Published in The Write Launch, 12/2/20
An aspirational God manifest in an infant's birth, the sun's warmth, a shoreline's rippling waves appeals to conscience, evokes compassion, succumbs to base behavior's primal force. Order and chaos, hope and despair, love and indifference recycle. We can't break their stalemate, no matter our creed.
Pablo Picasso's imagery in Guernica confirms this; a 1938 Nazi bombing intervention in the Spanish Civil War fueled his outraged grayscale painting of “my horror at the military caste which is plundering Spain into an ocean of misery and death.” Bull and horse symbolize aggression and passivity, human hands seek heaven's help, a harlequin sows chaos.
God gave us free will, with which to perceive the divine spark in peers.
My father said salvation lies in human hands. His World War II roles on the Merchant Marine's harrowing Atlantic crossings and at organizing a seamen's union on Brooklyn’s Red Hook docks made the claim credible to me in childhood.
I yearned to grow old, to go south for civil rights in 1964 as a Freedom Summer volunteer but that lay beyond me at age eleven. Prepare yourself in school for when your leading time arrives, dad urged. He was an atheist, mom a lapsed Catholic. His self-sufficient ways, not her dependent prayer, intrigued me.
Dad espoused “a real people's movement” during train rides to the old Madison Square Garden's hockey games after homework. He painted a Paul Robeson word portrait of the sports, stage and song star blacklisted in the 1940s and 50s for outspoken antiracism.
“I shall take my voice wherever there are those who want to hear the melody of freedom or the words that might inspire hope and courage in the face of fear. My weapons are peaceful,” Robeson, steadfast though ruined, declared. “For it is only by peace that peace shall be attained.”
When he said in 1938 in the aftermath of the bombing in Spain that “false notions of national and racial superiority challenge the scientist, the writer, the artist,” Robeson could have been speaking to me.
Confronting American hypocrisy then as now drew a threatened right wing's rage.
Robeson, a lauded college athlete, Broadway actor and global concert artist, was lynched in effigy at a labor rally and outdoor performance at Peekskill, New York. The FBI surveilled him for decrying African colonialism and Cold War confrontation. His yearly income crashed from $150,000 to $3,000 ($1,800,000 to $35,000 now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says).
He sought coexistence, sang in the Soviet Union, joined the US Communist Party. Robeson's heroism grew crystal clear years on when I interviewed his son, author Paul Robeson Jr., and his Bancroft Prize-winning biographer, Martin Duberman, on radio.
Dad one night in the car confided that he, too, had been a party member. He swore me to secrecy as I, frightened, wondered why he disclosed this — perhaps to impress me and instill moral courage.
My mother's tales of French worker priests convinced me that the sacred and secular could blend to our benefit. “Let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that on Earth, God's work must truly be our own,” President Kennedy’s Inaugural Address concluded.
Converting to Judaism made me aware of universal values among world religions; why won't we uphold them? Why must distinct faiths dominate? Why must greed prevail as the pandemic worsens poverty?
May “heathen,” “infidel” and “crusade” be some day struck from parlance. May the fear that cloaks itself as hate yield to integrity and love.
“True insight does not issue from specialized knowledge, from membership in coteries, from doctrines or dogmas,” a Zen tenet says, “but from the preconscious intuitions of one's whole being, from one's own code.”
Facades shield people afraid to seem weak physically, emotionally, financially to others. Accepting what is seems safer than striving for love-driven political and personal conduct. A paradigm shift appears merely for a moment in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
Do I hear derisive godly laughter?
God gives us free will to perceive the divine spark in others, but people kept to themselves before our enforced isolation. Stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination surmount “diversity and inclusion” cliché. Evidence proves we fought civil war over slavery yet southern denial asserts the primacy of states' rights.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's June 2020 count of 1,741 Confederate memorials proves God waits for us to act justly. The Virginia State Capitol's grounds in Richmond preserve a Jefferson Davis speech stage. Charlotte, North Carolina's sidewalk plaques mark where he stood when told of Lincoln's death, the house in which General J.E.B. Stuart died, and the site of the Confederate Cabinet's last session.
It chilled me to see those in person. Does any other nation honor treason?
Ancient Greek gods mirrored human nature’s jealousy, wisdom, rage. They quarrelled through proxy wars, as do the US and Russia in Yemen, orchestrating who would live or die on Trojan plains in Homer's Iliad:
“Menelaus, drawing his sword with silver studs, hacked Pisander between the eyes, the bridge of the nose, and bone cracked, blood sprayed and both eyes dropped at his feet to mix in the dust — he curled and crashed. Digging a heel in his chest Menelaus stripped his gear and vaunted out in glory.”
He’ll fall two pages on.
Perhaps guilt prompts our rampant use of hero labels to divert from plights of veterans traumatized or broken though heroic.
President Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex but didn’t stem its selfish power. “Mondale wants to raise the Defense budget by 4 percent, Glenn by 6 percent,” former Senator McGovern said on the eve of the 1984 Democratic primaries to my wife Sharon and me in his office. “I want to cut it by 25 percent!”
President Trump fuels a covert home war over racism. Charlottesville's anti-Semitic torchbearing marchers were, he said, “good people” despite chanted threats and Heather Heyer’s death. Trump's call to “liberate Michigan” from pandemic shutdowns encouraged plotters to kidnap its Governor. Trump dismissed the Obama-era Federal Consent Decrees that in fifteen cities suppressed police violence against people of color.
Asserting “most cops are good” — the least we have a right to expect — preserves a divisive punishment model. Investing outsize police budgets in affordable housing, youth services, health care, job creation and job training — from love — would reduce needs for police and crime in tandem.
On a micro level, a man across the street yelled “You! Put one dollar on the floor!” as I, white, turned a corner on my daily perimeter walk of Prospect Park's Parade Ground. He reached me, breached my comfort zone as his chest bumped mine, and demanded the one though I offered more.
“Let's slow this down, you're my brother,” I said while complying. I felt sad, not afraid, at his anger, my consent his fleeting power. It left me distressed that the “greatest country in the history of the world” won't take care of its people.
Could climate change actualize the Biblical tale of God's deluge if we don't change our ways?
What can you see in Guernica?