Advice From a Literature Teacher

SCOTUS and Resistance

The Supreme Court is captured and it’s as plain as the nose on your face after the SCOTUS decision on Monday, July 1, 2024.

In her dissent yesterday, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “The Republican appointed-majority in this opinion has opened the door to a President exercising wide dictatorial powers without any ultimate legal accountability for his actions.”

Meanwhile…

My neighbor is putting up siding. My donkey will not leave the round bales alone in the field and is gnawing the center out of each. My son is over to wash his clothes. The dogs are trying to catch a squirrel that has been pestering them for a week. My niece called to talk about selling raffle tickets for her daughter’s cheer team.

My tomatoes are getting big and should be turning red any day, and the President of the United States is now a King.

Everything seems normal, even boring, though the rule of law is smashed. Is this how democracy has failed in other countries?

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The Hollow Man, T.S. Eliot

I know about the end of democracy because I have studied history and literature, but I never thought the subjects I taught would be splayed out in front of me in my own country. I am often a little naive, but I don’t fall prey to hysterics. I am not a purveyor of doomsday. I am not a natural cynic. I can’t let myself fall into such a state that I stop paying attention, and I can’t act like any of this is normal.

And, I’m scared.

Propsero’s Book Store, Kansas City, Missouri.

I turn to literature in these times to steady myself with the words of poets and writers who were scared. Or enraged with righteous indignation. Or saddened by our country’s inability to live up to its potential. The writers who remind me that though these times are dark, I will not fill them with a positivity that feels toxic, but with words that will solidify and strengthen my spine. Words to help me resist.

I hope these words help you.

On not becoming a cog in the wheel…

Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

~On Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau

The experiences of motherhood radicalized me and if folks in charge think I'll sit back while the country is shredded from the inside out by religious zealots and billionaires, while harmful laws are imposed on my children and grandchildren, they don't know mothers like me.

I feel this bond with poet Adrienne Rich. Her poems and essays on feminism and history are bewitching.

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

~Adrianne Rich, What Kind of Times Are These

I have a phrase tattooed on my left arm: Resist much. Obey Little. It is a Walt Whitman quote and it reminds me that I am human and worthy of life and liberty and will resist unjust laws.

To The States, or any one of them, or any city of The
States, Resist much, obey little;
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved;
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth,
ever afterward resumes its liberty.

~Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

I love Langston Hughes for so many reasons, including his Missouri heritage, but it is his never-wavering, analytical dress-down of the United States that draws me to him today.

I look at the world

From awakening eyes in a black face—

And this is what I see:

This fenced-off narrow space   

Assigned to me.

I look then at the silly walls

Through dark eyes in a dark face—

And this is what I know:

That all these walls oppression builds

Will have to go!

I look at my own body   

With eyes no longer blind—

And I see that my own hands can make

The world that's in my mind.

Then let us hurry, comrades,

The road to find.

~Langston Hughes, I Look at the World

I wrote on the Harlem Renaissance a few posts back and how I loved teaching it to my students. They read Claude McKay for his raw words and his fight against racism in a world that was blatantly racist. This poem reminds me of the battle for equality and justice.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

~Claude McKay, If We Must Die

This poem by Margaret Walker has been a favorite. She presents resilience to all of the “Adams and Eves.”

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
    all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless
    generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now 
    rise and take control.

~Margaret Walker, For My People

How could I leave out MLK?

But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love? -- "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice? -- "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? -- "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist? -- "Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God." Was not John Bunyan an extremist? -- "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience." Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? -- "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?

~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Letter from Birmingham Jail

And, From the Declaration of Independence…a document that presented our grievances to a King:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

In solidarity, friends.

~Jess