Equity in America: An Invitation

Part Three of Greet the Light and Widen the Lens

 

In the late 1990’s I studied Judaism, hoping to convert. After a year of discourse, study and reflection, I felt as though I was swimming upstream in a mighty river. I confessed to the rabbi, “I can never learn everything about the Jewish faith.”

“This just proves, Elisa, that you are now ready to convert,” he responded.

I nearly fainted. Already?

Reckoning with our future in 2020 requires the same time-lapse review of the past. Deep currents of inequity must be explored. Understanding the past, and white society’s blindness to it, takes more than reading, more than careful realignment of perspectives, more than sorrow or surprise. I may never know all I need to know about this subject. But in order to make sense of the past and make corrections in the future, I need a new value scale.

Let me explain.

Color and music are vibration. Intervals, intensities, and juxtapositions generate a seemingly limitless range of effects. When we limit the notes, the palette, the vibration of life, we diminish our experience. It is the very combination of notes or colors that creates the unique resonance we perceive.

What makes color or music memorable, why is it moving?. Presence and absence, intervals, volume, contrast. These make a song or a piece of art, a color for a room, a pattern on fabric. Without contrast what would we have? Contrast piques our curiosity, and if we are attuned, even a little, curiosity can open the door to wonder, to interconnectedness, to what lies beyond the edges of our everyday self.

What draws us to the smile of a child, the warmth of the sun, the scent of a flower? These are an invitation to feel, to sense, to connect. What can we use now, in our agitated, defended, fearful society during political and social upheaval? We cannot erase the horror of slavery, we cannot explain it, defend it, we cannot even imagine what our country would have become without it. By looking away we did managed to forget it. This has to end. But, how?

How can these simultaneous crises in America –virus and inequity —generate a better resolution than crises of the past? Reconstruction and the Voting and Civil Rights Acts did not balance the scale. Jim Crow style backlash continues today as racism, in some places, remains tacitly sanctioned and directly encouraged.

This essay is an invitation to listen for the harmonic grace note sounding in the blood and bone of every human on the planet. Next, imagine beyond the human scale: feel the movement of the wind over the earth; hear the churn of the seas in response to the rising moon.

Courage is needed. I am reluctant to speak of politics to anyone who supports our current president. I am afraid my comments will “make things worse.” Worse? Political differences in our country already shrink our opportunity for human connection to the size of a pinhole.

Today, in much of California, and hopefully throughout America and the world, citizens limit interaction, wear masks. Our normal, palliative, consumer society is out of reach. No shopping in malls, no sporting events, no concerts, no celebrations of any considerable size. Collective somnambulism is no longer an option. We are reduced to our smallest denominator. One note. You. Me.

Television and social media are a handy recourse, but often suspicion and division lead us deeper into a private rabbit hole somewhere inside our chosen silo. How can we, blinded by generations and centuries of avoidance, see our way clear back to the source, the very resonance of life? How do we “greet the light and widen the lens?” Is there a formula for melting the edge, for increasing our harmonic vibration?

Yes.

We need a new value scale.

We must signal to others our willingness to listen, our ability to be vulnerable, our faith in forgiveness. To start this process, we must step across the threshold, out of the known, into the new.

Let me suggest you DO speak kindly to a political adversary, you do signal your willingness to listen, you do seek common ground. I have no proof, no perfect research, no authority to quote. But intuitively, I believe 85 percent of the people in our country want much the same things: freedom, safety, comfort, and love. But we have varying ideas about how to attain these. In creating this new value scale, I revert to values learned in my 1950’s childhood:

As a Girl Scout: I said the motto and agreed to be “ready to help out wherever needed. Willingness to serve is not enough; you must know how to do the job well, even in an emergency.”

At Catholic Catechism class, from six to twelve years old, I hoped it was true that a “special grace could deepen and strengthen my faith, not only for my needs but for the needs of others.”

At home I had a long list of chores, three times those of my two brothers. It was assumed that ironing, dishes, cleaning, baking, dusting and vacuuming were girl jobs, central to the family’s happiness.

Clearly, no matter the source, the importance of the greater good was the focus of childhood values 70 years ago. In these times I long to hear leaders, teachers, parents and friends bring forward, front and center, the notion of the greater good. In Judaism there are the ethical values. At NAACP meetings, forgiveness and inclusiveness ring clear despite the harrowing times people of color continue to face. In community work I find pitching in, physically and financially, fulfilling and soothing.

The notion of the greater good survives. But is it elevated enough to be seen by those sequestered in fear, or in anger, or in simple isolation? Raise the flag! Hold your head high! Ask your better angels to step forward, if you believe in angels. Perform a ritual if you are pagan. Pray and meditate, breathe and dance, make art. Release your own greater good. Ring the living bell; shine the living light. Be on the lookout for good. Deliver kindness. Receive forgiveness. Project hope.

Last night the Blue Moon rose, full and bright. Cool moonlight spread across our meadows, highlighting the edge of every substantive element outside. On a table in the center of the patio I placed a water glass, full. Beneath the glass was this written incantation:

May the light of the moon charge the landscape, the seas and rivers with positive healing energy. May the reflected light of the sun energize the hearts and minds of all of us as we seek and exemplify balance, peace, equity, truth and kind hearted community. And so it is.

When morning came I read aloud the incantation, and drank every drop of the charged moon water. Three days until the election. May I be brave and true, a good Girl Scout, at the ready to do the job well, the job of being human.

May the greater good spread like moonlight all across this land.