What to any of US is the fourth of July?
I am going to try this again, this disembodied speaking to the world. It still feels like stepping out onto a stage, where I'm about to sing, solo, to a group of people whose vague presence behind the footlights I can sense, but whom I can't actually make out in the glare. There might be . . . one? two? people out there? ... Oh, as my eyes adjust, I become pretty sure that one of them is a janitor, sweeping between the seats, just doing her job--and probably thinking that she could do her work more efficiently and pleasantly and if I weren't up here sqawking into the mic.
Which is to say, if you're reading this, dear reader, thank you for your patience.
So. What you all should know about me, on this day, all two of you, is that Frederick Douglass is perhaps my one true hero.
In his photographs, his face is always stern, serious, interrogating me, "Have you done anything worthwhile today?" In his writings, too, his words are steel-edged, devastatingly righteous. I hear him speaking when I read him, and his voice is deep and resonant, graced by the cadences of a majestic poetry. And sometimes, if you scratch for it, you sense, not too far off, the traces of a very subtle sense of humor that must have kept him sane and steady as he waded the intensely troubled, treacherous waters of his own times.
I have longed for much of my life to be ironic, to take things more easily, to be "cool." And, truly, I laugh easily and often, every day. I love to play with language and to mock myself. But then, just when I think I've got that cool stance down, something in my soul rises up and scolds me with a vision of the mess of the earth and the insulation of the smaller, cosier world in which I so easily live.
This part of me looks to Frederick Douglass and people like him in a kind of shame. His stern gaze tells me: you must be honest with yourself. Brutally honest. And if you do not act when you see injustice, and human need around you, you do not deserve the space you are taking up on this planet. (In fact, no one deserves as big a footprint as the average American has, but that may be a topic for another sermon.) You, as_alas, must work to understand the world from the perspective of those who are most oppressed around you; you must, face them, you must hear what they need to say, what they need to live, and not demand that they say only what you want them to say.
Listen to this man Frederick Douglass, in his scathing oration from 1852, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July":
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
The still United States of Amerigo Vespucci did overcome the horror of legal slavery, eventually. And that is not a victory to be ignored or sniffed at. But the crushing economic inequality that structures life in these United States today enslaves many people to systemic poverty and, more vitally, to a life where retaining even a shred of dignity is deliberately made virtually impossible. And I know that I benefit, daily, from this state of affairs.
Being middle class (and here's the rub) I have many means at my disposal to shut out human need at its most desperate and hopeless and ugly. It's becoming easier and easier to shut out the voices that would speak like Frederick Douglass today, the voices of those for whom American freedom is most a sham. I live in a house in a neighborhood where homeless people don't lie down on a pile of cardboard in my gutters or beg for a handout. I don't watch TV, but media outlets of all sorts are eager to pipe in to my house images of beautiful, wealthy, smiling people with cosmetically improved teeth and perfect skin; people on magazines and the internet; people I can turn on or off at will and to whom I have no serious obligation.
Caring about others beyond my family, caring about the massive problems in the world, becomes a kind of "optional" thing that, since I'm not "required" to do it, makes me saintly even to contemplate, let alone doing anything about. This is the seduction of the middle class life. We can luxuriate in not caring a rat's ass about our fellow humans, especially those who picked the strawberries we put on our morning cereal. Those who made our shoes. Those who clean the bedpans and sweep the floors in the hospital where we can go, assured of care, if we slice our finger while making lunch. Those who are off fighting a pointless war for the wealth of men like our vice chickenhawk, Dick Cheney, for George Bush I and all the members of the Carlyle Group. Told that sweet and fitting it is pro patria bleeping mori. Or, we can adopt a child and feel like we are killing a whole flock of ugly birds with one magic stone--satisfying our desires to experience parenthood, "helping one needy child," and getting a great liberal accessory that announces us to be as hip and eco-friendly as a brand new Prius. The child just has to continue to reinforce and reflect back our essential goodness to us for the rest of her life!
These working people, who in Douglass's day would have been called slaves and thereby dehumanized and made mostly invisible--or, just occasionally, shown smiling in the cotton fields or in the background of family pictures, holding a white child on their laps--are dehumanized, trivialized, and tokenized, and, above all, made invisible. Just a few images of these workers, smilling like Juan Valdez from a coffee can or a Wal-Mart greeter still show up from time to time, reassuring us that some people like to clean up our culture's toxic wasteland...
What to US, today, is the fourth of July? Who really has independence? To whom, or to what are we enslaved? What gold idol are we really worshipping, in this country, even in our acts of "charity" and "altruism" in the world--often, but not always, in the name of "God"? How much beauty and life are we sacricing to our cruel religions?
Douglass found reason to hope at the end of his oration in 1852, hopeful, in fact, that the globalized communications of his day would shed a light on all forms of tyranny and oppression, and lead to the end of slavery and war. That particular faith is still powerful and seductive today, oozing as it regularly does from the sermons of Tom Friedman and David Brooks and other self proclaimed economic "liberals" and "centrists." I sense that Douglass grew a little more skeptical, less certain of that religion by the time of his 1855 narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom, and, more than 150 years later, so have I. Yet, clinging to his words that "progress is yet possible," I will write. And work. And try to find and keep a better faith.
Which is to say, if you're reading this, dear reader, thank you for your patience.
So. What you all should know about me, on this day, all two of you, is that Frederick Douglass is perhaps my one true hero.
In his photographs, his face is always stern, serious, interrogating me, "Have you done anything worthwhile today?" In his writings, too, his words are steel-edged, devastatingly righteous. I hear him speaking when I read him, and his voice is deep and resonant, graced by the cadences of a majestic poetry. And sometimes, if you scratch for it, you sense, not too far off, the traces of a very subtle sense of humor that must have kept him sane and steady as he waded the intensely troubled, treacherous waters of his own times.
I have longed for much of my life to be ironic, to take things more easily, to be "cool." And, truly, I laugh easily and often, every day. I love to play with language and to mock myself. But then, just when I think I've got that cool stance down, something in my soul rises up and scolds me with a vision of the mess of the earth and the insulation of the smaller, cosier world in which I so easily live.
This part of me looks to Frederick Douglass and people like him in a kind of shame. His stern gaze tells me: you must be honest with yourself. Brutally honest. And if you do not act when you see injustice, and human need around you, you do not deserve the space you are taking up on this planet. (In fact, no one deserves as big a footprint as the average American has, but that may be a topic for another sermon.) You, as_alas, must work to understand the world from the perspective of those who are most oppressed around you; you must, face them, you must hear what they need to say, what they need to live, and not demand that they say only what you want them to say.
Listen to this man Frederick Douglass, in his scathing oration from 1852, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July":
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
The still United States of Amerigo Vespucci did overcome the horror of legal slavery, eventually. And that is not a victory to be ignored or sniffed at. But the crushing economic inequality that structures life in these United States today enslaves many people to systemic poverty and, more vitally, to a life where retaining even a shred of dignity is deliberately made virtually impossible. And I know that I benefit, daily, from this state of affairs.
Being middle class (and here's the rub) I have many means at my disposal to shut out human need at its most desperate and hopeless and ugly. It's becoming easier and easier to shut out the voices that would speak like Frederick Douglass today, the voices of those for whom American freedom is most a sham. I live in a house in a neighborhood where homeless people don't lie down on a pile of cardboard in my gutters or beg for a handout. I don't watch TV, but media outlets of all sorts are eager to pipe in to my house images of beautiful, wealthy, smiling people with cosmetically improved teeth and perfect skin; people on magazines and the internet; people I can turn on or off at will and to whom I have no serious obligation.
Caring about others beyond my family, caring about the massive problems in the world, becomes a kind of "optional" thing that, since I'm not "required" to do it, makes me saintly even to contemplate, let alone doing anything about. This is the seduction of the middle class life. We can luxuriate in not caring a rat's ass about our fellow humans, especially those who picked the strawberries we put on our morning cereal. Those who made our shoes. Those who clean the bedpans and sweep the floors in the hospital where we can go, assured of care, if we slice our finger while making lunch. Those who are off fighting a pointless war for the wealth of men like our vice chickenhawk, Dick Cheney, for George Bush I and all the members of the Carlyle Group. Told that sweet and fitting it is pro patria bleeping mori. Or, we can adopt a child and feel like we are killing a whole flock of ugly birds with one magic stone--satisfying our desires to experience parenthood, "helping one needy child," and getting a great liberal accessory that announces us to be as hip and eco-friendly as a brand new Prius. The child just has to continue to reinforce and reflect back our essential goodness to us for the rest of her life!
These working people, who in Douglass's day would have been called slaves and thereby dehumanized and made mostly invisible--or, just occasionally, shown smiling in the cotton fields or in the background of family pictures, holding a white child on their laps--are dehumanized, trivialized, and tokenized, and, above all, made invisible. Just a few images of these workers, smilling like Juan Valdez from a coffee can or a Wal-Mart greeter still show up from time to time, reassuring us that some people like to clean up our culture's toxic wasteland...
What to US, today, is the fourth of July? Who really has independence? To whom, or to what are we enslaved? What gold idol are we really worshipping, in this country, even in our acts of "charity" and "altruism" in the world--often, but not always, in the name of "God"? How much beauty and life are we sacricing to our cruel religions?
Douglass found reason to hope at the end of his oration in 1852, hopeful, in fact, that the globalized communications of his day would shed a light on all forms of tyranny and oppression, and lead to the end of slavery and war. That particular faith is still powerful and seductive today, oozing as it regularly does from the sermons of Tom Friedman and David Brooks and other self proclaimed economic "liberals" and "centrists." I sense that Douglass grew a little more skeptical, less certain of that religion by the time of his 1855 narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom, and, more than 150 years later, so have I. Yet, clinging to his words that "progress is yet possible," I will write. And work. And try to find and keep a better faith.