Politics

Planting Seeds

~ towles ~ 1 Comment

If you have children of a certain age, or if you just happen to love musical theater, then you know the power of the Hamilton soundtrack on repeat. My kids’ recent favorite song is “Non-Stop,” but my twelve year old can belt “Helpless” with an understudy’s zeal; my eight year old can roll his r’s just like Jonathan Groff’s King George III in “I’ll Be Back,”; and my ten year old has been known to pass a melancholic, quarantined afternoon with “It’s Quiet Uptown” on repeat.

My personal favorite, though, is a song that the kids usually skip. “The World Was Wide Enough” sets the scene for the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. In a play that harnesses the drama and intrigue of American history to such a degree that even an eight year old can sit watching with riveted attention, this is arguably its most dramatic and powerful moment. As the song builds and Burr fires his shot, the scene freezes around them. Here, Alexander Hamilton gives us his last words:

“Legacy—what is a legacy?” he asks. “It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me. America, you great unfinished symphony …”

If I forced my kids to listen to this bit of drama over and over, they’d whine: “Mom, this is so sad!” and we’d flip back through to “Satisfied,” or “Wait for It,” depending on the mood. But for me, “The World Was Wide Enough” captures Lin Manuel Miranda’s inspiration at its height, and it carries a message especially prescient for today’s America.

We often relegate the word “legacy” to people who are capital-I “important.” Famous nation-builders, writers, artists, physicians and pioneers in all manner of fields leave legacies. But what about our friends and neighbors? What about us? What seeds are we planting in the gardens we’ll never see?

Now less than two weeks from the outcome of an election that could just as easily be likened to a reckoning, I think about this. Last week, as I stood in line for an hour and a half at my local early voting precinct, I felt so proud to be a part of a country whose founders envisioned raising our minds and our voices rather than raising our guns.

Alongside me was an elderly man shuffling through the infinite line dragging his bad leg by a walker. A woman and her husband dressed beautifully for this unique and privileged occasion. She was wearing a feathered hat. Two haggard, unshaven guys behind me discussed the books we passed as we wound through the stacks of the public library before reaching the voting booth. A woman well ahead of me in the maze broke rank for just a second to compliment a faraway voter on her shoes.

America, the beautiful. America, the complicated, the imperfect, the human. The unfinished. How I love thee.

You, yourself, might be standing in line to vote as you read this. Or you might be planning to watch the debate tonight, to see if it will help you make your final choice. You may be wrestling with messages from your upbringing–past wounds and loyalties that get in the way of clarity.

Or, you might feel a bit defeated and apathetic: does any of this even matter? I think we all know what Alexander Hamilton would say to you: definitively, it does.

On our way home from school each weekday, we pass a beautiful white church on a prominent street. I first saw the protesters gather there in May, but they looked a little different from the people peacefully protesting and rioting in the streets of cities’ downtowns. This brave cluster was made up of elderly white people. Some of them leaned on canes; all of them wore masks. They held Black Lives Matters signs, standing six feet apart in their geriatric shoes, and they rang cowbells. (Who doesn’t love a little cowbell?) At first, there were no more than a handful of them — five or six at most. Over the summer and fall they’ve grown to forty or more.

This week we saw them again, and the kids and I had a Hamilton moment as we slowly drove by. “Who Tells Your Story” was on full blast, and we had the windows down. The day held that warm, soft autumn light that makes October in the South so wonderful. My eight year old leaned as far out the window as he could safely do. “The Oldies are protesting, Mom!” he said with delight. In his face was this incredible mixture of hope and joy. I’ll never forget it. They’re planting seeds in a garden they may never see. For my kids, it’s a lesson that you don’t have to stop growing even as you grow old.

Beneath the political noise and the fear-mongering, the paid political advertisements, the endless loop of your newsfeed, and the drone of cable news, Hamilton inspires this one helpful, clarifying question:

What might bloom in the garden where you intend to plant your seeds?

Vote wisely, friends. History has its eyes on us.

Wake Up

~ towles ~ Leave a comment
Photo Credit: Laura Chouette

At some point during quarantine, our youngest child started giving us all a little nudge.

“Mama … Mom … Mom … Mom … Wake up!” he’d say to me when I was absently scrolling Instagram.

“Wake up!” he’d say to my spouse, glued to the two computer monitors he’d set up in his “home office” (i.e. the kids playroom).

“Wake up!” he’d say to the girls as they did their school work via screens.

“Wake up!” to me, again, as I texted friends, read recipes, researched emergency homeschooling techniques, worked on the stalled-out novel I’d previously been making good progress on, and scrolled Facebook to see if the world really was as crazy as it felt, and if everyone else thought so, too.

What he was saying was “pay attention to ME,” of course. He’d learned how to scramble to the very top of our hallways’ door frames, and how to physically climb our walls, and he wanted us to see. But there was something in his phrasing that carried foreboding:

Wake Up!

What, exactly, were we asleep to?

Like everyone else, we’ve muddled through our quarantines. For a while, I made a paper chain and wrote down each day’s activities: worked on jigsaw puzzle; went for a walk even though it rained; played Yahtzee seven times, cleaned out the closets, etc. Already fairly outdoors-loving people, we’ve embraced, even more, all the open spaces that exist within a three hundred mile radius of where we live. We’ve read lots of books. We taught the kids how to play Hearts, Spades and Russian Bank. We gave them unfettered time on their devices. We bought a trampoline; we let our twelve year old go on solo runs; we granted permission for unchaperoned neighborhood bike rides. We fielded our kids’ unanswerable questions; we held non-celebrations for three family birthdays (four, if you count the dog’s), and my husband and I even went on a “date” in our garage.

We were AWAKE, for heaven’s sake. We were more awake, even, than we wanted to be; more awake, maybe, than we have ever been.

But about a month ago, knee-deep in pandemic fatigue, I took a step back. The kids had returned to school, and I’d started working again, however haltingly. Still, I couldn’t concentrate. My watch and my phone and my computer kept dinging. Every time a news story broke, I was too often propelled to social media, where a tidal wave of opinion, hearsay, fabrications, prideful misinformation, mean fun and hard news would, shamefully, ruin my day.

After a particularly testy conversation with my mother, she asked, “What is WRONG with you?”

I have a thousand answers to that question, but, quite honestly, the constant, muffled rage I’d been feeling was a bit … unnatural. So, I reassessed. I started paying attention to the way my body actually felt when I tapped that Twitter icon, or when I saw the outrageous memes, posted by both left and right-leaning “friends,” on Facebook. I took stock of the low-level depression and the high-level anxiety and the general frustration it all ignited within me.

I became more and more aware that I’ve been holding my breath rather than actually breathing. And I started wondering what it might feel like to be both less irate and less foggy, a paradoxical pairing that nonetheless seems wildly appropriate for today’s social and political landscape.

First, I deleted the Twitter app from my phone, and I found that I didn’t miss it. After a Facebook post announced that no one could be a Christian, an American AND a Democrat–I mean, really?–I gave that up, too.

A few days later, my husband and I sat down and watched Social Dilemma on Netflix, and it affirmed everything I’ve been processing over the past several months. Our perspectives are distorted because we are being pushed around by algorithms and unnatural digital platforms that actually don’t “care” whether we live in a functioning society or not. They don’t value our relationships. The Internet doesn’t mind pushing conspiracy theories or sowing division, and, unfortunately for we actual people, the weaker members of humanity and politics don’t mind agreeing with distorted reality so long as it’s used to their advantage–creating a snowball effect of enormous proportions.

Now six weeks in to my social media hiatus, the itch to see what “everyone” thinks is gone. After turning off all my phone’s notifications, aside from texts and phone calls from real people, the fog has begun to lift. I know where to get my news. But rather than having it dumped on me throughout the day, when I’m in a frame of mind that can abide it, I go looking for it myself.

Which leads me here–twenty-some days out from a major election that will likely impact whether or not social media companies face regulatory oversight. What if we all decided to wake up? The internet only has as much power as we allow it. Without us, its distortions have no agency. I’m not suggesting that we go back to 1990s-era bag phones–only that we begin to think more intentionally about how these pocket-sized computers can be used as tools, rather than allowing ourselves to be the ones who are used.

A Plan For Tomorrow

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Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

By the time all this is over, my hair will be gray at the temples, gray at the roots–and not from the stress of quarantine, though it is stressful–but because the gray is something I’ve been covering for years.

By the time all this is over, I wonder: what else will be laid bare that has been hiding in plain sight?

I picture myself in mid-May–or will it be August? Or November? Will we, after so many days unmarked, even know? I’ll drop the kids at school to gather supplies abandoned before their worlds stopped turning. They’ll clean out their desks and discover little bags of goldfish crackers and nutri-grain bars shoved to the back of their cubbies, long forgotten; wrinkled papers covered in math they used to know; spiral-bound agendas whose daily trends toward progress will look, even to them, naive.

No one will be able to fool them then. Tomorrow, it will be clear, is only an idea, a matter of hours.

But it is the hope of tomorrow that still gets me up in the morning. Nine days in to quarantine also means nine days out.

When it happens–when the world opens up again–I will be radiant. So will you.

I will be fearfully, joyfully, wildly gray; kinder, maybe.

I will be older. So will you.

We will enter in to the world then with a tender awareness of the many things we each have been covering up all this time and how they have been laid bare.

It will be okay, whatever you are afraid of. You can’t see the helpers now, but they will be there, emerging from their homes; appearing next to you, where they maybe have been hidden all along; walking alongside you on a road you’d thought abandoned, all your own.

Have you woken up each morning of quarantine and wondered when it will all end? How it will? Me too. See? We are not alone, after all.

One more thought to get you through today, the many hours ahead that will be spent behind your own four walls; the hours you will spend cajoling your children to go outside, to take deep, healing breaths in celebration of those who, as of this moment, cannot fully breathe; the hours that you will hold the sick and those who care for them up to the light; the hours ahead of you which will be filled with buzzing news alerts; the hours ahead of you in which you may feel you are sealing your own leaking boat with paper and scotch tape:

Maybe what we were living before was its own sort of quarantine. There would have been no way for us to know it. We couldn’t have seen.

But in the after that will be, months from the isolation that was and the quarantine that is now, we will see the world differently.

After all this, it won’t be hard.

We will reach out and link arms and find ourselves buoyed by a generosity that had been buried so deep within us that we’d forgotten it was ever there in the first place.

We will find ourselves reaching not only for our hair dressers, but also for one another.

We will see all the grays that everyone has been covering and offer a shrug of dismissal. Of course, they’ve always been there–the roots of things, buried deep, that tell the truth.

We will need to be gentle. We will need to apologize, maybe. We will need to listen, and to act, and to do so as though we were called to it, to do so as though this was all meant to be.

Change

~ towles ~ 9 Comments

For over a year now, Andrew and I have held a membership to Stone Mountain Park, just outside Atlanta.  The Rock, as we like to call it, just twenty minutes from our house, is heavily wooded and surrounded by a fresh lake in which our dog Ivy loves to swim.  The Rock, itself, which stands at the center of the park, is a humpbacked granite slab resembling a somber whale or a planetary hemisphere.

We love the place’s peacefulness – the view of local crew teams gliding across the lake’s early morning glimmer in conjunction with ducks in low flight is truly soul-settling – and we love that it gives our little family a taste of the great outdoors in the midst of a bustling metropolis.

But we also love and are intrigued by Stone Mountain’s irony.

The Rock is of sad history.  In 1915, hooded men in white robes revived the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) atop the lovely granite monolith, burning a cross in celebration.  This “reincarnation” of the Klan was led by a man named William J Simmons, and featured Nathan Bedford Forest II (the grandson of the KKK’s original Imperial Grand Wizard) administering oaths.  The group had permission of The Rock’s owner to hold all its rallies there and in 1924 commissioned a stone carving of the South’s Confederate heroes on its mountainside. (The KKK supplied half the funding for the artwork; the US government supplied the rest of the money.)

Today, however, few signs of the hatred and fear that characterized Stone Mountain for so many years remain.  The carving is still there, of course, and throughout the summer the park puts on a campy laser show to which tourists flock and clap along to the tune of Dixie.  The Confederate memorial, which details information about Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, is also there but rarely highlighted and does not appear to draw any crowds at all.

Far more prevalent than signs of bigotry at Stone Mountain are the African Americans who use the park grounds as a meeting place for cookouts, who bike, walk and run the trails surrounding The Rock, who fish in the lake and let their dogs run free through the woods. They have claimed Stone Mountain for themselves, not any more or any less than the rest of us, but equally, in light of forgiveness, in light of progress.

The juxtaposition of these two entities – proud Confederates and those they fought to oppress – is just downright bizarre. But it is also because of this juxtaposition that it feels as if the spirit of Stone Mountain has been set free, as if something very wrong has been righted there.

Earlier this summer, Andrew and I saw a group of young black boys – maybe between the ages of seven and ten – chasing one another up the sidewalk by the park grounds.  They were laughing and squealing and running as fast as their little legs could carry them. And I was so glad for them to be out of the city, to know the feel of fresh air, however hot and humid, to be assured for them that times do change, and that they have.

I saw in the boys’ faces the joy that I hope for our country, a country that may, indeed, be at the cusp of electing its first African-American President.

If Obama is not our nation‘s hope – the leader of a revival forced from hard times – he may still be the hope of all the little black boys sprinting full speed through the trees at Stone Mountain, an iconic figure for the future America.

The future America.  What will it be?  I pray for a place, like The Rock, that can overcome its history; for a place that seeks justice and loves mercy; for a place that makes those who live in it healthier, happier, and freer in both mind and spirit.

Until then, we will seek refuge among Stone Mountain’s ironies, waiting, patiently, for change.