Keeping Our Balance in the Era of Trump

essay

A friend called recently to ask for help. She told me she was melting down witnessing Donald Trump’s flood of outrageous appointments and executive orders. As one friend to another, she wondered, could I tell her something calming, something that would help her make sense of what we are witnessing? In other words, could I talk her down from the tree of despair she’d climbed?

Well, no, I answered, not exactly. I feel much the same, and I’m often as confused as anyone.

So we commiserated, looking hard for a bright, comforting spot to settle on. Maybe he’ll over-reach, as a few commentators have predicted, then fall, as many tyrants have. Maybe Congress or the courts will stop him. A lot of us are having these conversations. It’s easy in fast moving times, when the stakes are so high and forces seem so overwhelming, to lose our head. We find ourselves waving our arms and screaming at the television screen, entertaining fantasies of mayhem or escape.

My friend and I did come up with a little something, though. We agreed to remember Nietzsche’s famous admonition: While wrestling with a monster, take care not to become a monster. We need to learn to stay informed and engaged without becoming beaten into apathy or driven to an ultimately nihilistic rage.

But how?

One way to is to take action, as I argued in my last essay. We each need to find something tangible, however small, that we can do to resist. To do that, we obviously need to stay informed of events--but keeping up with the blow-by-blow assault on norms and laws, the summary dismissal of public servants tasked with making things work as intended, the utter stupidity and cruelty of Trump’s pronouncements and decisions—all of that is exactly what drives us to melt down as my friend did.

So, besides those individual acts of informed resistance, we need something else.

Since this is going to be a long struggle, we need to take the long view. In order to stay sane and to be productive forces for good, as well as to develop some level of perspective on current events, we need to cultivate an appreciation for the forces that have brought us to this moment. You know—history.

Unfortunately, many of us slept through history class.

Now, though, it’s time to wake up and open our books—or at least our podcasts. Personally, I prefer books, though reading may be on its way to becoming a pastime about as popular as knitting. That’s a shame, but reading’s decline is a subject for a different essay. The thesis for today is that we badly need to develop a deeper appreciation for our national story. Our small acts of resistance are our contributions to that story, but the story didn’t start with us. We are the product of the past. Knowing something of that past and how it may have shaped the present confers perspective, and perspective, oddly enough, offers a measure of solace. It’s a balancer.

Fortunately, there’s lots of readable and listen-to-able help out there on a wide range of subjects. To get started, if you need to get started, here are three experts worth paying attention to. The first and most obvious choice is Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson’s series of essays and podcasts. A professor at Boston College, she’s an expert on American economic and political history and an accomplished “explainer,” to boot. She brings you up to speed quickly and painlessly. Listen to her or read her. Your choice. Either way, she’ll make you smarter fast.

My second recommendation comes at us with a slightly different expertise. Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum is a journalist and historian with a special expertise in Eastern European history. You can find her on YouTube, in the Atlantic, where she is presently a staff writer, or you can choose one of her very readable books. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, for example, takes the reader on a tour of the similarities and differences between what we are experiencing in the United States now and what has been going on in Easten Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union. Though Americans have not chosen the more positive direction she imagines in her closing, the insights she gleans from her research are invaluable. The book is a reminder that history does not necessarily repeat itself, but it pretty clearly rhymes.

Then there’s Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story America’s Great Migration, which recounts through exhaustive research the movement of African-Americans from the Southern U. S. to the North and West. This is truly compelling reading. Wilkerson tells the life stories of a cast of individuals who made the move, and why they left the South. She paints a vivid picture of what their lives were like in the Jim Crow South and their struggles in their new homes. The Great Migration, which I never heard a word about as an undergraduate in American Studies, was a deeply profound event in American history. If you read nothing else, read this and follow it with Caste, an equally compelling read.

Americans will do well to take note of our national story. Having a realistic, informed perspective arms one to take the long view in what is sure to be a long struggle. And that perspective temporarily lifts us above the outrages and threats of the moment to a sane spot where we are reminded once again that, yes, the arc of history does indeed, eventually, bend toward justice—but only if we, average citizens, keep our balance with an active, informed faith.

For most of us, The United States has been a place of hope. Right now we are experiencing a dark moment in our story. Let’s make it an aberration to be remembered as a tragic mis-step corrected by a people who looked themselves in the mirror, gained self-knowledge, and moved on to repair their institutions, which we will surely need to do at the end of the next four years.