People talk about how tiring it is to fight all the time, how
exhausting it is to stay informed and think about what’s going on on the
surface and below the surface, how much it hurts to care so much and feel so
roundly defeated day after day by human ignorance and cruelty. But I think about people like Nelson Mandela and Pete Seeger and
Joan Baez and Noam Chomsky and Harry Belafonte and Angela Davis and Gloria
Steinman and others who managed not to get assassinated but have kept up their
crusade for social justice well into their 70’s, 80’s and even 90’s. Where do
they get their stamina from?
I believe that the energy of soul-force is real and palpable and
feeds us from some underground spring. It connects us to a past family of
ancestors who stood up and fought and links us to a future generation who
depend on us for a worthy and just life to come. It sustains us beyond the
short hits of coffee and chocolate and infuses life with a purpose and meaning
that begets the necessary energy to build it.
Meanwhile, what I think must be really exhausting is the act of
constantly turning your head to “pretend that you just don’t see.” Day after
day making up alternative facts, denying anything that challenges your
carefully constructed illusion designed to protect you from personal responsibility
and accountability and keep blaming your own failures on the scapegoat du jour.
Each act of denial tears another hole in the fabric of soul and that’s where
that long-haul energy leaks out.
Denial is not new in America. In fact, it has been a part of our
national style ever since the Founding Fathers said “All men are created equal”
while making out the list of day’s chores for their slaves. It is the go-to
default response to any attempt at critique— in my day, it was “Why don’t you
go to Russia?!” and today it’s “We’re still the greatest country in the world!”
in the face of all facts to the contrary—health care, education, quality of
life, quality of food, social justice significantly better in a long list of countries
and crime and murder rates much lower in another long list. Oh, but excuse me,
did I mention “facts?” Our current denial runs on “alternative facts.” Silly of
me to forget.
Back in the 1990’s, poet Robert Bly, along with James Hillman
and Michael Meade, put together a remarkable collection of poetry titled “The
Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.” In a section titled “Making a Hole in Denial,”
Bly wrote:
“It’s
possible that the United States has achieved the first consistent culture of
denial in the modern world. Denial can be considered as an extension of the
naïve person’ inability to face the harsh facts of life.
The
health of any nation’s soul depends on the capacity of adults to face the harsh
facts of the time. But the covering up of painful emotions inside us and the blocking
out of fearful images coming from outside have become in our country the
national and private style. We have established, with awesome verve, the animal
of denial as the guiding beast of the nation's life. As the rap song has it, ‘Denial
ain’t just a river in Egypt.’”
And so here we are, the floodwaters of Denial ravaging the land
fed by a couple of centuries conveniently ignoring the genocide, enslavement,
oppression that made us rich and powerful in the material sense and weak and
bankrupt in the moral and spiritual sense. For those still wondering whether to
turn up the volume and plug your ears or look ourselves in the eye, feel the
pain, grieve and move on, just know that one will exhaust and deplete you and
the other fill you with the soul-force that is the source of all energy.
