Driving to work last week, I heard a snippet of Michele Obama’s DNC speech replayed on Valley Public Radio. One sentence caught the attention of liberals and conservatives alike.
Referring to the White House, she said, “Every morning I wake up in a house that was built by slaves.” Most of us didn’t know that small but incredibly relevant fact, but when she spoke it, a more complex version of history began to emerge. Huh. Really? Wow….
A second layer of wonder sat quietly below the first one: that this woman with slave ancestors could hold those facts together in her mind and not flinch. That she and her half-Black husband (whose Kenyan ancestors were not part of our American slave history but who has been treated by some as if he still wore leg chains,) have risen to the position of highest responsibility in the world.
What I realized after hearing her
utter that sentence is that she has not turned a blind eye to the complexity of
her world: she knowingly inhabits a
culture and a social position dependent on the backs of other people who, in
reality, have little opportunity for recognition of their contributions or to enjoy
the proper fruits. Despite the
complexity, she does not blink.
The same could be said about
Barack’s Kansas-born Anglo mother, Ann Dunham:
she couldn’t turn a blind eye to the racism of mainland America, or even
that found in polyglot Hawaii. Barack’s
mother, who loved his father and fought for her son, worked for the equitable
development of rural people in foreign places until she died of untended health
problems. If we’d had Obamacare then,
she might have lived to see this miracle she partly created. No wonder our current President could not
turn a blind eye on health care reform: he didn’t have one.
Last week I also found a great story
about how a blind eye gains its sight. I
was working to edit passages from Rick Wartzman’s incredible book about the burning
of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for
my volume on Agriculture and the Common Good. In 1939 the Associated Farmers, claiming
the book was lewd, even obscene (hence the title of Wartzman’s book, Obscene in the Extreme) convinced the
Kern County Board of Supervisors to pass a resolution banning the book, then
staged its burning at the hands of an Okie farmworker. The book’s real violation was not so much
offensive language, however, as was its unveiling of an ungodly fact of Valley
life. It called our blind eyes on the
carpet.
Steinbeck started Grapes with his eyes partly shielded,
hoping to retain his objectivity like he did in In Dubious Battle, a book inspired by the Cotton Strike of 1933. He’d been shown the differences in the Dust
Bowl refugees’ living conditions between ditch-bank Hoovervilles and the
government labor camps, an important part of the eventual story. His notes were copious, his files were thick;
the story threatened to overwhelm him with its magnitude. He couldn’t see how to tell the story rightly
– until the rains came.
In the early months of 1938, the Kings
and Kaweah Rivers overflowed their banks, flooding the low places where workers
lived. He told a friend that he couldn’t
just write about it, he had to do something.
He drove to Visalia and joined a small group of people rescuing families
from flooded tents and cardboard shacks, bringing food and dry clothing,
working sopping wet day and night without food himself to help those who were
much hungrier and more desperately tired than he was. It was that experience that ripped any
remaining film of “objectivity” from his eyes and untethered his pen. The heavy manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath went to the publisher before the year was over.
“Turning a blind eye” on difficult
problems is something we all do, at least temporarily. Nationally, many of us are doing it with the
facts undermining Donald Trump’s claim to fame: his bankruptcies, labor abuses,
his cut-and-run approach to financial obligations, his refusal to face the
community impacts of his personal business practices. Locally, we cheer those who proclaim they can
fix our water shortage by building more reservoirs, turning a blind eye to the
lack of rainfall to fill them, the evidence for climate change and the lousy
cost-benefit ratios.
But I think we need to wake up to
the reality behind the conflicting claims and simple solutions. We need to take a good hard look at the facts
nationwide and in our own region, before we find ourselves sopping wet, cold
and hungry, knee-deep in the mud of truth.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Trudy Wischemann is a writer whose pen often champs at the bit. You can send her your blindness confessions c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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