US: It's Bigger Than Us

A confluence of experiences occurred in 2016 that set me on a course I never expected. A confluence can mean two ideas coming together to create one idea like two streams creating a powerful river. I've closely followed attempts across the country to ban teaching about structural inequalities and racism in schools. I'll continue to speak out against these efforts but as a historian I can't help but point out how these attempts to censor educators and hold students back from learning are doomed to fail. 

Because educators have a greater purpose and children have richer inner lives driven by curiosity. The world is at their fingertips. You can't legislate away truth in 2021.

My confluence:
1. On a trip to France and Germany in 2016 I read the Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd and was taken with Kidd's ability to illuminate the rich inner lives of her characters. In particular the inner world of Charlotte, a talented seamstress who is enslaved, redefined my understanding of what freedom meant to millions before emancipation. Charlotte continually reminds her daughter, Handful, that her mind can never be owned although the law says her body and labor is her master's possession.

2. On the same trip we visited the Dachau concentration camp. This discomfort left me restless and the grief of the space overwhelmed. I wandered until I found the chapels built on the site as a reminder of hope. I took the photo above and I've thought of that bright shaft of light many times since 2016. In the bookshop at Dachau I picked up Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. What did Frankl find was the key to staying sane and surviving a concentration camp? Having a greater purpose, a focus beyond the horrors of daily life. "“The prisoner who had lost faith in the future – his future – was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay.”

We find ourselves in 2021 at a confluence. During 2020 a burst of activism and a demand for reform and renewed civil rights came together during a pandemic. A historic election lead to turmoil and insurrection. It was enough to get washed downstream and fear drowning in overwhelm.

If not for a rich inner life, where we connected our small actions to a larger meaning and purpose how many might have been lost in the overwhelm?

You can't legislate away ideas. Banning ideas that make you uncomfortable won't stop young people from seeking them out, being horrified by injustice and taking action to make our county a place of "with liberty and justice for all."

A confluence leads to a mighty river. You might dam that river but the water level will just rise. You can't stop it. A river will always flow on.
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