Courage is Grace Under Pressure
Finding resilience in the face of despair
I am in London as I write this, sitting in a lover’s flat overlooking the London city skyline. I was here when I learned the news of the 2024 Presidential election — that hate won over love, bigotry over compassion, spite over benevolence.
I understand the sick despair many of us feel in the pit of our stomach right now. Dark times hover on the horizon. I don’t believe the people who voted so resoundingly against the better angels of our nature realize yet what they’ve done. Some of them likely never will, and for those who do, it will be too late.
I’m not here to analyze what happened, or rail against the stubborn streak of vicious, ugly racist misogyny that has long been part of the American spirit. Others are already doing that, some of them quite eloquently, and I do believe there’s value in understanding what happened, but that is not the most important thing right now.
It’s vital to understand going forward, though I think the answer is grubber, more sordid, and more banal than we might otherwise hope: there has always been this vicious streak of mean-spirited, ugly anti-intellectualism embedded deep in the American national character, that has been with us from the start. It has never changed, and it likely never will in our lifetimes. We are simultaneously the land of can-do optimism and sleazy, seedy execration. These are the two faces of the American civic character, and this week, the ignorance won.
But I want to remind everyone reading this that there is hope. Like the dawning of the sun after a night of terror, this too shall pass.
I do not wish to trivialize what is to come. Many people will suffer. My trans and nonbinary friends are terrified right now. Two nights ago, a great many decent Americans discovered just how badly their country hates them, just how deep the ugly river of xenophobia flows through the American psyche.
There will be suffering. There will be blood. There will be ugliness, and violence, and hopelessness, and despair. I do not want to minimize any of the grotesqueries we all see on the horizon.
I will, instead, invite us all to take a deep breath, and remember that the course of history is neither straight nor smooth, but it does tend, in the long term, toward peace and justice.
We have been here before. We have, as a nation, been worse before. We were built on the foundation of slavery and we have never truly stepped away from it. Yet we have made progress, and we will again. It might not seem like it now, but this is a setback, not the end of all things.
I would especially like to remind those of us who feel most betrayed by our fellow citizens, those who voted against their own interests purely out of spite and desire to hurt, not to do the oppressor’s work for him.
I still remember the first time this country elevated this vicious, narcissistic, racist, sexist, conman, this tumor on the American psyche, to the highest office the first time. I remember how the shockwaves echoed through my own personal life, how a person I once loved became a bitter, angry, sullen echo of herself, how she told me directly that she was abrasive and prickly to me simply because, in her words, she felt overwhelmed with hopelessness and despair, and I was the only safe place for her to dump that poisonous emotional sewage.
I learned only a few days ago from a person in my life I love dearly that there’s a name for this. It’s called “lateral violence.” Those who feel oppressed, who feel ground down by an enemy far too dangerous and powerful to fight, release their anger and fear and frustration on one another, tearing into each other with a viciousness that it is not safe to direct outward.
Many of us will do that over the coming year. I would like to invite us all not to do the oppressors’ work for them, not to become a participant in our own subjugation.
This has always been a peculiar and pernicious weakness of those of us on the progressive side, this tendency to turn on our own. Tim Minchin expressed this beautifully:
It cannot, it cannot be okay if the intention of progressives — which I assume it is — is progress forward into a future of more empathy and understanding for more people, it cannot be that the primary mechanism by which we’re going to make that progress is the suppression of empathy and understanding for anyone who doesn’t align with our beliefs. It cannot be that unmitigated expression of furious outrage will somehow alchemize into a future of peace and love.
I understand the impulse toward despair and the anger that it brings. I understand that anger, lacking a safe outlet, is all too easily directed at those around us who are like us, those we think have failed the cause, have not done enough to fight oppression (or perhaps have not fought it in the “right” way).
I understand, too, where this leads.
We cannot do this. We must not do this. The story is not over. The storm will end. We must not, in our rage and hopelessness, turn on one another.
Now, more than ever, if we are to survive what is to come, we must, we absolutely must, support each other. That is the way we get through this. Not by adopting the tools and mindset of our enemy, not by doing our enemy’s work for him, not by tearing each other down because we don’t know where else to direct our feelings, but by holding each other, supporting each other, loving each other. Love does not triumph over hate by becoming hate.
The the arc of the moral universe is long, as MLK Jr said, but it bends toward justice.. This path is never as straight nor as swift as we would like, and sometimes for every three steps forward there is one backward.
It’s okay to feel rage, despair, all those other things. I feel them too. We have a choice: we can use them to lift each other up or tear each other down.
I don’t believe in New Years resolutions. But I have, today, this moment, made a resolution for the next four years.
My resolution is that I will do everything in my power to act with greater kindness, greater compassion, greater benevolence and empathy and grace. I will not allow those who despise these things to destroy them in me. I will not do the oppressor’s work for him. I will not be complicit in my own eradication.
JRR Tolkien believed — indeed, this is one of the central moral lessons of his works — that good triumphs over evil not because good is stronger than evil, but because good works with itself while evil works against itself. We do not defeat bullies by becoming bullies ourselves. That, I think, is our blueprint forward.
I’ve posted this image on my blog before. It is vital to remember it now.
