘fuck you.’  I think a lot of us smugly thought that the future couldn’t possibly belong to those who so represented all that was wrong in America in the first place.  Surely, we thought, we were going to continue to expand and not contract civil rights.  Surely, we would be more tolerant and more accepting of difference and diversity.  But the powers that emerged out of the carnage of 68 weren’t ready to roll over and disappear.  Helped along by an economy that tilted toward financial wealth and away from manufacturing and union labor, the gains of the 50’s and 60’s were being erased.

                Looking back on 68 from the political circus we live in today, it seems so clear that this was inevitable.  It seems so obvious that the abnormality isn’t what has happened since 68, the abnormality is what happened before.  The struggles of the 60’s are the struggles we still face today.  We have been fragmented and distracted into thinking that we don’t need unions or public schools or even public decency.  We’ve been conned into thinking that someone else would do all the hard stuff for us.  We have allowed ourselves to believe that words written by a slave owning oligarch were intended for the rest of us.

                I think we are at a crossroads of democracy, one that has little to do with Donald J. Trump.  We have been travelling this road for a long time now.  68 may have been the high point of democracy in America, not because things were so great but because the vision was so grand.  We thought victory was inevitable.   It wasn’t.  No democracy can tolerate a distribution of wealth as out of whack as ours is.  No democracy can withstand a police mentality that makes it legal to publicly execute black men.  No democracy can survive the putrid public schools we’ve created.  If we are to finally become a democracy, then we have to face the reality that America has always been an oligarchy, a political system ruled by elites for their benefit.  I think what died in 68 was the dream that the words we have all been raised to revere are as self-evident as Jefferson said they were.  

Erasing Barry

                I was just home from the hospital when my Grandmother changed my name to Barry.  I was given her husband’s middle name, Bernard, as my given name.  She didn’t like her husband much.  She had that kind of power.  I’ve grown up with the name my Grandmother invented for me.  Bernard is something I use on official documents, and I mostly only hear it when I’m in trouble.  No one calls me that.  I ran for office as Barry, and I worked long enough at my last job that they even started making out my checks to Barry. The things I’ve published have been published as Barry.   It’s a good name.  I’ve enjoyed having it.  It’s time to let it go.

                It’s not that I plan on returning to my given name, like some last- ditch attempt to gain respectability.  Bernard is just a legal symbol to me; I don’t identify with it at all.  I want to erase my name because after working my whole life to accomplish something, I realize now – hopefully not too late – that the only way I can learn what’s next is to leave the identity I’ve created behind.  The good and the bad.  I feel like I’m at the cusp of the experience at the heart of Mahayana Buddhism where the pilgrim has to turn away from the world and their accomplishments and wonders as a begging monk in search of Enlightenment.  I’m not going that far.  I guess I’m like the believer who prays all night to move the mountain but isn’t surprised when it’s still there in the morning.  What I identify with is the realization that what we know is more of an obstacle than an asset at some point to learning something new.

                We live in a culture saturated with individual identity.  It’s inconceivable to us that our self is an illusion.  I am not, finally, any of the things that make up my identity.  Only by letting go of that can I create a space for wisdom – which I think is a different kind of learning than the kind I’ve been practicing.  I do not want an identity.  It doesn’t matter any more what kind of impression or perception other people have, and it doesn’t matter what I think of my identity either.  I probably have a lot to apologize for, but I have nothing to defend.  I’m not for or against anything anymore.  The world still matters to me, but I think the only way I can change anything is to let go of the changes I’ve been trying to make.

                I’ve written on this blog that human knowledge is understanding the expanse and the limitations of being human.  I do not want to be immortal.  I have no need to be right.  My sense is that the next thing I have to learn in my life cycle isn’t logical, empirical or discursive.  It isn’t personal.  This will be very hard for me, because I’ve practiced hard to be all those things.  To understand the limits of being human is to open up to the possibility of beyond human.  If were going to survive our intelligence isn’t going to be artificial, it’s going to be cosmic.  I’m working on it.

                I’ll still answer if you call.  I still eat lunch, walk and play pickleball.  I will probably still write.  Maybe only poetry (if that happens I promise to have the good sense not to share it with you).   I doubt you’ll notice a difference – at least at first.  But I’m trying to be still. I’m trying to be empty.   I’m trying to be open and not judge things so fast.  I’m trying not participate in our cultural ADHD.  Maybe there won’t be anything there.  Maybe you just reach the end of the dock and step off into nothing.  But maybe there is something I can learn by erasing my identity and trying a new way.

Losing My Religion 

                There are a lot of things wrong about the way we think about the world.  There are a lot of things that prevent us from evolving a more embodied and grounded way of interacting with one another.  But one of the biggest is religion, at least the kind of religion that we have developed in our culture.  I don’t mean to suggest that spirituality or belief is wrong, just the formation of churches and congregations that are really nothing more than tribal enforcers of purity and exclusion.  Religion has done more to eat away at our politics and civility than anything else.  To top it off, the religions that are most adamant about their superiority are the ones who are least likely to actually follow any of the major concepts they supposedly adhere to.

                I was raised by a Catholic mother in a small town dominated by a Baptist church.  My father’s family belonged to a particularly virulent and illiterate branch of Protestant Christianity.  None of this had anything to do with God, at least as far as I could tell.  It was all about adults arguing about who was right and who was saved.  My Grandmother frequently told me I was going to Hell.  I got to the point where it was hard to take any of it seriously anymore.  The Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, transformed a loose affiliation of ‘christian’ practices that were multiple and diverse into dogma.  When the Reformation came as a political and economic struggle cloaked in theology, 500,000 people were killed in six months – most of them probably killed by neighbors and relatives.

                We live in an age dominated by religious conflict.  We live in a country where politics has been perversely focused on ‘religion.’  Too much of American Protestant and Evangelical thought is a strange mix of capitalism, patriotism and an Old Testament oriented Christianity.  It has little to do with an historically accurate or inclusive approach to the Gospel.   When ‘Godfearing’ Evangelicals can excuse and rationalize Trump, what is left to salvage of this mess?  We argue and militarize differences in theology that seem minute and arcane to the rest of the world.  The rest of the world is busy killing each other over the transmission of the Prophet’s message.  Eight-year old girls are raped and murdered as part of a religious caste conflict.  Can’t we just agree that whatever it was that started us on this path, it’s been an absolute failure?

                Identity politics has followed the same dead- end vision of religion, devolving all too frequently in a trial of who is most pure.  My Grandmother would have said they are all going to Hell.  We live in a world that demands we see a bigger affiliation.  Hate groups and separatists are gaining power precisely because they are united by hate in a way the majority of more tolerant souls are not.  None of us has an identity that is sustainable outside of a coalition of people who support us but are not like us. I don’t have to go to your church, believe the same things or identify the same way you do to be a good person.  We have to find a way to get beyond the barriers of identity, not because the identities aren’t true, but because we need a broader, larger community to honor and protect them.

                I feel that the only way for me to reclaim any sense of the spiritual in the world is to lose my religion.  It’s easy for me at this point to set aside the obvious markers of religion; a church, a country an ethnicity.  But I want to go farther than that.  I want to reclaim a sense of becoming as opposed to a sense of belonging to a category or tribe.  I feel like the only way to reclaim what I have lost in all these conflicts is to try and be part of something bigger.  Being old helps.  I’m not as valuable a team member as I once was.  I wear the cloak of elderly invisibility most days – just another old fart in a donut shop, trying to pay with cash instead of credit.  The moment is filled with distraction and anxiety, but the thing that calls us forward is larger that all of this.  I am part of something that is still asking me to try and understand it on its own terms.  Something that keeps reminding me that there is a lot I don’t know.  Maybe we just need to return to the spirits before religion.  We need to listen to the wind.  We need to reacquaint ourselves with the stars.  

               

Game On

                Fifty years-ago Dr. King was shot.  The next morning, I was in Flint at a speech competition when the State Police came into the basement at St. Matt’s and escorted us out of the city during the riots.  Two months later it was Bobby Kennedy, and a few months after that the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  It felt like everything was falling apart, like the next news flash would send us over the edge.  The civil rights protests and the protests against the war, the opposition to Nixon and the emergence of the movements for women and sexual identity made it feel like we were fighting back and winning.  It felt like we had turned a corner and were never going back, that the George Wallaces were in final retreat. It felt like the battle was over.  But it wasn’t.

                Looking back, it feels like all we did was pick the low hanging fruit and call it a day.  The evil we protested against never really went away.  We never followed through, so now we are at this juncture again, the one where we have to decide how to respond to the part of the American psyche that is permeated with misogyny and racism, with hate and violence, and is once again in power.  It doesn’t seem important to me to ask how it happened.  All that really matters is how we respond.  During Watergate, the Republican party was still a party with respect for America and the Constitution.  It no longer is.  We have to decide which direction we will take as a nation.

                Trump is waking up to the realization that the walls are closing in.  Like any infantile tyrant he will now follow his rage and his worst instincts and advisors.  He will bring in John Bolton.  If we don’t love him, he will attack.  He will continue to sell out the interests of the country to appease Putin.  He is more dangerous now than he has ever been.  He knows he is entering the final phase of a failed presidency, and he has no intention of going quietly.  He will be more erratic and more impulsive as time goes on.

                The Republicans will not help.  A few may be moved by the treasonous way Trump appeases Russia, but everything else he does, they approve of.  They don’t believe in fixing the multiple problems with our elections, because if our elections were really free and fair they would be out of power.  They have manipulated the system so that the minority is in power, and they are using that power to dismantle any part of the government that doesn’t serve their craven interests.  They will not protect the environment.  They will not protect school children.  They will not impeach Trump.

                In 68, the sense of urgency was palpable.  We all knew that the moment demanded something new.  Maybe the kids from Parkland, the womens marches, and the progressive and diverse group of people running for office are signs of a new urgency.  Maybe.  What seems clear to me now looking back on the events of 68 is that it isn’t enough to win the battle.  Throwing Trump out will certainly help, but it won’t get to the root of the problem.  The low hanging fruit isn’t enough.  We have to face who we are.  We have to face how exceptionally destructive and duplicitous we’ve been as a nation.  We have to deal with racism and misogyny and a host of other deeply rooted fears and hatreds that drive our politics.

                I’m reminded of an Ursula Le Guinn story where a wizard is attacked by an evil wizard who has killed off all the other local wizards.  He eventually defeats the evil wizard and sends him to the underworld, but to complete his task he leaves the world of the living to stand guard over his grave to make sure he never returns.  Trump is what happens when the evil wizard is merely left for dead instead of finally defeated.  Each iteration of the Trumpish parts of our national psyche is more and more dangerous and more and more vile.  The forces that brought Trump to power are not going to go quietly.  They will have to be defeated.  It may turn violent – we have a tendency to do that.  This time we have to play for keeps – play to the end.  I hope that fifty years from now one of those beautiful kids from Parkland isn’t sitting by a window thinking about how they missed the chance to do it right.  Game on.