American are you losing your mind — or just your soul?
A vision for healing America needs to include restorative justice.
Joe Biden is now officially my President-Elect, despite the difficulty outgoing President Trump has accepting this fact.
I trust that will be worked out as soon as possible, so a peaceful transition may begin. I’m beaming my thoughts and prayers to the White House to that end.
I appreciate Biden’s choice of sensitive words in calling for unity in becoming the president of the entire country, red or blue. If ever we need to work towards healing and harmony, it is now.
When COVID first hit, I figured we’d be hunkering and bunkering long enough to read a book as thick and meaty as Pulitzer-Prize winning and best-selling historian Doris Kearns Godwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. So I did.
Lincoln’s team of rivals were his presidential contenders in the primary who he appointed to his cabinet. President Obama used this as a model for putting his cabinet together. He even met with Godwin as a Senator to discuss her understanding of Lincoln’s approach.
As I read the book, I envisioned a Democratic win, with the best and finest of all the candidates serving as a dynamic cabinet team. They would work well together, finally controlling the virus, addressing racial violence and justice, and repairing the damage done to our nation’s soul over the past four years.
And yes, I saw that team headed by a woman — Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren, most likely. I grieved each time one of them withdrew from the race when the votes and will were not there to go the distance — yet.
A Very Sobering Victory
After seeing the election results and how close it was and is, I realize that where I thought and hoped we were as a nation is not exactly where we are. That’s why the Blue landslide or tidal wave — depending on whether you’re an earth or water sign, right? — did not happen.
As sobering and scary as that is, I am thrilled that Kamala Harris is my and our Vice-President. In my book, we have the best of both worlds.
We have the best of both worlds — a president and vice-presidential team with both unitary experience and vision, as well as commitment to empowering people of color, immigrants, disabled, women, LGBTQIA, and other constituents.
Without them, this victory would not have happened.
Let’s face it, their time has come to be counted as vibrant and valued parts of our nation. We owe them that much and more, considering our long history of genocide, slavery, racial violence, and exclusion.
It seems this vision of full equality and participation triggers deep racial, xenophobic, and homophobic fears. These fears had lots of folks voting against their long term economic and health care interests.
Consuming pundits whose rhetoric sparks primal, survival-at-stake, fight-or-flee kinds of fear, they ended up casting their ballots for alarmist white supremacist tickets.
My heart is heavy imagining of the amount of pain someone may be in, and not aware of, such that they buy the idea that COVID is a political conspiracy, not a deadly disease that could kill them. As well as deny the very real climate and environmental issues facing us as a planet.
In so doing, what kind of legacy are they leaving their children and grandchildren? Apparently, selfishness does not include understanding what’s in one’s own self-interest.
Like it or not, this is roughly half our country. We have a lot of soul searching and healing to do if we are to come together and solve our serious problems.
So while I’m celebrating, I’m not gloating.
While I’m excited about the future, I’m still scared, too. This is why I say we’ve only just begun.
I believe these times call on the angels of our better natures, as Lincoln put it. He only lived a few days after the civil war ended. But he anticipated that ending and promoted some very unpopular plans for unifying and healing.
After he died, the Republicans went ahead with their plans, which basically meant occupying the south as a conquered territory, rather than finding more restorative justice types of solutions.
I’m not saying that Lincoln’s plans were along the lines of restorative justice by today’s standards. Indeed they may have been repugnantly concessionary, considering the evils of slavery. But he clearly wanted to heal and unify the country.
We don’t have to invent the wheel.
We can borrow a page from South Africa’s history of healing from the evil of Apartheid during Nelson Mandela’s presidency.
Their Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings worked because they incentivized truth-telling. Rather than calling for the blood of vicious murderers, Nuremberg-style, there was amnesty for those willing to face their victims’ family members and own their behavior.
Racist Afrikaners faced the wives and daughters of men they had killed and dismembered. These women wanted to know exactly what happened.
Telling what they did to the survivors of their victims did something to these men. Being brutally honest about what they did and why they did it brought them to tears. When they sincerely asked to be forgiven, they were met with understanding and, in some cases, hugs.
In at least one story, an African woman who’d lost both her husband and her son invited the man who’d murdered them into her home to become her new family.
Our process may look very different.
However, apples and oranges are still fruit. We clearly need some kind of process to end racial violence, prevent vigilante militias, and restore civility. Revenge and retribution won’t do that.
Let South African stories remind us that healing is possible. No one is too far gone in extreme viewpoints that their humanity can’t be touched and moved.
There is a process I’ve been reading about lately that may be in order for us. Resmaa Menakam, MSW, LICSW, SEP, in his book, My Grandmother’s Hands, outlines the steps to healing the wounds of racial trauma and white supremacy.
As a trauma therapist, he understands the way trauma lodges in the body.
He’s worked with trauma victims, couples, public schools, the military as well as police departments. In his work, he applies neuroscience, and somatic healing techniques to the wounding all Americans — black, white, and/or blue — sustain living in a culture founded and maintained on white supremacy.
When the body releases trauma, it’s no longer at the mercy of lower emotions. It can think with its brain and feel with its heart again. So this may be a key to the path forward.
This may look extravagant and costly. But what is the alternative?
A further divided country where bigotry and racial fears get so deeply entrenched that fascism digs even deeper roots in America’s soil and psyche?
Already Republicans whose ideology scares me talk of running in 2024. And I believe it was actor Robert De Niro who publicly warned, the next “Trump” could be way more skilled and savvy, organized, and effective than #45 ever was.
If that happens, we can kiss civilization as we know it goodbye.
That’s the nightmare that doesn’t have to become real if we rally around a vision for unification and healing, deep listening, and inclusion. And have meaningful conversations about who we are as a country. Are we a beacon to the world or the bearer of more darkness?
Marilyn Flower writes political humor and satire to delight socially and spiritually conscious folks. She’s a regular columnist for the prison newsletter, Freedom Anywhere, where she writes about faith and prayer. Five of her short plays have been produced in San Francisco. Clowning and improvisation strengthen her resolve during these crazy times. Stay in touch!