Read. And Resist Fear.

This past month has been difficult regarding the news: Paris, Colorado Springs, Laquan McDonald, San Bernardino. Each morning, when I check my updates, I feel a certain anxiety about what I might find. But it is not just the events themselves. The dread also stems from the way that so-called "leaders" have responded to these events. We have entered an ugly moment. Suspicion, hate, and intolerance appear to be on the rise. I am not naive. I understand we face threats to our safety; however, these reactions warrant a different fear--that of losing ourselves.

Then, while rereading Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character, Janie, reminded me of something. We all have within us the power to resist intolerance and hate.

At a pivotal part of the book, Janie's husband dies. From the moment we meet him, Joe Starks can think of nothing more than becoming the boss and lording over all he sees, just like white folks. His need for power is pathological. It knows no bounds. A reader has just witnessed pages of Joe mentally, emotionally, and even physically abusing Janie, slapping her for poorly cooked food or for having the temerity to defend herself against his ridicule of her body, her age, her looks. Now, with his death, Janie finds the chance to have the kind of freedom and self-determination that she always dreams of.

However, in the moments immediately following his demise, her initial reaction is compassion for the man who tormented her for years. As she looks at his dead body, she considers that "Jody had been hard on her and others, but life had mishandled him too" (83). The way she sees it, in his striving to become a powerful voice he had to sacrifice so much. "In the making of a voice out of a man," Joe surrendered the hope for a genuine, trusting relationship with another human being. It is a peculiar moment, as Janie focuses on the face in front of her, not on the compounded miseries she endured over the years of their marriage. And Janie did suffer in her marriage to Joe. Yet just when she could have celebrated pridefully the fact that his power was gone, and that he "got what he deserved," this woman studies the face of a fellow human being and finds within herself the ability to empathize.

How instructive.

But what exactly allows Janie to react this way? She never says. Maybe she understands the desperation Joe felt at being a black man in a racist society: his overbearing manner an outgrowth of living for 30 years under the weight of a system that denied him a degree of determination.

And this reminded me of the fantastic Ted talk by Chris Abani in which the former Nigerian political prisoner states that "the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion." In order to illustrate this point, Abani tells stories that are disturbing, humorous, and full of suffering and empathy and love--the stuff of our lives. And he talks of Ubuntu, a South African philosophy that focuses on our interconnectedness. Abani defines it this way: "the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me." We must see each other, accept each other, and resist the ease of one-dimensional caricatures.

I don’t expect shortsighted leaders to understand any of this. After all, they are too busy fear mongering and pointing out the dangers and darkness all around us. But just because they point, do I have to look? Do I have to be scared? Do I have to be angry? No. Because I am a reader.

Manifesto: After Reading, What I Want to Think, Act, Do

The human race is never at a loss for rage and brutality, and any action I take will do little to staunch the global thirst for violence. Wait, this thinking is as misdirected as it is defeatist. Let me start again.

I must not give in. Yes, humanity can inflict a horrific amount of pain upon itself, but it also has the capacity for untold kindness. 

I must control the kind of person I want to be, the kind of father I want my kids to have, the kind of teacher I want my students to learn from. 

I must be thoughtful, caring, and courageous in my empathy--especially when confronted by complexity and the inexplicable. 

I must exercise my imagination and wonder daily, just as the artists I love who make the world so beautiful and intriguing.