What Happens In America Won’t Stay In America

The choices you make now matter to everyone, everywhere

Americans have an extra burden of responsibility now

And that might not seem fair. Recently, I wrote that being American these days is exhausting. The news in the days since has done nothing but confirm that feeling.

We are in a troubled time, one in which we each face a threat to our physical survival at the same time we watch our country being torn apart politically, socially, racially, environmentally. Senate Republicans balk at extending extra unemployment benefits even as an inevitable yet entirely foreseeable eviction crisis rolls toward us. The COVID case count and the death rate keep rising, numbing our minds with their grim toll. More anonymous, militarized federal troops are being deployed to our cities against the wishes of governors and mayors, exacerbating the protests already taking place with their Stasi-style methods. Meanwhile, the Current Occupant waxes gleeful about seeing Portland’s mayor be repeatedly teargassed.

As a nation, we waver on a tipping point. It’s damn scary.

But our weariness doesn’t let you or me off the hook

While our unprecedented, near-total inability to travel anywhere outside our own borders may make it feel as though the rest of the globe has turned its face away from us, the truth is that the world is watching.

Some look on in horror as a nation they once regarded with admiration and respect is subverted by division and hatred fomented by our leadership. Others — particularly authoritarian regimes — no doubt observe us with interest. It’s not simply that our top spot as leader of the free world is in jeopardy. As much as we have often failed, and failed deeply, to live up to them, the fact remains that the U.S. is a country founded on democratic ideals, “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men (sic)are created equal.*”

America is a 244-year-old, ongoing experiment in democracy

It hasn’t been an easy journey. From our earliest beginnings, our bedrock sense of identity as the land of the free has been eroded by dark forces: slavery, physical and cultural genocide against our native population, bigotry, intolerance, religious extremism. We have come close to utter failure before: the Civil War, Jim Crow, the McCarthy era, Bloody Sunday.

Up until now, the center has held. Whether or not our nation makes it through the eye of the needle as an intact, democratic republic (words that are not, it’s important to remember, in opposition to one another) remains to be seen.

And it means that all of us — as long as we’re old enough to think and act rationally and are not struggling for breath — have a role to play in our country’s agonizing identity crisis.

Your role is critical, whether it’s loud or quiet

The small decisions you make at this moment in history have deep repercussions: wearing a facemask is the most obvious and easiest example. Whether or not you accept minor inconvenience and discomfort — a restraint upon your personal liberty similar to wearing a seatbelt — can mean the difference between whether the people you come in casual contact with, say at the grocery store, remain healthy or end up on a ventilator.

Other individual choices are not so easy: visit Grandma, who may not live to see the end of this pandemic, or stay home? Send your kids to school, assuming your district is planning on opening anytime in the foreseeable future? Go back to work, even if you fall into one of the higher-risk categories? All of those decisions have the potential to impact people far outside your personal sphere.

If you are taking on a more active, public-facing role, your actions are a matter of the highest stakes, especially if you are one of the thousands of protesters in cities from Portland to Austin to Omaha. If you’ve taken to the streets to resist systemic racism, the abuse of police powers, and what is rapidly devolving into an authoritarian crackdown on free speech, then I salute you — assuming your intentions are good.

If you’re part of a righteously protective Wall of Moms, or a leaf-blower-wielding Wall of Dads, or Vets, or Nurses, then you are my hero.

But if you can’t commit to nonviolence, you don’t belong out there

I understand your anger at invading feds or police brutality. I know it’s outrageous that they can smash the bones in a peaceably-behaving Navy vet’s hand and then drench him with teargas, or fire “less-lethal” projectiles at another peaceful marcher’s head, landing him in the hospital for facial surgery to repair his broken skull, and do so with apparent impunity.

It makes me furious too. But if you toss bricks or concrete blocks, if you smash windows, if you lob fireworks, if you storm barricades around federal property, or set fires, or even lob water bottles — and certainly if you show up with an armed militia, however justifiable it may seem — then you are playing right into the authoritarian narrative.

Whatever violence you indulge in, no matter how comparatively minor, will be magnified a thousandfold. It will be used as clear evidence that the stormtroopers are justified, that our (Democratic-led) cities are devolving into anarchy, that anyone who says #BlackLivesMatter or objects to police brutality is a terrorist who has thrown away any claim to civil rights.

If you’re going out there, go in the spirit of John Lewis, or don’t go

On Sunday, July 26, civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis’ casket was carried across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama to commemorate his leading role in the famous event on March 7, 1965 that became known as Bloody Sunday. I vividly remember, as a preteen girl, being shocked to tears at the televised images of police viciously attacking peaceful, unarmed marchers with nightsticks, clubs, and teargas. It was my first inkling that America had a brutal side. Lewis and other marchers were beaten so badly they were hospitalized.

But John Lewis did not back down. He fought back, but with words and positive actions, and he called on us to do the same. He made noise, he got in good and necessary trouble, but he never allowed himself to be fodder for the law-and-order myth machine by descending into violence. He called on people of goodwill to “redeem the soul of America.” He told us to speak out, to condemn speech that was racist or hateful, and, at all costs, to vote.

Even if we had to endure inconvenience, insult, or injury to do so.

Whatever you do, or don’t do, democracy is counting on you

Again, not just here in America. If we can’t keep it together through this long crisis without losing our soul, then the damage won’t be contained within our borders any more than the coronavirus is. The light of justice and freedom for which we fought at Gettysburg and stormed the beaches of Normandy to keep aflame will be blown out, leaving darkness ready to smother other nations as well as our own.

As November draws closer, a corrupt President is finding himself backed into a corner, his support caving in like a sandcastle at high tide. His only hope lies in ramping up his familiar, fear-mongering, race-baiting tactics to new levels. We must not remain silent or complacent, but neither can we give him and his minions any justification for their abuses.

Take what action you can; don’t sit this one out. But make sure that if you get in trouble, you get in good trouble. Now is an excellent time to recall Mr. Lewis’s words from the 1963 March on Washington:

“I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete.”

*President Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address