Today we have been in
We wandered around a little before we found the storytelling project—a series of 16 or so semi-circular benches with a storyteller sitting at each, waiting to tell stories to interested customers. We found the benches after 3, and the stories ended by 4:30, but we had time for three or four of them as we wandered around the city, bench to bench. It was a delight.
Less delightful was the fact that everything was either closed or sold out, or both. So we headed over to the still open and still free Liberty Bell (although all who had seen it told us not to bother). There, a large cluster of white people took turns being photographed beside an old bell with a famous crack. I wandered back through the nearly-empty exhibit to find out about the bell—when had it cracked, when was it made, etc.? There was an African-American series on the exhibit, about 
allowed women in the society too. He read silently about the hall the society built, and the riots there, but he read out loud again when he came to the part that said the building was burnt to the ground two days after it opened. “They only left it alone two days,” he said, shaking his head. I stood next to him and read along, silently, my cheeks burning with shame as though I had thrown the rocks depicted in the sketch of the riot that burned the building down. I, who have done an awful lot of work on white guilt, stood there feeling as guilty as I have ever felt, just witnessing the calm reading aloud of a Parks Department sign.
I walked to the bell for a last look. I had discovered that it was cast with a fault, that the crack had first appeared when the bell was tested, that they thought to recast it but decided to repair it instead. It cracked again—time unknown—and they used it less. And when they rang it to celebrate George Washington’s birthday in the mid 1800s, it cracked so badly that it went horribly out of tune and they never rang it again. Standing in front of the damaged sign of liberty, the black man was taking pictures of his companions, two lovely black women. Then he swapped with one of the women and was in a picture with the other. I stepped forward (as I tend to do) and offered to take the picture of the three of them. His face lit up and he gathered together the women who had already started walking away. He stood with them, slightly hunched so that the bell would figure most prominently in the picture, and I snapped the shot on the throw-away camera. He took it back from me with a hearty thank you, and I felt tears well up in my eyes so fast that it took me by surprise. I walked in a teary haze to the excavation of George Washington’s house in
And then, at the end of the day, walking back to the hotel on feet sore from their first day in sandals in months, we came upon another piece of 
they were in the beginning?) as the emotional tone captured me. George Washington—and others who began this country—owned slaves, wove inequity into the very fabric of this new nation. And they also wove freedom and opportunity into the fabric, too. One million Irish came here to live—and they were discriminated against and persecuted and made to live in Irish ghettos. And they were also alive, which their native land would not have supported. Like my grandparents and great grandparents, they became members of the society that eventually took them in as their accents dropped away. Those were my people, too, every bit as much as George Washington. Like the liberty bell itself, this country is forged with imperfect materials, and it is cracked through with near-fatal flaws. And today I saw glimpses of both the beauty and the horror in it, saw ways that I continue both lines—the racist lines of the white people who founded this nation and the hopeful Irish seeking of a better land across the sea. There is nothing simple here, nothing straightforward. I should have remembered that this country is far too big for that.
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There was a moment just before the invasion of Iraq when the west started to question its motives. Political leaders were called to account. Their justifications and platitudes failed to entirely convince. Talk of ulterior motive buzzed through senates and saunas. Fear, the ol’ faithful tool of persuasion, was whipped out and brought down hard on the backs of the audacious masses. Stunned and confused, the masses barely had chance to protest ‘wait a minute’ to the deafened ears of the hungry and angry monster disappearing over the horizon toward the east. The energy fuelled by collective doubt was re-directed toward self preservation as the masses stockpiled water, batteries and non-perishables in accordance with ‘state of emergency’ guidelines. Yet… the seeds of transformative doubt survived to take root.
Patriarchal power works like that. It keeps us certain of what is really illusory; and throws us into states of emergency to seek self-preserving distinctions where there are none. For you to be a daughter of a slave owner, keeps the black-man a son of a slave. Guilt re-affirms shame. Patriarchal power will have us stock-piling guilt (a power based emotion) so that we don’t see the extent of one’s own enslavement in ‘cracked’ perceptions of liberty. For every time we look ‘down’ on someone, we enslave the observer and observed both. Every time we refer to ‘a peer’ we enslave both ‘peer’ and ‘non peer’ in a value judgement. Am I taking a bath in de-construction here? Absolutely and unashamedly!! Beware the vogue against a good hot soak in de-construction, because a shallow dip leaves us to dry off on a towel called ‘conformity’. (Observe the group-think at Integral Institute where de-construction is as welcome as a bogie on a tea-cake). De-construction involves the dying to old forms necessary for rebirth into new. Too quick a dip has us emerging back into the world of conventional thinking.
[Here comes a tangent: So what! if meetings of de-constructionists go on forever! If real change is required give them the time. If it’s technical change that’s required, then call in the mechanics! Let’s kill the profit hungry beast that keeps us dancing to its eco-destroying chant of ‘rapid change’]. Oooh that felt good… where was I?
To seek to become the black-man’s peer binds you both in victimhood and still fails to see the backside of the beast behind both historic acts. The beast’s most subtle work is in the rewards (and implicit punishments) bestowed upon the holders of its power - The executive who rarely sees his status-affirming home; the Beverley Hills ‘beauty’ clinics conducting genital mutilation to give women what? - a tidy space to store the balm for their Botox lips; the straight-A kids with grades and social dislocation; stunning careers filling empty wombs; the de-humanized slave-owner who sells his mixed-blood offspring for a premium… We worship gods of our own manufacture and then sacrifice ourselves and each other to them.
Do we shift our worship to the matriarchal paradigms? That keeps us in the same place from the other side (though it doesn’t hurt to be intrigued by the patriarchal God’s usurpation of the Goddess - demoting her to whore and bitch; nor does it hurt to reflect that Jesus, Abraham, Mohammed and their like did not have blue eyes; and that ‘minorities’ constitute the majority of the world’s population; women – just over half).
So where do we go with this despair? Well once we see what’s pulling our strings (and convincing us it feels good) we can start to liberate ourselves and we free others from the projection of our own inner selves that can find no pride of place in the system. We don’t need to leave the system and become bums – unless one loves the outdoors that much! – No, we become more the dancer than the danced. We are better placed to ask and answer who The Grail – or lipstick holder – serves? We can gain and lose the grades, promotions, social status and approval without being so identified with these things. Perhaps the ‘black man’ can be our guide and mentor. In his own dance to deep soulful rhythms he can teach us to re-frame our shallow notions of bliss: to add depth, balance and ironic joys eked out of and co-existing with the painful ‘cracks’.
ahhh, sweet, you made me cry.
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