Meeting the forces of history by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

On August 25, Robert Reich said to David Pakman, “I am trying not to be alarmist. I am trying not to despair. But this is the worst I’ve ever seen.” And that was a little more than two weeks before the assassination that shook the ground on which we’re doing our best to stand.

I am deeply tired but also strangely calm in the face of what is happening. I wait for the next shoe to drop and wonder when it will be a really big one, more of a boot than a shoe, perhaps. It’s an oddly mutated version of the proverbial calm before the storm, given that it hasn’t been even remotely calm for a very long time. January 20, to be exact. But there is also something else going on for me that I am trying to feel my way into.

Last night, unable to sleep, I turned on the light and jotted down one sentence: Witnessing the inexorability of what is happening politically might be freeing me. Perhaps it’s also freeing my mother, dead these last thirty-five years, but whose spirit has always felt restless to me. And maybe even my grandparents might at last be able to forgive their daughter for not, despite all her efforts, being able to save them from Auschwitz. That would help her rest, for sure.

The forces of history mow us down at times. Which isn’t to say that I am let off the hook by the lived awareness that those forces operating now are darker and stronger than anything I have directly encountered before. This does not give me permission to be passive, but perhaps it can help me work through the kind of crippling guilt my mother lived with all her life, and which I inherited a good dose of.

I attended a local protest on Saturday morning. It was more sparsely attended than the last couple I’d been to. Many fewer young people. One old guy yelled at some students who were walking up the hill behind us to get lunch. “Lazy chickens!” he shouted. “Get out here and join us!” Not a helpful recruitment tool, I thought. I considered saying something to him, but suspected I wouldn’t get any further with him than if I had tried to talk with the young man who gave us the finger as he drove by.

Fewer horns honked, too. “They’re afraid,” said one person. “Everyone is scared.” But one young woman rolled down her window and shouted, “Good for you! Thank you for what you’re doing!” Her thumbs-up, friendly smile and wave as she drove off made a difference.

As did these words from Robert Hubbell:

It is difficult not to feel exhausted by the events of last week and the hypocritical moralizing that seeks to simultaneously blame and silence those standing for democracy. There is only one path forward during troubled times: Leaning into resistance with greater effort and courage.

We are on the right path, but we cannot expect everyone to maintain peak intensity every day. Do not despair because participation waxes and wanes over time. That is the natural order of the universe.

Our most important task is to persevere and remain steadfast in resistance. The massive crowds will return…The sense of deflation that some (not all) are feeling is compounded by the fact that the media has effectively forgotten about the ongoing resistance to Trump’s unlawful agenda. 

Stay strong, my friends! …We have been charged with a sacred trust, and we must not waver in our commitment, despite transitory feelings of exhaustion and worry. We are up to the task.

Or, as the Pirke Avot, Ethics of Our Fathers, a major Jewish text, gently reminds us: You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it altogether.