November 14, 2024
One week into the new regime, and we’re all still here. So there’s that.
I have found my friends helpful in maintaining my equilibrium, so I want to be helpful to them. I worry about how hard some are taking it.
Today’s help comes from a likely source, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi. He told the story of his father’s defeat in an election in 1981, and the lesson Velshi learned as an 11-year-old at that time. The story, in part, is that of a father providing support for a son experiencing a trauma. In response to Young Velshi’s incredulity at the loss, the father said with a comforting smile, “Of course we lost; we were never going to win…” And in the explanation, he contextualized the nature of struggle and responsibility and purpose. The lessons speak of kindness, maturity, resolve—and how a loving authority figure can make everything right, or at least bearable, in the face of a devastating outcome.
But there’s devastation and devastation. What’s different now seems to be the stakes involved, the way the world seems to be at a precipice. It’s not just an “inflection point” as Joe Biden has liked to say. What has been called into question is the very possibility of “futurity,” the future of democracy, at least. It’s hard to talk of “setbacks” and “rebounding” when the stakes are framed in such existential terms.
Velshi’s personal story about his father was framed in terms of other moments of American history where people in conflict had no guarantees of success. He cited many “starts”: The start of the Revolutionary War, the start of the Civil War, the storming of the beaches of Normandy, and more. All these undertakings were entered into with no “clear path forward” (the title of Velshi’s essay was “The Path Forward”). In each of these examples, the people fighting for freedom did not possess the certainty of defeat that Velshi’s father had, but they might reasonably have felt hopeless, given the odds. They certainly lacked of context of just how much would be won by success—the motivation they might have accrued from seeing the benefits and possibilities of their victory, something, from our perspective in history, we can see so clearly. In the current environment, all we see are the monumental stakes of loss. We need to step back from that a bit, before full paralysis sets in.
Velshi’s guest was the historian John Meacham, and he, after complimenting Velshi for more than “setting up” the discussion, advanced the idea that “history is not reassuring” . . . but “it is inspiring.” So many of our past struggles resulted in victory and advancement towards the lofty goals of our founding fathers and documents. But the freedom fighters acted without a lot of certainties in place. These agents were not really better than us. The endpoints arrived at were not endpoints once and for all. And so, the process they engaged in continues under the watch of successors. The setbacks have been with us in every iteration of past struggles.
One of my stumbling blocks in accepting this election is my thought—my bias—that some progress had become baked in, settled once and for all. My bias comes, in part, by way of Isaac Newton who said, with pride and possibility: “We see so far, because we stand on the shoulders of giants.” Progress is like that, right? But now, when racism wins, when criminality prevails, when sleaze is embraced—by so many and so readily, how can we see anything clearly ever again?
But, as Meacham says, “despair is a sin.” We’re all in this unending process, and, all things considered, the setbacks are not as bad as they might have been; they are not as bad as what we have already experienced; they are not as demoralizing as what prior generations have suffered. We must not be too impatient in finding our way back to the top of the giants’ shoulders. We got there once, and we can get there again.
The briefest look at the struggles of the past informs us of our heightened current position. Our giants may be in quicksand, and sinking, but we’re still a high way up, and there are routes of escape from the quagmire. Our giants are really, really tall, too. We need Velshi’s father looking at us, with a smile, and an assurance that we can go on—that our expectations must be tuned to some harsher realities—but not debilitatingly so.
As I look forward to the future—with so much more education available—or at least information—I see possibilities for seeing farther and farther, and from higher and higher perches. Those loftier resting places may not have solidity beneath, but they may still be functional. There is reason to hope.
In that spirit, I will hold onto an old personal hope of mine, first experienced in 1993 at UIC, in the library, when I first caught a glimpse of the World Wide Web. I had just finished my dissertation, and felt free and unleashed for the first time in many years. As I walked among the desks of patrons, I saw the computers displaying Web pages—text and images displayed in ways that inspired marvel at the newness and possibility. Who were these people, and what were they looking at, and in living color? The Internet had been around a bit in my consciousness prior to that, but a qualitative shift struck me in a revelatory flash, as though in a religious rapture. The reach and transformative potential of the medium registered fully. I saw the connection of minds and the spread of knowledge and the democratic ethos undergirding the whole platform—all of it a game changer in the arc of human interconnection and community and knowledge.
The Internet (we now know all too well) is not a panacea, but it does unleash untold powers of communication, access to information, and yes, even education. The genie is out of the bottle. As we go through the growing pains of conspiracy thinking, the spread of misinformation, the hurt over lost privilege, the hardships of evolving economies, and more, we have opportunities for all the salubrious effects of communion and shared purpose—something, one hopes, that is always a promise in communication systems, beginning in that first and foremost one, prayer. Censorship can only go so far, and is doomed to failure in a digital world. As our communities experience more contact, the things that bind us as humans will be given more opportunities to be seen and known. The shrinking of the world and the infusion of information and the processing of our growing pains—all pave the way to possibilities of compassion and empathy and unity.
A digital shoulder may be less stable than a real giant’s—but all this shoulder talk is merely playing with metaphors anyway.
I pride myself in recalling that Aristotle claimed that the ability to use metaphors was a sign of genius. But in closing, I prefer to let the metaphor speak more to our hearts than our heads, and so I’ll leave with an imagined image of Young Velshi on his father’s shoulders. And his father’s implied comment: “We’ve been set to win all along…” [Or did he say, “Love conquers all”?]
