The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
~James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket
Late this afternoon along the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath in Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
My first bike ride there in over a year, and it was a beauty!
I say we buried Elizabeth II because she represents the end of our era, of the era of those of us who born just before and during World War II.
What a grand era it has been for us! It began with our side vanquishing the Nazi threat to humanity, and the beginning of a time of great prosperity for millions around the globe. Our side of the world—the western side—created the United Nations largely in our image. We forced the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and dismantling itself, making it clear to all the democracy/free enterprise was the best and most humane of all governments. Increasing awareness of other peoples and other cultures enriched our lives, and we even came to new understandings of pains and the aspirations of the varieties of people within our own borders. Some of us even offered apologies for the abuses those before us and we ourselves visited upon others.
And the Queen smiled over it all, her benign countenance blessing all. Even her beloved England, now picking up whatever pieces of its remaining empire that it might yet hang on to, put on a display of power and pride for her funeral as only the Brits can. For a few hours you’d have thought Britain still ruled the waves and the world.
But of course, things have changed. They have been changing for decades. The first hints came in the 1960s. In that decade distrust of institutions seemed overwhelming, but time proved those years to be only mildly unsettling compared to what was to come. While Elizabeth II smiled, the world order created by the west fragmented, Vladimir Putin became the 21st century’s Joseph Stalin, China grew into the new Communist threat, American democracy was assaulted by our own citizens, and the distance between wealth and poverty increased everywhere. Dictators were encouraged; democracy was dismantled; free enterprise was costly for everyone except the wealthiest. People stared into screens from the security of their own homes, and civic involvement has all but disappeared. Pop culture celebrated the crude, celebrities with no discernible talent got rich as “inflencers,” and everything became subservient to the whims and wiles of the individual.
Not to mention that the natural world, having had enough our abuse, struck back at us with increasing ferocity.
But the Queen smiles on us no more, except in pictures. Her “rule”—backed up by no real political power—her rule will fade as we pick at and fight among ourselves for our last fragments of a world forever lost.
The Queen is dead. What sort of humanity will we become now that she is gone?
I am not sure what I thought that meant when he said it some 70 years ago. But I have often thought of it recently with all the talk of the rights and powers of the several states vs. the rights and power of our federal government.
A lot of that talk goes back to the 19th century, when our nation’s divisions over slavery led southern states to emphasize the “sovereignty” of each state over what it considered its own internal business. That talk culminated in the Civil War. It never went away, and enjoyed a powerful revival in the mid-twentieth century in the desegregation struggles.
Is the “United States” in fact fifty sovereign states separated by borders that need defending in order to protect each state’s own values and interests?
The issue is complex, and I am no expert. “Line” is probably not strong enough to describe how the states relate to one another within our union. Certainly not “line in the sand,” subject to being moved or obliterated in the breeze. Isolated states merely in the guise of being “United States” were not key to winning two world wars, which may have influenced my father’s thinking when he said that to me.
And “states’ rights?” How do “states’ rights” and individual rights as American citizens interface? If a state’s rights can take away or deny an individual’s rights, then what sense does it make to speak of being citizens of “United States?”
I don’t buy all the revived talk of the unassailable nature of “states’ rights.” I know there’s constitutional basis for some such talk, but most of what I am hearing sounds like a cover-up for denying human rights, as it always has been.
