In quiet moments, sometimes a respected elder chooses to deepen the conversation. It’s one way you know that life’s adventure doesn’t diminish in later years. I was a guest sitting with her on the sofa in her front room, waiting for others to arrive, and she began to reminisce about the long struggle for equality in our community. For years she’d been a witness at public meetings, a committee member, an active citizen working to make our town a better place. Living up to its most basic promises. Putting an end to some things everyone should have been ashamed of. This was a good story: some blatant injustices knocked down a level or two, some prejudices sent into hiding.
A proud and worthy job well done. I looked across the sofa at her in admiration and gratitude, but she wasn’t done. Instead, her story grew more personal and particular. Shopping downtown one day, she’d realized she needed a boost of energy, maybe a sandwich and a fountain drink. But upstairs, she said, at the department store’s cafe, she was refused service because of the cultural group she belonged to. The anger and shame she described must have been substantial because here it was again, bubbling up after decades, visible across the sofa in the clench of her jaw and then the softening of her eyes. She still felt deeply the insult and the injustice.
If we erase certain recent episodes and trends from the history we teach our schoolchildren, they might grow up surprised that a good number of cultural groups in our country could be angry or grieving about their treatment here. But I drive across Indiana and Michigan and Illinois, maybe you do too. In a small midwestern city or more rural town, it’s not difficult to spot the ugliness of broken-down curbs and crumbling houses, the decay of some once-grand places of worship, the evidence of different groups of fellow citizens pushed aside or abandoned for one historical reason or another. It’s easy to see why old wounds might still haunt members of this community or that one. The damage is still visible on the surface. We’d have to tear pages out of the history books, we’d have to look away, not to see it. The folks raised there don’t even have to open their eyes to remember. All around us, fellow citizens surely do remember. They still deeply feel it.
How to go forward? We’re good at power struggles and retribution, but we don’t take much interest in a people’s wounds. We treat people like light switches that can be turned on or off. Whatever you’ve gone through, throw the switch and get about your business. Grief and rage? Throw the switch, get over it and move on. Poverty? Dismal education? Brutal places to live? Get over it, throw the switch and move on. That’s our general approach. Forget about the decades or generations it might take for a people to heal. Cut nobody any slack if they blunder along the way, if they strike out, if they simmer in rage or fear. Who knows what a people go through down deep after sudden or long-simmering brutality by their fellow citizens. Treating people that way is the bitter national pathology.
If we’re lucky, sitting together on the sofa in her front room, in the privacy of her home, a respected elder teaches us how an old wound works in America. But elsewhere, we aren’t in the habit of talking about it.
