“Starting All Over Again”
“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night” (Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”).
Night darkened the United States, in stark daylight, on January 6, 2021.
I worked on Capitol Hill for two years, walking up and down the steps of the Capitol at any chance. The old building’s understated grandeur charms, as does the maze of often-unmarked doors leading into offices, closets, storage, and the Senate and House floors. Its layout remained a mystery I had no interest in solving. The moment I absorbed the first image on that crazed afternoon, I knew. This had to be a plan long in the making—its perpetrators scheming within the Capitol as well as storming outside. The result could be catastrophic, an ending beyond imagination.
How hideous to suddenly recognize a face here, another there. But those faces invaded Charlottesville in August, 2017. Self-identified white supremacists, neo-Nazis and Confederates, anti-Muslims and Semites, ghoulishly assembled in a park where I’d given a graduation speech a few years earlier. My friends with downtown businesses texted live videos as they immediately hurried their employees away and then stayed to assist first responders. What an odd, visceral sensation shook me on January 6, one that mixed with horror and fear: my relief that everyone was witnessing and therefore forced into focusing on this hollow stupidity. Those ghastly, vacant faces. Neither heart nor soul. Lights out. “Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face” (Camus, The Fall).
A few articles to share. Marc Elias in his Democracy Docket: “The Day Democracy Was Attacked.” ProPublica’s Joshua Kaplan and Joaquim Sapien: “No One Took Us Seriously: Black Cops Warned About Racist Capitol Police Officers for Years.” From BuzzFeed, Emmanuel Felton’s “The Racist Attacks They Faced as They Protected the Capitol.” Umair Haque, in Medium: “America Needs to Break the Back of Its Fascist Movement Now – Or Else.” And, whew, “The Bitter Fruits of Trump’s White Power Presidency” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker.
For all the promise of this democracy, we’ve never gotten it right. Founded on the slave trade and nourished by mass destruction of indigenous tribes, improvements in this country have come slowly, begrudgingly, partially. At last, however, the cruel white male patriarchal structure/system, one that guarantees privilege to a few, crumbles before our weary, teary eyes. Dr. King wrote from his cell in the Birmingham jail: “History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.” Time’s up. More than enough. Longer than too long. Be gone, deadly ignorance.
So, we start all over again. I watch Congressman Jamie Raskin, brilliant and kind, bereaved beyond measure, move us forward, up, beyond. “I’m not going to lose my son at the end of 2020 and lose my country and republic in 2021. It’s not going to happen.” Thinking outside the box? There isn’t even a box, for anyone. New eyes, new hearts, new minds embrace every possibility. The sky isn’t the limit. Any and every thing right here and now presents possibility. “We must have beginner’s mind…. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few” (Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind). Each moment an opening, each breath a first, each experience a soft and free start—unfettered, fresh, bright.
Smart, fearless people abound. I’d gladly lose my way in the Capitol and bump, gently, into Representatives Cori Bush and Katie Porter. Pow! Sages Joyce White Vance and Jemele Hill speak truth, and like Anand Giridharadas, a sense of humor graces their words. Laurie Garrett and Andy Slavitt educate about the virus and vaccine. Historians Michael Beschloss and Jon Meacham take us back and forward.
Tomorrow. Inauguration Day. Fine faces abound—the beginning opens wide. “Starting all over again is gonna be rough / But we’re gonna make it,” cousins Mel and Tim serenade us. In 1964, Sam Cooke, the young and tired Father of Soul, sang that “It’s been a long / a long time coming” but “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Now.
photo credit: Maria Mudd Ruth
Listen to the children. It’s September 25, 2015 at the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. The Young People’s Choir of New York soothes, uplifts, and nudges. “Let there be peace on earth / And let it begin with me.”
Thumbs up. Heart upon heart.
Told with McCarty’s characteristic wisdom, marvel, exuberance, and good will, Leaving 1203 is about navigating that way through. The author draws on all available resources—friends and strangers, food and laughter, life lessons learned in the very house she now empties, and, not least, her newly-inherited West Highland terrier, Billy. McCarty simultaneously learns and deftly teaches the fine arts of remembering, letting go, and holding on to what matters most. She not only finds the way through, she shows the way.
the greatest gift an author could give a reader… lessons of a universally philosophical and existential kind… a touching journey… a welcome, upbeat ride
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