Three Ways to Survive the Great Divide

Lately, for reasons not worth retelling, I’ve been feeling old and vulnerable. In my imagination, I’m warming up for a second guest appearance in “Kinky Boots” on Broadway. (Yes, I really did that.) In reality, after last week’s fall, I’m wondering where I put the cane someone generously brought me despite my protestations.

Stuck mostly in bed under doctor’s orders, I’ve had too much time to think. Inevitably, my mind flits to the Great Divide. We’re stacked up on the Fox-news right and the MSNBC-left. We’re picking, like vultures, at what used to be middle ground for common agreement. Everything from common good to common sense is ammunition in our political and social warfare. A year after the fact, Trump & Friends still cling to lies and incendiary rhetoric. Where do we find a “centrist” position on thugs violating everything American on January 6th? How are we going to survive this craziness?

It seems to me that, once I emerge from the world of pain killers and canes, I have three fundamental strategies by which to survive the divide.

Option One? Pick a side. Maybe I can get more comfortable with belonging on one side of the Great Divide. I can’t stand Trump’s arrogance, stupidity or dishonesty. He deserves time in the Big House not the White House. By definition, my animosity to him means I’m “on the other side.” So Rachel Maddow speaks my mind and Adam Schiff represents my views. I should just pick a side and stop worrying about how we’re coming apart as a nation. I may not have time or money enough for all the therapy this approach would require of me. But it’s an option.

A second option, and one some friends are taking, is to crawl under the blankets and hide. If I turn off the TV, stop reading any news and pretend the national warfare isn’t real, it’ll be gone when I come back. I’ve actually tried this option in short spurts. It doesn’t work for me. I can’t cuddle under a blanket while Texas’s Governor brutalizes Black men and all women.

Which leaves me with a third, and more difficult, option: Try rebuilding community. When I read that sentence again, it feels naïve. Who am I to create community? Where would I begin?

Forty-some years ago Robert Bellah and some colleagues wrote a remarkable book, Habits of the Heart. Despite its rigorous questions and academic tone, Bellah et al produced a study of “Individualism and Commitment in American Life” that still echoes today. They were forty years ahead of their time.

Somewhere mid-book, they were describing the kind of community we all long to have in America. I found that paragraph again this week. It’s worth hearing over the din of our political clashes:

“Communities…have a history — in any important sense they are constituted by their past — and for this reason we can speak of a real community as a ‘community of memory,’ one that does not forget its past. In order not to forget that past, a community is involved in retelling its story, its constitutive narrative, and in so doing it offers examples of the men and women who have embodied and exemplified the meaning of the community. These stories of collective history and exemplary individuals are an important part of the tradition that is so central to a community of memory. …But the stories are not all exemplary, not all about successes and achievements. A genuine community of memory will also tell painful stories of shared suffering that sometimes creates deeper identities than success, as we saw when Ruth Levy recognized her own identity with a community of shared love and suffering in the number [tattooed] on her babysitter’s arm."

If Option Three is recovering a community of memory, I’m for it. I don’t see another way. The hostilities between Trump’s allies and his enemies can only be settled by a shared memory and vision of a community we remember and want to recover.

The terrible danger I sense in the Republicans’ attempt to craft a new story around the 2020 election or the January 6th rebellion is this: They are crafting a false narrative, offering a different history of an America that is strictly Christian, white, anti-immigrant and anti-suffrage. They want to erase the realities experienced by America’s Black and indigenous communities. They are creating a false history built not on patriotism but on falsehoods.

General Colin Powell died this week. Two years ago he warned us that we "have come to live in a society based on insults, on lies and on things that just aren't true. It creates an environment where deranged people feel empowered. We've seen incidents before but now, we've come to live in a society…attacking almost every facet of American life.” He was just right.

The greatest danger of Trump’s assaults isn’t found in the physical damage left behind on January 6, or even the false claims that riddle his speeches and his addled brain. The most grave danger is a rewriting of American history. He is seeking, and in some quarters achieving, a false narrative of who America is and who it wants to be.

Turning off the news may be a short-term option. Curling under the covers works for a day. But what we really need is a community of memory built on truth.

The Impossible Caregiver

COVID has put the spotlight on medical caregivers who exhaust themselves struggling to save the un-saveable. Reading through old speeches, I was reminded that in the 1980s and ‘90s AIDS, not COVID, begged for heroic caregivers. I singled out one who has guided us through both COVID and AIDS, Dr. Michael S. Saag, when keynoting an AIDS Symposium at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Dear, dear Michael – how we admire your brilliance. We’re grateful for your tenacity, and we can barely understand your boundless energy and productivity. Do you ever sleep?

Beyond the limelight where you love to act out some goofy Broadway song, after the lights have gone out in the lab, when your office is finally empty, we’ve seen you haunting the hallways of your clinic. You were still looking for the man whose life you could not save, the sweet woman who was never compliant, the nurse who could not hold another dying hand, the patient who was both rabbi and friend. One of the reasons we love you is that you’ve never let us go, even when death has taken us.

But there was more, not only about what you’ve done but about who you are. You never sought a famous list of patients, though others have and you could have. You never worried about your haircut, or made your bedside manner into that feigned sympathy we resent in caregivers who must hurry on to others.

You wore our blonde wigs and danced into our rooms, bringing us laughter when you could not bring us healing. In the midst of all the dying, however improbably, you have relieved us of our obsession with death. In the quiet of the night, I have sometimes wondered how you stayed sane and gentle amid the torrent of dying, where you found strength to point us to hope when we had none.

You have served us all well. How often have I heard you speak of science, and responded by speaking to you of miracles. You have taught us about knowledge and wisdom, and we have answered you with love….

Phenomenal Women

I was rummaging through old files and ran into a speech manuscript from six or seven years ago. An organization paying tribute to some “Phenomenal Women” asked that I keynote their event. Here’s some of what I said then and would be willing to say again.

Although I don’t place myself among them, I’ve known some phenomenal women. I knew the First Lady when she was broken by addiction and by breast cancer. Decades before it was fashionable, Betty Ford looked into the camera and told the truth. And I knew Elizabeth Glaser when her body failed but her spirit triumphed. She, like Mrs. Ford, was phenomenal.

In Ghana, it was a mother with AIDS who had lost all nine of her children to the virus; now, she  was caring for her dying sister. Inside Riker’s Island Women’s Prison, I met an amazing chaplain who loved the women others despise. In Rwanda, the woman for whom death in the Genocide might have been more merciful – she’d been raped, and mutilated, and shoved beneath the bodies of her children – came out of a crowd to gently ask how she might help me.

These women are bypassed in a culture obsessed with celebrity. They didn’t have Twitter accounts or Facebook pages. They did not crave headlines because they were not hunting for fame. Somehow, perhaps intuitively, they recognized that if name recognition is what matters most, Charles Manson would be our role model. Instead of nurturing celebrity, these women modeled character.

Then there was a women I met in Kansas City twenty years ago. We’d honored AIDS volunteers in a fund-raising champagne dinner hosted by a socialite who was well coiffed, wearing her three strands of pearls. As we sat together, occasionally chatting, she felt very…Republican. It wasn’t until we left that I discovered the truth.

As we came out of the ballroom into the warm summer evening, we were greeted by a busload of so-called “Christians” who’d driven in from rural Kansas to scream at us. They chanted “AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!” and “God hates fags!!!” and – pointing at me – “Die! Die!  Die!”

In the screaming and the chaos behind the police line, the “socialite” with whom I’d had dinner surveyed the screamers, then sidled up to me and said quietly, “We must be doing something right.” She was dead a year later. Cancer. As far as I know, she never asked for celebrity or fame. But, God – the woman had character. She was, in a word, phenomenal.