Meet Me At The Corner…Of The Crouch and The Reach

All Politics, And Sanity, Is Indeed Local, Especially After November 5

A collapsed Southern California freeway after the Sylmar earthquake of 1971.

Note: For more than a year I’ve kicked around the idea of writing a series called “Meet Me at the Corner.” I’ve overthought it, obsessed over it, abandoned it, and revisited it, all while exercising my greatest of superpowers–weapons grade procrastination–as the precious days and months bled by. I even solicited ideas on what “corners” I should seek out. The handful of answers recommended I write about cooking and food, travel, golf, sports, books, music, and faith–subjects everyone knows I love and live by. Comfortable, familiar, well-lit corners.

On a semi-regular basis over the coming months, all will get their due, along with who knows what else. I’ll also visit actual, physical streetcorners I’ve come across through my life, places that keep a particular and powerful hold on my psyche. I’ll swing by plenty of metaphorical corners as well–including this inaugural riff, which, of course, loiters on a dark corner absolutely no one asked for: Politics. But I simply can’t move on without exploring some of the thoughts, fears, acknowledgements, and realizations that have buried my brain in an avalanche of ideas over the past weeks and years. I must share what I, just another American citizen who loves his country, feel I, and we, need to do to find a way forward, together, to avoid The End of the Experiment.

You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder
Throw your hands in the air, say, ‘What does it matter?’
But it don’t do no good to get angry
So help me, I know

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter
You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there
Wrapped up in a trap of your very own
Chain of sorrow

— John Prine

It’s a threadbare phrase by now, but America is indeed at a crossroads. More accurately, we find ourselves on a multilevel, Los Angeles-style tangle of lanes and off-ramps in varying various states of construction or disrepair. Some lanes we might find blocked by ignorance, arrogance, selfishness or, worst of all, indifference. The smoothest and straightest surfaces are usually reserved for the few, while the many deal with teeth-rattling potholes and maddening detours. The highest lanes are clogged with cronynism, cowardice, cynicism and unadulterated capitalist greed. Those in the middle and below might, just might, still lead to a semi-level playing field yet fertilized by the rule of law, fair play, empathy, freedom and justice.

Ok, perhaps my glasses are too rose-colored. Have we ever truly found those lanes, or reached those fertile fields? If the more fortunate and entitled among us pay attention as we race through the lowest reaches as fast as possible, we’ll see that we’ve got a lot of work to do. They’re the lanes shadowed by those above. They’re the lanes lined by temporary tent villages and strewn with garbage and discarded needles, clouded with broken lives, often leading nowhere for their underserved and underrepresented denizens. They’re the lanes where our best intentions as a semi-functioning democracy don’t often find purchase.

And, they’re the lanes–the darkened corners of society–where we’re most likely to find our fellow humans locked into a crouch of fear and despair, sometimes for generations on end, which leaves America less safe and further away from our shared goal of “liberty and justice for all.”

SAFE AND SECURE?

I can’t blame folks for making crouch their default protection posture. It offers a measure of safety or at least perceived safety. It helps preserve body heat and fight back the elements. It softens the blows of cruelty, ignorance, hate, and disfigured “love.”

And, yes, it’s much easier to disappear when you’re rolled up into a silent ball. Standing up and being seen and heard is a far more dangerous proposition when you’ve been in a crouch for days, months, decades, centuries. Venturing into the sunlight, into full exposure, and asserting one’s God-given agency in the world via something as basic as the vote, is a dangerous proposition. So uncounted millions don’t bother, or don’t feel they have the power or right to bother. They continue to suffer. They stay disappeared and let others push them down by default.

But they don’t suffer alone. All of us feel helpless or unseen at some point. Some of us, even the most fortunate among us who do have the power–through birthright or economic status or race or gender–revert to the crouch without even realizing it, and consciously avoid finding a way to leap out of it. I tend to sleep in a fetal position, that’s when I get my best rest, which is telling for an introvert like me. Just being safe and warm under the covers, with my beautiful and loving life partner by my side, isn’t enough security for my anxiety-ridden mind; I’ve gotta go back to the womb, away from the pain I feel, or feel for someone who I know and love, or someone I may never know or meet.

So, I carry the crouch into the daylight hours, and feed it with endless stretches of doomscrolling, worry, anger, joylessness, borderline despair. And through experience, through the ups and downs of life, I can safely say that I’m not alone. I saw my mother in the crouch when she reached for the bottle under the kitchen sink. I saw my dad in the crouch when he got injured on the job, or lost a friend, or weathered a financial setback, or watched my mom walk out the door after decades of marriage. I’ve crouched alongside my own family through Covid, through bankruptcy, through many challenges that threatened to derail our hope indefinitely. All of us can say that. We’ve all lived it and witnessed it, but we made it through. Most of us did, anyway.

No, I’ve never not seen someone in the crouch, especially not at this “crossroads” moment in the American Experiment. A larger number of us–at least the portion that voted a certain way, alongside many millions more who didn’t show up at the polls–are in a collective crouch whether we’ll admit it or not, and it remains a dangerous posture. Unsafe. Unproductive. Unsustainable.

Selfish, too. We’re human, after all.

But we do not have the luxury of staying in the crouch, even if the changes to come, however severe they end up being, won’t affect our lives in radical ways. We don’t have luxury of relying on the Constitutional “guardrails” we think are in place and secure against any uprising, or the assumptions we’ve always harbored about our political and economic systems’ dominance in the world. We don’t have the luxury or time to argue about what went wrong (or right for nearly 50 percent of the voting bloc), or who’s at fault or merits credit, or why we find ourselves so damaged and discordant as a nation, so at odds at what our future should look like. We can’t stand still on the corner we’ve come to, this crossroads, this tangle of confusing lanes.

We’ve got to keep going. We’ve got to pull ourselves out of the crouch and into the “reach.”

THE EXTENDED HAND

I acknowledge that reaching up and out will take longer for some than others. Grief and anger, anxiety and distrust, the brutal gravity of wanting to give up or give in or chuck it all and go back to the crouch–all need to be dealt with on our own timelines, in our own ways. But I also acknowledge, and humbly offer, that we can’t reach out into the world and find a solid handhold of hope without another hand extended in our direction. To turn the reach into action we have to band together in groups, small and local, in whatever form those groups take–through work or worship or friendly, like-minded social connections. And again, it must start at ground zero: LOCALLY.

Why? Because we’ve given enough of our mental and emotional energy to national politics over the past decade. We’ve followed the drama, ogled the outrageousness, shaken our heads and fists at the non-stop onslaught of lies and shamelessness and blatant hate. We also have more than enough evidence that extreme positions lead to a deadly flow of what I call “decision-making cholesterol” through the nation’s circulatory system, and recognize that they must be moderated with cooperation, careful listening, and a common commitment to abandoning hidebound positions hardened in social media silos.

Now that we know that federal-level executive branch “leadership” is about to a take our nation into uncharted waters, and most likely a dark path, no matter what we do–and no matter what needed “resets” the incoming administration’s supporters currently think they will get–we should and must concentrate or limited energy on our immediate neighborhoods, our cities, counties, and states–on looking in on each other, lifting each other up, and making sure that the rot doesn’t spread further into our local government structures than it already has.

We need to get up, take a breath, look around, and discern both what needs we can reach and embrace in the short term, and where our limited energy will help fuel the resistance–and the resurgence of a brighter, more inclusive, less volatile, truly stronger America.

That’s what the hamlets and fledgling cities of the colonies did in the mid-1700s, building on a collective vision of “liberty and justice for all” that was then put into words and action by the Founders. That’s what the growing Union did under Lincoln in the 1960s as the Confederacy threatened to destroy the Experiment. That’s how thousands of communities got through the Great Depression, the civil uprisings of he 1960s, the 9/11 attacks: By reaching for one another’s hands, checking in on neighbors, putting others’ needs above their own, turning fear into hope. Eventually that hope seeped upward, toward the largest seats of power.

As contemporary scribes such as Heather Cox Richardson, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Hubbell, and Timothy Snyder remind us, there is no true hope without action. Christian writer Clint Schnekloth also offers a Christian perspective on this subject, and if you’re of a more “classic conservative” bent, check out one of my favorite firebrands, Lincoln Project co-founder and chief writer Rick Wilson. None of them advocates dropping everything and hitting the streets, and certainly would never get behind attacking any capital, including Washington, D.C. And like any fellow human, they need a moment to gather their wits before circumstances and headlines focus our minds and hearts and spur us onward, and recommend we take that moment, too.

In the meantime, let’s stop crouching and start reaching.

PICK A CORNER

So, where can we meet to feed that focus and turn it into action on the streets where we live, and start rebuilding those crumbled, dead-end on- and off-ramps?

A couple weeks ago, Emelie and I hosted an “expanded neighborhood” brunch of friends to check in, commiserate, give voice to our disappointment and borderline despair, and plant the seeds of collective action at the local level. Our opinions of what to do next were varied, of course. Some were more fiery and give-no-quarter in flavor, others had a slow-simmer quality, with no desire to get anywhere near a full boil. As we spoke and listened, we spied green shoots of hope and joy upon the scorched post-election earth, and as a group we were and are determined to keep those shoots growing. We agreed to reach into our immediate community and help where we can. Perhaps that means speaking at a county commission meeting to get behind continued public library funding, or volunteering for and donating to not-for-profit organizations that will no doubt face financial stresses as federal grant dollars dry up in the coming years, or e-mailing and calling local and state officials to remind them not to leave “the least of these” behind. Perhaps it means advocating for and supporting those elements of a healthy society that tend to bring us together. Independent, fact-based journalism, for instance. Or the arts, or literacy, or well-fed school kids, or well-paid teachers and well-considered curricula (such as reviving true and deep civics studies, for instance). Fair and accessible housing. Fairer taxation laws. A welcoming and workable overhaul, at all government levels, of an admittedly dysfunctional immigration system.

Indeed, there are many opportunities to crowd that corner of hope–the crouch fading behind us, the reach straight ahead. So let’s meet there, ready to go, tools in hand and hope in heart, when the time is right.