Something's Happening Here, What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear

Turning to History for the Answers

There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. Buffalo Springfield

When I last wrote, it was Christmas, and we were beside the sea in the busy port town of Dylan Thomas’ childhood. “There were wolves in Wales, “he wrote,” and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats.” Christmas, a time suffused with the nostalgia of childhood innocence, with a longing for something pure and good, is only two weeks behind me, but any lingering feelings I had of “peace on earth, good will to men” have been blown out to sea like flotsam in a storm. 

For the last two days my phone has, like a frog in spring, been chirping and croaking with news of the Republican party’s efforts to disrupt democracy by demanding bone-chilling concessions in the election of Speaker of the House of Representatives. Yesterday, in the dead of night, minutes after January 6 slipped away, McCarthy was finally elected after nineteen roll call votes. But to get those votes, McCarthy had to agree to actions that will render much of the federal government powerless in the next two years. This will happen, as Heather Cox Richardson reports, because McCarthy had to agree to compromises that will dramatically reduce the funding of government programs.

“The extremists wanted this control because they seem to believe that if the U.S. stops funding the government, the programs they hate will die. To kill off the government built by the liberal consensus, they are threatening to do as Trump has advocated: take the government into default.”

It was all too uncanny that this chaos in the House unfolded on the very day, two years ago, when Trump and his followers violently breached the Capitol in an effort to overthrow the election results. Trauma has a way of holding on to the past for dear life: images blink and shimmer in neon colors, sounds pound. “Don’t forget, don’t forget,” the brain mutters stubbornly. 

I haven’t forgotten.  Hours of sitting on the couch watching the January 6 violent coup are imprinted on my mind. Images of lawmakers taking shelter in this same House gallery where the votes were taken for Speaker, of violent crowds roaming the halls of the capitol, of the Confederate flag being carried in those same halls are as vivid to me now as they were on that day two years ago. 

Remember. Remember. But what is it I am supposed to remember? What does all this mean?

There’s something’s happening here,

What it is ain’t exactly clear

There’s a man with a gun over there

Telling me I got to beware

******************************************

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down. 

Clearly, we are, as a country, suffering and flailing, despite, or maybe because of, the strong leadership of a man even older than I, President Biden. As I turn seventy-eight this month, we are far from the political peace of my childhood which was shaped, as described by Heather Cox Richardson, by the Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal:

“When the new system shored up the economy, preserved democracy, and enabled the U.S. to help destroy European fascism, most Americans—Republicans as well as Democrats—supported the new system. Over time, they expanded it, and they also began to use the government to protect civil rights. The shared belief in this active government became known as the “liberal consensus” and was so popular that most Americans never imagined it might be dismantled. Social Security, for example, the Voting Rights Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency were all simply part of the air we breathed.” 

In my work as a psychotherapist it is my job to make sense of the personal trauma of the person sitting across from me.  There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. I always begin the search for meaning with a person’s history. I listen for the unprocessed, unlanguaged clefts in a person’s past. I believe change happens by making conscious the ways in which the past binds us to old beliefs, feelings, ideas of self and other and that without examination of the past, it would, and does, as the old cliché goes, repeat itself. 

Curiously, it wasn’t until I got old and gray that I began to look to history to make sense of what it is that’s happening here in the world around me. I hated history in school. It was all memorization of dates and treaties and famous white men and battles and inventions. Maybe I missed it, but the way history was taught, and written, gave me no greater understanding of what it means to live, of what the internal battles are that mankind faced and is facing, of where we came from, or what our choices are. I read fiction for those answers, but never history. 

Now, just as I combed the history of those who came to me for help, I comb the history books for clues to how to understand this frightening moment of distrust and violence against democracy.  For Christmas, our daughter gave her father the mind-bending book I recommend to all of you: “The 1619 Project,” a compilation of essays and poetry on the topic of slavery and the founding of this country. But he hasn’t had a chance to read it yet, as I have stolen it out from under his nose and hidden it under my pillow. 

The other night, while reading the purloined book, on page 169 I found this:

“So if Washington often feels broken, that’s because it was built that way.  A 2011 study of twenty-three long-standing democracies identified the United States as the only country in the group that had four “veto points” empowered to block legislative action: the president, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court.  Most other democracies in the study had just a single veto point…But the United States government is characterized by political inaction—and that was by design.  By creating political structures that weakened the role of the federal government’s ability to regulate slavery, the framers hobbled Washington’s ability to pass legislation on a host of other matters. Chief among them was taxation.” 

Proslavery advocates from Virginia were the primary authors of the Constitution. They were so afraid that Northern majorities would dismantle slavery that they wrote into the Constitution two institutions based on population numbers: the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. 

 “What pro-slavery advocates feared most was democracy itself: that Northern majorities would use the power of the federal government to dismantle slavery. This fear shaped our political institutions in ways still felt today.”  P. 168

So there it is. The original cleft, the faulty foundational principle upon which this country, this democracy lies, even today.  Democracy has to be limited or it actually might grant freedom to everyone, even Black and Brown people and women and immigrants from Sudan and Haiti. And it might have to give land back to all those Americans, native to this land, from whom it was stolen. All that baloney about checks and balances built into the government: just so much rationalization for not actually having to be who we say we are: a nation dedicated to freedom, to liberty and justice. 

Now that I’ve uncovered this deadly cleft what would I, the psychotherapist sitting across from myself, tell my troubled self I need to do or think or feel about my American family’s past? Would I advise myself to sit with the word slavery or the word theft? Could we leave it there and call it a day?  Thanks so much, I’ve got it now? 

“Sit with it,” I would tell myself. “Go deeper until the full emotional truth of this is something you don’t need to run from. Sit with it long enough to wake you to an entirely new way of seeing and being. Isn’t that what you came here for?  Real change, real turning?”

I take my advice and sit there until an entirely new word offers itself to me.  The word is murder. Beware reading history. You will learn terrible things about yourself and your country. The history of the establishment of this place called home is a history of murders committed in the name of God, in the name of saving the world from savagery and paganism, in defense of Manifest Destiny, in service to capitalism. Hundreds of thousands of murders.

My family, in so far as I am fully identified as Katheen Sullivan, and America is my home, murdered slaves by working them to death, murdered them when they tried to gain freedom, murdered them in overloaded ships when we brought them to this country. We hung black men from trees when they didn’t pay small debts or tried to learn to read. We massacred Native Americans and then stole their lands.  We scalped them.  We starved them, we took away their ability to support themselves and thrive.

It doesn’t matter that I personally didn’t throw the rope over the tree and place the noose around the Black man’s neck.  What matters is that I understand the price of this place called home, this place with lush green lawns mowed down to the sea.  This place where we’ve done the same thing to nature: destroyed thousands of species and despoiled the life enhancing biosystems to the point where all life is at stake.  

“How do you feel now?” I ask the self who sits on the other side of the room, processing all this.

“I feel a great aching grief, like an ocean of sadness, pools of regret and ripples of shame. I feel the wish to open my arms to all the families we have left out, degraded, shamed, murdered. I want to join with them in a murmuration of care.  It makes me feel more deeply committed to the activism work I am doing.  It opens my heart and gives rise to a desire to give birth to another, more loving, more inclusive way to live on this planet.   

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down.