Bridging the Gap

I didn’t so much boycott President Trump’s Joint Address to Congress as dread it. My expectations were sufficiently low: a campaign-style speech, too long and too full of half-truths and un-truths. My expectations were, unfortunately, about right.

But it set me to wondering what it will take to recognize and slow the torrent of false messaging and divisive strategies that drive wedges between the American people, keeping us separated, gnawing at each other’s ankles before we finish our first morning coffee.

In a few weeks, my new book (Uneasy Silence) will be available. Here’s part of a reflection on that question as framed there:

“We need, as a society, to find a way to bridge the news gap between MSNBC and Fox, and between many of the thousands of voices shouting on social media. Unless we can reach across the divide, we’ll never find a way to talk to one another. I’d like to think that truthfulness will be the basis of trustworthiness. But we have a long way to go. You hold your truth; I hold mine. The battle being waged in both traditional and social media is to win our loyalty that the truth is being told whether it is or not. When nearly half of the nation’s voting adults are willing to accept a torrent of lies in place of honest storytelling, we’re evidently in some trouble.

Perhaps it’s because I served President Gerald R. Ford, who was at once truthful and humble, that I bleed over the lies told by some so-called ”leaders.” I long for the moment in which every news outlet will bring us a single message:

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule….”

It’s a half-century since President Ford took office, and once more we’re struggling to “bind up the internal wounds.”

To stitch us back together, we need to find a way to share a common truth, resist motives of profit and fear, and reach out to people with whom we disagree, sometimes strenuously. But my behavior shows that I’m staying home, close to friends and family whose life views are close to mine.

Reach out to strangers who stormed the Capitol? Listen to someone who votes against my priority? Try some social stitching that’d pull together our divided population? Oh…I don’t know. I’m not confident it’s worth the price in time and emotional energy. So I stay home, as comfortable as I can be, listening to news stories I trust.

I may be part of the problem. I need to become part of the solution. I’ll definitely need your help on this.”

 — Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Uneasy Silence, coming soon wherever online books are sold.

Tools of the Trade

I don’t really know how it feels to be transgender, but I have some acquaintance with being the object of ignorance and bias. To be a woman with AIDS, when I was first diagnosed and probably still now, was to be a dirty woman, not infected but corrupted.

Maybe that’s why I resonated with an article sent by a friend, authored by Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell. He noted that “every single major medical organization, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychiatric Association, supports age-appropriate, gender-affirming care for transgender and non-binary people.”

Then he adds: “In the last election, the United States decided that the prime threats to American greatness are not the climate crisis, not systemic racism, not income inequality. Rather, they are immigrants, park rangers, and transgender people. I won’t go into all the tragic stories and statistics about transgender people – family rejection, social scorn, assaults and murders, homelessness, suicide. If anyone seriously believes that a person would go through all this so they could skulk in women’s restrooms or have a successful swimming career, they are dismally misinformed and have been callously manipulated.”

I think both are true: people are being “dismally misinformed” and “callously manipulated” by power brokers who want to stir the cauldron of fear and hide behind chaos. I can count on one hand the number of media sources I now completely trust to tell the objective truth, and some days I’m not sure about two of those fingers.

This isn’t new. I noted in my forthcoming book (Uneasy Silence) that what the media reports and what it does not report are both key to manipulation. Tiny lies become national stories. Myths and deceit are transformed into wide-spread convictions. Those manipulating the media in State Houses and the White House, invoking censorship to “cleanse history,” are employing tools of the trade for despots and dictators. This isn’t politics as usual; it’s dictatorship as always.

And it's why I included the following in my book:

“Sarah Quinn tells the largely unreported story of the 1889 massacre in Leflore County, Mississippi. Black farmers, struggling to survive, organized a co-op, or ‘Alliance,’ to increase the poverty-level prices they were paid for their goods. The National Guard, called in to impose order, arrested 40 local Black men and turned them over to a local white mob. One scholar estimates that the Leflore County Massacre took the lives of 25 Black people; reports at the time actually suggested 100 people were tortured and killed, including women and children. As a strategy to take away the voice of the oppressed, Quinn notes, the killing ‘was purposely not recorded in the county news, and a journalist who later went to investigate found locals too terrified to speak of it.’”

Terror works. Intimidation is a potent silencer. When Black people in Ocoee, Florida asked for the right to vote, a white mob turned Election Day 1920 into what historian Paul Ortiz has called ‘the single bloodiest election day in modern American history.’ At least sixty Black people died. Black homes were burned. Black men were castrated. The horror went largely unreported. I’ve never read about it in any history book I was assigned.

Time and again, history proves that nothing is as silent as the grave.”

I wanted Uneasy Silence to be uplifting and encouraging, something that evokes a smile or teases out a laugh. Early readers of the manuscript have generously said it achieves this.

But the problem is, every page isn’t a joke because I also wanted to tell the truth. These days, given – well, given everything, it isn’t easy to balance grim realities, truthful reporting and a relieving laugh before bedtime. It just ain’t easy.

— Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Uneasy Silence - coming soon

Oh, The Noise!

I want to cover my ears and, when I drop my hands, know that this was all just a bad dream. It hasn’t really happened: Shutting off the lifeline of USAID to millions – millions! – of infants, children and adults. Firing people who’ve been faithful public servants, a class and concept of which he is ignorant. Shoving himself into the roles of Kennedy Center leadership as if he’s qualified when, in truth, he's perfectly incompetent.  

All this roars into my life because I haven’t been able to shut it down. The noise is deafening. It’s like a screaming machine someone failed to oil. Noise so loud it hurts my ears and denies me the ability to think or act. The evil is being done while the noise immobilizes us, confuses us, uses chaos to keep us at bay, assaults us with today’s message of hatred and meanness before I’ve fully comprehended yesterday’s explosive, deafening roars.

I don’t know where the Resistance will come from in my life or what will make  Resistance most effective against this ugly storm of cruelty. But I know I need to find a quiet place to think, to analyze, to imagine, to remember and to bear witness to a life I knew before the screeching stupidities began.

“One of the greatest joys I’ve known in the past thirty years has been preaching in churches and synagogues. Surveying the many denominations in which I’ve led worship in the US and Africa, we’ve concluded that I could be a Unitarian Baptist Presbyterian Methodist Catholic Lutheran Jew.

…I’ve forgotten where I was preaching when I recalled the story of Elijah on Mt. Sinai looking to have a chat with God. Elijah was hanging out at the entrance to a cave where he’d spent the night, hoping God would drop by. Then came a hurricane-like wind that whipped across the mountain’s face; but, says the text, “the Lord was not in the wind.” The mountain trembled in an earthquake, and the earthquake was followed by lightning. “But the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a still, small voice.” And, yes, it was in the still, small voice that Elijah heard the Creator of heaven and earth. 

As I’ve aged, I’ve had spiritual experiences of various sorts, led by spiritual leaders from a full range of religious and spiritual traditions. For decades in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous I’ve confessed the need for a power greater than myself if I’m to be delivered into sanity and sobriety. And always, when alone and reflecting in silence, I’m drawn to a divine reality containing the power of the universe and speaking to me in such a soft voice that the silence is hardly interrupted.”

It's what I need now: a quiet place where I can think clearly, remember I’m here for a purpose and wonder what that might be.

— Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Uneasy Silence — coming soon