We watched the election results with growing disbelief and shock. Raw shock: as though the blow was physical. (1)
I recall seeing a peculiar street performer in New York City in 2011. My wife and I were in the City to see a Broadway show and were walking in the labyrinthine subway complex below Times Square when we encountered her. We stopped. She looked to be about 40-ish, slight and rather tall. She had long black hair and looked to be of European extraction. Her artful art was to pose as a frozen ballerina for several minutes, perfectly and unnaturally still. Her clothes were sort of like that of a ballerina, but she’d donned white make up all over, which made the overall impression starker, more theatrical. We watched for a half-minute or so, dropped a couple of dollars into her box, and continued watching.
Finally, a moment later, she came out of her pose to rest and stood uncomfortably, as if her privacy were being violated and she was intent on being polite about it. I spoke to her and complimented her and extended my hand to shake hands in a friendly way. She did not acknowledge my presence less than three feet in front of her, and I immediately turned to my wife and remarked, “Oh, she has to maintain concentration.”
But the whole encounter was too nonstandard. I’d just seen somebody stand in a freakishly immobile way for several minutes, and then experienced that she had, or could acknowledge, no social connectedness at all. “Concentration?” She was then relaxing between the stillness performances. Without the perspicacity of Sherlock Holmes, it took me a while to come to a comfortable conclusion about the woman and her situation. What brought this woman to this specific place at this specific time in her life? And what made her respond (not respond) so oddly when I extended my hand? She never made eye contact with either of us, never said a word to us, and never in any way acknowledged our existence. Maybe to acknowledge us would have meant to confess that humans moved, and it was natural for them to, and they moved both physically and metaphysically; that is, they made decisions to change and changed. And their change represented a possible progression toward fulfillment. Might auspicious change have eluded her very personally?
I remember about eighteen years ago enduring a very depressing time in my life. I had been recently divorced, was completely out of my profession/occupation, was unsatisfactorily employed, was socially isolated, and did not know where my life was headed. I was in a state of growing unhappiness and hopelessness. At a certain point I was virtually inconsolable. In such despondency, I happened to be in a supermarket in a nearby town one day, and there encountered a man I knew from my religious community. He addressed me by name, and with a polite smile. My emotional state at that moment was so unrelentingly aggrieved and joyless that I could not return any sort of greeting or acknowledgement at all; I continued on my way in what surely appeared rude from his perspective.
The suffering of indignities produces such discontent that we are sometimes crippled and unable in our social relations and obligations.
As I later thought about that street performer in the subway, I thought about what her life and perspective might have been. I thought about the fact that lots of people enjoy hopeful lives when they’re young, but a tragedy like an illness or financial strain, or some personal misfortune, or just a set of poor decisions sets the individual’s life on a less-than-ideal path. Perhaps that lady had a lot to be optimistic about when she was in her twenties. Maybe she was being asked out on dates and was able to do well in school. Perhaps she got married. But then, in her late 20s or early 30s, she found herself discontented. She wished she’d pursued another major, which would have taken her into a completely different career. But it was (in her mind) too late, and she found herself in New York City maybe trying to be a dancer, or an actress, or an artist or musician of some sort, when that narrow, indifferent temporal window of opportunity had already closed. At only 35, her life may have seemed to already pass her by.
She struggles to make it; possibly, she tries acting and being any sort of stagehand or bit player or extra. She makes a few dollars, but only enough to scrape by, and achieves nothing upon which to progress toward greater self-esteem, status, or hope. Just perhaps, hers was so much aspiration, so much potentially available to enjoy, and so little to show for it.
There she was in front of us that winter evening, in the temperate comfort of the subway station, motionless, her physical body and her life going precisely nowhere. Yet, all about her was a-rushing, like so much purposeful spring waters after a storm. The feeling of being ‘different’, of being somehow lesser, counted among the “bungled and the botched,” must have grown with every stranger that hurried past, leaving her frozen, alienated, without.
If we are normal human beings, regardless of creed or nationality or age, or any other distinction, we continually strive for the preservation of our dignity. But what is dignity? It is, quite simply, elevated experience. What does that mean? Does it mean that a person is better than another, that he or she is superior? The short answer is, No. We experience dignity not when we are necessarily better than anybody else, but rather when we are not degraded by sufferance, misfortune or victimization. Our dignity is a distance from piteousness.
Millions of Americans have, in the ten days since the presidential election of 2016, told of their feelings in the wake of the outcome in melodramatic terms: “It was the worst thing that I have ever experienced in my life;” “it was awful, like being punched in the stomach;” “I felt sick and unable to think;” “I was dumfounded; I could not comprehend it.” “It was like the end of the world;” “I was shocked… I couldn’t move.”
These citizen democrats were not people whose political interests had taken a blow; they were not people complaining of not getting their political agendas advanced, their progressive dreams satisfied. They were people whose basic dignity had been assaulted!
The winning candidate was not popular with millions of women and ethnic minorities, Muslims and immigrants, gay and disabled persons. And this was understandable, as he’d said many things expressive of disdain for these large demographic, often overlapping groups.
Me? I am from none of these groups, and on November 8th and 9th I experienced uncomprehending shock – even more extreme than what I felt back in September of 2001, when the World Trade Center was felled by a small cadre of dastardly still-lifes.
The winning candidate seemed to have a sort of latent (or not so latent) contempt for the condition of misfortune such that he felt contempt for those who suffer it, very much as if they were to blame, as if the loss of dignity as a consequence of mere circumstance were on a par with or superior to the indignity that inheres in profligate values and actions. People were targets of contempt in such a mind as that not because of anything they had done, but because of the ignominy of what they indisputably suffered. And this was evident in his “What have you got to lose” speech, where he courted the Black vote, but offered nothing whatever – no special programs, advocacy, encouragement, or organizational direction. He offered nothing because his target audience (in his morality-oblivious mind) those who were literally sufferers, and sufferers were morally contemptible.
In the election aftermath, I was numb with disbelief because I said and strongly felt that if this man became president the United States, the nation would no longer be able to recognize itself – so egregious was the degradation of allowing a misanthrope with fascist predilections to succeed to the highest office in the land. A nation of contradictions and paradoxes would become a vile monster. And not only could we no longer recognize ourselves… we were at much greater risk of the most horrific misfortune imaginable – global thermonuclear war – due to the fact that this person, albeit in his 70s, was crass and uncareful in conduct and his speech. Common sense tells that a person who is immature, short-tempered, thin-skinned, defensive, or easily offended would pose a heightened risk of participating in or precipitating the onset of a nuclear war. Miscalculation can happen to anyone. But error and miscalculation are universally believed to be the flaws of persons more likely to cause (or participate in causing) a nuclear strike or nuclear exchange when a calmer and more mature personality might have continued with nonlethal, non-crossing-the-Rubicon, actions, and continuing for a longer and still longer time. “Last resort,” is used to mean precisely that: a person has not gone off on any sort of excursion or guess or angry defensiveness, but has exhausted all options strategically and diplomatically available (and perhaps even extemporaneously invented a few), and now the dots and lines on the screen in the War Room tell that those previously available avenues have been closed. That is what “last resort” ought to mean. And, on this subject, as an aside, Americans ought to have elected a radical and dilettante, a fascist and insensate misanthrope, as a last resort, not just because they were interested in venting their anger at a vicious, amoral jihadist enemy. Anyone who volunteers to engage a contentious exchange with a Gold Star family at three o’clock in the morning is not somebody you want to be Commander in Chief, dealing with intricate and hazard-fraught matters in a crisis at three o’clock in the morning! Now the misguidedness and unintelligence that was our shame because it came into the American limelight and threatened to influence American policy will in 2017 become the new voice of American policy.
Is it any wonder that millions feel dumfounded and sick?
For me, the saddest and scariest part of the present crisis – for all of its real and specific threats and outrages – remains conjectural: having established that decency, maturity and circumspection, responsibility, aplomb and intelligence do not rank high among the many requisites of the executive, it is obvious that humankind cannot save itself (by maintenance of calm, poised, well-considered and consistent values and actions).
Dignity may be an invisible, experiential thing, but still indispensable to human happiness and fulfillment. Actions and statements that are disdainful of dignity indicate to the intelligence something still more unwholesome – as the sneeze insinuates the cold, the fever suggests the infection, and the uncontrolled bleeding predicts shock. Unfortunately, when we see assaults on human dignity, we compartmentalize and atomize them, and sometimes we fail to apprehend that this is not just a slight, not just an “inartful” way of saying something, but is representative of a political ilk that obviously poses a threat to basic human dignity and hence to the maintenance of robust pillars of civilization. And, in the interest of fullest comprehensiveness in the present writing, here are those pillars: inclusiveness, nonviolence, non-discrimination, universal liberal education, and social responsibility. We saw during the campaign of the Republican nominee for president a transgression upon human dignity. And we saw it not once or twice; we saw it repeated dozens of times.
(1) From Death Penalty Focus, a California human rights group, 17 November 2016.