Numbers, 24:10

The king, Balak, sent Balaam to curse the Israelites, who were amassed at the border of Moab.  King Balak was aware that the Israelites were on the march.  He was also aware that they were capable of crushing their enemies.  Curse them, Balak commanded, and deny them entry into the land.

Now, these Israelites, led by Moses, were the same people who had been wandering in the wilderness without food.  They were the same people in the Bible who received the Ten Commandments (and frequently needed Moses’s reminders to remain steadfast in their commitment to one God).

Though Balaam was inclined to do King Balak’s bidding, he was repeatedly thwarted by God’s interventions.  God “visited” the donkey upon which Balaam rode.  The donkey refused to make progress, stopping in the middle of the road and squeezing  Balaam’s leg up against the sides of buildings.  Balaam beat the donkey and threatened to kill it.  God instructed Balaam to make the trip to the border to see the Israelites but only to utter words God put in Balaam’s mouth.

The words, of the most famous in the Bible: “How fair are your tents, O Jacob, / Your dwellings, O Israel!”

Instead of cursing the Israelites, Balaam blessed them.  He marveled.  He opened the possibility of wonder and questioning.  At once an exaltation and a request (there are no exclamation or question marks in ancient Hebrew), Balaam’s words conferred praise and humanity on the strangers. The king?  Not happy.

It strikes me, in reading this week’s Torah portion — on which my rabbi, Elaine Zecher, offered her own commentary — is that one of the ingredients missing from King Balak’s worldview is curiosity.  He is afraid of what he does not know. Fear supplants his curiosity. Were he more secure, he might ask: Who are these people?  Why are they encamped at my border?  From whom are they running?  Towards what are they running?  What might I gain by forging an alliance with them or extending them aid?

It seems to me that one of the dividing lines between fascists and everybody else is the ability to ask these sorts of questions, each rooted in curiosity.  The ability to ask open-ended questions is one of the first casualties in the rise of repressive regimes.

Many religions, at their best, require and inspire curiosity rather than blind obedience. Judaism demands such curiosity in the study of sacred texts. What is it to study Torah and Talmud other than a hunger to ask questions and be open to the possibility of multiple answers?  Jewish text study requires creativity. It fosters problem-solving. And because the long tradition of such study includes groups and partners, it also demands community.

These features and qualities are also necessary for participatory democracy. It is worth reminding ourselves this week as the United States refuses to allow refugees to apply for asylum within the boundaries of the nation, that God’s blessing, through Balaam, is essentially a statement of wonder. It begins with the word “how.” How wonderful. An exclamation. Also a question. As in: in how many different ways is this community of strangers wonderful?

Imagine if the American president were to marvel and ask for a few moments: How are these tent communities of refugees wonderful? How might God be blessing them, not just us? How strong are these people? How driven are they?  Why have they traveled so far and so long? What can I do to ease their suffering? How will I and my country be stronger — and blessed — for trying to make their lot better?

An old, old story. An ancient message we seem unable and unwilling to receive.

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Like many, I’ve been trying to understand of late exactly what Facebook’s executives did or did not do, what they knew, when they knew it.

Did Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg allow data hacks?  Did Facebook hire “right leaning opposition research team” (according to Wikipedia) Definers Public Affairs to disseminate untrue, negative stories about those who criticized the company, including George Soros?  Zuckerberg and Sandberg steadfastly denied denied denied.  And then, yesterday, Elliot Schrage, the company’s head of communications and policy, not only admitted that Facebook hired Definers, it also requested that Definers work to discredit Soros, a Jewish philanthropist.

And, like many, I’ve been trying to decide whether I want to continue using Facebook to connect with friends and acquaintances far and near.

I took a break from Facebook for a week, ignoring the steady stream of email messages trying to get me to “use.”  Did I experience withdrawal?  Not really.

When I went back onto FB this morning, it took me but a few minutes to conclude that my life had not been materially worse for having stayed off the social media site.

For the record, here’s what I think I’ll miss:

+ Cheery photos of friends’ children, grandchildren, and pets.  (These always make me smile.)

+ Messages from organizations and causes I care about.  Updates from organizations such as Decoding Dyslexia, which works to reduce barriers between dyslexic individuals and effective education, make me feel like I know what’s going on and tell me what supportive actions I can take.

+ Private messages from folks who have reached out to find me despite the passage of time.

+ Opportunities from time to time to express my thoughts in an easy-to-reach way.  I’ll hope, perhaps, that some will sign up to receive messages from my blog, Bowl o’ Cherries, and I will work to post more frequently.

In the end, I think, if I leave Facebook, there will be trouble – the platform is handy and makes some things easier.  But, if I stay, I’ll be allowing an irresponsible company to continue using me and my friendships for its own ends, which, it is clear to me at the moment, do not mesh with my own:  “And if I stay it will be double.”

Though I am thoroughly opposed to using textbooks, especially at the university level, I also know it’s helpful to give students something to lay down a narrative. I’ve relied on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United Statesfor the past eight years in the course on early American history I’ve offered at UMass Boston. A sprinkling of students over the years, usually from liberal, private high schools, has encountered the text before my class. For the rest, the book has mostly been a welcome introduction to early America, the subject of the course. I’m not sure Zinn’s overview will be the right fit for the class I’ll be teaching this fall, which will be at a somewhat selective, private college. I’ve tried to find an alternative, but I’m coming up empty-handed.

Zinn wrote his overview of US history in 1980 on the heels of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam and the obscenities of Watergate. A Marxist and veteran of the US military, Zinn’s message was that the country has always been at its best when its peoples embraced racial differences to confront injustice. His view of the Founding Fathers and their revolution was consistently cynical:

“They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.

“When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command” (59).

One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed using Zinn’s book is that his biases were always clear. He argued that all historians have points of view. Unlike many others, he wrote, he was open about his perspectives and objectives. His aim was to identify what he described as “fugitive moments of compassion” rather than military or electoral victories. Students struggling to pay down debt, earn a degree, and move into white collar jobs – many who are also caring for children and working 40+ hours a week – have often found Zinn’s book refreshing. Some, usually young, white men, have declared Zinn relentlessly negative and incapable of celebrating what they describe as “our great nation.” When others in the class have pointed out that these guys are having pronoun problems (OK, so they don’t usually know that “our” is a possessive pronoun), they are able to draw on evidence relating to race, class, and gender from the text to support their sense of exclusion from standard narratives.

What’s missing from Zinn? His narrative sidesteps an open-minded evaluation of an American middle class. His political philosophy only allows him to find this group important when it augments working peoples’ efforts to resist. In addition, Zinn refuses to reckon with “equality” as a radical concept. I’m not a Marxist, and though I am entirely sympathetic to Zinn’s mission, I think the nation’s history is more complicated than A People’s History lets on. I’ve developed a few workarounds over the years. I’ve had students explore the rise of consumer cultures before the Civil War, examining a variety of primary sources, from newspapers to ceramics. In addition, I’ve lectured on Enlightenment philosophy and the philosophes’ exploration of government as a “social contract” in which all give up absolute freedoms in exchange for security and the possibility (not a guarantee) of relative wealth.

What else is out there, aside from Zinn, that would give students an overview and would not mire them in detail or obfuscatory prose?

My fussing skyrocketed last month when I began exploring other one-volume texts I might adopt in the new course. There are several very good standard textbooks of US history, but each comes in at about 1,200 pages, far too long for my purposes. (I particularly liked David Emory Shi’s America: The Essential Learning Edition, which is truly terrific as far as textbooks go.) Most of these bonanzas are now available in online editions, with all sorts of bells and whistles, from interactive maps and timelines to ready-made quizzes. And they are expensive. A used copy of Zinn runs about $7 and change. The textbooks, used, cost at least $50.

I took a look at British historian Hugh Brogan’s 694-page text, The Penguin History of the USA. The blurbs were encouraging: “lively,” “wide-ranging,” “superb,” “engaging.” I opened the cover and began to read. “Man established himself in all parts of the two continents and in the related islands of the Caribbean. His cultures grew to be many, varied and fascinating. None of them advanced to the use of iron or to complete literacy; by other measures of human progress the achievements were striking, especially those of the Mayan, Aztec and Inca civilizations of Central and South America. But by AD 1492 the New World, in its isolation, lagged substantially, in culture, behind the Old” (3).  Aside from the objectionable gendered language and the uncritical use of the terms “New” and “Old” world, the assertion that native peoples’ “cultures” were inferior — rather than some of their technologies– stopped me in my reading tracks. And that was only the first page.

On, then, to American historian Robert V. Remini’s 350-page text, A Short History of the United States: From the Arrival of Native American Tribes to the Obama Presidency. Two blurbs on the back of the book employed the word “masterful.” One of these described the book as “sprightly.” The book begins well enough, with respectful descriptions of native peoples and their accomplishments. Remini includes the Vikings, as well, avoiding the falsehood that North America was unknown to Europe until the fifteenth century. Remini pivots to the Crusades, Marco Polo, and the rise of Europe’s “capitalistic economy.” But, then, this: “Thousands of Europeans responded and traveled to the East where they were exposed to a different and more exotic culture, a way of life that excited their imagination” (4). Fair enough to write that travels excited European imaginations, but 1) to name a part of the world “the East” (in truth, a direction) is to center geography on Europe, and 2) to describe culture as “more exotic” perpetuates worn-out, racist stereotypes. There’s a section, mid-book, of images. Of 64 representations of humans worth committing to history, but three of these images depict women: suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Jeannette Rankin. (One image of Civil Rights protesters prominently features an African American woman – among others — holding a sign, so maybe the tally should really be 4?) Needless to say, I won’t be assigning Remini.

A mentor suggested The American Yawp (referencing Walt Whitman), a concise, free, online text with links to primary sources. It’s not offensive. I listened to part of radio phenom Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland, a funny and lively take on the nation’s longstanding preoccupation with irrationality and religion. Not sure it works as an introductory text any more than Zinn’s A People’s History.

On the Fourth of July, 2018, I am frustrated that my options for a readable, lively, one-volume overview of this country’s history seem so terrible. What am I missing? Surely, the bar needs to be set higher in concisely, inexpensively telling the many stories of the complicated country I love.

Debórah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, 1991, xlvi.

There are so many questions to ask about how a people reaches a point allowing its government to separate children from their parents and, for all intents and purposes, incarcerates them. And there is another set of questions to ask about what activates this people to insist that its government change course.

Making people feel, I’ll argue, is perhaps the greatest single factor in that activation process.

Ginger Thompson, a reporter with independent, investigative journalism outfit ProPublica, this week shared audio of children in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. In the recording, the children, estimated to be between 4 and 10 years old, wail and sob, desperate for their parents.

The audio has been a game-changer.

Once Americans had to reckon emotionally with the pain of these children, many began taking steps to force policy change. In addition to rallying and contacting elected representatives, one couple started a fundraising page on Facebook, hoping to raise $1,500, enough money to pay for a lawyer to represent one detained adult. A week later, donations had come in at $12 million. The money will go to Texas-based non-profit RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. It will pay for everything from legal services to commissary funds, the latter necessary for children and parents to contact one another by telephone. Those calls, made from phones controlled by corporations running these detention facilities, can cost eight dollars a minute.

The plight of these immigrant children has brought to mind work I did this spring, when I was teaching a history of the Holocaust to students twice a week. I assigned these very motivated, advanced 8^thgraders the introduction to historian Debórah Dwork’s Children with a Yellow Star. These students – low income, of color – didn’t know much about Judaism, the Holocaust, or even how to study history. Dwork’s introduction provided evidence of Jewish children’s experiences, suffering, and death during the war, which predictably awakened students’ sense of outrage. Nonetheless, some still made unthinking comments that Jews were all showily rich, owned banks and businesses, and therefore stood out for scapegoating. Dwork’s words worked like a hot knife through butter with this kind of reasoning, which she described as “nonsense.”

“Even if such pronouncements meant anything – and they do not – they are simply irrelevant or inapplicable to the maltreatment of children.  In the case of a child, someone who saw his neighbor carted away by the SS, or French police, or Hungarian gendarmes, could no longer say to himself to rationalize what he witnessed, ‘I wonder what he did to provoke the authorities,’ because an infant or three-year-old or six-year-old could not possibly have done anything” (xlv-xlvi).

Dwork’s intro forced students to reckon with their feelings about these children’s experiences:

“Child life is a subculture of the dominant society, and that subculture was singularly stricken by the ever-increasing burden of Nazi persecution.  […]  Our unwillingness to accept the murder of children is emotionally different from our incomprehension of the genocide of adults.  […]  Adults are never seen as totally helpless; it is a contradiction of our understanding, our archetypal image of what an adult is.  But in the case of children no such defense exists.  Children are, and are expected to be, helpless and dependent.  In their case it is no longer possible to be angry with and to blame the victim” (xlv).

Dwork’s incisive distinction between adults and children enabled students to jettison their negative stereotypes and fully appreciate the horror of what had taken place.

I think Ginger Thompson’s work this week has had an impact on Americans similar to the one my students experienced.  President Trump and those who support him can spout all the “nonsense” (Dwork’s word) they wish about migrants from Mexico and Central America. I will not repeat them here. Most of us cannot justify, let alone tolerate, the application of these stereotypes to children. Perhaps, in a twisted way, the president will have done his opponents a favor by incarcerating minors in former Wal-Marts and cyclone-fenced tent camps. While many will sit silently while adults are treated unfairly, their emotional reactions make them unwilling, as Dwork suggests, to accept the impact of such policy on the very young.

I wish, as a nation, we could apply a similar “emotional logic” to police violence against young men of color. But perhaps it will take the senseless deaths of boys much younger than Trayvon Martin, 17, to move us all to action. My fingers shake as I type these words.

My father Jack, 57, opened the passenger side door to his silver Mercedes. My mother Leah, 55, sank into the seat uncomfortably. It was the fall of 1985, a bit more than a year from her death.

Olive skinned with a dark pixie cut sprinkled with silver, my mother had dimples, not wrinkles. Six years before, she had lost her larynx to an unrelated cancer. Now, her tears prevented her from belching air to speak. What was left to say, anyway? A hole in her neck. Before long, a hole in her belly to bypass tumors choking her bowels.

My dad climbed behind the steering wheel. The door made an impressively solid thunk as he pulled it shut. He inserted the car key into the ignition, his rabbit’s foot dangling from a ring on the chain. Mom had given him the sleek sedan for his last birthday. Not her money. His. But it was her choice, a wish that he enjoy some of the fortune he had earned.

My dad reversed the car from its parking place, swinging the steering wheel to aim for the exit. The sedan glided through the open-air lot rimmed with live oaks and fuschia-blossomed crape myrtles. He extracted the parking ticket from his wallet and inserted it into the slot. The arm of the gate did not rise. He pushed the help button. Cars began lining up behind him, with restive drivers leaning on their horns. “Let’s go!” one shouted. “What’s the hold-up?” asked another.

Honking horns and repeated jabs at the help button finally roused an attendee. Nothing to be done at the moment, Sir. Help has been requested.

Now, a long line of cars idled behind my dad’s Mercedes. Windows lowered periodically as heads poked out from air-conditioned interiors. Was anybody coming? Who ran such a badly cared for lot?

Lips tightly pressed together, my long-legged father lowered the electric windows, switched off the car, and popped the trunk. He rummaged, lifting his sunglasses to see into the deep cavity holding maps, accordion files, an umbrella, a can of tennis balls, spare quarts of washer fluid and motor oil. He lifted a cloth-bound toolkit included in the purchase of the car.

Sunglasses returned to his excellent beak, my father nimbly deployed the Phillip’s-head screwdriver to uncouple arm from gate. A few turns of a wrench, and he laid that arm on the spongy asphalt, made tacky with the heat. Cheering and applause met my father as he turned to replace the toolkit in his trunk. He slid back behind the wheel of the Mercedes, leading the snaking line of cars out of the parking lot on his way home.

Graustein’s answer made me stand still. She quietly explained that many, if not all, of her students “…have lost friends or family members to gun violence.” Like her students, Graustein lives in Dorchester. She told Becker that she had lost nine students and a housemate to gun violence. She went on to describe a recent interaction with kindergartners when she read a story to them about East Africa. She had worn earrings from the region.

“After finishing the book,” Graustein said, “I had five kindergartners around my body, looking at the jewelry I was wearing, exploring it, and I think about if I had a gun on me, the entire time I’d have to be worried about is the kid touching it? Are they triggering the safety? Is it going to accidentally go off and shoot somebody? And instead, I was just there with a pair of earrings and a book, and I could just be with the kids, and it was safe.”

Graustein had created an ideal learning environment, where kids felt safe, expressed curiosity, and explored freely. This is the beloved community that expert teachers work so hard to create. Whether in kindergarten or college, students thrive in environments where they are set free emotionally and intellectually to explore and question. Introducing a gun into the mix would not only present a physical obstacle to students. It would also, in low-income communities of color, present potential emotional obstacles, as well.

Race and income have largely been missing in calls to arm teachers since the shooting in Florida at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day. Like many, I have shivered thinking about the implications of putting firearms in teachers’ hands. I have not heard enough comments such as Graustein’s assertion that “a gun by its very presence is re-triggering of a severe trauma for many […] students.” The dearth of such comments relates to the lack of dialogue around gun violence and race and poverty.

Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Florida’s Broward County were lucky that they had not previously been traumatized by gun violence. The high school is relatively high-performing, with a majority white student body. It serves 2,972 students. Niche.com gives the school an A for academics and a B+ for diversity. The site gives the school an A- overall. Sixty-six percent and 72 percent of its students are “at least proficient” in math and reading, respectively. According to greatschools.org, the average SAT score for students at the high school is 1595, about 42 percent take Advanced Placement tests (state average is 23 percent), and the graduation rate from the school is 97 percent (state average of 82 percent). Sixty-two percent of students at the school classify themselves as white. Madeleine Marr reported in the Miami Herald that the city of Parkland was listed as “one of the safest in the country” before the shooting, which is “statistically safer than 85 percent of cities in the entire country.” All of which to say that the grim surprise these students, parents, and teachers experienced Valentine’s Day wouldn’t be such a surprise to many students attending low-performing, inner-city public high schools.

I don’t want to diminish the horror that took place last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. At the same time, there has to be a different context or frame within which to understand gun violence and to shape gun control policy. Yes, we need to prohibit access to AR-15s. We also need to be thinking about the ways so many in public schools are exposed to gun violence on their way to and from school, how they experience gun violence at home and in their neighborhoods, and what it would mean to them to introduce even more armed figures of authority into the equation. We have to consider the epidemic – or, is genocide the right word? – of homicides which police continue to carry out with their licensed handguns against young men of color.

If we genuinely care about student safety, we have to widen our circle of concern. All students, not just those of relative privilege unused to gun violence, deserve to live and grow and learn in physical and emotional safety. Thank you, Lisa Graustein, for the visceral reminder. Keep reading to the kids and wearing funky earrings.

I point to Collins’s piece because I’m actually more concerned, at the moment, with another, less funny “third option.” National political leaders, mostly Republicans, are ducking the “yes/no” question by calling for voters in Alabama to make the decision, themselves.

“Popular sovereignty” was the ruinous policy intended to let the will of the people on the ground determine the expansion of slavery before the Civil War. The federal government did not have to make a decision about slavery’s existence in territories such as Kansas and Nebraska. Instead, to mollify Southern slave owners, those elected to federal office decided that residents of the new Western territories would cast votes. If Kansans wanted slavery, they would have slavery.

This weasely policy led to claims of voter fraud, with free-soilers claiming the winning pro-slavers had brought in non-residents to cast ballots. Free-soilers established a separate legislature and refused to recognize the legitimacy of the election. Pres. Franklin Pierce sent federal troops to Kansas to quell violence, which got so bad that the rest of the nation came to refer to the territory as “Bleeding Kansas.” A second ballot re-established a pro-slave majority. It was not until 1861, about three months before the nascent Confederate army fired shots on Ft. Sumter in South Carolina, that popular sovereignty made slavery illegal in Kansas. At that point, the federal government brought Kansas into the Union as a state (rather than a territory), signaling an end to the expansion of slavery and an imposition of federal will on the American South.

How many more compromises will we make in 2017 to avoid having to condemn discriminatory behaviors? When will Republicans realize that by refusing to confront the likes of Roy Moore and Donald J. Trump, their conciliation may, in the end, lead to the nation’s undoing? If the Union could come asunder in 1861 after a series of unholy, unjust compromises, is it beyond the possible that it could split apart once again in the twenty-first century?

Last: many have criticized Pres. Barack Obama for his unwillingness to bring those with irreconcilable views to the bargaining table. They point to Pres. Lyndon Johnson as an example of an effective dealmaker. While I have some sympathy for these views and even, as a longtime Texan-in-Exile, appreciation for LBJ, I also think there are times when it’s not possible or even effective to compromise. Politics, it is said, is the art of the possible. What art will it take to make it possible for Republicans to refuse to be governed by lying, cheating monsters?

No formal celebration falling in spring or summer would omit the fizzy concoction, in my mind. But punch wasn’t an intuitive choice for this committee of New Englanders. In an email, I pitched punch as a beverage that conjured, for me, “patent leather shoes, caps’n’gowns, the shine of sweat on upper lips, accomplishment.” I wasn’t suggesting we serve Hawaiian Punch or, for that matter, anything spiked with Everclear or rum.

For a recipe, I turned to the copy of Helen Corbitt’s Pot Luck I inherited from my mother. Corbitt was the trailblazing executive chef for Stanley Marcus and the department store Neiman-Marcus. You can learn more about her here, in this lively piece by Prudence Mackintosh from 1999 that ran in TexasMonthly magazine. Corbitt’s pickled black-eyed peas are a part of my annual New Year’s Day menu, and I bake her crisp, thin oatmeal lace cookies to put smiles on even the glummest of faces.

Here, forthwith, is Corbitt’s alchemical recipe for “Sherbet Punch”: “2 quarts gingerale, 1 quart sherbet (pineapple or orange best) will serve 20 people” (Pot Luck, 160). The sherbet goes into the bottom of the punch bowl. The gingerale goes on top, slowly. A layer of fizzy foam ensues. The socially awkward can always be counted on to ladle the concoction into cups to avoid having to make small talk.

Imagine me pushing a cart heavy with a dozen bottles of soda along the aisles of my grocer’s freezer section in search of sherbet. Friendly’s Double Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough? Check. Talenti Blood Orange Sorbetto? Check. Almond Dream Cappuccino Swirl? Check. The blocky cartons of lime or orange sherbet of my childhood? Nowhere to be found. At last, I spied Lucerne Rainbow Sherbet. Dowdy, plastic tubs filled with a swirl of imitation flavored raspberry, orange, and lime. A quick read of the label: “Skim Milk, Sugar, Water, Corn Syrup, Cream, Raspberry Flavor (Raspberry Juice Concentrate, Citric Acid, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Red 40, Blue 1)…” In short, perfection. I piled all available tubs into my cart.

And imagine my delight as I, in party clothes and wearing a tatty apron, assembled the secret ingredients into bowls as beaming graduates, their beaming families, and their beaming teachers and mentors lined up to enter the social hall for the reception. A little boy approached. Might he just have the “ice cream?” Sure, I told him. But first, I said, how about you try a little punch?

Democrats have tried making nice with Republicans. The result is an even more divided electorate, riven by differences in worldview that I am not willing or able to paper over. Last night’s election is evidence to me not of a need to listen to one another or of a need to acknowledge the validity of another world view. I have turned to Tocqueville, Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison, and John Brown for counsel.

French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville surveyed the United States in 1831. The child of nobles who had survived the French Revolution, Tocqueville wondered how a democratic government worked. He picked up on a potentially fatal flaw in the system. The “majority,” he noted “exercise a prodigious actual authority” that had the potential to ignore “the complaints of those whom it crushes upon its path. This state of things is harmful in itself and dangerous for the future” (Democracy in America, vol. 1, ch. 15).

Faced with the power of such a majority in 1849 as the nation invaded Mexico and a majority of voters persisted in upholding legalized slavery, Henry David Thoreau wrote that “when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule […] not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest.” Why, if the majority favors injustice, “[m]ust the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?”

Thoreau’s essay, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” advised readers to heed their consciences. He refused to pay taxes, to resist not with violence but with the power of the pocket. To what did he owe allegiance? His conscience. He knew what he thought was right, and he would not betray it. This is a dangerous principle, one that can be used to justify most any atrocious actions, but, in Thoreau’s case, his motives and methods inspired many who would go on to lead their nations to independence, from Mohandas K. Gandhi in India to Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

The words of William Lloyd Garrison, the great Abolitionist and newspaper publisher, also inspire me: “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest – I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – and I will be heard” (The Liberator, 1, Jan. 1, 1831).

A coincidence that a curator recently unearthed and identified a marble bust of John Brown? I think not. A decade after Thoreau published his essay on civil disobedience, Brown and a band of extremists raided the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia in a bid to arm slaves and end human bondage in this country. Before he was hanged December 2, 1859, months before the outbreak of the Civil War, he allowed a sculptor from Boston to measure his face. The bust was unveiled in 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

I do not espouse violence. But I will not sit by as Democrats make nice, yet again. I am motivated by the words and actions of my American forbears as I try to imagine how I can participate in American democracy without appearing to support the revocation of hard-won civil rights. I will never turn my back on equality. I will never bow to the will of a majority that sanctions racism, misogyny, nativism, and ignorance.

N.B.: My daughter remarks that I have only drawn on the thoughts and words of “dead white men.” My point: one does not need to be female or be of color to have a corner on righteousness. These issues belong to all of us. And in solidarity, we are defiant and demand justice and fairness for all.