It’s (Long Past) Time to Take it Down

Like many who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, I grew up admiring Robert E. Lee. In an era when our history books stressed a consensus view of America’s past, Lee was seen as a noble figure: a respected leader, a skillful tactician, and an honorable man. President Lincoln offered him a major command in the Union Army, over which he agonized before resigning his commission and taking command of the forces of his beloved Virginia. In doing so, he chose to wage war against his country, a war that would claim more lives than all our future wars combined.

Lee’s whitewashed legacy reinforced the image of the Lost Cause– an antebellum South now Gone With the Wind, yet still struggling nobly to preserve its agrarian way of life. It’s an image that haunts us still. As the courtly symbol of that idyllic South, Lee has allowed us to gloss over its brutality.

Taking down his statue will not, as critics claim, erase history. On the contrary, it will enrich it by acknowledging historical truths we need to confront: four million slaves and over 4,000 lynchings, a century of Jim Crow and racism still strong enough to elect a president who will not condemn it. Robert E. Lee was a complex man, but there is nothing complicated about the symbol he has become. How can we fulfill Lincoln’s promise “to bind up the nation’s wounds” if we insist on venerating icons that rub salt in them?

Resisting the Erosion of Democracy

“The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America,” a joint exhibit of the Brooklyn Museum and the Equal Justice Initiative, opened at the museum. Two days later, not far away on Long Island, President Trump gave a speech to law enforcement officers in which, to “significant applause,” he gave a nod and a wink to police brutality.

These two events are part of the single story of America. The first confronts us with truths we seek to evade in the belief that “great art and courageous conversations contribute to a more just, civic, and empathetic world.” The other, the one Donald Trump tells, aims to drive us further apart.

Since the end of World War Two – and its lesson of what happens in a country where groups of people are dehumanized – America has, slowly and against much resistance, broadened the definition of our community.

But today we have a new kind of bully pulpit, from which the president goes after the vulnerable, the marginalized ones, because that’s what bullies do, and suggests that organizations that have struggled to be more inclusive don’t need to do so anymore.

Many are pushing back: the military declined (at least for now) to enforce the transgender ban; the boy scouts apologized for Trump’s speech; the police resisted his call. But many are also cheering. I fear that those who resist will grow tired, while those who cheer will grow bolder, and democracy will erode.

America cannot have an honest, unifying conversation with a president who speaks in divisive, deceitful code. It’s time to join the resistance.

The Reign of the Locusts

Some things you just can’t get out of your head.

In yesterday’s Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor discussed the “largest recorded swarm of locusts” in American history, which took place on July 20, 1875. Locusts have been a plague at least since the time of Moses whose god set them on Egypt where “they covered all the ground until it was black. They devoured … everything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees [until] nothing green remained on tree or plant in all the land of Egypt.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine that the Bible-reading farmers of the Great Plains were prepared for what came out of the sky: a swarm 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, as 10 billion insects descended as one giant organism and devoured everything in their path – every stalk of grain, the bark off trees, laundry hanging out to dry, tool handles and fence posts. They even ate the clothes right off farmers who tried to scare them away.

And then, when they had eaten everything, they disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived. No Rocky Mountain locust has been found alive since 1902.

Nobody has missed them very much, other than some entomologists for whom the fate of the locust remains a mystery to be solved.

For me, the mystery is how quickly the world we take for granted can be upended. I’m not suggesting that Washington is filled with locusts, but as I read the newspaper each morning, I realize that we can no longer assume the continuity of government on which we have, for better or for worse, up to now, relied.

Thank Heaven for Women

Some years ago when my daughter Gayley was in preschool, her friend Niles would assume the characters of his favorite Saturday morning cartoon villains and terrorize his classmates, for whom the distinction between reality and television cartoons was not yet fully developed. Since we didn’t have a television back then, Gayley had no idea what Niles was doing; and when she told him to stop being so silly, he seemed relieved to drop his tough-guy facade and just be a four-year-old again.

I thought of this story as I read about the role three Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Shelley Moore Capito, played in the final collapse of their party’s healthcare follies, which had come down to repealing Obamacare and replacing it with nothing.

“We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it,” said Donald Trump, washing his irresponsible hands of a matter that seems to him little more than a way to score political points. “We’ll let Obamacare fail.”

Compare that with Capito’s “I did not come to Washington to hurt people.”

Capito, Collins and Murkowski are no fans of Obamacare. But they also seem much less afraid of bullies than so many of their male counterparts – perhaps because they see through the persona of the locker-room lout and perhaps also because they see their roles as actually trying to do something to help their constituents.

Maybe gender has nothing to do with it. And maybe it’s just a coincidence that 169 years ago today the first Women’s Rights Convention met in Seneca Falls, N.Y. and condemned the “history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.”