American Duality

July 22, 2016

When she was seventeen, my daughter moved to Europe. She has been there almost continually for the last twenty-two years, so most of her adult life has been spent in Europe. In a sense, she’s more European than American. Visiting Traverse City during the recent Cherry Festival, she and my ten-yearold grandson enjoyed that quintessential American spectacle: a parade.

“The parade looked like how I always picture America in my mind when out of the country,” she marveled. “So diverse; people looked like the could have come from anywhere and everywhere across the globe. All colors all hues, and all of them marching together as one; what a country!”

Alas, in a matter of days her infectious optimism was shattered. The parades were over, the wild display of national pride had started to recede into the shadows.

Gone was the sense of an America embracing its diversities and differences, and in its place arose again the images such as the bloody aftermath of yet another police shooting. Protests have been taking place across the country in response to shootings in Minnesota, Louisiana, and Dallas.

Later the same day of the Dallas shootings, a supporter of the Republican presidential candidate called for the beginning of a race war in America. The candidate himself has been accused -- not without justification -- of racism, xenophobia, misogamy, and inciting violence at his rallies. He has encouraged his followers to “knock the hell out of them.

It is estimated that 40 percent of Americans support that candidate, which raises the question: Which America is the real one, the one my daughter observed at the parade, or the one represented by the recent violence and the spectacles attending the Republican candidate’s rally?

As a song from the turbulent 60s declares, “there’s something going on here; what it is isn’t exactly clear.” Our country seems to be coming together and coming apart, all at the same time, and right before our eyes.

We seem to lack either the will or the inclination to change course. As my daughter observed, there’s some wonderful, amazing good stuff happening here, things that we never thought we would see: Supreme Court rulings turning down Texas restrictions of abortion rights; the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage; TV commercials where you see successful couples of all different colors, mixed couples, same sex couples, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, nonbelievers, all representing American values.

On the other hand, at the same time, you can’t help but see the apparent increase in hate mongering, violence and domestic terrorism and the ugly specter of the Republican nominee who, against all common sense and decency, commands millions of followers. These two trends develop in tandem at a dizzying pace, both the positive and the negative superimposed upon each other.

I am an optimist, and I’d like to think that fundamental goodness of Americans will prevail, as it almost always has, and this too will pass (as Lincoln famously said during another period of national turmoil). I invoke Lincoln because it does seem to me that America is going through another civil war, and this war may well last longer than the first one.

In “Huckleberry Finn Alive at 100,” Norman Mailer wrote that “the near burned out, throttled, hate-filled dying affair between whites and blacks is still our great national love affair because it frees us to think of democracy and its sublime, terrifying premise. Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings.”

Nobody writes like that anymore; it is also abundantly clear that nobody writing today thinks like that. Mailer was able to see the gray areas, while so many of our writers/thinkers today tend to see black versus white, wrong versus right.

The hope that our shared racial past would drown in a sea of diversity flickers like a match lit against a storm, yet refuses to die. We thought we had seen the worst, but this new wave of hatred has us all disenchanted and discouraged.

The tiny hope nurtured in the deepest part of the American psyche has been severely tested these last few weeks. The violence reported from other countries almost always involved violence perpetrated by foreigners. The distressing part of our violent July is mostly homegown. America cannibalizes itself in ways that are as surprising as they are inexplicable and unsettling.

An inability to let it go -- to be both realistic and resigned to a fate destined from the start -- that is our due, the ending we have worked for, hoped for, without being the least bit conscious of the outcome and price we will have to pay for when it’s all over. It is very much like watching the end of a movie and never having the opportunity to see how it starts. The ending is clear, the beginning hidden in the mist of past times.

The burden gets so heavy at times it seems we will not be able to carry on; yet we persist for that is all we know. We are in this together, even as we fail to acknowledge our shared history and the inexorability of the fate that awaits us.

When our daughter boarded the plane back to a country where most people look differently than she, her eyes were misty. It was not just that she would be missing her parents, but it was because America frightens her now. It frightens her so that she cannot imagine her son, my grandson, growing up here. She loves our country like any other good American, flaws and all; nevertheless, however, she admitted, “I feel we are safer in Sweden.” And that breaks my heart.

Isiah Smith, Jr. is a former columnist for the Miami Times. He worked as a psychotherapist before attending the University of Miami Law School, where he also received a Master’s Degree in Psychology. In December 2013, he retired from the Department of Energy’s Office of General Counsel, where he served as a Deputy Assistant General Counsel for Administrative Litigation and Information Law. Isiah lives in Traverse City with his wife Marlene.