Redtree Times

New Day Rising- Now at West End Gallery

We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.

–Anand Giridharadas, The Ink, January 15, 2021

Taking a bit of a break since the West End Gallery show came down and wasn’t planning on writing anything this morning. But I saw Anand Giridharadas this morning on the tube speaking of the Harris/Walz campaign as being the politics of anti-inflammation, that they were normal, caring people whose inclusive stances stand as the direct antithesis to the uncaring, divisive, and inflammatory rhetoric coming from that other guy. He pointed out that we have had a decade or more beset by this sort of inflammatory fever and their campaign seems to serve as a balm of sorts.

I liked that. It reminded me of another article from Giridharadas that I featured here back in early 2021, in the week before the Biden inauguration. That article still seems pertinent today so I thought I’d share it again, as is.

The words above are the final line in a what I believe to be a brilliant essay from writer Anand Giridharadas that was posted a couple of days ago on his blog, The.Ink that bears the heading We are falling on our face because we are jumping high. I hope you’ll click on the link and read this short essay.

In it, he observes that the chaos that we are experiencing is not the chaos that often comes with the beginning of something but is actually the sort that comes with an ending. I have also felt for years that we were watching of the death throes of a certain type of power and control, that those who were predominantly white and male felt they were entitled.

We are falling on our face because we are jumping very high right now. We are trying to do something that does not work in theory.

To be a country of all the world, a country made up of all the countries, a country without a center of identity, without a default idea of what a human being is or looks like, without a shared religious belief, without a shared language that is people’s first language at home. And what we’re trying to do is awesome. It is literally awesome in the correct sense of that word.

This is one of my favorite passages from this essay. To be the country we desire it to be, one that offers equal hope for each of its citizens, is enormously difficult and unlike anything ever done. No nation has ever aspired to so diversely share its rights and governance among all the groups that make up its citizenry.

There are massive challenges and it will not be easy. And in a nation whose default setting is easy, that means we will have to do much more than that which we normally are accustomed to doing. We will have to work and scrap, to strain far beyond what we believe our limits to be.

But if it succeeds, we all benefit, all boats are lifted and we all become part and parcel of something great, something unique in human history.

Something of which we can all truly be proud.

Please give Mr. Giridharadas’ essay a read. It is short but potently hopeful. Definitely worth a few minutes.

For this week’s Sunday Morning Music [this was a Sunday in January, 2021], I am going with a recent tune, Tough to Let Go, from the Drive-By Truckers, whose last couple of albums have been dark and timely.  I think it says a lot about what we are seeing in the chaos of this struggle between those who look to the future and those who want to hold onto an imagined past. Our beliefs, even when we can see that they defy logic and fact, are sometimes tough to leave behind. They continue to haunt us and dictate our actions until we can fully separate ourselves from them.

It’s tough to let go. But it has to happen.

Do something good today.