A thoughtful friend has suggested that the past few years have revealed some profound truths about who we are as a people. She cites some of the disturbing revelations emanating from #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo as a kind of apocalypse if we understand what the term implies, i.e. a kind of “peeling back” of the layers of obfuscation that have heretofore obscured the Truth. For most Americans, the truth is hard to accept, I fear.
I have long believed that we find facing the facts just too painful, and so we soothe ourselves with notions of American exceptionalism and sometimes even a revisionist history that refuses to make moral judgments about our collective past. Hey, I get it; nobody wants to embrace the ugliness of slavery and the shame of wealth inequality, to cite just two realities. That’s not who we are, we exclaim! Well, it’s certainly not who we want to be—who we claim to be! It just doesn’t sit right with us to peel back the layers to try and get at the substance.
It is far easier and more palatable to our bruised American sensibilities to demonize the AOCs of the world even as we hold fast to a system we know does not work. And we now know—every one of us—that what we have does not work. The apocalypse has come, and there is no denying it. The question remains as to what this new revelation will inspire us to do about it. Perhaps we do nothing and go on with business as usual.
This pandemic will end someday. Will that day find us clinging stubbornly to a battered and inequitable health care system? Will we continue to ignore the vast food insecurity that plagues this nation? Will we still turn our backs on those who struggle to pay their bills and who suffer under the weight of exorbitant prescription drug prices? Will we turn a blind eye to government corruption and the unholy efforts to deny access to the ballot box? Will we continue to consume the pablum of the Right because we just can’t stomach anything that looks like the dreaded socialism that we fear so deeply?
Because there is a better way for America. We now know that the old way is not it. This apocalypse has taught us valuable lessons. Will we allow our “leaders” to mislead us into a spiral of injustice and existential death? I pray we will muster the moral courage to rise up and do what is right.
I might have a decade and a half of life left. I just hope…
Raising Basileia 