Curfew

I just made a list of all the things I hope to accomplish during this 36-hour curfew in Salt Lake City. Yesterday, protests against the lynching of George Floyd got out of hand when a police car, then another car, were overturned. I am a Quaker, but I cannot help feeling that these pieces of violence are understandable. 

 Lea Tsemel, an Israeli attorney who represents  Palestinians in Israeli courts, says that she never second-guesses the violent actions that her clients have done. Any action that is done in reaction to the Occupation is legitimate in her eyes, and she will take it on. 

I thought of this yesterday when I saw the images of the burning car on KSL. Any action taken in response to the systematic oppression of people of color in our country is legitimate and defensible. This seems extreme, and perhaps it is more than I mean. But systems of oppression do not change through people following rules. 

This list of things to accomplish during curfew is a-political. Vacuuming the floor and preparing for a work meeting are on it. One thing missing from my list is "deal with my private truth." 

I have been distressed about what kind of public action is responsible and right in the wake of George Floyd's death, but Baldwin says that "dealing with" the private side of things must come alongside public action. 

Here is the first paragraph of his essay: 

A GREAT WRITER operates as an unimpeachable witness to one's own experience; and one of the reasons that great writers are so rare (and their careers, in the main, so stormy) is that almost no one wishes to have his experience corroborated. I suppose that one of the reasons for this is that one's actual experience cannot but assault one's self-image, one's aspirations and one's safety. We all attempt to live on the surface, where we assume we will be less lonely, whereas experience is of the depths and is dictated by what we really fear and hate and love as distinguished from what we think we ought to fear and hate and love. One can imagine, for example, that a Shakespeare, writing of the recent bloody events in Texas, would give us a very different version of those events from that which we are presently evolving; by which I do not mean to say that Shakespeare's version would be literally the true one - the literal truth, anyway, is almost always astoundingly misleading. But Shakespeare's version would differ from ours in one important and disturbing way. We would rather believe that evil comes into the world by means of a single man, can be laid at the door of Another; but Shakespeare knew, and all artists know, that evil comes into the world by means of some vast, inexplicable and probably ineradicable human fault. That is to say: the evil is, in some sense, ours, and we help to feed it by failing so often in our private lives to deal with our private truth-our own experience. 

All artists know, Baldwin tells us, that evil is not contained in one man, or one police department, or one institution. It exists in all of us, and it is through examining ("dealing with") our private truth - our own experience, that we awaken to the complexity of racism. 

Let this day of curfew be a day of famine for that evil, during which we cease to "feed" it by taking time to examine, by ourselves and with trusted others, our private lives. 

A fellow Friend posted a list of things he thought a church "ought to be" in times like these. I am sad that I cannot pretend that I think the church is ready to respond helpfully to the current crisis. I can only think in terms of of communities, of human networks and relationships, because churches seem way too flawed and far gone to respond immediately to the spiritual needs of this moment, this week, this year. 

So, human community ought to provide a place where we can do the hard work of examining our experience. That means we need to create those spaces, because we are human community. We cannot leave the responsibility for organizing self-educational groups to pastors and other church officials. We must take ownership of our own spiritual formation, and insist that we partake, together, in the painful examination of our personal experience.

Schools ought to provide the space where students can process their experience, and we teachers ought to teach them how to create this space for themselves after they graduate. 

What is this space supposed to look like?

Impossible to predict - since people will create (and are creating) these spaces in a million iterations. As a literature teacher I am inclined to see a book club as the model, where literature is used to facilitate discussion. When we read a book together, we read about a character's experience. Then we can hold up our own experience alongside that example and feel emboldened to comment on it. 

With schools closed, the opportunity to examine and deal with our experience in community is suspended, and this is perhaps one of the gravest spiritual costs of the COVID shutdown of schools.