I. Direst Fate
From when I was a young teenager, I've had an ongoing love for Walt Whitman. In tough times, especially, I'm draw to poetry. Poets tend to see with a clarity I admire. So it won't be too much of a surprise that since the presidential election occurred, I've been rehearsing a line from "Long, Too Long America" from Leaves of Grass. Whitman writing about the United States during the Civil War contrasted the country's civic prosperity prior to the war with it during the war. He said,
"But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not."
I love the conflict between naming the situation as direst fate and yet commanding fellow citizens to not recoil. Now, that tension feels very contemporary. Very much the moment.
A similar 'direst fate' is before us today, a crises for certain. No, we are not in an actual civil war although those words have been threatened prior to election result and for the moment our sovereignty seems intact. Certainly, though the influence of oligarchs on our political and now on our governing party should cause all citizens in this country grave concern. With their extraordinary wealth, dubious morality, alignment to Russia, and questionable capacity to love or even respect this country and its laws, the influence of digital oligarchs such as Elon Musk on Trump and those he will share power within his cabinet is highly alarming.
Timothy Snyder (2024), Yale historian writes in On Freedom that "Putin’s genocidal undertaking was supported by the wealthiest digital oligarch, Elon Musk...Musk and others wax nostalgic for the racial purity of an imagined past" (p. 157). Musk, like Trump, is a serial liar and pundit of ignorant, fanciful mistruths. Snyder again writes, "Putin says Ukraine does not exist, and Elon Musk boosts the lie; hydrocarbon companies claim that global warming is not a problem, and Elon Musk boosts the lie; Trump says that he won the election of 2020, and Elon Musk boosts the lie. These lies then grow within us thanks to mental vulnerabilities that machines find and exploit" (p. 106). Snyder states, "Like the Czechoslovak communists, the Silicon Valley libertarians first promised a brave new world, then told us that there were no alternatives, then invited us to live inside a screen. Like the communists, they passed from great certainty about utopia to total nihilism about everything, to a world in which “everything is shit.” And then they ask us if we are not, perhaps, living in a computer simulation ourselves—or, in an older language, inside Plato’s cave. Unfortunately, wealthy and important people who speak of simulations are searching for an excuse to be irresponsible. If we decide that we are not real, that life is elsewhere, we can drop into a cave where morality has no sense and freedom is impossible" (p. 70).
Currently, Trump has nominated 6 billionaires to cabinet level positions. Together, the billionaires Trump nominated are worth at least $344 billion which according US News and World Report is "higher than the GDP of 169 countries." To imagine their interests and yours will be aligned, is to be mistaken. Elon Musk has used Twitter to amplify lies that feeds his wealth and forwards a very Pro-Russia agenda.
II. Recoiling Not
Where do we stand considering such threats? Those of us who read the landscape before us with clear trepidation and yet know that silence cannot occur must not recoil. As women in red states are dying due to draconian laws, we cannot recoil. We cannot take a pause while more and more women die because they have been denied necessary health care. Had these women lived where I live (in NJ) they would be alive today. That is a fact.
In NJ, the last few weeks, our forests have been burning. That burning has occurred up the east coast in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts all due to drought. This burning comes a few weeks after a rapid succession of hurricanes that also marched up the east coast destroying mountain towns in western North Carolina happened. At the same time, on the west coast, flooding from torrential storms is changing the landscapes of northern California and Oregon. And all of this is in just a 6-week period. Trump's nominee to head the EPA is Lee Zeldin. Zeldin said in a Fox News interview that he would prioritize efforts to "roll back regulations." Zeldin is a climate denier, just like Musk.
Across the globe, the people of Ukraine are fighting for their sovereignty, their right to be self-governing and have the final say about their laws, their lives. Recently, a Russian oligarch claimed that Ukrainians do not actually know that they are really Russians and if it takes killing a million Ukrainians or even 5 million Ukrainians to get them to understand this, so be it. This is genocide. We should be appalled and moved to action. Just wait though, and this idiocy will soon be a talking point that some members of our Republican party, including the president-elect, will be mouthing as they attempt to convince you that this untruth is an old truth, and that Putin really has sovereignty over a country that is not Russia.
I'd love to remain silent and turn my eyes away from all the dying: young women in red states, Ukrainians, our Earth.
I'd love to practice 'self-care' and dim my responsibilities to this country, but forests, less than 5 miles away from my home have burned and the smell of smoke is becoming so common, not exceptional.
I'd love to lower my eyes and stop seeing trash islands in the Pacific, rising ocean waters, declining ice masses, increasing temperatures, droughts and floods, burning forests, declining species, and disappearing land, but I can't find the apathy needed to do so.
III. Which Way America?
In 1955, Allen Ginsberg in "A Supermarket in California" asked Walt Whitman, "Where are we going?" He mused,
"...Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?"
And perhaps similar questions are before us, if we are still brave enough to ask: "What America did you have" when you voted or failed to vote in November? Will we have a future without democracy? Where are we going? What world will we be leaving our children? Grandchildren? What country will be here across these next four years? Will we be a Republic? Will we grow immune to young women unnecessarily dying when health care elsewhere in the country would easily save them? Will life expectancy in the United States continue to decline? Will we turn blind eyes to the world beyond us? Will we even ask such questions?
Snyder closes his book with some important advice:
"We can recognize reporters as the heroes of our time. Paying for newspaper subscriptions is a start. Too often, we profit from the reporting of others without rewarding them. Subscribe to media that offer investigative reporting, and post to social media items that are reported by a human. Support campaigns to tax social media companies to fund local reporting. Without solidarity, we fail to see others’ travails as like our own, and so we lose the ability to see ourselves. Choosing a way to express solidarity makes us freer—and helps us to resist frustration and demoralization. Deliberate in organized settings. Pick a civil society organization to join, and another (if you can afford it) to support financially. Try to listen. Remember that neighbors might have had worse luck. Help others vote. Listen to those whose families’ historical experiences are very different from your own. Find organizations that allow you to help others. If you have the means, pay off someone else’s medical debt." (p. 233).
Do not turn your eyes away.
We need one another. As Margaret Wheatley said so well, "We can turn away, or we can turn toward. Those are the only two choices we have."
Two choices.
Which choice will you make?
Works Cited
- Ginsberg, Allen. (1956/2023) "A Supermarket in California" in Howl and Other Poems. Macon, GA: Mercer Books.
- Snyder, Timothy. (2024). On Freedom. New York: Penguin.
- Wheatley, Margaret J. (2009). Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
- Whitman, Walt. (1881). Leaves of Grass. from https://whitmanarchive.org/published-writings/leaves-of-grass.
