Why Things Matter

Sometimes I'm tempted to discount ritual. To think of the familiar repetitions of ceremony as rote and empty. But I noticed something as I watched Biden's inauguration. I felt a profound relief that the ceremony meant something to so many people. So many of us watched Kamala Harris make history. We listened to Biden quote St. Augustine. We were made speechless by Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem. We took in the colors, the music, and the peculiar pride of the U.S. transfer of power. We wept with the momentousness of it all. A small catharsis.

Biden isn't our savior. No one should fool themselves into thinking that. But these last four years have been a steady drum of callousness and cruelty. A nearly constant insistence from the White House that nothing and no one mattered. We were ruled by lies, greed and corruption, incompetence and arrogance, and a vile exploitation of this country's most hateful history. We were changed by these four years. Or if you haven't been, then you must face the question of why not?

To be alive now is not the same as surviving unscathed. I think about the people who are lost inside conspiracy theories, whose entire worldview must be sustained through a perpetual screen of lies, who have submitted so completely to authoritarian fantasies that they would overthrow their own democratically elected government. What meaning can a free world hold for them? Other than a call to vengeance and violence. And we will have to live with these people and their very real threat.

My children are young. They've come into consciousness in the last four years. Alongside playdates and all the firsts of childhood, they've had to march and write to legislators and color protest signs and understand themselves as part of a community under siege. I think about a protest sign, from the Women's March in 2017, that read: If Trump builds a wall, my generation will tear it down. I think about the burdens we place on the future. The hope that we insist lives there. It is a deflection and a lie if we do not see that we ourselves have laid the foundation for that useless wall. That wall sits on the bedrock of our fake innocence, American exceptionalism, and steady refusal to acknowledge the colonizing, violent white supremacist forces embedded in our institutions. And the truth is our children have no future until that is uprooted and starved out of our national identity.

You can choose to think of the last four years as an unfortunate anomaly. You can let out a breath that democracy held, and want to move on. This brush with tyranny, like a car crash you passed by after the fact. You might even look forward to the coming years as a kind of course correction for the force of goodness you think U.S. imperialism is. But you would be wrong.

That my children know how to play, that I know how to use my voice, that you know you don't want me to be right does not negate that fact. We watched our government cage children, pardon the most egregious predators, court and inflame white supremacists, harass journalists, pack the courts, weaken our civil service and protections, and enrich themselves while people suffered and suffered and suffered. Even if you will not recognize the burden of nearly a half million preventable deaths, it still weighs on all of us. We know now just how disposable people are to the unchecked power of wealth and white supremacy. When anyone is disposable, eventually all of us will become so. A hierarchy of human worth will always grind through every human life. Your position, your justifications by way of class or race or gender or religion or money, will not protect you from that predation.

To manifest a world in which all of us truly matter requires imagination, which is another word for bravery. Because that world has yet to exist. It starts with language, with shared rituals and ceremonies to remind us of our connections and collective responsibilities, and with an uncertain faith in those responsibilities. But a new world must always be opening towards the wholeness of truth. We must see the world unvarnished as it is so we can truly envision the just world that can be. We must hold together the possibilities and impossibilities. Our liberation resides in the humility of every life being unaccountably precious and powerful. Our liberation demands conscious attention to our incalculable lives and our ongoing legacies. I don't want my children to be cleaning up after my generation or any other generation. I want them to be freer than I, or any other fool adult, can possibly imagine.