Purity Tests and False Equivalencies, Redux

Standing in line for an ice cream cone on Wells Street the other day, I watched two young black men, who had been chatting amicably through a car window, begin to play wrestle. They were laughing, and it made me smile. Not so for a young white woman standing nearby, who turned even whiter and, with a look of abject terror on her face, scurried off with her cone. She glanced over her shoulder the entire time, at least until she was down the block and across the street and, frankly, I had lost interest. 

As a lifelong democrat and generally decent albeit flawed human, I am all about equality. I believe in our current reckonings, most of which were accelerated by the horrifying elevation of a misogynistic, racist, all-around abominable person to the highest office in the land. In the world, technically, before our fall from grace. 

I am not black, and cannot pretend to know what it feels like to walk in a black person's shoes. I cannot say, with certainty, that I would not have been tempted to scurry years ago, when my enlightenment may not have been in as advanced a stage as it is today. Five years from now, I may wonder whether I would have even noticed the men chatting on Wells Street, had they been white. 

I am a woman, and though, as a young attorney, I was called "honey" by a judge and even endured an occasional unwanted ass pat, I have never experienced the sort of vile and traumatic invasion of livelihood or personhood for which others seek -- and deserve -- an accounting. I am Jewish, but have never been a personal target of anti-Semitism. Though some Jews of a generation before mine found it difficult to buy a German car, I am inclined to forgive for the sins of the fathers, assuming lessons have been learned. When JFK protected black students entering the University of Alabama, he asked why a black man should have fewer rights than a white man. It did not occur to him, then, that the theory should apply to people of all genders, but that certainly does not undermine his legacy. 

So here we are, drowning in misguided notions of unattained ideals and unattainable purity. The well-intentioned @MeToo movement was immediately endangered by politically motivated false equivalencies. Exhibit A -- Al Franken. The long overdue @Blacklivesmatter movement was endangered by the carelessly worded "defund the police" slogan, hijacked by the usual suspects to suggest that we liberals are fighting for a lawless new world. Now, some are giving those same bad actors another gift, suggesting we topple monuments to founding fathers and cease to honor past leaders who lived long before civil rights legislation was even a thing. 

The time to honor the slave-owning founders of our imperfect union is past, wrote Lucian K. Truscott IV in an Op-Ed in the New York Times. Mr. Truscott is black, a great-grandson of a great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, whom he owned. 

As a child, Mr. Truscott spent much time at Monticello, Jefferson's ancestral home; he and his brother viewed it as their family playground, and was told he would be buried there, as his ancestors -- black and white -- have been. Now, with statues of brutal confederate leaders being removed from public spaces, Mr. Truscott advocates that Monticello is monument enough, that the Jefferson Memorial in D.C. be taken down, replaced with a memorial to Harriet Tubman. He went on to explain: It’s a shrine to a man who famously wrote that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence that founded this nation — and yet never did much to make those words come true. 

Slave owning. Founders. Imperfect union. All men are created equal. Thomas Jefferson's slave-owning past has long been acknowledged. So have his accomplishments. I am not a historian, but this much I know: Jefferson was ahead of his time, an advocate for religious freedom and a loud and effective voice against tyranny. He was ahead of his time and a product of his time. He could not have imagined that "all men" would one day come to mean "all men and women, no matter their color, no matter their sexual orientation." Blacks were viewed as not fully human long after Jefferson died, and we have not yet come close to achieving full equality for all, no matter how far we think we have progressed. Our imperfect union continues to evolve, and remains far from perfect. 

Mr. Truscott, I get what you're saying, and I would love to see a monument to Harriet Tubman -- and countless other heroes and heroines -- standing prominently in our nation's capital. But we need to keep our eye on the prize, which is, right now, our collective soul. Which means honoring the visionaries of our past who have, in their inherently flawed human way, moved us forward. Which means getting rid of the forces of evil now in power, who seek to push us back. Creating a purity test, either for those who live now or those who lived long ago, does not serve us well. 

My Second City, though the Lens of Pandemic and Protest

LAKEFRONT.

I could see the sparkle of the water long before I pedaled up to the concrete underpass with the confirming inscription. The interlocking steel barriers were gone, but still, I glanced around to be sure I wasn't imagining it, that the beautiful shoreline I had fallen in love with 36 summers ago was again open for business. 

These days, I head south, a choice that might have seemed unthinkable to me years ago, when I first settled into life as a north-sider, and then migrated to the northern suburbs. As progressive a city as Chicago is, there is an invisible but overt north south segregation. 

Yes, the city is diverse, and the streets, to the north anyway, are a mosaic of color and foreign tongues. But on the south side, just south of where Soldier Field and football bring Cubs fans and Sox fans together for a brief season of unity, the whites are few and far between, tucked away in insulated pockets amidst large neighborhoods where many of Chicago's black lives are lived. 

Even in non-pandemic times, the south lakefront has little in common with its northern counterpart. It is largely unvisited by tourists, and its running and bike paths are relatively uncongested. There are spectacular views of the city, but little sense of its bustle or its commerce or its tourism. Instead, there is a pristine shoreline and broad swaths of prairie grass. At least I assume it's prairie grass, knowing as little as I do about gardening and botany. What I do know is it is beautiful in its wildness, its irregularity, its splotches of random color. But still, as I said, it's where the black lives are lived, too close for comfort, to many of us.

I confess to my ignorance. I had seen "Juneteenth" on my Google calendar for years, but I never wondered for more than a fleeting instant what it was. I don't remember anybody mentioning it, and I never bothered to ask. I never knew Fort Bragg was named for a Confederate general, I never knew the Mississippi flag included the Confederate battle flag, I never knew that slaves in Texas remained enslaved for two years after emancipation. I knew Aunt Jemima had racist connotations, but I never spent much time wondering why the syrup still bore the offensive picture. 

Since I moved back downtown last spring, I have biked all over my second city, the city I fell in love with so many years ago. It is progressive and smart, my adopted hometown. Almost everybody is wearing a mask, or at least has one close at hand. We smile at each other -- as best as we can -- with our eyes as we give each other wide berth on the sidewalks. The rules are enforced with signs that are both gentle and firm, and we comply without much complaint. We have collectively applauded the protests, we have collectively mourned the devastation done by the looters, and we watch, with hope, as the plywood boards covering so many of the storefronts are painted with colorful messages of peace, love, and understanding. Still, we shy away from the parts of the city where black lives are lived, where Covid-19 has selected so many victims, which makes me wonder how much those lives can really matter, even to those of us who like to think we have always done the right thing. 

I am reluctant to share the secret of the southern lakefront, uncrowded, peaceful, unspoiled by curiosity seekers. But, against my own self interest, might I recommend a spin through the prairie grasses, maybe even a detour into the majestic patchwork of neighborhoods south of our imaginary but insidious dividing line. We already share a lake; it's time to share the experience. 

Demings, Harris, Abrams, Rice. Pick One, Joe.

I admit it. I was wrong.

It bothered me, all this chatter about Biden needing to choose a black woman as his running mate. I wondered why we were again eating our own, we Democrats, holding our candidate's campaign hostage for petty identity politics. I will vote for Joe no matter what, no matter whom he chooses -- any gender, any color, even a tuna fish sandwich, as a reformed Republican claims in a recent ad. 

Shame on me. I cannot possibly know how important it is, knowing only, as I do, how unimportant it is to me to have a middle-aged Jewish woman on the ticket. My only connection to the kind of pain American blacks feel is historical -- pictures of gaunt and tortured Jews behind barbed wire fences, grainy videos of people, like me, being shot into mass graves. It happened there, not here. It happened then, not now.

The past few days have been catastrophic, and they have been enlightening. A white policeman squeezed the life out of defenseless black man as the world watched. While the only ones who could have stopped it not only remained silent but even leant a knee, to hold the doomed man's legs down while he gasped for air. We are, collectively, shocked, though we have no reason to be. It has happened before. Often. All too recently. Breonna Taylor. Freddie Gray.

I was not surprised by the ensuing violence, even the torching of a police station. A police station. I wanted to shake my finger at the rioters, remind them that not all cops are bad, and that killing and destruction are not the answers. Well what is, then. If a dying man's desperate cries -- I can't breathe -- are not enough. If each horrific news report is not enough. If a nation's grief is so palpable it draws long quarantined citizens out en masse, blows fears of a deadly pandemic away with the smoldering ashes of a community, will that be enough? I'm guessing not. 

An acquaintance, a casual acquaintance about whom I know very little, posted a letter on Facebook today. She was a teacher (I didn't know that). She had quit being a teacher (I didn't know that either). She had taught in the places we privileged people don't go, and had seen the despair, seen the seemingly endless cycle of oppression and poverty and misery that perpetuates itself and leaves an entire segment of the population stuck under our knee, unable to breathe. Having taught only three years, she listed the names of eight of her former students who are now dead. And those, she says, are only the ones she knows about. 

I think I empathize, but really, I cannot. I am ignorant, I have no idea what it feels like to live inside black skin. I have no idea what it is to worry, as a black mother worries, that her child will not make it home from school alive. That her teenaged son will be arrested for, well, breathing. Mostly, all I worried about was hurt feelings. Or a little anxiety about a test. Or that somebody else's kid was -- heaven forbid -- smarter than mine. 

I was wrong, wrong to think that when there are four eminently  qualified and impressive black women on the VP short list, there is some reason not to narrow the search. Pick one of them Joe. We need her ears, her voices, her wisdom. And we need the memories that live in her psyche, and hers alone. We need her to breathe life into a dying nation.

Distancing in the Dark

The lights went out last night. Right in the middle of an episode of Breaking Bad, my television screen went dark. Shame on me for becoming a Netflix junkie so late in the game, but I was despondent. Well, maybe just annoyed, but the pandemic tends to magnify. 

A push alert had warned me of flooding, but nobody had warned me my evening of binge watching, the thing I look forward to all day, would be interrupted. On a day I had decided to go wine-free, just to see if it was still possible. (It was. Barely.)

Zoom cocktail hours, walks to Whole Foods and Target and, yesterday, the somewhat guilty cheat of Sunday dinner in person with my kids (they have a large table) notwithstanding, the isolation has seemed overwhelming. Darkness didn't help. I heard commotion in the hallway and poked my head out, surprised to see everybody else had done the same thing. It was oddly tentative, the head poking, nobody daring to venture too much into the communal space. Some even wore masks, determined to ward off an unlikely onslaught of stray viral droplets. Though back-up generators kept the hallway lit, we all withdrew quickly into our own darkness, comforted to know we were at least, still, in the same boat. 

As power outages go, it really wasn't so bad. There's no heat wave, as there usually is when the power grid goes haywire, and the city lights outside helped. I rustled up every candle I could find, filling my small apartment with dancing shadows and a somewhat nauseating mix of scents, including something called "karma." I've discovered that karma is better felt than smelled. 

I crawled into bed with my phone and my Kindle, hoping the batteries would outlast the blackout. Feeling, for some reason, as if my suffering had just increased tenfold. A pandemic topped by darkness and no Netflix. And no wine. I wondered how much more I could bear. A lot, if what others are going through is any indication. 

The lights came on within 90 minutes, but I stayed in bed. I face-timed with my son, and talked about the world with him for a while. Politics, pandemics. As always, he gave me a bit of a history lesson, and I went to sleep, still discouraged about the state of things, still worried about all the unknowns, but content that I had seen all my kids that day, one way or another, and they are all fine, they had all made me laugh, and, at the end of the day, I knew more than I had when I woke that morning. 

This morning, I might know more than I knew yesterday, but still, the unknowns loom large. Tonight, though, there will be wine. And Netflix.

It's the Little Things

My mom wants me to take her to Target when this is all over. 

Tar-jhay, she said, remembering how I used to pronounce it, when she could hear. 

She read my assurance on her "caption phone" as seriously as she might have heard a promise a half century ago that I would clean my room. Or do my homework. I mean it, she said. Promise me we'll go. 

I promised. And I meant it. I had told her she would hate it, and she would have, before this. Even the new one on the tony Upper East Side. Before, before this, I might have had to take her into a Walmart first, so the Target would look good. Even if it doesn't carry Chanel. 

She's 89 now, still going strong after breaking her collar bone, some ribs, her pelvis, and her hip, all within the last decade. Throw in a little spinal collapse for good measure. She is not unfamiliar with confinement, certainly not unfamiliar with fear. The fear of never walking again, of losing her independence. But she fought once, and walked, and she fought a second time, and still walks. This is different, though. Being afraid to touch anything, go near anybody, breathe communal air. She has a will of steel, but that only works for things you can understand.  

A few weeks ago, I despaired when I realized by toes weren't as close as I had remembered, even after years of yoga. It had been a long time since I had to cut my own toenails. My mother's toes are woefully out of reach, even with her shortened spine. How did that not occur to me. I've sent her some long-handled clippers; I hope they arrive before things get out of hand. 

I had to watch my good friend's father's funeral on my laptop, couldn't give her a hug. Her mother, after more than 60 years of marriage, couldn't go. Couldn't say goodbye. My friend goes to see her, though a window. 

Another friend wonders when she will hold her new grandson. I marveled at the pictures, wanted so much for her to be able to touch his toes. 

My own children, at least two of them, are out of reach except for Zoom. It helps, but it's not the same. 

My apartment seems smaller, as my world shrinks. I think it's Sunday, but I'm not absolutely sure. There is tape on the elevator floors, marking out properly distanced squares in the corners. Like a hopscotch board, exploded.

I sent my mother pears, because her favorite fruit store finally shut its doors, at least for now. Even the beautiful fruit gave her pause. But mostly, she wished she could share them with one of us. She wonders, aloud, when -- or whether -- she will be able to spend time with her children, her grandchildren. 

She wants to go to Target. Tar-jhay. Even if they don't carry Chanel. 

Collateral Damage

The memes were funny, at first.

There were no mushroom clouds, no pictures of gaunt Jews pressed against chain link fences, no live images of burning towers on the Southern tip of Manhattan, of thousands of regular folks trying to outrun the two million tons of concrete, metal, and human remains. Rubble, they call it. 

It has occurred to me that even after a cushion of decades, nobody laughs about 9/11, or the Holocaust, or about bombs vaporizing entire cities in Japan. More than a half century later, I made a tasteless pun while walking down a street in Hiroshima. My son was appalled, and I was appropriately chastised. This was before I went into the museum, before I saw the bench that had survived, along with the dim shadow of the person who had just been sitting there. Still, there was no excuse. 

We cannot see a virus, and those of us who are not medical professionals in hot spot emergency rooms cannot really imagine what it looks like, death on a ventilator, just days after a toilet paper shortage may have been somebody's biggest concern. 

The memes have kept us laughing, while we wonder when -- or if --- we will return to our favorite bars or restaurants, or go to a gym, or have a reason to shower before late in the afternoon. As horrific as the pandemic is, most of us will likely not know somebody who dies. 100,000 people is a lot of people, but in a country of 330 million, a world of billions, our odds are pretty good. And there's no volcano of human remains to remind us, in the starkest of terms, of the tragedy. 

The economic pain is a reality check, but the toll goes much deeper. What of all the people who die alone, now, whether of the virus or old age or some other "normal" disease? What of the ones who are left behind, haunted by the notion that they couldn't be there, to squeeze a hand, to whisper I love you. What of our elderly parents, holed up alone, wondering when we will allow them to see us again.

When my father died, 22 years ago, I had just arrived back in Chicago, not really believing that when I said goodbye to him that morning in Brooklyn, I would never see him again. He waited for me to call. I know he did; he wasn't about to let go until he knew I was home, safe. I called, and he began to die, with my mother there, holding his hand, and placing the phone to his ear so I could tell him I love him.  

The covid 19 memes were funny at first. I admit, some of them continue to make me laugh. But most of us will not escape the rubble.

Life Without Hugs

A friend had a birthday, so we gathered, Covid style. In her driveway, each of us six feet away from the nearest other, each of us holding our own miniature Prosecco. We even left extra space between our cars as we parked. 

I haven't seen my friends in what seems like ages. Weeks, probably, but the isolation has made the days run together, periods of gray punctuated by stretches of darkness, with an occasional glimpse of sunlight to remind us of what used to be. A sliver of false optimism, as we wonder when it will matter again whether it is Saturday or Monday. 

It was good to see my friends again, even though we couldn't hug. Still better than the group texts that ping in the distant perimeter of my solitude while I try to work. Work alone, at home, as I often do, but it feels so different now. 

Mind you, it's not all bad. I am trying my hand at cooking and baking. I apologized to my son yesterday, for not trying all that sooner, like, say, when he and his siblings might have enjoyed coming home to a house that smelled like cookies just out of the oven. I've been concocting Bloody Mary's, convincing myself it's just a salad in a glass. I have found a reason for celery; I have binged on pickled asparagus. 

I crave my mother's wisdom. Not the thinness wisdom (the best exercise is pushing yourself away from the table) that has always amused my friends, but the trite wisdom that I have always waved away, as my children do when I tell them everything will work out. This too shall pass, she has always told me. I believe it when she says it, though I still hold my breath every morning until I know she is all right. 

We have relied for so long now upon virtual connection; now, it is all we have. It's something, more than something. We check on our friends and our family, certainly more than we used to. But no hugging. That's a tough one for me. 

Until the curve flattens, virtual will have to do. Virtual exercise classes with my daughters while we amuse ourselves on FaceTime with our genetic lack of coordination; virtual cocktail hours with my girlfriends, without clinking; daily family wellness checks; an uncanny urge to tell all the people in my life to stay safe, having had a taste of what life might be without them. 

This too shall pass, and, I expect, not without some valuable lessons for all of us.