There’s a beautiful song by Kate Wolf called “Give Yourself to Love.” It’s playing in my head right now, telling me what to write. I love it when It does that.
The song snuck into my awareness
this week while we were on our Kavanaugh binge, getting divided up into two
camps as if by a wicked gym teacher making teams for a flashy volleyball
game. Bad Boys vs. Good Girls – or was
it Good Boys vs. Bad Girls? Demonic Democrats
vs. Responsible Republicans, or maybe it was Wretched Republicans vs. Decent
Democrats? Twenty five years from now
the evidence will be released to determine who the bad actors really were. All I knew this weekend was that my side – no
matter how you divided up the teams – my side appeared to have lost.
And I felt the sickness that comes
after a battle, no matter who wins. It’s
Rage’s post-partum effects. It’s the
view of all we care about being overridden by the need to go blind in its defense,
to become willing to leave it all behind, like family and home left in America
to go fight Nazis in Europe. And the
only antidote to rage is to remember love.
In my own small recovery process, I
found myself licking my own wounds first.
They were largely self-inflicted anyway:
I could have followed my own good advice to my mother and just stayed
away from the news. But there was
something important for me to learn in this battle, and the lessons became
clearer as I made up for lost time in the kitchen and yard. Washing dishes and gathering trash restored
my sense of value to myself if not to the rest of the world. Now: what did we learn?
The battle between the sexes is
still here. It’s not too different from
the battle between conservatism and liberalism or the hard right and the far
left: how best to meet the needs of
maintaining the free spirit of this country, this state, this county, this neighborhood,
this home. Through rigorous
self-determinism or generous, self-forgetting and communing with each other?
This divide was built into us in this
nation’s founding, or so said Robert Bellah, a Berkeley sociologist in his
book, The Broken Covenant: American
Civil Religion in a Time of Trial (1975.) It’s the same divide that separated Jefferson
from Hamilton, the South from the North, the divide that led to America’s Civil
War and all the major civil uprisings in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the “Trial”
Bellah was addressing. We are still struggling
over a question we have not yet answered rightly: can we have freedom without equality?
Some of us know the answer is
“no.” Freedom for some people at the
expense of others is not freedom. It’s
temporary insanity, temporary because those unfree others are always knocking
at the door of the “free” ones’ mind, wanting to be let in. I’d like to propose that Brett Kavanaugh’s
rage was not just from being pantsed in public, but also from the ghost of
Christine (and who knows how many others) on that bed who he (and all the other
“boys being boys” we recognized in her story) truly doesn’t remember because he
truly never saw her as a person.
I think the only way to heal this
divide, temporarily and in the long term, is to give yourself to love. Love can be fierce as well as tender, but
it’s love so long as the beloved stays in view.
Love thyself, to use Woody Guthrie’s parting poem to us, as a child of
God (no more, no less.) Then, to part B
of the one great commandment: Love thy
neighbor as thyself.
It’s so simple. Remind me again: why are we fighting?
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Trudy
Wischemann is a spearmaiden who writes. You
can send her your battle scars % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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