photo by Peggy Braun
courtesy of Sohn Fine Art
Our President, the one we still have, remains audacious about hope. A few days ago, he advised the citizens of Flint, Michigan not to communicate despair to their children. This is the kind of nuanced suggestion we have come to expect from Barack Obama. It implies that he understands the anguish experienced by the people of Flint as they check in to motels in neighboring towns once a week to shower.....but that he also appreciates the corrosive effect that despair can have on young people. He knows that children need hope, even if giving it to them involves a certain amount of bearing false witness. The incident in Michigan makes me think back to the unwarranted optimism of the postwar years when confidence in the future was impressed upon me. I like to say that I was born in the last four days of the pre-nuclear age, August 2, 1945. Of course, as an infant, I was ignorant of the more than 50 million people who had just died in World War II, including the Holocaust and the bombs dropped on Japan. But it wasn't just me. Throughout grade school in the Eisenhower years, unless we were red diaper babies, we all continued to cling to a scrubbed version of reality. Where I came from, we were spoon fed progress with our Gerber's baby food. It was, as the pre-presidential General Electric spokesman, Ronald Reagan pointed out, our most important product.
We all wandered wide-eyed in Mr. Disney's Tomorrowland, flying to the moon, curing cancer. We were hoodwinked into believing that the epic violence at mid-century was an aberration, that the country would outgrow its racism. We watched as the new cars came off the assembly line and the women waxed their floors on TV and we held fast to the illusion of a future.
Somewhere along the line, while our contemporaries fought in Vietnam, or protested the war at home, or spent those years exiled in Sweden, we lost our innocence. Now, we are confronted with a Candidate who advertises his authenticity, his fervor for "telling it like it is," who gleefully brings the widespread simmering fear of women, people of color and immigrants to a boil. The Candidate serves up a toxic soup - promising to make America great again by playing to a nostalgia for a simpler time that never existed - seasoned with a reality show hot sauce that leaves us desperate for a cold glass of water that doesn't come from the Flint River. What goes around comes around. Some months ago, I saw a post on Facebook that featured a head shot of Hitler next to Trump with a list of characteristics common to both of them. I immediately shared it. Ten minutes later, I frantically took it down, thinking I had gone too far, crossed the line. This is the hopeful child in me, crouching under her school desk in the ludicrous belief that this posture will save me in the event of a nuclear attack. I am a grownup now and can't afford to be so naive.
But what will we tell the children? It depends on our willingness to absorb some portion of the pain of the world, even when it keeps us awake at night or causes us to burst into tears for no discernible reason. Confronting the reality makes it possible for us to know what's at stake when our children ask us difficult questions. The best answers come when we stare down the demons, let them know that we are on to them and will not allow ourselves to be deceived. If we fall for the magician's sleight of hand as my parents and teachers did in the '50s, we will lapse into habits of denial and avoidance. Children know the difference between adults who are carrying a great burden of truth, feeding it to them in digestible bites, and adults who are not paying attention. Children, if they are loved, will ask to be citizens of this fractured world in small increments and sometimes they will see things, like hungry people on street corners, that adults have become inured to. Then, they will be our teachers. We will learn from them that one answer, a first response, to the man's hunger is to give him your sandwich.