Are We Already Too Late?
As I sit down to write this November column, it is 24 hours until election day. Last month, I spent my time crafting an article that the Tribune refused to publish as it related “too directly to national politics,” a crime I have most certainly committed time and again over these past five years as a columnist for this newspaper. And while I understand why the Tribune might enforce such a policy to help limit contention, I object to any form of censorship whether it pertains to my words or anyone else’s. Given the crossroads we are facing in this moment and all that we stand to lose, I think one of the most notable losses we could suffer is the extermination of our freedom to disagree.
I ask the Tribune to reconsider their decision on my October column and any other pieces by columnists who ventured into this forbidden territory, as national politics is sewn directly into our everyday lives. There is no escaping it. My previously unpublished column centered on how sexism continues to impact women in our homes, our workplaces, and on the national political stage in this current election. Without open dialogue surrounding the double standard that remains between the sexes, we can never hope to create an equitable community for ourselves and our children – a goal that far surpasses any single election, no matter how divisive this one may be. Moreover, by limiting our space for public disagreement, what else do we stand to lose as we head into voting day and beyond?
All of that is to say that as I contemplate what thesis I could put forth this month with any probability of getting published, I am at a loss. The looming election infiltrates enough of my day to day that any other topic feels wholly trivial, a waste of precious ticking time.
When we wake on the first Thursday of November when this column is due to print, we will be waking to one of two vastly different trajectories for America. I am concerned with how one or the other will affect my family and everyone else in this small corner of Michigan, tucked peacefully along the lakeshore.
But this community is not all that matters. So along with my hope and worry for this place, I also hold concern for those living outside of this town, those who reside in the buzz of growing cities, rural farmlands, resource-drained reservations, or crowded stacks of migrant housing. I worry where these two roads laid out before us will lead and how many more relationships will be destroyed before we reach the end. The fallout from these past eight years of political tumult has been life-altering for countless Americans, our family included, and I fear that the way back to ourselves will be forever lost if we are stripped of our right to respectfully disagree.
Sitting here in the softness of this rainy autumn day, there is no way to know what we will awaken to on Thursday morning, what conversations or conflicts will result once the news breaks or where we will go from there. Will we work to continue a dialogue? Or will we be forced to go silent?
As we move closer to election day, I am reminded of a conversation I had on a similarly rain-soaked night last year. I had started reading my boys Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, a work of historical fiction about a family who hides their Jewish neighbors during the German occupation of Denmark in World War II. The novel, one I have read as both a child and adult, won Lowry the Newberry Medal in 1990. In the book’s revised introduction, Lowry speaks to her story’s enduring success. “I think readers of every age match themselves against the protagonists of the books they love. Would I have done that? they ask themselves as they follow a fictional character through a novel. What choice would I have made?” she writes.
My children stopped me mid-sentence that evening to ask this very question. Nazi soldiers had arrived in the middle of the night to search a home where a Jewish girl was hiding. It is a frightening scene, one that illustrates both the fierce, protective love, as well as the cruel indifference, that exists inside our neighbors and ourselves.
“Mom, what would you and Dad do if this ever happened to us?” they wanted to know. I could feel the fear from where this question formed.
“This would never happen to us,” I answered. “Your Dad and I understand history enough to never let it repeat itself. We would be gone long before it got to that point. We would see it coming, and we would leave,” I assured them. Surely, we would see it coming. When the rhetoric turned violent, when the newspapers grew quiet, when the indifference overwhelmed the people we had known inside our very bones – we would see it coming, wouldn’t we?
I think about that conversation every day now, and I am sure that when I wake on the Thursday morning this column may or may not go to print, I will be faced with that conversation again. Given the constant cry for mass deportations, political retribution, and the silencing of women’s voices, how far are we really from reliving the scene spelled out with Lowry’s words?
On Thursday morning, as I watch my children ready themselves for school, as I zip backpacks and fill half-drained water bottles, I will pray for my boys’ safety while they are out of reach. Later, when the world goes dark and they lay their heads to rest, drained from their long hours of childhood, I will think of that Danish family who lived both in Lowry’s mind as well as in the actual pages of our hate-filled history. I will think of them and reflect on which road our country has elected to take. And should we choose to repeat the cold indifference and blatant cruelty within that rear-facing mirror, I will sit at the edge of my children’s bed and ask of the night, “Is it finally time to go or are we already too late?”
Ashley, Woman of A Certain Rage