I found this new piece enormously comforting, and as always, you offer valuable tools from the heart for navigating this truly frightening political moment. Your work is thoughtful, rigorous, but sometimes disorienting, and that is especially true here. In the brief pantheon of inspirational role models you cite, who cultivated beauty, joy, purpose and meaning despite overwhelming brutality and oppression during their lifetimes, did you consciously or unconsciously choose to skip over the entire Black American experience in this country? Really? No Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois, MLK, no one? Hard to reconcile this erasure when every word you wrote had me remembering so many hard won lessons my grandmother taught me, walking upright and dignified while she walked to work cleaning white folks' houses in the Jim Crow south. I remember once you wondered why black women were overrepresented amongst your readers. Don't know if that's still true, but I think I understand why. Staying human, pressing on, claiming joy, decoding lies and clinging fiercely to a Truth that is somehow still knowable and teachable--these ways of being are true to us, but sadly, not new to us. You write with empathy and insight, intellectual honesty and discipline, and I'm grateful for every brick you contribute to building dialogue and wisdom. But for our sake, get out there and meet more Black grandmas! Even my bougie black ass knows that there are some things money can't buy and they don't teach you in school!
I voted a like but wanted to voice some feelings. The time we are living in is for me horrific. I am White and Jewish and born in 1942. Lucky for me, I was born in the US and not where my ancestors were born in Poland. I have read as well as experienced (second hand) what the American Black population went through. As a physician, many of my patients have been Black. My love of medicine involves the instant intimacy one has as a physician, assuming you care about the lives of those under your aegis, as I do. As a cancer doc, I would often sit with my patients, like Harry Sweets Edison, and hear how he was "treated" as a famous musician when he toured various cities. I remember those segregated bathrooms, and I recall my own fear driving across Southern states, dreading the possibility of being stopped by a policeman. I lived on the Southside of Chicago, and my first year in medical school my apartment was directly across the street from Temple #2 of the Islamic Nation, where Malcolm X attended. The Fruits of Islam (FOI), mostly Black from my recall, never bothered the White students, but I had two unpleasant encounters with White cops and one ended up with me spending the day in jail because I had no money to bribe the cop. MLK has long been one of the most revered personages in my 83 years of life. Our present horror show of Trump et al. + a GOP that lost its moral fiber, brings back to me my favorite MLK quote:
"Our lives begin to end the day that we become silent about things that matter."
-Martin Luther King
None of the above experiences comes remotely close to yours. None of my family's losses in trucks with pumped in carbon monoxide or gas chambers dripping Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide on men, women, children, elderly can be understood fully by others. What Jews and Blacks have had in common for so long has been the atrocities "bestowed" upon them. Everyone in this country would learn something reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. I can only say that it is a monumental work. Similarly, read While Six Million Died-A Chronicle of American Apathy by Arthur Morse.
As for Mike Brock, I cannot think of another person who has written so tirelessly about every aspect of the current state of affairs in this country. I felt his compassion in this recent commentary, as I know you did. There is so much to say and often important, very important things are left out. Our plates are so full in this country-not in the dinner kind of way but in the emotional overload.
For those who are caring, and compassionate like Brock, we must be grateful, but also we must be forgiving the few errors and omissions among the prolific writing he brings to us. I know you and others appreciate this. Even me, a hypercritical double Virgo, has to acknowledge the grace and humanity of Mike Brock.
Fortunately, I have always been aware that I have lived in blessed times, but, even so, I have been profoundly shaken to see them ending. To see that I must enter into battle for things i have taken for granted, like civil rights, a modicum of justice (for White people, anyway). Your essay here really helps center myself to live well despite the battles to come.
Thanks. I think reaching out to the Black and Latino communities, the left behind, homeless, or the chronically ill, or those scapegoated as too Other, who suffer, yet continue to survive, under a neoliberal US structural white supremacist authoritarianism, might help. Their daily negotiation with economic oppression, generational cultural erasure and ongoing unaddressed politicised racial violence, might offer us all valuable embodied wisdom gleaned directly from their visceral collective lived experiences.
This is really powerful. It aligns with GenX and older Millennials experience. It captures the mirage in a way that allows a little grace. I've felt so blind-sided by it, and really thought I had done something wrong not being able to keep up (and yes, I made some less than strategic career choices for sure but now it's like there's no way back to any kind of stability anymore). I fell for the new age self help nonsense, that if I was just mindful and loving enough, then things would start going right. I fell for the illusion of cosmic order, fairness and that life bended towards justice. Seeing monopolies continue to grow though and media get bought up should have set the alarm bells off louder and sooner. Brett Kavanaugh being voted in I think was when the hope really died.
"We have been blessed. Most of civilized history has been a much scarier world on a day-to-day basis than what we experience now. We are all contending with a sense of loss—especially those who came of age in the 1990s, when America seemed confident and the future looked like it would be obviously better than the past.
People sometimes refer to this as the “End of History” moment, referencing Francis Fukuyama’s famous book. He takes too much flak for that thesis. Fukuyama wasn’t predicting that nothing would ever happen again—he was observing something real: liberal democracy had triumphed over its ideological competitors. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Market economies had proven superior to command economies. Democratic governance had demonstrated its advantage over authoritarian alternatives. For a brief, shining moment, it seemed the fundamental questions of political organization had been answered, and all that remained was to work out the details.
That moment felt like liberation. Like we’d escaped something fundamental about the human condition. Like our children would inherit a world where freedom was guaranteed, where progress was automatic, where the future promised only improvement over the past.
We hadn’t escaped. We’d been granted a reprieve.
The anomaly wasn’t Trump. The anomaly was that post-Cold War moment when it seemed like we’d permanently solved the problem of tyranny. We’re back now to what history normally looks like: uncertainty about the future, threat from those in power, the need to maintain dignity and meaning under conditions that don’t guarantee either.
This is normal history. And that’s terrifying for people who thought they’d escaped it."
I appreciate your reference to "End of History". It fits the fairy tale of the smug neoliberal elites, but actually no one else. Dig a little deeper and we find the great untried world of "free markets" -- not freedom from regulation but freedom from manipulation. Democratize it and change the world. As Picard says: "Engage!"
Yes to all this. The British novelist Margery Allingham wrote during World War II about uncertainty. In her book The Oaken Heart (nonfiction) she describes the period when Britain was alone, from 1939 to 1941. She survived the war, but deliberately ended the book before the end, once America had joined in, to stress the lingering uncertainty they all felt.
She was in the southeast, near the coast, and was part of the near universal informal mobilization of civilians in Home defence. It's witty, and notes the small things, good and bad, that people contributed, despite the cold, the lack of fuel and food, the making do, the noise and the fear. After the Fall of France, they could hear the guns across the Channel, and of course were bombed nightly.
What stuck out to me was that she realizes very quickly that courage might not be enough to win. That was shattering, devastating to her. At the end she writes a ringing endorsement of carrying on anyway, and says that it is a privilege to have lived the experience, WHETHER OR NOT THEY PREVAIL against the gates of hell (not that she was religious). I have found very inspiring (even though I cannot do it!) this nearly incomprehensible thumbing her nose at the bad guys of history, defiance whatever happens.
I have purchased the Oaken Heart and the first pages are touching. She writes, "Lying, they say, is a new modern art of the enemy’s, but telling the truth is not easy. In fact, telling the truth is the basis of all classic art, which has always been notoriously difficult." I can tell this is a good read. Thank you.
That's wonderful. I hope you find it valuable. I could never get on with her mysteries: perhaps I will try them again.. My family lived through the London Blitz, and my father had a desk job first during the Battle of Britain at a RAF Base, and then later in the war same job in London for Special Ops. He said average life span of the young fighter pilots and crew in the Fall of 1940 was 3 weeks. Would you believe that when I got to where Allingham starts on May 1940 as France was surrendering, I had to put the book down for several days, ok weeks, because though born after the war, a few years after you, I absorbed the trauma in some way vicariously perhaps, as you described further up. My brother and I always thought our dad was difficult because broken by it, and I realise now a tiny fraction of what he went through, though he told us little, and even worse for your family I dare say. Forgive any typos; I am a shockingly poor proofreader!
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
A sonnet written by John Gillespie Magee, an American pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War. He came to Britain, flew in a Spitfire squadron, and was killed at the age of nineteen on 11 December 1941 during a training flight from the airfield near Scopwick.)
When I first read this at a much younger age than I am now, I was overcome by emotion. I looked for more about John Magee, and found the following, which may be of interest to you and others.
High Flight was composed by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., an American serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was born in Shanghai, China in 1922, the son of missionary parents, Reverend and Mrs. John Gillespie Magee; his father was an American and his mother was originally a British citizen. He came to the U.S. in 1939 and earned a scholarship to Yale, but in September 1940 he enlisted in the RCAF and was graduated as a pilot. He was sent to England for combat duty in July 1941. In August or September 1941, Pilot Officer Magee composed High Flight and sent a copy to his parents. Several months later, on December 11, 1941 his Spitfire collided with another plane over England and Magee, only 19 years of age, crashed to his death. His remains are buried in the churchyard cemetery at Scopwick, Lincolnshire.
Thank you for this. Stunning, isn’t it. I did know it, but didn’t research or find out about young Magee. I can’t get through Churchill’s famous words about the Few, without being similarly flooded with emotion.
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
I do not know where that generation found its courage.
I love that living on the right side of history, carrying on anyway, is the resonant chord in human life. We're there: we don't know what's going to happen, but our integrity is worth it all.
It is. In a small way it reminds me of how we felt at the beginning of the pandemic, when the initial casualties forced us to wonder, as my brother said, if we would be alive in 3 months' time. Of course that did not call for integrity, though it did teach us about uncertainty in a way I had never experienced.
I think back on my parents who survived the Great Depression and the horrors of WWII. It is reassuring to know we still have what they possessed to live full lives. Thank you for the blueprint for centering and survival.
That is a superb article, which is realistic and contextualise what is happening. Not an anomaly, but 'business as usual'; no reason to accept it as how things now are or yo lose all hope. Thank you. Love from the other side of the Atlantic xxx
It's a tautology! Living well includes being engaged in community, which, like an apple a day, keeps the tyrants away. So many heartfelt comments today. We're going to make it!
I love your remarks about the person who works the gas station. When you are low waged it’s extremely hard to feel that you are a valued member of society. And yes, I can envisage that person smiling as they greet each person who comes to pay for their gas, who makes someone else else’s day a little brighter and who tells them that they are happy they met.
There is always something that we can do and know it does not always take money sometimes it’s just sharing a smile.
I found this new piece enormously comforting, and as always, you offer valuable tools from the heart for navigating this truly frightening political moment. Your work is thoughtful, rigorous, but sometimes disorienting, and that is especially true here. In the brief pantheon of inspirational role models you cite, who cultivated beauty, joy, purpose and meaning despite overwhelming brutality and oppression during their lifetimes, did you consciously or unconsciously choose to skip over the entire Black American experience in this country? Really? No Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois, MLK, no one? Hard to reconcile this erasure when every word you wrote had me remembering so many hard won lessons my grandmother taught me, walking upright and dignified while she walked to work cleaning white folks' houses in the Jim Crow south. I remember once you wondered why black women were overrepresented amongst your readers. Don't know if that's still true, but I think I understand why. Staying human, pressing on, claiming joy, decoding lies and clinging fiercely to a Truth that is somehow still knowable and teachable--these ways of being are true to us, but sadly, not new to us. You write with empathy and insight, intellectual honesty and discipline, and I'm grateful for every brick you contribute to building dialogue and wisdom. But for our sake, get out there and meet more Black grandmas! Even my bougie black ass knows that there are some things money can't buy and they don't teach you in school!
I voted a like but wanted to voice some feelings. The time we are living in is for me horrific. I am White and Jewish and born in 1942. Lucky for me, I was born in the US and not where my ancestors were born in Poland. I have read as well as experienced (second hand) what the American Black population went through. As a physician, many of my patients have been Black. My love of medicine involves the instant intimacy one has as a physician, assuming you care about the lives of those under your aegis, as I do. As a cancer doc, I would often sit with my patients, like Harry Sweets Edison, and hear how he was "treated" as a famous musician when he toured various cities. I remember those segregated bathrooms, and I recall my own fear driving across Southern states, dreading the possibility of being stopped by a policeman. I lived on the Southside of Chicago, and my first year in medical school my apartment was directly across the street from Temple #2 of the Islamic Nation, where Malcolm X attended. The Fruits of Islam (FOI), mostly Black from my recall, never bothered the White students, but I had two unpleasant encounters with White cops and one ended up with me spending the day in jail because I had no money to bribe the cop. MLK has long been one of the most revered personages in my 83 years of life. Our present horror show of Trump et al. + a GOP that lost its moral fiber, brings back to me my favorite MLK quote:
"Our lives begin to end the day that we become silent about things that matter."
-Martin Luther King
None of the above experiences comes remotely close to yours. None of my family's losses in trucks with pumped in carbon monoxide or gas chambers dripping Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide on men, women, children, elderly can be understood fully by others. What Jews and Blacks have had in common for so long has been the atrocities "bestowed" upon them. Everyone in this country would learn something reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. I can only say that it is a monumental work. Similarly, read While Six Million Died-A Chronicle of American Apathy by Arthur Morse.
As for Mike Brock, I cannot think of another person who has written so tirelessly about every aspect of the current state of affairs in this country. I felt his compassion in this recent commentary, as I know you did. There is so much to say and often important, very important things are left out. Our plates are so full in this country-not in the dinner kind of way but in the emotional overload.
For those who are caring, and compassionate like Brock, we must be grateful, but also we must be forgiving the few errors and omissions among the prolific writing he brings to us. I know you and others appreciate this. Even me, a hypercritical double Virgo, has to acknowledge the grace and humanity of Mike Brock.
Fortunately, I have always been aware that I have lived in blessed times, but, even so, I have been profoundly shaken to see them ending. To see that I must enter into battle for things i have taken for granted, like civil rights, a modicum of justice (for White people, anyway). Your essay here really helps center myself to live well despite the battles to come.
Thanks. I think reaching out to the Black and Latino communities, the left behind, homeless, or the chronically ill, or those scapegoated as too Other, who suffer, yet continue to survive, under a neoliberal US structural white supremacist authoritarianism, might help. Their daily negotiation with economic oppression, generational cultural erasure and ongoing unaddressed politicised racial violence, might offer us all valuable embodied wisdom gleaned directly from their visceral collective lived experiences.
This is really powerful. It aligns with GenX and older Millennials experience. It captures the mirage in a way that allows a little grace. I've felt so blind-sided by it, and really thought I had done something wrong not being able to keep up (and yes, I made some less than strategic career choices for sure but now it's like there's no way back to any kind of stability anymore). I fell for the new age self help nonsense, that if I was just mindful and loving enough, then things would start going right. I fell for the illusion of cosmic order, fairness and that life bended towards justice. Seeing monopolies continue to grow though and media get bought up should have set the alarm bells off louder and sooner. Brett Kavanaugh being voted in I think was when the hope really died.
"We have been blessed. Most of civilized history has been a much scarier world on a day-to-day basis than what we experience now. We are all contending with a sense of loss—especially those who came of age in the 1990s, when America seemed confident and the future looked like it would be obviously better than the past.
People sometimes refer to this as the “End of History” moment, referencing Francis Fukuyama’s famous book. He takes too much flak for that thesis. Fukuyama wasn’t predicting that nothing would ever happen again—he was observing something real: liberal democracy had triumphed over its ideological competitors. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Market economies had proven superior to command economies. Democratic governance had demonstrated its advantage over authoritarian alternatives. For a brief, shining moment, it seemed the fundamental questions of political organization had been answered, and all that remained was to work out the details.
That moment felt like liberation. Like we’d escaped something fundamental about the human condition. Like our children would inherit a world where freedom was guaranteed, where progress was automatic, where the future promised only improvement over the past.
We hadn’t escaped. We’d been granted a reprieve.
The anomaly wasn’t Trump. The anomaly was that post-Cold War moment when it seemed like we’d permanently solved the problem of tyranny. We’re back now to what history normally looks like: uncertainty about the future, threat from those in power, the need to maintain dignity and meaning under conditions that don’t guarantee either.
This is normal history. And that’s terrifying for people who thought they’d escaped it."
I appreciate your reference to "End of History". It fits the fairy tale of the smug neoliberal elites, but actually no one else. Dig a little deeper and we find the great untried world of "free markets" -- not freedom from regulation but freedom from manipulation. Democratize it and change the world. As Picard says: "Engage!"
Yes to all this. The British novelist Margery Allingham wrote during World War II about uncertainty. In her book The Oaken Heart (nonfiction) she describes the period when Britain was alone, from 1939 to 1941. She survived the war, but deliberately ended the book before the end, once America had joined in, to stress the lingering uncertainty they all felt.
She was in the southeast, near the coast, and was part of the near universal informal mobilization of civilians in Home defence. It's witty, and notes the small things, good and bad, that people contributed, despite the cold, the lack of fuel and food, the making do, the noise and the fear. After the Fall of France, they could hear the guns across the Channel, and of course were bombed nightly.
What stuck out to me was that she realizes very quickly that courage might not be enough to win. That was shattering, devastating to her. At the end she writes a ringing endorsement of carrying on anyway, and says that it is a privilege to have lived the experience, WHETHER OR NOT THEY PREVAIL against the gates of hell (not that she was religious). I have found very inspiring (even though I cannot do it!) this nearly incomprehensible thumbing her nose at the bad guys of history, defiance whatever happens.
I have purchased the Oaken Heart and the first pages are touching. She writes, "Lying, they say, is a new modern art of the enemy’s, but telling the truth is not easy. In fact, telling the truth is the basis of all classic art, which has always been notoriously difficult." I can tell this is a good read. Thank you.
That's wonderful. I hope you find it valuable. I could never get on with her mysteries: perhaps I will try them again.. My family lived through the London Blitz, and my father had a desk job first during the Battle of Britain at a RAF Base, and then later in the war same job in London for Special Ops. He said average life span of the young fighter pilots and crew in the Fall of 1940 was 3 weeks. Would you believe that when I got to where Allingham starts on May 1940 as France was surrendering, I had to put the book down for several days, ok weeks, because though born after the war, a few years after you, I absorbed the trauma in some way vicariously perhaps, as you described further up. My brother and I always thought our dad was difficult because broken by it, and I realise now a tiny fraction of what he went through, though he told us little, and even worse for your family I dare say. Forgive any typos; I am a shockingly poor proofreader!
I am pretty sure you are familiar with this:
High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
A sonnet written by John Gillespie Magee, an American pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War. He came to Britain, flew in a Spitfire squadron, and was killed at the age of nineteen on 11 December 1941 during a training flight from the airfield near Scopwick.)
When I first read this at a much younger age than I am now, I was overcome by emotion. I looked for more about John Magee, and found the following, which may be of interest to you and others.
High Flight was composed by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., an American serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was born in Shanghai, China in 1922, the son of missionary parents, Reverend and Mrs. John Gillespie Magee; his father was an American and his mother was originally a British citizen. He came to the U.S. in 1939 and earned a scholarship to Yale, but in September 1940 he enlisted in the RCAF and was graduated as a pilot. He was sent to England for combat duty in July 1941. In August or September 1941, Pilot Officer Magee composed High Flight and sent a copy to his parents. Several months later, on December 11, 1941 his Spitfire collided with another plane over England and Magee, only 19 years of age, crashed to his death. His remains are buried in the churchyard cemetery at Scopwick, Lincolnshire.
Thank you for this. Stunning, isn’t it. I did know it, but didn’t research or find out about young Magee. I can’t get through Churchill’s famous words about the Few, without being similarly flooded with emotion.
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
I do not know where that generation found its courage.
I love that living on the right side of history, carrying on anyway, is the resonant chord in human life. We're there: we don't know what's going to happen, but our integrity is worth it all.
It is. In a small way it reminds me of how we felt at the beginning of the pandemic, when the initial casualties forced us to wonder, as my brother said, if we would be alive in 3 months' time. Of course that did not call for integrity, though it did teach us about uncertainty in a way I had never experienced.
I think back on my parents who survived the Great Depression and the horrors of WWII. It is reassuring to know we still have what they possessed to live full lives. Thank you for the blueprint for centering and survival.
Thank you for this today. I needed this.
That is a superb article, which is realistic and contextualise what is happening. Not an anomaly, but 'business as usual'; no reason to accept it as how things now are or yo lose all hope. Thank you. Love from the other side of the Atlantic xxx
Once again, I love your mind ❤️🔥
This was a good read, thanks.
This is the most beautiful piece of inspired writing I’ve ever encountered. Thank you.
Beautifully said!
It's a tautology! Living well includes being engaged in community, which, like an apple a day, keeps the tyrants away. So many heartfelt comments today. We're going to make it!
Oh man. Thank you for speaking to how so many of us are feeling and help us re-ground ourselves.
I love your remarks about the person who works the gas station. When you are low waged it’s extremely hard to feel that you are a valued member of society. And yes, I can envisage that person smiling as they greet each person who comes to pay for their gas, who makes someone else else’s day a little brighter and who tells them that they are happy they met.
There is always something that we can do and know it does not always take money sometimes it’s just sharing a smile.
I have a very good smile!
All of this. Thank you 😊
Excellent article Mike, you have given me encouragement and perspective in this difficult time.