Being deliberate about joy

                It’s important to be deliberate about joy when holiday contact has been flattened and we’re all locked in with few and sometimes wounded relations.

               On Tuesday night, I ran an all-staff, no-talent talent show for Roosevelt High School. I know students have been isolated and sad, but educators have been too: for the same reason I share with students a Zen at Ten half hour for happiness on Wednesdays, I organized a talent show with health and community in mind.

               And it was so good—a joyous affair that included singing and guitar and poetry, cookie deliveries and virtual eating, cat tricks, juggling, crochet and art shares, a Boomwhacker arrangement of Rolling in the Deep, a dramatic reading of a children’s book, and a stage-stealing pursed lip trumpeting of The Star Spangled Banner, all in one neat hour.

               Today, the day between semesters, an hour and a half away from home, I slipped into a forest at an unmarked pullout and followed the roaring sound to a perch over water churning white, blue, and green. The ground was the soft overlayer of forest—needles and moss and soft rot of wood and earth—until I came out on the slick rocks over a dramatic river. At Eagle Falls, the river had kettled out round bowls in rock while a boulder-layered wall lifted cedars on the other side.

               By the time I got back on the road, I was buoyant and happy in ways I haven’t felt much since the lockdown and the car drove like a teenager’s.

Democracy Terrorized

                Yesterday, white terrorists stormed and vandalized the capitol. Images of a man smugly propping up his feet on House Speaker Pelosi’s abandoned desk unsettled me as much as pictures of Pramila Jayapal huddled on the floor of the balcony, hordes breaking down barriers, smashing windows, marauding through halls of Congress, pipe bombs found at Democratic and Republican headquarters, a corpse of a young woman carried down the Capitol steps.

               A president of the United States effectively sparked violence against another branch of government. We’ve had an illiterate, racist, hyper-coddled man-baby running our country, and he never seemed to understand the difference between presidents and kings. Our democracy has always been partial and inequitable, but I never expected to see it so severely ignored and violently sabotaged.

               Yet democracy is our country’s most vital and originating claim.

               Do we know anymore what this means? Equal voice and power of citizens hang on mechanisms of consensus. That means a number of things.

               We have signed on to a loud, messy project, one that calls for a rarely-smooth caucusing of ideas and good communication of facts to inform decisions. It calls for a mechanism of settling debates. And it involves a social contract that citizens will abide by rules of debate and then peaceably tolerate outcomes.

               Such debate calls for protection of assembly and speech, as well as dependable information and therefore vigorous protections of the press and quality education. We then need careful and accessible means of voting. And the settled outcome of these decisions requires our trust and peaceful acquiescence to what’s been decided.

               Our democracy is in trouble.

               The Republican Party, for too long, has relied on compromises in democracy that advantage targeted minoritarian interests. To achieve this, an executive class seeking to avoid taxes and regulation sold grievance, xenophobia, patriotism and freedom to a white, rural working class seeking to preserve Christian values and access to jobs. Such compromise includes a Senate where Nebraska has power equal to California and an Electoral College where sparsely populated states punch above their weight. These compromises have served Republicans well.

               Add to these compromises other degradations of democracy that advantage Republicans: massive voter suppression, Gerry-rigged redistricting, poorly funded schools, a bullied press.

               With all these advantages, Republicans still lost the White House and Senate.

               They were then able to go to courts, packed with judges appointed by Trump and rushed through confirmation by McConnell, and still, they lost. No fewer than 60 times, judges and Justices listened patiently to claims of election fraud, and claimants lost over and over.

               The President told his supporters yesterday he would never concede. He told them to march up Pennsylvania Avenue and give Republicans “the kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country.”

               That’s not democracy. That’s a bullied press, degraded schooling, arduous voting, and an absolute refusal after two months to accept the will of the people. The fact that it ended up in the breaching and vandalizing of the People’s House where state-certified votes were then being honored and received is only the most demonstrable statement of the fact.

               Democracy is fragile. We have kicked the shit out of it. And we need to attend to its needs, quickly and with care.

The use of professional mourning

               In the book I’m reading today, In the Language of Miracles by Raija Hassib, there’s mention of professional mourners. It’s a job I’ve heard of before, but I’ve only nodded towards the intrigues of other times and places. I understand how one might hire others to demonstrate high standing—behold such sorrow at this great loss! I also guess that even if funeral-goers knew the keening and gnashing of teeth was amplified by mercenary wailers, there’d be respect for the effort to broadcast pain.

               But I put the book down to feel it more. Last night, Amelia and I were watching the end of Won’t You Be My Neighbor, a documentary that tuned in deeply to Fred Rogers’ radical slowness and quiet and love, his intent stare and unblinking recognitions of hardship and anxieties of children. In one tender moment, Daniel Striped Tiger is talking to Lady Aberlin, and the tiger softly says, I’ve been wondering if I’m a mistake. Then he timidly sings that he's not like anyone else he knows. She sings back, forcefully: “You’re not a fake. You’re no mistake. You are my friend.” It becomes a duet, where the tiger continues in his anxieties, and Lady Aberlin continues in her reassurance.

               When they stop singing, Lady Aberlin says, “You are just fine, exactly the way you are.”

               The way I look? he asks.

               Yeah, she says.

               The way I talk?

               Yes!

               The way I love?

               And she says, “Especially the way you love.” And that’s when I know I’m crying.

               But I’m not weeping like I am at the end of the movie, when Amelia had joined me. It’s after Mr. Rogers’ funeral. One of the talking heads remembers a time Mr. Rogers had said, Think of someone who helped you along the way, for one minute; I’m gonna time you. And then we hear Mr. Rogers’ own, slow voice and deliberate timbre: “Let’s just take some time to think of those extra special people.” And we see former cast members, sons, sister, aunt, friends looking off, looking down, one at a time, as we hear the rest of Mr. Rogers’ statement—that wherever those people are, you know that deep down, they always want what’s best for you; they’ve always cared for you beyond measure, and encouraged you to be true to the best in you. One by one, we watch the seven or eight people think; we watch them feel. They cry, smile, nod, fill, and finally, they look at us in blessing through the magic of the camera, by which point, I was ugly crying, and embarrassed to be doing so, but Amelia was crying with me, and we were transported together.

               This morning, I was thinking about professional mourners. I was thinking about the onion cellar in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, where people go to cut onions and cry together. Maybe the role of professional mourners isn’t mostly to broadcast status, but to encourage our wary grief. A quote from the book of Jeremiah suggests this to be so: “Consider and call for the mourning women, that they may come; And send for the wailing women, that they may come! Let them make haste and take up a wailing for us, That our eyes may shed tears and our eyelids flow with water” (9: 17–18).

               Sometimes we need help to liberate the churning and bruised humanity within.