Breaking Our Vows:
Some Thoughts on Our Dark Times & How to Move Towards the Light
In the park behind my house, I often see troops of toddlers taken out to play from one of the neighborhood nurseries. This is London and the children are multi-hued, in a rainbow of skin and hair tones. They are tender with each other, holding hands, playing, laughing, and I think when I see them with a kind of lifting in my heart: this is what we are meant to be.
Every person on earth is born to love. Every one of us is afraid. Our lives are lived between light and dark. We swing between our ability to love: to flourish, find good, embrace each other and a positive vision of the future, and the shrinking, withdrawing, judging, anger, hatred and even violence that come from fear.
Countries are like people. Each country on earth has the potential for good, a common unifying mythology drawing on our best impulses, and a dark side, an ugliness often unexplored which, being hidden, has power to rise up and swallow the light. Even the worst — North Korea, ISIS — has a germ of idealism; the best — functioning, thriving democracies — contain a shadow.
I am thinking about this comparison between people and place as a way to try to understand what is happening in the two countries in which I hold citizenship: the US and the UK, to use the analogy of my own experience. I want to try to find out what is really going on, not at a superficial but at a deep level: because it frightens me.
If countries are like people, citizenship is like a marriage. You are born into a nation or an ethnicity, but you choose citizenship: the active decision to tie your fate to those of others in your group. Belonging is passive; citizenship an active choice requiring intention.
In my marriage to my English husband, we have had many disagreements. As in any functioning democracy, we resolve them with a compromise neither of us loves but which keeps the engine of our lives moving forward.
Occasionally my husband and I have had epic fights, and these are different. These terrifying struggles feel like our lives are at stake. They come to us when we hit a topic that threatens us on an existential level, when something about which we cannot agree reaches deep into the dark of our own unexamined fears. These fights threaten to spiral out of our control.
This is where we seem to be going right now in the US and in the UK. Our disagreements with each other have turned ugly and bitter. We have lost trust in the other side, and our struggle feels life-threatening. In the UK, lives have been lost: the brilliant young MP Jo Cox; the Polish victim of a racist assault. In the US, one political opponent threatens to jail the other if he wins and his party does not denounce him. On-line, posts are hijacked by verbal violence and often threats of real violence, too. Families have stopped speaking to each other because of how they have chosen to vote.
The heat rising from our differences in a world in which we all seemingly agree on the basic value of representative democracy has been frightening. Like all emotional heat, it is hard to see where it will end. It feels like we have hit one of those moments in our citizenship marriage, where a present conflict has collided with something dark and unspoken in our history.
It is no surprise to say the two unexamined wounds are race and class.
The United States is a country whose ruling idea contradicts its true history. America prospered on the backs of slaves, and even now remains a country where racism is the big, unspoken thread that runs through so much public life. Race and gender inequality exist alongside the myth of the common good every school child in America imbibes from their first Thanksgiving feast. Propertied, white men founded America for their own benefit; our history reflects a long struggle to claim that benefit for everyone else.
No one in the UK is unaware of class, though it is still possible for someone from a privileged background to say, as one posh woman recently did to me: “Class is not an issue any longer, is it?” People here have worked hard in the last two hundred years to evolve out of an aristocratic system of governance where the disenfranchised majority is ruled by a small elite in London, a system going back to William the Conqueror. The NHS, universal suffrage, access to good education, membership in transnational cooperative bodies like NATO, the UN and yes, the Europe Union: these are all part of the progress toward a more equal and open society.
Yet the previous government evoked the deepest wounds in the culture. David Cameron was an upper crust Etonian, no matter how matey he tried to appear, and he and his other highly privileged cabinet members did ask everyone else in the country to pay through austerity for the damage done by protected elites in the financial world. How different was it, really, from the kings milking the peasants to pay for their golden palaces?
Brexit drew its support from the disenfranchised majority who wanted to punish a distant and indifferent government. They called it “Brussels,” but really it was Westminster. It was aided by those very same leaders trying to find outsiders to blame for their failures. Talk now of a “hard” or “clean” Brexit evokes the emotional impulse behind what is, in fact, an extremely complicated political process (see Labour’s 170 questions about Brexit).
In the US, those who feel angry and neglected are also those who in the past may have been unfairly privileged because of race and gender; they are both wounded and guilty: a terrible combination. The man they have chosen as their living id embodies that: a serial abuser who always feels like a victim.
So here we are, in the kitchen, screaming at each other. We are saying things we can never take back, things that will make it much harder to live together, and we are not sparing the children, either.
When I reflect on nearly a quarter of a century married to someone who is really quite different from me, I see that we have been able to survive and even thrive because in our battles we have not forgotten our commitment to the common good. We have invested a lot of time and effort into understanding what scares us, what hides in the underground. This has been patient and difficult work, but out of the worst has come the best.
Can we in the UK or the US take the time to really listen to each other and try to understand each other’s fears and hopes? Can we use this crisis to evolve? Can we remember our investment in our children — biological or mythological, the future that will follow us? Some people will only ever be able to shout. But some in the US and the UK have begun to talk to each other across their divides about how to sort this mess out, and that it the one hope I cling to as all the furniture gets flung about around me.
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You might also be interested in: Pharoahs, Troubadours and Drag Queens, Life Through Two Lenses or On Cross Cultural Unions, Conflicts and Compromise
