Boy on Bicycle with Feather, or Young America

The boy on the bicycle in Andrew Wyeth’s 1950 color lithograph looks as if he is the freest person on earth. Dressed in 1950’s-cool style with rakish hat, he casually pedals along a level, hard-surface road (surely not of his own building), across a wide-open landscape, a red, white, and blue-dyed feather tethered to a front fender brace and flying high above his head. He turns his head, perhaps looking toward the distant horizon.

What, or who, could more accurately represent Young America, one of the two names I find assigned to this picture?

The world is his to see, to imagine, to explore, and perhaps to conquer. He is more than a Boy on Bicycle with Feather; he is Young America.

In recent weeks I have been looking with new eyes at my print of this picture. New eyes, after seeing it for some 50 years. New eyes, on this, the 244th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence.

What if the boy on the bicycle were Black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or Native American, or visually identifiable as anything other than European? Would he be as relaxed as this boy is out here all by himself? Would he need to be sure to keep his eyes glued to the road just ahead lest he be picked up for reckless riding? Would he dare to look at any horizon beyond his immediate experience? Would he proudly attach our nation’s colors to his bike?

What if the boy on the bicycle were not a boy at all, but a girl? Could she dream of a future that was hers to choose to follow, unhindered by sexism, fear, and any sense of inadequacy inculcated in her because of her gender? Could she fully honor what the colors of her homeland represent?

What if the person on the bicycle were LGBTQ…would they need to keep glancing back over their shoulder to see if someone might be coming up behind them to frighten, intimidate, even to kill them? Might they show colors they do not really trust in an attempt to keep themselves hidden, even while in plain sight?

What if this boy were Jewish, or Moslem, or Sikh, or atheist, or any other of the many varieties of religion and non-religion that belong in our nation? If he is anything but Christian, might he be riding away from the school where he is forced to declare his differentness because he cannot pretend to pray in the name of Jesus Christ? Might he display the colors in defiance of the American popular religion that mixes patriotism and quasi-Christianity?

If this Boy on the Bicycle with Feather were any of the above, or more, would they be certain that the laws of their homeland and the practices of their neighbors would allow them to see, to imagine, to explore…to at least give them a fair shot at conquering some piece of their worldly existence?

Most likely, not.

My eyes—forced opened by the frustration and anger of so many who were not white boys on bicycles in America’s 1950s—my eyes are examining the assumptions of my own experiences against the realities of their experiences. I assumed everyone could, if they wanted to, ride the same kind of road I have ridden to take their own version of the kind of journey I have taken, all the while gratefully waving the red, white, and blue without a second thought. What I have assumed was wrong.

I love Wyeth’s print, hanging near the door into the room in which I am writing this. It speaks to me, to my memories of growing up on a bike in Iowa. But it also speaks of the privilege that has been and is mine by accidents of my birth. What it says to me this 4th of July unsettles me.

Truth about power

“The truth is, the unlimited power which merchant captains have, upon long voyages on strange coasts, takes away a sense of responsibility, and too often, even in men otherwise well-disposed, substitutes a disregard for the rights and feelings of others.” (Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast; originally published in 1840.)

An apt description of the psychological condition of the current captain of our ship of state, three and a half years into this “long voyage on strange coasts.” Worse, he was not “otherwise well-disposed” even before we offered him command of our ship.

Watch this and take to your knees

I watched a YouTube video Sunday morning that I want you to watch before reading on. Search for "Brandon Brackins" on YouTube to find it. It happened in a small town in Ohio.

…

We who are white may well now be thinking, Wow! It’s just awful what some idiot inflicted on that black FedEx driver. I really feel sorry for Brandon. No one in their right mind would do that, and whoever did it ought to be thrown in jail. I have never done anything like that and sure as heck never would.

Well, okay. But if that’s where our thinking stops, we are not thinking hard enough.

As a white person it is easy for me to see racism’s most obvious manifestations, and to excuse myself from being complicit in them: I do not say and do racist things, so I am not racist. So long as my thinking about racism stops with individual words and acts, I have not truly confronted racism in myself and in our society.

Americans are born into racism. It is like the air we breathe, all around us, largely invisible, and easy to ignore until something in it brings it to our awareness. 401 years of slavery and the denial of humanity by white society over black society is a condition we cannot escape just by wishing it away or pretending we are not part of it.

That is why we who are white in America must recognize and commit ourselves to dismantling the pervasive systemic and institutional racism that pollutes our political, social, economic, and religious life. Doing that will not be easy, and it will cost us something, maybe a lot, to do it. But we really have no choice, because the air of racial hatred and oppression is filthy and it is killing us all.

Drill down on Brandon Brackins’s fear, anger, rage, and near paralysis. Multiply it many times over. Expand it to a larger picture of whole “categories” of people subjected to unrelenting and persistent denial of the right to be human, generation after generation, by another “category” of people. Then, one day, something happens that wakes up those who have been denied so much for so long. Something comes just a little too close to in fact killing them perhaps, and they break out of the paralysis racism hopes will keep them forever enslaved and they are no longer afraid, but angry and enraged.

Is that so hard to imagine?

Now, maybe, I understand what’s continuing to take place on America’s streets since George Floyd’s death, and, tragically, hundreds of times before it. Perhaps I understand why simply claiming that I am not racist is neither true nor sufficient for this moment. Surely I can do something about it, beginning with doing something about myself, perhaps by being, at last, honest.

Maybe I start—maybe we all start—by taking to our knees, some to protest, some to confess, but most of us to do both.

On the looting of shops

Some 70 years ago, my father started a business. It was an agriculture-related business in Iowa, and required enormous time and energy and sacrifice on the part of my dad, as well as of our family.

My mother was not directly involved in the business itself. She concentrated her efforts on managing our household--with all that that means, including being primarily responsible for the well-being of my two brothers, and me. She contributed substantially, if indirectly, to my dad’s success.

The early years were incredibly difficult, and although my parents rarely talked about the business itself in my presence, I knew when things weren’t going well. Our family income varied from week to week depending on how sales had been, and some weeks I knew the checking account balance hovered barely above zero. We never went hungry, in part because of the huge garden Dad planted and harvested, whose bounty Mom cooked when it was fresh and preserved for our use during long winters.

In time, the business became quite successful, but it was always a “small business.” The purchase of a couple of farms added to my parents’ security after I’d left home, but the farm crisis of the 1980s hit them hard. They got through that, but my father’s enterprises were never “too big to fail” by any measure.

My dad’s name was the name of his business. In many ways, the business was him, and he was the business. It hung on for a few years after his death, but eventually it died, too.

I write these things today because the destruction and looting of shops and stores this weekend feels discounted in many tellings of what’s been happening all across our nation. I write these words because I am reminded of how much my father’s business meant to him and to us, not just financially, but also emotionally and psychologically.

I write this remembrance not to take anything at all away from the brutal and unjustified murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis Police officer, nor to deny the systemic racism that infects police departments and our entire justice system from coast to coast. The problem of police brutality against communities of color must be addressed, and the kinds of efforts begun by the Justice Department under the Obama administration must be restarted. The national sin of racism needs to be defeated in all its dimensions.

I am compelled to write this because it is easy to say of a burnt-out, looted store, Well, it’s only a business…it can be rebuilt, but a life taken cannot be restored. Which is true, but only partially so.

A business can be, and often is, the embodiment of a life-of hopes and of dreams, of sweat and of tears. Of risks taken, and rewards deferred. Of sacrifice, often as much to serve the community as to make a buck. 

We tend to see many things in one of two ways…this way or that way…on the one hand or on the other. If George Floyd’s death is bad, burning stores and destroying neighborhoods in response must be by some measure not so bad, maybe even good. But it isn’t. Pay attention to all the people involved—hurting, in pain, struggling, sorrowing—and real life is much more than a child’s game of cops and robbers.

About this point, some of my readers are no doubt getting ready to respond, But looting and burning cities is the only way to get white America to pay attention to the realities of life in black America. I cannot argue with that fact. Non-white Americans have been used, abused, and then ignored by both political parties for years. Both have had their chance to make things better, neither has succeeded. It is a crisis deeper than our carefully cultivated partisanship.

But hear out my feelings.

A number of years ago the machine shed on my uncle’s farm was struck by lightning in the middle of the night. As I recall, its contents were pretty much destroyed in the ensuing fire. I was in Iowa visiting my family when it happened, and drove to the farm to see for myself and offer what I could to the family. My uncle and my cousin were sifting through the thick mix of ash and water that covered the ground, looking for what they could salvage. It was one of the saddest sights I’d ever seen. I ached for the work they had to do to begin to recover.

In time, they did recover from the fire, and I hardly heard it mentioned in later years. But there was one thing lost that night that never will be replaced: a set of daily journals my great-grandfather kept for many years as he worked that very farm.

I suspect many of the businesses ransacked the past few days held irreplaceable memories such as the ones I have of my father’s business and such as those journals recorded. They are part and parcel of the very lives of people invested in them, as well as a means of financial and social stability for them and their employees. To talk of their destruction as if no human cost is exacted is simply wrong.

Our new “god of the gaps”

This morning I shared a FB post that stated that only better science refutes science—that science is not refuted by feelings, religion, our favorite politician, or half-baked opinions found on YouTube videos. Here’s more on the subject…

There’s an old phrase, “god of the gaps.” It describes how people attribute to a deity anything they cannot otherwise explain or understand. “God” resides in those “gaps” in human knowledge. So, if and when science provides a reasonable and consistent explanation of some previously-mysterious phenomenon, the “god of the gaps” is claimed to reside a little deeper into whatever remains unexplained, into the remaining gap. If and when a reasonable and consistent explanation of that new gap is proposed, then this “god” finds a new place to lodge in the remaining unknown.

During the past couple of centuries, the “god of the gaps” has been relegated to an ever-shrinking place in human understanding. I believe this is one important, though largely-ignored, reason for the decline of many religious institutions that have held science and the scientific method in high regard and as not antithetical to religious faith. We have taught our children to take science seriously, but have not articulated a faith that can co-exist with science.

Now the “god of the gaps” has been supplanted by what might be called “conspiracy in the crevices.” What is not known is like a crevice in which it is tempting to see a conspiracy. Many love conspiracies because they seem to explain things that are not otherwise fully understood and which may never be. 

It would be interesting to know if people who are adherents of religious institutions where suspicion of science is prevalent are more likely than the general population to see a conspiracy when something is not fully explainable. I am not saying they are, just wondering if there is a positive correlation.

Conspiracy theorists used to be on the fringes of modern society, but now they have an advocate in the White House, and evangelists on Facebook and YouTube to spread their news. One great American fantasy is that anyone with an opinion can be regarded as an expert. Carefully researched explanations of events and phenomena can be cavalierly discounted when they don't answer all questions. Someone in authority or just holding a bigger megaphone can suggest a completely different explanation that fills in the blanks, and millions are eager to lap it up.

To me, it’s a mighty dangerous shift in our culture, and a very real threat to our nation’s credibility and leadership in the world.

A recommendation and a couple of my FB policies (fyi)

Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” blog is worth checking out if you are looking for a clear, documented, and largely dispassionate analysis of the current president and his regime by a scholar who is deeply troubled by what’s going on in America. I recently began following it, and recommend it to you.

If, on the other hand, you are happy with the ongoing and growing assault on the fundamentals of our republic, you might not like to read her blog. It just might change your mind.

By the way, I work hard to resist any urge to share the many Facebook entries about politics that I get from friends and which which I agree. I try to limit my response to an occasional “like.” While I appreciate my friends' concerns, I know I get more of that sort of thing than I have time to read, even while sheltering-in-place.

Further, for the record and just so you will know, I never, ever “share” or “copy and post as my own” any Facebook post that bets only a few will post it, as in “only a few will say they love Jesus, hate cancer, have wonderful grandchildren, etc.”, even though I love Jesus, hate cancer, and have the most wonderful grandchildren in this whole, wide world.

Wondering in a World on Fire

PBS Masterpiece’s current series, World on Fire, is a riveting and disturbing story of the lives of European civilians during World War II. It opens with the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and quickly expands geographically to introduce viewers to civilians in France, England, and Germany itself. Those caught up in the war respond in various, sometimes conflicting, ways to the chaos around them. It is not difficult to feel the emotional anguish of ordinary people forced to make decisions they never dreamed they would have to make.

We have been watching World on Fire since it began, and we intend to continue. But it is not easy to watch, not only because of its unsettling storylines, but also because of our own COVID-19, pandemic-ignited, “world on fire.” Of course, the pandemic’s dislocation of so much that we thought was secure is nothing like the absolute destruction of everything at the hands of the German army. But as I watch I cannot help but wonder what lies ahead for me and for us all in the face of a virus’s invasion of our ordered lives and times. World on Fire touches and heightens my daily sense of unease.

The ruthless cruelty of the Nazi-driven German military and bureaucratic apparatus challenges all humane impulses. In one scene, the doctor in charge of tearing “unfit” children away from their parents to be killed justifies what he is doing in the name of science. I wince…how science can be misused to make evil look good! Yet how dependent upon science we are for our survival in this world.

When I hear and see reports of people carrying hateful signs about Jews and others, or displaying swastikas, I wonder if they really know what demons they unleashing upon the world, what suffering they are inflicting. Maybe, I think, they just don’t understand, or perhaps they don’t intend to be that cruel or heartless…surely they would stop short of a 21st century “final solution.”

I would like to think they do not know what they are doing, but I know better. I wonder what it is like to live by hate.