Maintaining Infinite Hope
Obama’s favorite painting, and hope in Trump’s America
Who has not had to face the agony of blasted hopes and shattered dreams? — Martin Luther King, Jr.
George Frederic Watts’s Hope is Barack Obama’s favorite painting. Alone, plucking the single remaining string on her lyre with bandaged eyes and a broken heart, she inspired the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Shattered Dreams sermon in 1959, and later the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s 1990 Audacity to Hope.
Wright’s sermon so electrified the young Obama that he’d go on to adopt it as the rallying cry of his 2004 DNC address, the title of his memoir, and the slogan for his presidency:
… in spite of being on a world destroyed by hate and decimated by distrust […], she had the audacity to make music and praise God. — Rev. Jeremiah Wright
Now, Hope furnishes an appropriate bookend to his national political career. His statement in a post-election Rolling Stone interview that “history doesn’t travel in a straight line,” channels King in Shattered Dreams:
Life seems to have a fatal flaw, and history seems to have an irrational and unpredictable streak. […] Shattered dreams! Blasted hopes! This is life. — Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The sermon in its entirety is a staggering statement of courage intermixed with practical advice — a clear-eyed embrace of each individual’s small role in moving mankind toward a distant goal, much higher than their dashed individual hopes, and much bigger than their own existence. (Here’s the link again; it’s worth the 20 minutes.)
On the one hand we must accept the finite disappointment, but in spite of this we must maintain the infinite hope. — Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This is how, in the midst of what felt like a shattered reality for at least some of us, our former Commander-in-Chief could seem so inexplicably happy.
Transforming liabilities into assets
The coming years will require more resilience and depth of spirit from the Left than we’ve had in recent memory. Our children will learn (maybe rightly) that cruelty isn’t always checked by society, and that often people who live at or over the boundary of decency can gain wealth, power, and popularity. Of course they can! How is this a surprise?
We need effective ways to confront and learn from this new, more transparently cynical, world.
Josh Waitzkin, the chess champion featured in Searching for Bobby Fischer (who later became a champion Tai Chi artist), writes about his experience as a lifelong competitor, battling and overcoming unequal pairings, unfair situations, and his own personal demons in a pragmatic, yet transcendent book: The Art of Learning.
Although the struggles he faced aren’t nearly as monumental as those faced by the Civil Rights Movement, he’s learned, successfully applied, and written about concrete methods (such as breathing exercises, visualization exercises, and a perspective on leveraging failure that’s very similar to Dr. King’s) that are useful to anybody who needs to transform liabilities into assets.
I think at the highest levels, what you have to be able to do is use your emotional reality as fuel, and to funnel it into intensity.[…] Initially you have to learn how not to get thrown by these things. Then you need to learn how to use them. — Josh Waitzkin, in his 2008 seminar at Google
We say “Black lives matter,” and what they hear is “Blue lives don’t matter.” They say “All lives matter,” and what we hear is “Black lives don’t matter.” — overheard
Honestly confronting the shattered dream
Immediately after the election, it seemed America would finally be pushed to have a real conversation about diversity. But we largely ran from that to hide behind economics. It’s not surprising. For me, discussing race (or pretty much any other diversity topic) is paralyzing and emotional.
Sam Altman, President of YCombinator, recently sought dialogue with Red America. His blog post summarizes findings from 100 conversations with Trump voters. At least in his experience, the perception that Blue America is closed-minded and quick to judge was one of their most commonly held opinions:
“The left is more intolerant than the right.” Note: This concept came up a lot, with real animosity in otherwise pleasant conversations. — Sam Altman
This is a little hard to swallow for many Blue folks, for valid reasons that don’t deserve a moment more publicity than they’ve already had. But the sentiment is real: it’s crying for attention on the lawns of my small, blue-leaning, union-working Midwestern suburb as well.
Anyway, it’s Lent, a season of introspection for a lot of us. In that spirit — and because it’s easier to change oneself than to change the world — the rest of this essay explores ways to maybe help dialogue. It talks about interactions with the Red Americans (there must be a few receptive ones…), and about empowering the rainbow of other individuals with smaller voices than our own.
Blue vs. Red
A lot of the present vocabulary around inequality is new to me. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago, in an expensive class designed to make me a better manager, that I learned the concepts of implicit bias, stereotype threat, and self-fulfilling prophecy.
(Briefly, implicit bias is unintentional discrimination, stereotype threat is when you psych yourself out based on negative stereotypes, and self-fulfilling prophecy is when your expectation of someone’s response makes you do stuff to ensure that response.)
The good news is awareness of the issue seems to reduce the effect.
The bad news for dialogue right now is the vocabulary we’ve developed to explore these ideas is probably foreign to almost everyone over 40 years old.
It was obvious from the VP debate that Mike Pence didn’t know what implicit bias meant, and sadly clear from National Review writer David French’s commentary that some view it as a leftist plot to brainwash cops into surrendering their authority. Which prompted a (sadly post-election) response from a pair of NYU psychologists describing the term more precisely, and assuring readers that the simplest way to combat bias is to just be aware of it in oneself.
Perceived persecution?
Maybe Trump’s buoyancy in the face of his wanton cruelty (or to supporters, his delicious resistance to the tyranny of political correctness) is partly a side effect of the devastating consequences past outcry has had for smaller people than a president or a pop star (e.g. How social media can get you fired, or A dongle joke that spiraled way out of control).
Jon Ronson writes about this in So you’ve been shamed, a book detailing Justine Sacco’s (the woman who tweeted about AIDS and Africa), and other ordinary people’s shattered lives.
Our desire to be seen to be compassionate is what led us to commit this profoundly un-compassionate act. […] the phrase “misuse of privilege” is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. […] it’s making us lose our capacity for empathy, and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions. — Jon Ronson
But where’s the line?
Part of the varying shades of alarm shown by Trump’s detractors in the past months have been related to whether or not each individual believes America has started on the slippery path toward some kind of social abyss. For example, that brand new Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement (Washington Post, paywall) program sounds ominously like a propaganda arm that will amplify otherizing voices.
After all, the message educators try to drive home in Holocaust memorials isn’t that Germany was bad, or even that Hitler was bad…right? It’s that any person, in any country, anywhere, can just lose focus for a moment, and sort of slide into these things. (I’m not sounding insane…right?)
The disagreement now — the thing that Red America’s pundits are saying — is that the left is overly freaking out, like it has been since the invention of Twitter.
Perhaps, as Ronson says, we lost our capacity “for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions,” and have appeared to be crying wolf for so long now that any argument we make against Trump’s rhetoric falls on deaf ears.
Maybe not deaf, but unaware?
A perspective-changing January trip to our local Holocaust museum taught me that currently only eight states require some form of Holocaust education in public schools’ curriculum. (California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. But a charity is pushing for all 50.)
This may sound crazy, but if Americans weren’t alive during the holocaust, there’s a reasonable chance they don’t even know it happened.
Don’t believe me? In 2013, when Rhonda Fink-Whitman learned (to her surprise) that Pennsylvania was only then proposing a bill requiring Holocaust education, she was moved to make this video in its support:
Maybe a large fraction of our countrymen think humans are stronger and more righteous than history tells us…because they honestly have never learned otherwise. (Rah STEM! History is for goats! Um…)
Or maybe our own desire to appear just — an almost religious zeal to publicly persecute those who “misuse their privilege” — has pushed Red America to defend things they’d never tolerate in a more neutral environment.
Brave spaces
Can we reclaim courtesy? In a wide-ranging Valentine’s day discussion about facilitating interfaith dialogue on college campuses, Tahera Ahmad, Assistant Chaplain and Director of Interfaith Engagement at Northwestern University, and Michael Simon, executive director of the Fiedler Hillel at Northwestern, discuss ways to help shape spaces where students communicate.
Yes, they need to be safe spaces, but they also need to be brave spaces — Tahera Ahmad
Dialogue doesn’t start right away, they agree, but one important concrete step toward trust can just be presence at events, or mutual volunteer projects. Over time, these accumulated shared experiences provide enough fertile ground for further conversation to grow.
Blue vs. Blue
Movies and music really do provide almost all of the vocabulary modern people have to describe their own relationship to the rest of the world. So Hollywood’s Oscars dialogue provides a good mirror for Blue introspection.
Last year, we were all grateful that Chris Rock so deftly navigated #oscarssowhite. Stacey Dash, widely criticized for her opinions on the controversy (and panned for her brief appearance onstage) nonetheless penned a thoughtful response to Rock’s “Grandma swinging from a tree” quip, quoting David French:
But how progressive is white liberal Hollywood when it has to make even the tiniest sacrifices — like perhaps not giving the best jobs to friends and family? — David French
Externalized power
In this case, French’s criticism is just. And it would be a shame if Trump’s election allows us in the Blue community to elevate what previously was considered to be embarrassing to being acceptable:
I want to say thank you to President Trump: remember last year, when it seemed like the Oscars were racist? That’s gone! Thanks to him. — Jimmy Kimmel at the 2017 Oscars
It seems sometimes that the left externalizes power: when we want to get something done, our first thought is “the government should do this,” or “HR should do that.” Although most of us are not powerful people, we are far from powerless:
- We may not control what other Americans say or do, but we have the power of our own voices.
- We may not control police or social services, but we have the power make sure our neighbors know at least one friendly face.
- We may not control hiring laws, but we have the power to seek out and recommend minorities for jobs posted at our own workplaces.
This election has taken away almost all of the left’s external power, and with it, gifted us with a new urgency. Hollywood’s diversity problem existed before Trump. Lots of bad things did. And now we can demonstrate that we don’t need Academy officials, legislation, or even Presidents on our side to change the world:
Place [your shattered dream] at the forefront of your mind and stare daringly at it. Then ask yourself, “how can I transform this liability into an asset?” — Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We can stare daringly at our powerlessness, and recall that no government, anywhere, has authority over the human heart❤️.
Things have been much worse. “Life seems to have a fatal flaw, and history seems to have an irrational and unpredictable streak.” But prior generations had the Audacity to Hope:
If only to save ourselves from bitterness, we need the vision to see the ordeals of this generation as the opportunity to transfigure ourselves and American society. — Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
