Today in Ferguson 150 years after the Civil War we see "ghastly remnants of our great shame emerging still"/Lincoln warned of "national suicide" if we neglect to be a "nation of freemen"/Mark Twain's Huck Finn deciding to "go to hell" instead of turning in the "property" of his runaway slave friend Jim "may be the finest moment in all of American literature"/Our insistence on "Exceptionalism" blinds us to making necessary fixes/BlackLivesMatter because we have not achieved a post-racial society when institutional racism is still enshrined.
If you like to get a little history now and then from your tv on these United States (which I do and enjoy as a supplement to reading books) and are not a cave dweller in New Mexico or something then Ken Burns needs no introduction. He is an icon of documentary film-making, with techniques that have revolutionized the art of historical story-telling. His style is so well-known and vaunted in documentary film-making that one could say he's as much a standard as The Beatles "Sgt. Pepper" was to serious album-making (even the I-Photo program of Apple Mac's has a "Ken Burns effect" feature). Which is probably why he's been an exclusive part of a legacy that values nuanced and critical story-telling (PBS), rather than one that pumps out sensational and often jingoistic pap for the undiscerning (The History Channel).
Given that he occupies such strata through his lifetime devotion to history, his decision to lay bare the moment we find ourselves in, with respect to America perhaps finally coming to terms in grappling with, after a very long avoidance of, the malignancy of systemic racism, was a very powerful and instructive deed.
Powerful and salient he was in this remarkable commencement speech at Washington University in St. Louis. His choice of historical anecdotes and geographical context, perfectly harmonized with the events of today. Of that he didn't mince words either, telling these young folks that he was "drafting them into a new Union Army." In that sense he is very much an advocate, an activist, if you will.
That's an important distinction. Where are our civic leaders, elected officials, journalists, celebrities, who are willing to unequivocally confront systemic institutional racism, enough to instigate the painful discussion and in turn force the subsequent legislation needed to once and for all remedy this?
There are so few amongst us willing to put themselves forward. It's an era of craven sellout, self-promotion and celebrity gossip. The vast majority of media outlets have made it clear too, that they're not in business to honor such a quaint idea as the Fourth Estate of journalism providing the checks and balances which quite literally are the lifeblood of democracy. Instead the landscape is littered with fear-mongering trash such as Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck et all, but also folks such as Wolf Blitzer, and the subservience of Meet The Press, CNN and the rest of network news.
It is all the more significant that Burns chose to use his platform to courageously put the hard conversation front and center. For this he should be roundly applauded, and more importantly, imitated.
Here are some highlight of this poetic tour de force, in which he calls upon on the young graduates to respond collectively to this moral carpe diem, instead of the death of "careerism," by answering "the angels of our better nature" so we can fulfill at last the American promise of freedom and equality (all emphasis mine):
Over the years I've come to understand an important fact, I think: that we are not condemned to repeat, as the cliché goes and we are fond of quoting, what we don't remember. That's a clever, even poetic phrase, but not even close to the truth. Nor are there cycles of history, as the academic community periodically promotes. The Bible, Ecclesiastes to be specific, got it right, I think: "What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun."
What that means is that human nature never changes. Or almost never changes. We have continually superimposed our complex and contradictory nature over the random course of human events. All of our inherent strengths and weaknesses, our greed and generosity, our puritanism and our prurience parade before our eyes, generation after generation after generation. This often gives us the impression that history repeats itself. It doesn't.
Lincoln's Springfield speech also suggests what is so great and so good about the people who inhabit this lucky and exquisite country of ours (that's the world you now inherit): our work ethic, our restlessness, our innovation and our improvisation, our communities and our institutions of higher learning, our suspicion of power; the fact that we seem resolutely dedicated to parsing the meaning between individual and collective freedom; that we are dedicated to understanding what Thomas Jefferson really meant when he wrote that inscrutable phrase "the pursuit of Happiness."
But the isolation of those two mighty oceans has also helped to incubate habits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to money and guns; our certainty -- about everything; our stubborn insistence on our own exceptionalism, blinding us to that which needs repair, our preoccupation with always making the other wrong, at an individual as well as global level.
Before the enormous strides in equality achieved in statutes and laws in the 150 years since the Civil War that Lincoln correctly predicted would come are in danger of being undone by our still imperfect human nature and by politicians who now insist on a hypocritical color-blindness -- after four centuries of discrimination. That discrimination now takes on new, sometimes subtler, less obvious but still malevolent forms today. The chains of slavery have been broken, thank God, and so too has the feudal dependence of sharecroppers as the vengeful Jim Crow era recedes (sort of) into the distant past. But now in places like -- but not limited to -- your other neighbors a few miles as the crow flies from here in Ferguson, we see the ghastly remnants of our great shame emerging still, the shame Lincoln thought would lead to national suicide, our inability to see beyond the color of someone's skin. It has been with us since our founding...
But the shame continues: prison populations exploding with young black men, young black men killed almost weekly by policemen, whole communities of color burdened by corrupt municipalities that resemble more the predatory company store of a supposedly bygone era than a responsible local government. Our cities and towns and suburbs cannot become modern plantations.
It is unconscionable, as you emerge from this privileged sanctuary, that a few miles from here -- and nearly everywhere else in America: Baltimore, New York City, North Charleston, Cleveland, Oklahoma, Sanford, Florida, nearly everywhere else -- we are still playing out, sadly, an utterly American story, that the same stultifying conditions and sentiments that brought on our Civil War are still on such vivid and unpleasant display.
Twain, himself, writing after the Civil War and after the collapse of Reconstruction, a misunderstood period devoted to trying to enforce civil rights, was actually expressing his profound disappointment that racial differences still persisted in America, that racism still festered in this favored land, founded as it was on the most noble principle yet advanced by humankind -- that all men are created equal. That civil war had not cleansed our original sin, a sin we continue to confront today, daily, in this supposedly enlightened "post-racial" time.
It is into this disorienting and sometimes disappointing world that you now plummet, I'm afraid, unprotected from the shelter of family and school. You have fresh prospects and real dreams and I wish each and every one of you the very best. But I am drafting you now into a new Union Army that must be committed to preserving the values, the sense of humor, the sense of cohesion that have long been a part of our American nature, too. You have no choice, you've been called up, and it is your difficult, but great and challenging responsibility to help change things and set us right again.
Let me apologize in advance to you. We broke it, but you've got to fix it.
Let me speak directly to the graduating class. (Watch out. Here comes the advice.)
Remember: Black lives matter. All lives matter.
Reject fundamentalism wherever it raises its ugly head. It's not civilized. Choose to live in the Bedford Falls of "It's a Wonderful Life," not its oppressive opposite, Pottersville...
Don't confuse monetary success with excellence. The poet Robert Penn Warren once warned me that "careerism is death"...
Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all -- not the car, not the TV, not the computer or the smartphone.
Do not allow our social media to segregate us into ever smaller tribes and clans, fiercely and sometimes appropriately loyal to our group, but also capable of metastasizing into profound distrust of the other...
Convince your government that the real threat, as Lincoln knew, comes from within. Governments always forget that, too. Do not let your government outsource honesty, transparency or candor. Do not let your government outsource democracy...
Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of the country -- they just make the country worth defending...
And if you ever find yourself in Huck's spot, if you've "got to decide betwixt two things," do the right thing. Don't forget to tear up the letter. He didn't go to hell -- and you won't either.
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