“The only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment … You’re only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.”   Jon Kabat-Zinn

(NOTE: This is an “ancient” (meaning anything older than three months in today’s vernacular) post, but I think it’s even more germane today than when I penned it in 2017. And I needed some pithy words to post here while I regain my sanity in London. See you all next month with fresh words.)

I’m lucky to live in a state that has over 300 miles of rail-trails, so when I’m done with the morning’s writing (and it’s not January), I often go for a bike ride. Lose the tension in my shoulders. Let go of whatever problems my characters have posed for me that day (and those pesky people can cause real trouble when they choose).

My favorite loop, about ten miles out and back, takes me to Look Park, a vast oasis of  green lawn and blue ponds. The trail there mostly goes through wooded areas. At one spot, chickens and ducks waddle along the verge, scouring the long grasses and wildflowers for a snack to supplement their caregiver’s feed. The first time I saw them, I worried for their safety—so many bicyclists whizzing by—but over the years, I’ve come to realize they are proof of Darwin’s law:  Adapt or perish. They are obviously smart fowl.

At another spot, the land falls sharply away from the trail, and I glimpse the skeleton of a 1940s truck, blue in the patches that rust hasn’t eaten. Time. It’s always there, at some moments shouting, at others whispering.

No matter how scorching or muggy the day, a breeze lifts my hair, cools my skin, empties my busy brain, and I tune into the birdsong, tranquil. Which is what makes it all the more jarring when I pass a woman, walking with her toddler and talking into her cell phone. Seconds later, I cycle past another walker, this one with ear buds connecting her to an iPod while she texts on her phone, fingers flying over the keyboard. There’s even a bicyclist—and I’m not making this up—pedaling along while texting two-handed.

It’s lovely that all these folks are out here enjoying the rail-trail, but my question is: Are they actually enjoying the rail-trail?

Selfie Madness

We’ve all seen the absorbed texter (maybe even bumped into them!) walking through the airport, oblivious to others and their luggage or, like an errant pinball, caroming down a crowded city sidewalk only to step off the curb into traffic, unaware.

People speak of life passing you by, but our digital addictions are causing us to pass by life without pausing to register its pulse. Texting. Tweeting. And then there’s selfie-madness.

In June, I was at a Yankees-Red Sox game with my husband. Since we only go once a year, we treated ourselves to field level tickets along the first base line. These seats aren’t cheap, so I was surprised at how many people around us spent the entire game taking selfies, their backs to the ball field. They seemed to prefer snapping photos of themselves attending a Yankees-Red Sox game to actually watching the play on the field. And it was a great game. Tense. The lead bouncing back and forth. Close score. But it often felt like my husband and I were the only ones following the action, a task not made easier by the bodies hurtling through our line of sight in search of the perfect location/angle/backdrop for a selfie.

The Digital Invasion

I first glimpsed signs of what would become our digital mania in 2003 while vacationing in Florence, Italy. We were visiting Il Duomo (Santa Maria del Fiore) when I noticed a man walking about with a video camera, filming, his wife and kids doggedly trotting after. Although camcorders still used videotape at this time, they had shrunk considerably in size from their dinosaur predecessors of the mid-1980s. And this man was determined to make use of their newfound mobility.

He continued filming as we strolled about the piazza, admiring Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise—ten dramatic bronze reliefs that depict Old Testament scenes on the doors of the Baptistery—and Giotto’s polychromatic marble-faced campanile with its della Robbia panels.

The camera remained glued to his face when we entered Il Duomo beneath the clock designed by Uccello, and traveled up, up, up the 463 steps to stand amazed beneath Brunelleschi’s architectural miracle of a dome, its interior graced with Vasari’s frescoes of the Last Judgment.

I never saw his face that day. In my mind, he remains a figure ambling about with a large camera where his head should be. I’ve often wondered if he and the family ever got around to watching the hundreds of hours I’m guessing he filmed during his Italian vacation. Or did he just move on to the next destination, camera at the ready, missing more moments of his life amid the wonders of the world? Perhaps he morphed into the guy I saw a decade later during another trip to Florence, a selfie stick strapped to his forehead, a camcorder suspended from its top, dutifully recording everything he was walking away from in the Piazza della Signoria, his face in the foreground.

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing

With smartphones, the capture of every moment is only a click away. On the same trip that took us to Yankee Stadium, we spent a morning in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We were hanging out in European Paintings 1250-1800, soaking up the dark mysteries of Rembrandt, the pink fulsome flesh of Rubens, the broad Flemish landscapes of Bruegel. Darting all about us, like a gnat you can’t seem to lose, was a woman snapping photos of every painting. And not only the paintings, but the little description cards that accompanied each work. Snap. Snap. Snap. She paused only a nanosecond to capture Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher before buzzing off to give Franz Hals’s Portrait of a Bearded Man with a Ruff the same blink of her camera.

I can report she missed not a single painting, but in another, more significant way she missed them all. If that seems an exaggeration, pick up a postcard of Van Gogh’s extraordinary painting of a chair, called reasonably enough Van Gogh’s Chair, and compare it to the original that hangs in London’s National Gallery. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an amateur photo of a major artwork is… squat.

Patti LuPone Takes On The Texters

And when we’re not filming, we’re texting. Two years ago, while starring in Shows for Days, actress Patti LuPone grabbed the cell phone of an audience member in the front row who had been texting through the entire first act. The cast and audience had already endured four separate cell phone rings during that day’s show, so tempers were somewhat frayed.

“She was sitting in the light, so everyone could see her texting. It’s ridiculous,” LuPone said.

Lupone returned the phone after the performance was over, but gave vent to her distress. “I’m defeated by this. It’s not changing, it’s only getting worse … If something isn’t done, I will think twice before I get back on a stage again.

“It’s not [about] theater etiquette,” she explained. “It’s human etiquette. We’re living in an isolated society, the phone controls our every move, and we’ve lost sight of our neighbor, the people surrounding us.”

One of the great ironies of our cell phone addiction is that it was preceded by an innovation that freed us from our phones: the answering machine. They were a revelation, a revolution. No longer did you have to worry about missing an important call. It would be there on the little cassette when you got home. You were free to go about your day, or travel the world, without once thinking of your phone. It was a golden time, however short-lived.

Surprise: Pop Quiz!

Okay, I’ve had my moment on the soapbox. Now it’s time for you to play along.

When did you last:

-Take an evening off Facebook and Twitter to hang out with friends and neighbors?

-Visit an art gallery or museum using only your eyes, no camera (photos of you and loved ones in front of the museum don’t count here)?

-Pick a dining spot in a city not your own by walking along the streets “window shopping” restaurants and cafes rather than googling TripAdvisor or Yelp?

-Enjoy a cup of coffee or glass of wine at a cafe with your significant other and no cell phones in sight?

-Browse a brick-and-mortar bookstore–with actual shelves and real books you can open and read–rather than surf Goodreads for recommendations, then order from Amazon?

-Go for a hike or a bicycle ride “naked”–no iPod, no earbuds, no smartphone?

If you can’t recall the last time for any or (yikes!) all of the above, I suggest you get out into the world immediately. Talk to real people. Listen to the sounds of summer—the buzz of bees, kids laughing, birds trilling, the lap of water at the beach. Literally, stop and smell the roses.

And give your texting thumbs a rest. For there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your mobile apps.

The onset of Spring in the Northeast is marked by the blooming of the first flowers. Daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths. Usually, this occurs mid-March but this past winter, the high-40s/mid-50s weather that brings these blossoms came early in a surprisingly mild February. Valentine’s Day saw the first buds appear on the bank of daffodils that line my driveway. Like the unexpected reprieve from the usual snow, ice and freezing temps of winter, the sight of these early buds both lifted my spirits and worried me. Climate change, with its spikes of unseasonable warm winter weather, followed by a freeze, had killed the local peach crops in 2023, and this February “heat wave” made me fear these buds, too, would die before they ever bloomed. After all, we had a long stretch of winter to go. I resigned myself to this likeliest of fates. Next year, I told myself. Maybe next year.             

When the daffodils actually blossomed in the first week of March, I was cautiously happy: Well, at least I’ll enjoy them for however long they have. Then came a frost. Nighttime temps dipped into the low 20s for several days. Cold winds buffeted the garden at 20 miles an hour. The daffodils slumped, heads downward, and I thought, Okay, they’re over.

But the following week brought several days of bright sun. Despite the cold winds still blowing, the flowers seemed to lift in this welcome light.  At first, I thought it was just my wishful thinking, but as I checked them daily, I realized they were, in fact, not simply hanging in there but getting stronger. Then one morning after two days of rain, voila!, they looked great. No longer tentative, but hale and hearty! They even survived an early April ice storm. I recalled the poet Emily Dickinson’s famous verse:

Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops–at all.

Hope–the life raft we cling to in times of trouble.

Bad News on the Doorstep

The late winter weeks were not an easy time for me. In mid-February, my dentist informed me I had an infection in Tooth #31 that would require the tooth be extracted. Since the drug I take to build bone density carries a risk of jaw necrosis (meaning “death of the jaw”—not good!) for such procedures, no regular dentist wants to touch it. I had to schedule an appointment with an oral surgeon ASAP. But as we all know well, everyone is “scheduling out” for months in advance. After some gentle but steady pressure on my part, I was able to secure an appointment for the end of March. By mid-March, my tooth and jaw were really aching, but a round of antibiotics eased the pain. Just two weeks to go, I thought. I can make it. Everything will be okay.

And then I got a summons for U.S. District Court. Two months of on-call jury duty for May and June. The problem? Ed and I had booked flights and rented a flat in London many months earlier for—you guessed it—May. Ten-thousand dollars, non-refundable.  

I answered my summons online and pleaded my case. I got an email reply that same day. My service would be postponed until August/September. September—the month we were already booked to travel to Rome for our anniversary. I searched my summons papers for a phone number to call. Nada. Just an automated check-in line for jurors already on duty.   

I replied to the email that same afternoon. Happy, I said, overjoyed, I stressed, to do the jury thing in July and August. Or October and November. I’ve been summoned for jury duty 10 times in my life, I emphasized, and other than the summons during the dark months of COVID (when it posed a risk to Ed), I’ve never asked to be excused or postponed. Please. Please. PRETTY PLEASE!

No reply. I decided to give it a week. After all, people get busy.  

Hitting Bottom                                                                                                                                 

Four days later, I heard not from the court, but the oral surgeon. Could I come in today? The office had a cancellation and he could pull my tooth that afternoon—a week ahead of schedule. Yes! Sooner meant less risk of serious jaw infection.

The oral surgeon turned out to be excellent and I followed the usual “eat only applesauce/yogurt/pablum” post-surgery diet for a week. I was relieved, but the jury thing was still out there. I wrote the court a second time, mindful to include our previous correspondence, and crossed my fingers. A week went by, then another. Silence. Meanwhile, though the area around the pulled tooth was healing well, all kinds of pain was occurring in other teeth, my sinuses and the back of my jaw on both sides. The soonest my dentist could see me was April 11. Two…whole…weeks…away. More of a wait than I wanted but what can you do? I asked them to let me know if anyone cancelled before that date, and returned to my diet of soft mush, Advil—and hope.

Then in the early hours of April 2, I woke with a pain so intense in my left jaw, I couldn’t worry about or even imagine the future. April 11? In that moment, it felt like the 12^th of Never. Ed retrieved the ice pack—a gift of the oral surgeon—from the freezer. I wrapped it snug around my head and took two Advil.  

I was enjoying a light doze when the phone rang at 7:15 a.m. No one calls at that hour unless it’s important, so I jumped up and retrieved the phone from my dresser. It was the dentist. There’d been a cancellation. Could I come in now? There was no time for a shower, so I did a quick spot clean, brushed my teeth, and headed out the door. The upshot? Jealous of all the fuss the extracted tooth (Tooth #31) had received, Tooth #15 was now yammering for a root canal. My dentist set up an appointment with the endodontist for that same afternoon. Ed and I went to work in our usual coffee shop for a few hours, then headed 20 miles north to seek salvation. Three hours later and $1,800 lighter, I emerged painless.   

A Celebration and the Gift of Hope

Two days later, I celebrated my birthday quietly with Ed, watching movies and playing Scrabble, while the ice storm I mentioned up top raged outside. I was just glad to be pain-free. The next evening we had dinner out at a favorite local eatery, High Brow. Our town has never really recovered from The Plague restaurant-wise. Many places closed and those that remained open seem to largely survive through take-out orders. More than once, Ed and I have been the sole table in a restaurant, while people came and went, picking up their take-out food. But High Brow hops on a Friday night. Friendly staff. Excellent food. Always a lively crowd. It was a real celebration and it refueled my hopes. Hope for a world where people value and enjoy a communal life. If we can come together, we can support one another, solve our problems, take courage—and joy—in the knowledge that we are not alone.

Even a brief one-on-one encounter with another person can boost hope as I was reminded three days later when, out for a walk as the Total Solar Eclipse reached the Northeast, I stopped to chat with a young man who was viewing the phenomenon through a pair of special eclipse glasses. He asked if I’d like to take a look. The “black” moon with its fiery orange sun rays was indeed amazing. I thanked him and continued home. A five-minute exchange at most, but I’m convinced our mental health, happiness, hope depend on these human connections—big and small.    

When You Have Exhausted All the Possibilities, Remember This: You Haven’t (Thomas A. Edison)

So, the tooth was good—just waiting for a crown. The birthday was happy. The daffodils had been joined by a few tulips. But there was still the jury duty thing. Keeping to my long-standing mantra of “one disaster at a time,” I had let it go for a couple of weeks, simply checking my email daily in hopes of a reply. So far…nada. I would have to figure out the next step. Soon. Real soon.

The night after the eclipse, seeking some, any idea on how to proceed, I googled “postponing jury duty.” Scrolling through the results, I was excited to discover that one could request a specific postponement date on the state government’s website. Why had this not been mentioned on the summons? Or the original email I received from the Clerk of Court? I went to the website the next morning. I had my juror number, but you also needed the pin number from your summons. My summons had no pin number. Scrolling, scrolling, I discovered a helpline for answers in filling out your request. I called and got A Real Person! I explained my situation, the correspondence that had ended in limbo. “No problem,” this lovely person replied. “I’ll just schedule you for the week after you return from Rome.” Three minutes later, I had an email in my Inbox, confirming the new date. The stress of the past two months fell away in seconds, like the ice from the daffodils had done the week before. By the time I picked up my youngest from the train station that afternoon for a much-anticipated visit, my heart was light, joyful.

Hope, as Eternal as the Stars

I have written here about the stars on several occasions. How, sitting on my deck on a clear night, the sight of them fills me with hope. They are eternal. Whatever mess of things we mortals make down here, however stupidly, dangerously we risk the future of our planet and all its abundant life, the stars will survive. My stressful weeks from late February to mid-April happened to coincide with a long string of cloudy evenings. The stars were not in evidence just when I needed them most. But one night, I thought It’s okay. Though I can’t see them at the moment, they’re still up there, exactly where they should be. Obvious, I know, and yet profoundly comforting.     

I leave you with a haiku I composed in the shower the morning we “sprang ahead” to Daylight Savings Time on March 10:

Today the light’s one
Hour longer, the dark recedes,
Our hopes grow stronger.

(Yes, this is a lengthy post, but I believe we need to remember and draw courage from the moments of our greatest strength, our finest ambitions. I promise you a much shorter post for May. )

When I was three years old, my mom sent me to a nursery school run by a former teacher in her home. As I had no siblings (yet) and all the kids in my neighborhood were teens and pre-teens, my mom thought the preschool would help me to overcome my shyness. The problem was, the other 7-8 kids were a year older, which doesn’t sound like much, but that one year difference feels mighty big when you’re a measly three. They mostly ignored me, but I was used to playing on my own, so not unduly stressed about the situation.

One of my favorite toys was a miniature wooden train set. I had one like it at home, but this set had twice the track. And I loved the accessories that went with it—the little painted wooden houses, the bridges, the cars of red, blue and green. I could make a whole story in a world of my choosing inside my head. Just like I did at home. If I could get my hands on it. A highly popular toy, it was usually monopolized by the boys.

But one morning, I saw my chance. The train set was wide open! I knelt on the floor and quietly went about the business of linking cars together from engine to caboose. I was almost there when a hand swooped down and snatched the blue car from my grasp.

“You can’t play with this!”

Startled, I looked up to see John R. towering above me, a menacing, satisfied sneer on his face as he placed a firm foot on a section of track.

The shock of that moment. I have never forgotten it. Outwardly, I ventured no response. I didn’t punch or slap him, didn’t yell or try to wrestle the stolen car from his grip. I didn’t even call for the teacher. But in the moments after he grabbed that train car, I burned with indignation. Who was he to take that car from me! I had every right to play with the train set and he had no right to stop me!  

I never told the teacher, or my parents, but for the remainder of that year, I sat behind an armchair in the living room and watched the other kids play. Then I went home and copied the games/activities I had seen them enjoying. My mother discovered this from talking to the teacher, but neither of them knew why. Only I did, and I never revealed the reason. 

Of course, many other injustices would happen to me over the years, perhaps the most egregious being the failing grade I received in a graduate seminar because I strenuously ignored the professor’s blatant attempts to seduce me during our requisite weekly one-on-one sessions. As payback, he “rescheduled” my final project presentation on the day it was due, leaving only a note in my department mailbox that same morning to say our meeting had been moved up from 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., knowing I would not get the note until I was on my way to see him. When I found the message at 8:45, I rushed to his office, project in hand, to find him standing in the doorway, ready for the scene he’d set up. “You’re late!” He shouted. “I’m failing you!”

Seeking redress for this outrage, I went to see the ombudswoman. While admitting it was a not an uncommon complaint about this instructor, she let me know that “many just go along with it, until the semester ends,” then added, “He does publish more than anyone else on the faculty.” My faculty advisor ruled that he couldn’t fail me while refusing to accept my project, and got the course expunged from my record (the money was not refunded). But it tagged me in the department as someone who “doesn’t go along to get along.” The kiss of death.

And yet, the seizing of the little wooden train car remains the most vivid of all these affronts. It was my first real, solid end-to-end memory, and it both shaped who I would become and revealed to me who I was. Those who were bigger, those with more power, more money, more cruelty in their so-called hearts—bullying others they believed weaker, inferior; grabbing what wasn’t theirs; cutting a trail of misery everywhere they went—I would take them on in whatever way I could. Justice, not only for myself but for all others who suffered unfair treatment. It was my first solid core value. It has guided me through my life.

The year following the train-set incident, a friend from my new preschool at the local YWCA slept over. As we lay in the dark that night, we talked briefly about racial prejudice. I have no memory of what touched off the topic, maybe stories about the “color bar” in the South—Whites Only signs everywhere—I’d seen on the nightly news, a program that always accompanied our family dinners. I said it was terrible how mean white people were to colored people (we were still a few years shy of Stokely Carmichael and his term black power). Maureen considered this. “I don’t really care for the Negro much,” she said, “but I do love the Indians. It makes me sad that they are treated so badly.”

Honest to god, those were her exact words. I can’t recall what came after that, but I do know that I was: 1) startled and unhappy that my friend didn’t “care for” Black people, and 2) surprised to learn that Native Americans (a term we did not have at the time) were also the victims of prejudice. I had only seen the “happy” portrayals of these indigenous folks sharing that wonderful first Thanksgiving with the “kindly” pilgrims.     

This not-fairness thing was almost bigger and wider than it was possible to grasp. Almost. But I would come, bit by bit, to understand the enormity of injustice out there.

The Only Child in School That Day: The Courage of Ruby Bridges

In kindergarten, I witnessed a rarity on the nightly news—a story about a little girl just a year older than me. Her name was Ruby Bridges and she lived in a city familiar to me only through a postcard my parents had of the place they’d honeymooned—New Orleans.

Though the Supreme Court had ruled segregated schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in May 1954—shortly before Ruby Bridges was born—the backlash, especially in the South, was fierce. Fierce enough that six-and-a-half years later, Ruby was the first Black child in New Orleans to attempt to integrate a “white school.” She was accompanied by a cadre of U.S. Marshals to protect her from the white crowds who heckled and threatened her every step of the way, right up to the schoolhouse door, many of them parents! People with children of their own, who would never for one minute tolerate their kids being treated that way.

As children, we rely on adults to keep some kind of order. To be fair or, if failing that, at least not malicious. But that day, I learned how brutal injustice could be. Later, I would discover that all the teachers at William Frantz Elementary School had stayed home that day—to register their hostility to desegregation. All but one—Barbara Henry, a white teacher who had recently moved to New Orleans from Boston. She alone volunteered to teach Ruby. In fact, Ruby would be Henry’s only student that year. The school literally kept all the white students hidden from Ruby’s view. She was not allowed to go to the cafeteria or the playground at recess, and U.S. Marshals accompanied her to the restroom. They also continued to walk Ruby to school as the angry crowds remained for months, hurling racial epithets and death threats at the six-year-old.

But Ruby Bridges, with Barbara Henry’s support, did not give up. Eventually the protests stopped and many of the white parents let their kids return to the school. In her second year, Ruby was taught in a classroom with other students, she ate in the cafeteria, went out to the playground, and—surprise!—life went on.

Four Little Girls on A Sunday Morning: The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing

I had just started third grade when a white man planted a box of explosives under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—a Black church and a hub of civil rights activities—in Birmingham, Alabama on a Sunday morning. The explosives went off during the morning services, killing four young girls who were attending Sunday school and injuring many others. In the violence that erupted afterwards between police and furious members of the Black community, two more Black children were killed. Outrageously, it would be fourteen years before Ku Klux Klan leader, Robert Chambliss, was convicted of murder for the church bombing. His partners-in-crime, Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton would not be convicted for another twenty-four years!

In third grade, too, I would encounter the word empathy and immediately grasp its meaning: The ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine oneself in their place. Thirty-two years later, I would buy my children Christopher Paul Curtis’s wonderful book, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, the story of a Black family who travels south to visit Grandma in Birmingham, Alabama and arrives there just in time for the church bombing. It was Curtis’s first novel and it catapulted him to national prominence, winning both the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award and the Newbery Honor Book Award. Today, sadly, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 ranks high on many banned books lists.

Bloody Sunday: All They Wanted Was Their Civil Rights

I would be just shy of my 10^th birthday when the world witnessed another horrifying injustice. What would come to be called “Bloody Sunday” took place on March 7, 1965, as some 600 civil rights activists began the 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to demand of Governor Wallace that their full rights as American citizens, enumerated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, be recognized and respected. As with Brown v. Board of Education a decade earlier, large swaths of the South had simply chosen to ignore the new law.

Led by Hosea Williams from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Amelia Boynton Robinson, a local civil rights activist, and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the marchers passed through Selma without incident, but as they crested the Edmund Pettis Bridge (named for a Confederate general), they got a good look at what awaited them. A throng of Alabama state troopers, billy clubs in hand, blocked the road at the bottom of the bridge, backed by county sheriff deputies, and a crowd of locals waving Confederate flags, rooting for a bloodbath.

The marchers continued cautiously, but as they neared the troopers, they were ordered to disperse or there would be serious consequences. Williams offered to talk. No dice. When the marchers did not move, the troopers rushed in, beating them mercilessly and choking them with tear gas. Lewis was knocked down repeatedly (he suffered a skull fracture that day) and Robinson was severely battered. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized and 50 more required treatment for injuries. 

Film of the brutal attack was rushed to the networks. An outraged nation reacted swiftly, organizing sit-ins and demonstrations. Their cries for justice did not go unheeded. A federal court intervened and, at last, protected by National Guard troops, the marchers made it to Montgomery, with Martin Luther King at the helm (he had been in Washington, DC, conferring with President Johnson on Bloody Sunday, intending to join the march the next day).  

In August, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed by Congress and signed into law, 94 years after the Fifteenth Amendment had granted Black people the right to vote. The arc of the moral universe is, indeed, long, but Bloody Sunday made me understand that it is up to us to see that it bends toward justice.

They Were Dancing and Laughing, and the State Said You Can’t Do That: Stonewall 1969         

I was about to enter high school when the Stonewall Uprising occurred. The Stonewall Inn, a popular Greenwich Village gay bar in an era when same-sex relations were outlawed in every state but Illinois, was a target of frequent police raids. Part of New York’s campaign to rid the city of “sexual deviants.” But on June 28, 1969, the police got more than they bargained for. As they entered the bar in the early morning hours, their attempts to harass and arrest patrons met with unflagging resistance. That resistance spilled into the streets. As word spread, hundreds, then thousands joined the protest. Over the next six days, the clash between riot police and LGBTQ+ people and their allies would rage unabated. But when the tear gas finally cleared, what would become known as the Gay Pride movement had come into being.

It had been a long road. Before the Stonewall Uprising, the possibility of justice for LGBTQ+ folks looked pretty grim. It wasn’t enough that they weren’t bothering anyone, that they had their own clubs to dance and mingle in. If the attitude toward Black people had been that they could exist as long as they knew their place and kept to it, the official take on gays was they had no right to exist. A Chicago group, The Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924 to advocate for gay rights, enjoyed a brief moment of attention before political pressure shut it down.  

A quarter century later, another gay rights activist, Harry Hay, founded a more enduring organization—the Mattachine Society—to make Americans rethink their bias against and fear of homosexuals (especially gay men). The Los Angeles-based org sprouted chapters across the country, but the times were still less than hospitable. A 1950 Senate report, “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government” equated homosexuality with mental illness, concluding that LGBTQ+ people were “security risks” to the country. President Eisenhower later banned them from working for the government or any of its contractors. A 1952 publication of the American Psychiatric Association declared homosexuality a “sociopathic personality disturbance.”

The Stonewall Uprising radically altered the landscape. A year later, what would come to be called America’s first Gay Pride parades took place in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York where thousands of LGBTQ+ folks and their allies marched, chanting: Say it loud, gay is proud! Today, Gay Pride Parades are annual events in many countries.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association finally deleted homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses, and the next year the first openly gay candidate won a seat on the Ann Arbor, Michigan City Council.

I was a sophomore at Michigan State when the university hosted a “Wear Jeans if You’re Gay Day.” Since this was 1975 and all anyone wore was jeans, it meant that only people who were terrified of being thought gay would make the effort to choose some other garment. I’m happy to report that on a campus of over 50,000 people, I saw no one that day wearing other than denim. It was the era of solidarity. And though it would take another forty years for Obergefell v. Hodges to make same-sex marriage legal across the U.S., the tide had turned.

The Shocking Notion That Women Are People, Too: Roe v. Wade and the Women’s Movement

I would be a senior in high school when Roe v. Wade at last made abortion legal for women. Before that ruling, women were forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Though the advent of “the pill” in 1960 had radically changed women’s lives, back-alley abortions still posed significant risks. And women were still expected to be subservient to men. The happy housewife. The docile helpmate. The all-sacrificing mommy. A woman’s sexuality also remained an unseemly and potentially dangerous thing. Women were still the ones on the hot seat when it came to convictions for rape: Had she “asked for it” in her style of dress (male judges could decide her clothing was too provocative), or by her manner (too flirtatious)? I will say right here, no woman asks to be raped, but the prevailing attitude of the male-dominated judicial system kept many rape victims, already severely traumatized, from reporting the crime.   

The women’s movement that arose in the late 1960s imagined a new destiny for their half of the population. Took to the streets to say we demand control over our bodies, our options, our lives. Women would no longer go to college to get their “Mrs. degree”—the term used for women enrolled in higher education where it was assumed they were “husband shopping” for a man with a bright, monied future. Instead, they began running for political office in numbers, increased their presence in the legal system. They worked outside the home, not because economic necessity demanded it but because they wanted to use their talents and intelligence to create a fulfilling life as an independent adult. Roe v. Wade made so much of that possible. It was a momentous victory.

In This Dark Era of Reaction, John Lewis Still Guides Us

And now, so many of our gains for freedom and justice in the past 65 years have been or are being rescinded. In 2013, the Supreme Court kneecapped the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling that waived the need for preclearance of new voting or redistricting laws in states and jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination (as identified in the VRA). Some two dozen states didn’t waste a moment in passing legislation that has restricted Black voters from exercising their rights—changes in voter ID laws and registration  mail-in voting, limited polling places and voting hours in Black neighborhoods.

SCOTUS struck again when it overturned the right to abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade in its June 2022 Dobbs decision. Instantly, a raft of reactionary laws were enacted in states across the nation, severely limiting or banning abortion, in some instances even in cases of rape, incest, or endangerment to the mother’s life. To enforce these draconian measures, some states have raised the possibility of legally preventing women from traveling to another state where abortion is legal. So far, thankfully, this proposal has met with a resounding “hands off” from the DOJ who filed a “Statement of Interest” in the matter, proclaiming that: The Constitution protects the right to travel across state lines and engage in conduct that is lawful where it is performed and that states cannot prevent third parties from assisting others in exercising that right. 

Book bans, laws against providing transgender healthcare or teaching Black history, threats to overturn gay marriage—we are living in a dark era of reaction, bordering on fascism. High on injustice and white male supremacy, low on freedom and civil rights.

It’s been 65 years since John R. grabbed that blue car from my hand and told me I couldn’t play with the train set. Sixty-five years of witnessing the wounding injustice to others, of suffering it myself on several occasions, of fighting for a world of true equality, freedom, and justice. Sixty-five years of hope, celebration and, now, deep concern as attacks on our rights mount once again.

In Barbados this past January, talking with our Bajan friend Tyrone, the subject of justice came up and I mentioned the powerful, lifelong effect that moment at age three has had on me. Thinking it was a stressor—emotional baggage that was weighing me down—Tyrone encouraged me to let it go. But as I explained to him, I don’t want to let it go. Far from being a recollection of defeat, it remains a moment of clarification—what I stand for—of identity. It is precious to me. It is me. As the fabulously courageous John Lewis said: When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something. You have to DO something.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of books have been written on the subject of Time—what it is, how we perceive it, how to manage it. From Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and the General Theory to Kevin Kruse’s 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management, time—that elusive thing that keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking—continues to baffle us.

But for my money, no one has captured the truth of the matter better than James Baldwin, American writer and civil rights activist, who said: There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.  As much as we duck and dodge, delay and defer—time for that later, once everything is settled, when I feel less harried—there’s no denying Baldwin nailed it. Tomorrow never comes. It is always now. Now is the time.

Say It Now                                           

One of the most tragic figures to ever grace the literary world is the poet Sylvia Plath. Plath’s Ariel, a collection of poetry written in the last months of her life, would rock the world and catch fire with the burgeoning women’s movement of the 1960s. Her novel, The Bell Jar—after initially being rejected by numerous American publishers—would become a fixture on required reading lists in high schools and colleges. For Plath, however, the recognition would come too late. On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself. She was 30 years old. She had two children. And her husband had recently dumped her for another woman. On the night Plath left plates of food by her children’s bedside, then sealed off the kitchen with wet towels before turning on the gas oven and inhaling its poisonous fumes, she already knew Hughes’ lover was pregnant.

It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that Plath and Hughes’ marriage (achieved within scant months of their meeting) broke down solely over his infidelity. That was more the result than the cause. In many ways, their marital troubles can be ascribed to a simple truth—as two fiercely ambitious aspiring poets, they were in love and they were in competition. But as a man, in a time when men “knew best,” Hughes was in a position to assert his authority. It was he who insisted they return to England in 1958, a year after they’d moved to America where Plath had accepted the teaching position Smith College had offered their talented alumna. Hughes had managed to get a gig lecturing at nearby UMass Amherst, but he didn’t like teaching. He told Plath he was determined to earn a living as an author and poet.

One wonders at this distance why Hughes didn’t simply do that from America? At least for a few years, to let Plath fully engage with the post she’d been given. He’d already won the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award for his collection of poetry, Hawk in the Rain, which Plath had faithfully typed up for him. He could have written from anywhere.

Plath decided she, too, would focus solely on her poetry, but the birth of their first child in 1960 vied for her time and attention. Her first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published that same year. Though well-received by critics, it did not win a prestigious award. If Plath was disappointed, her response was to write more poetry, better poetry. She wrote at a feverish pace, excited about where her new verses were taking her. Then Hughes walked out just months after their second child was born in 1962. The emotional strain was intense but Plath completed the collection of poetry for what would become the crowning literary achievement of her short life, Ariel. At her death, she left detailed instructions as to how the poems should be ordered in the book. Hughes was familiar with the verses, for Plath had shared many of them with her estranged husband on those occasions when he visited the children after he moved out.   

Hughes did see Ariel through to publication, spending two years on the project, but he changed Plath’s arrangement of the poems. He also omitted some poems, while adding others. These changes would earn him decades of rebuke from the new wave of feminist writers and academics who assumed Hughes had deleted Plath’s most damning verses against him. To compound the perceived offense, it was discovered that Hughes had burned Plath’s final journals.

Hughes’ “interference” in Plath’s manuscript would remain a point of contention and speculation until the publication in 2004 of The Restored Edition: Ariel, the collection of Plath’s poems as she had intended at her death. Meghan O’Rourke, writing for Slate, argued a “good case could be made that Hughes’ version of Ariel is actually superior to Plath’s,” for it included poems written in the final weeks of her life, poems she herself predicted would Make my name.

Eighteen years after Plath’s death, Hughes would edit and publish Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems, the works Plath had published in her teens and 20s in such esteemed publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The Christian Science Monitor. To this, Hughes added some of Plath’s poetry he had omitted from Ariel almost two decades earlier. It would seem the ghost of his late first wife continued to haunt him. But the world would not realize just how fierce this haunting was for Hughes until the 1998 publication of Birthday Letters in the final months of his life. This collection of poetry from the man who was then England’s esteemed poet laureate—a man frequently cited as one of the twentieth century’s great writers—would reveal just how shattering Plath’s suicide had been for Hughes, how it had haunted him every day of his life for 35 years. Professor of English at Williams College, Lynda K. Bundtzen, noted that many of these new poems were direct responses to Plath’s own poetry. “They address her as if she’s still alive, as if he can talk to her,” Bundtzen said.

For me, the most poignant—and revealing—poem in Birthday Letters is “The Machine,” with its closing lines: …Blackly yawned me Into its otherworld interior Where I would find my home. My children. And my life Forever trying to climb the steps now stone Towards the door now red Which you, in your own likeness, would open With still time to talk.

What if Hughes had opened up his true self, his real feelings to his wife in those final months? What if he had said, “I’m sorry. What I’ve done is less than honest. Your talent feels threatening sometimes. It both amazes and scares me.” Words left unsaid are never heard. Our best intentions, our deepest feelings are never known unless we make them known. If you love someone, tell them now. Apologize for those harsh words now. Admit the mistake you made now. Express your gratitude now.  

Do It Now    

Time has a way of creeping up on us. We mean to do something, but in the hurly-burly of day-to-day life, we often put off making a decision or taking action until—poof!—the moment is gone when we can do so. Perhaps nowhere in modern history has this played out so tragically as it did in Germany when Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in 1933.

Hitler—and this is essential in understanding people’s response—did not simply waltz into Berlin and “seize” power, as is often supposed. In fact, the Nazis (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) had been rather small potatoes in the wake of the German Empire’s collapse after WWI. The new government, known as the Weimar Republic, considered itself a democratic institution. It held elections. It had a constitution. Under this government, Hitler spent some nine months in prison for treason when his attempted coup failed in 1924. The Weimer Republic believed the growing popularity of the German Communist Party to be a much greater threat.

But as I said, time has a way of creeping up on us. In Germany, the economic devastation caused by the post-war Treaty of Versailles, with the huge reparations it demanded for France and Great Britain, became unbearable as the world economy collapsed in the Great Depression. The Nazi Party was only too happy to lay the blame for Germany’s economic woes on the Jews and the Communists. With their message that true-blooded Germans were the real “chosen people”, the Nazis began to unite a sizeable chunk of the country. By 1932, they were winning a third of the votes in parliamentary elections—an achievement no other party could claim. German President Paul von Hindenburg at first refused to grant Hitler’s demand that he be appointed chancellor, but after various backroom deals with conservative politicians who assured him they could control the Nazi’s leader, von Hindenburg ceded to his wishes. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. When Hindenburg died nineteen months later, Hitler had already engineered a bill—with a little intimidation and much suspected fraud—that merged the offices of President and Chancellor into one, making him the sole leader (Führer) of Germany. The Nazis then seized control of the government and booted democracy into the gutter.

But it was a gradual coup, and the passage of time lulls people, prepares them in many ways to accept circumstances they would have once found intolerable. Acts like a narcotic— anesthetizing its victims with the thought If things get worse, then I’ll act, I’ll leave then… Because, let’s face it, leaving your homeland—your family, your house, all you’ve ever known—is the hardest thing anyone can do. And the Nazis manipulated this gradual dance with cruel brilliance.

Even before President von Hindenburg’s death, the strength of the Nazi Party in parliament had made it possible to pass laws banning Jews and other political opponents of the Reich from holding civil service positions or practicing law, with a few exemptions. But the pace of persecution kicked up a notch once Hitler took full control. The infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935—the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor—proclaimed Judaism not a religion but a race, distinct from and inferior to the German race. Therefore, Jews could no longer vote or hold public office. As non-Germans, they had no legal rights. In 1936, Jewish doctors were banned from practicing medicine. In 1938, all Jews were required to register any property held within the Reich and Jewish students were barred from German schools.

And then Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) happened and everything exploded. This wholesale attack on all things Jewish saw synagogues, hospitals, and schools destroyed. Jewish shops and homes were burned and looted. At the end of that fiery, violent pogrom on November 9/10, ninety-one Jews had been murdered and some 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.

Dachau, built in 1933, was the first concentration camp, a forced labor camp originally built to imprison Hitler’s political opponents—Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists. In the ensuing years, Jehovah’s witnesses, Gypsies, and gay men swelled the ranks, as well. Few Jews, though, were to be found at Dachau unless they belonged to one of these groups or had violated the Nuremberg Laws. Until Kristallnacht. After that, German Jews could no longer hope or believe that the Nazis were just an annoying but not mortally dangerous blip on the timeline of history—that things would surely return to normal soon, democracy would be restored. Now, every Jew in Germany understood they must leave ASAP.

Though emigration for Jews was still encouraged in 1938 by the Nazis—the fewer Jews in Germany, the better—that didn’t mean the process was smooth or, for many, even possible. To emigrate, you needed paperwork, mountains of it, much of it difficult to obtain. You needed a destination country willing to take you in. If you managed both those things, you still faced having to find some way of setting up once you arrived. Before 1938, the financial struggles of the Great Depression made many countries reluctant to take on more residents. By 1939, when emigration became easier and quotas rose in both the U.K and the U.S., the Nazis had placed a heavy emigration tax on Jews and severely restricted the amount of money they could transfer abroad from German banks. Though many would make it out, one-third of the original Jewish population would still be in Germany in 1941 when emigration was banned by the Nazis and Hitler’s “Final Solution” took effect, with its forced internment of Jews in the rapidly sprouting number of death camps. Now, it was too late.

Although genocide remains an active evil in our world—just turn on the news—most of us will not face such a dire threat, where every moment lost to hesitation, to inaction may spell the difference between life and death. But we still struggle with the human tendency to “kick the can down the road.” We put off leaving a job that bores us. We remain in a relationship that’s making us unhappy. Or we postpone getting those medical tests the doctor urged us to have.

Why do we hesitate? Perhaps a task seems difficult—too laborious (I can’t imagine undertaking all this). Or we’re not sure how to proceed (What if I make a mistake?).  Maybe we’re fearful (What if the tests come back positive?). So, we put off taking the first step and thus this thing that matters—it never happens.

Revel in the Now     

It would seem that no one would need to be exhorted to enjoy the moment, to revel in the now, and yet, many of us tend to come up with a lengthy list of reasons to put off pleasure when confronted with the opportunity to relax or take up some project we’ve been longing to launch into. Even something as simple as scheduling a definite date to meet up with old friends—those ones we keep messaging on Facebook: Let’s get together for drinks on our deck this summer and catch up. But June slips by, then July, then August, and “this summer” too often becomes never.  

Recently I was reminded how precious—and fleeting—the “now” is. Every Sunday evening during our annual jaunt to Barbados, Ed and I go to Surfside, an open-air club on the ocean sands that features live steel pan bands on that day. For three hours, we revel in the songs of Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Neil Diamond, the Village People, Jimmy Buffett and a jillion other steel-pan classics. We—and when I say “we”, I mean everyone in the place—sing along with “Sweet Caroline” and do the hand motions to “Y.M.C.A.” People flock to the “dance floor”—a narrow sandy strip between the bandstand and the tables—to boogie in whatever style moves them, or no particular style at all. It is People. Feeling great. About being ALIVE.

The last Sunday of our stay, as we were munching on shrimp and drinking Rum Punch, the band struck up ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” Ed and I looked at each other and headed for the dance floor. It’s a great song to dance to, but as I started whirling and twirling around, the lyrics played in my head: You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen…Having the time of your life. For a moment, my heart clutched. So much time gone by never to return. How did it slip by so fast? But then I looked at Ed, at the night, the people, the stars above. Felt how much I loved it all. How much I loved this moment.     

James Baldwin was spot-on. The time is always now. Say it Now. Act Now. Above all, Revel in the Now.

“History never really says goodbye. History says, ‘See you later.'” (Eduardo Galeano)

[NOTE: Though I wrote this post more than five years ago, it could not be more timely, or urgent, than now.  I’m on the road this month, but I’ll be back with a brand new post in March. Meanwhile, keep hollering and harbor hope. We still have a democracy, however flawed–and we must keep it.]

My husband and I are having dinner at a local farm-sourced, regional-brewers kind of place when I notice the TV set over the bar is playing Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, that 1962 cult classic, mental/emotional slugfest between a manipulative Joan Crawford and a deranged Bette Davis. Both of them on the far side of their ingénue years.

When the server—a young woman in her mid-20s—comes to take our order, I ask if she knows the film. She scrutinizes the action on the TV screen and shakes her head. Never heard of it. I give it a strong recommendation. It may be camp, but it’s first-rate camp and it was nominated for five Academy Awards.

This exchange got me thinking about the increasing transcience of culture and knowledge. How what’s happening in the ever-changing nanosecond fills and floods our attention to the exclusion of everything that came before.

The Seduction of Now

It’s very seductive to think of the past as something finished. Over. That it has no connection or relevance to who we are now or where we’re headed. That we can re-invent ourselves at will, without a backward glance, and no price to pay.

Our high-tech world, with its rapid flow of new, disposable “product” and seemingly endless streams of “content” not only encourages this attitude, but practically demands it. When something “brand new” happens every 15 minutes, our attention is sorely taxed just scrambling to keep up. Who has time to reflect? To make connections?

Though each of us has a personal life that begins with our birth and ends with our death, we’re also part of a much larger world with a long and complicated past that affects our little blip on the timeline.

Okay, no one is going to argue that Whatever Happened to Baby Jane is a force to deepen ones understanding of the world. But an existence composed solely of what’s-happening-now leaves us with no compass to steer by, no yardstick for comparison on serious, larger-than-our-lifetime issues—say, global warming or the worldwide resurgence of nationalist movements. Without an understanding of what “went before,” we might not even realize it is a resurgence. That the current global trend toward nationalism has roots in the European fascist movements of the 1930s and the Jim Crow laws of the American South—the latter going back to the Civil War and that defender of slavery, John C. Calhoun. That nationalism is not without links to the European conquerors of Columbus’s “new world.” All of it a shorthand for the belief that some people are created more equal than others. That some people don’t even have the right to exist.

Without a sense of how today’s headlines fit in along the timeline of human history, we’re left vulnerable to all who would prey on that ignorance. And they are out there.

In a State of Disconnect: Clueless about History

A quick survey of polls targeting common misconceptions (and just plain ignorance) about history makes for fascinating—if frightening—reading.

A 2006 poll by the now defunct McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that one in five Americans could name all five Simpson cartoon family members, but only one in a thousand people could identify all five First Amendment freedoms.

A 2012 ACTA survey revealed that fewer than 20% of college graduates could correctly identify the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation.

A 2010 survey, cited by The Atlantic, reported more Americans knew that Michael Jackson composed “Beat It” than knew that the Bill of Rights is a body of amendments to the Constitution. And one in three did not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees the right to a trial by jury.

Fifty percent of Americans surveyed also suffer severe timeline confusion. They identified the American Revolution as happening after either the Civil War or the War of 1812. And more than a third had no clue at all in which century the American Revolution occurred. One can only hope continued sell-out performances of Hamilton will provide some hints.

In light of the video that went viral this summer—a man harassing a woman for wearing a shirt with the flag of Puerto Rico (“You should not be wearing that in the United States of America!” he shouted repeatedly.)—it’s worth noting that a 2017 poll revealed almost half of Americans don’t know that the people of Puerto Rico are United States citizens.

Perhaps the most shocking—and saddening—statistic I came across was cited on NPR’s All Things Considered: Forty percent of Americans cannot identify what Auschwitz was.

In fact, fewer than half of Americans know that Hitler did not take control of Germany by force, but was democratically elected. We’ll return to this later.

Why Does This Matter? Why Should We Care?

Not knowing what came before, as I said, renders us prey to spin doctors, Russian hackers, unscrupulous politicians, and hucksters of every stripe.

It leaves us vulnerable to the lies of others, told for their own nefarious purposes. 

“I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down,” said then-presidential candidate Trump at a 2015 Birmingham rally. “And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of [Muslims] were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”

Trump stirred up a lot of anti-immigrant feeling with these words, sowing the seeds of support for his notorious Muslim Ban, but politifact.com gave him a “Pants on Fire” rating for that speech. That’s code for one big fat whopper.

PolitiFact cites a September 17, 2001 Associated Press report that debunked “rumors of rooftop celebrations of the attack by Muslims” in Jersey City. And wildfire rumors of Muslim-Americans cheering the fall of the World Trade Center in Paterson, N.J., turned out to be a nasty lie spawned by chain e-mails and fanned by shock jock Howard Stern.

The historical truth? Muslim residents of Paterson mounted a banner in that city saying “The Muslim Community Does Not Support Terrorism.”

We fall for solutions that have failed us before.

Trump sold his tax cuts for the rich by promising American workers that with more money in their boss’s pocket, they would benefit from increased wages and bonuses. It was gonna be “beeeeautiful.”

If there’s one thing we should be wise to by this point, it’s the bald-faced lie of trickle-down economics—that when you let the rich keep all their money, out of gratitude they will pass pots of it along to the peons who made them rich in the first place. William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential candidate, exposed the nonsense of trickle-down more than a hundred years ago in his Cross of Gold speech:

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through to those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

The term “trickle-down economics” was coined by American humorist and commentator Will Rogers to ridicule President Hoover’s dismal stimulus efforts to cure a Great Depression many economists feel he played a large hand in creating. Hoover, a cheerleader for “rugged individualism,” believed that only the voluntary action of “socially responsible capitalist leaders” (know any?), not government intervention, would restore economic order.

Trickle-down economics failed in the close of the 19^th century. It failed in the Great Depression. It failed in the massive tax cuts to the rich known as “Reaganomics” that started an almost 30-year slide into the financial crash of 2008. And it is failing under Trump. A 2018 analysis of Fortune 500 companies reveals that fewer than five percent of workers will get a one-time bonus or wage increase from the Trump tax cuts. If they still have a job. AT&T and General Motors both cut 1,500 jobs. Kimberly-Clark dumped 5,000 workers. It seems that most companies poured virtually all of their tax-break money into stock buybacks, making the richest folks even richer.

Trickle-down economics does one thing and one thing only: It robs from the poor and middle classes, and gives to the rich.

Blinds us from seeing how attacks on others are attacks on all of us.

Recently, I read a piece (sorry, I didn’t copy the link) where psychologists discussed how people tend to mentally catalog only those things they perceive as affecting them directly. For example, if you’re not a union member—a teacher, a nurse, an auto worker—you might think that current efforts to cripple or destroy unions have little to do with you. “Right to work” laws, attacks on overtime pay. But you’d be wrong.

History shows that the advantages labor unions have fought for and won (starting with the right to unionize) have generally benefited all American workers.

Before there were unions, many people worked six, even seven days a week for an average workweek of 61 hours. It was the unions, waging massive (and sometimes bloody) strikes in the late 19^th/early 20^th centuries that brought us the 8-hour day and the weekend. A half-century of struggle culminated in the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. 

When unions are strong, the middle class tends to flourish. When they are weakened, as is happening now, income inequality increases for all workers and the purchasing power of the middle and poor classes shrinks. A lot. Benefits disappear, too.

Speaking of benefits, it was the rise of unions in the 1930s and 1940s that we have to thank for employer-sponsored health insurance. When unions used their numerical clout to negotiate health care for their members, many other employers scrambled to stay competitive by offering the same.  By 1950, a majority of employers offered some type of health insurance to their workers. With the current two-pronged effort of the GOP to weaken unions and sabotage the ACA, the future of employer-sponsored healthcare is something to keep on your radar.

In its first national convention (1881), the American Federation of Labor started the ball rolling to end child labor. State after state responded to this call until the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act abolished child labor nationwide.

Allows those in power to cheat us of our rights.

If you don’t know the Bill of Rights guarantees you a trial by jury for criminal cases and serious civil cases—and inhibits the court from overturning a jury’s finding—you might be bulldozed into waiving your right to a jury trial in exchange for one heard (and ruled on) solely by a judge. This is increasingly a power tactic of corporations who feel juries tend to be sympathetic to individuals claiming damage or loss rather than to the big companies alleged to have screwed them.

It’s easy to take from people what they don’t know is theirs. Remember those 999 people out of 1,000 who could not name the five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment? They are at risk for believing the current propaganda that a press who criticizes the president is un-American. They may fear to speak out because some politician with an agenda says protesting government actions is “illegal.”

Well, here they are, the five freedoms guaranteed to all Americans under the First Amendment to the Constitution (at the very top of the Bill of Rights):

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

We are allowed to holler with all our might against those who would violate or destroy our democracy. And we should.

We fail to recognize the signposts of eminent danger when they’re right before us.

Recently, a guest on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes said of the current fight against widespread attacks on voting rights, “The Civil Rights Movement continues. It is eternal.”

Ditto the fight against fascism. Fascism did not end with the surrender of the Nazis any more than white supremacy died with Abraham Lincoln’s signature on the Emancipation Proclamation or the passage of the 13^th Amendment.  

I mentioned up-top a poll that found fewer than half of Americans know that Hitler did not take control of Germany by force, but was democratically elected. As Emory University history professor, Deborah Lipstadt, explains, “The Nazis didn’t come into office on January 30, 1933, and decide on a genocide the next day. They slowly broke down a democracy. They destroyed it.”

She goes on to cite the “steady drumbeat of attacks” that began under Hitler. “First on the press, then on the courts, then on institutions, [the] slow takeover of institutions.”

Sound familiar?

Connecting the Dots  

To have a solid grasp of what came before is to have a richer understanding of what we’re seeing now. A guide to sift truth from lies. A way to answer the always-pertinent question: From whose viewpoint is this coming and what do they stand to gain by pushing this particular agenda? Instead of bouncing from tweet to tweet, history gives us a telescopic lens to pinpoint the connections. And it cannot be said enough: Everything is connected.

The films and books, the music and paintings and theatre of the past have messages for us, too. Not perhaps the kitschy romp of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, but there is much worth our attention in the dusty archives of film, the overflowing shelves of the library, in Shakespeare’s plays and John Donne’s poetry.

One book that Americans are rediscovering is a little dystopian novel, 1984.

Written 68 years ago by English author George Orwell, it’s been flying off the shelves, as they say, topping the best-seller list at Amazon in January 2017—after Kellyanne Conway coined the term “alternative facts” to justify Trump’s complete fabrication about the size of his inaugural crowd.

That tells you what happened. It doesn’t tell you why it matters. To do that, I will close with a paragraph from an article written by Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker in 2017, “Orwell’s 1984 and Trump’s America”:

“And so, rereading Orwell, one is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism—and that was essentially that it rests on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.”

To know what came before us is a great gift–enriching, fascinating. It is also a warning.