World on Fire

Well, dear Succotash, I never thought I would say "I'm glad the looters didn't hit our apartment building," but you have been born into extraordinary times. At the moment cities around the country have been convulsed in rage and protest over the death of a man, George Floyd, at the hands of Minneapolis police. That means that we are at present in the midst of a global pandemic, a global economic collapse, and a moment raising real questions about the tenuous future of American democracy. Not, in short, the world I would have wished for you. I honestly wonder what's going to happen next.

Your godless mother Ginger was protesting last night, and hightailed it away before the police took people out with billy clubs in Boston. She's tired and shaken and also thinks she shouldn't come sit in our garden until she has quarantined for another two weeks. In another time in our life, your father and I would have been with her. We are not. When I got her text I was in bed with you snoozing next to me. I then stayed awake and hypervigilant until 1 am for no reason. "Why weren't you at Selma" was a question for the 1960s. Why weren't you barricading the Brooklyn Bridge, mama and daddy? Because of you, my nonimaginary baby. I would like to have thought I was the sort of mother who would take her baby to protests. But it turns out I am the sort of woman to hightail it out of town and hide as long as it keeps her baby safe. And I'm not even all that sorry.

Maybe a little.

I love that you are wholly unaware of any of this. You smile at me in the morning the moment you wake up, a happy and safe baby who seems to be cutting his first tooth and taking it all in stride. I know your gender and your class status and your race confer privileges upon you that are substantial, and unfair, and unearned, and it will be my job to teach you humility, and empathy, and responsibility, and a sense of fairness and equanimity and justice. I know I must do that soon, immediately, or that I should have done it already. I know that the constant low-grade fear or awareness that I feel every moment for your safety would be magnified a hundredfold if you were black, or poor, or sick, and that my fear for you would make my soul constantly hurt.

Here's my hope. A lot of people of my generation naively believed that the 1960s maybe didn't sort all this stuff out, but at least got us started in the right direction. We bought into the Sesame Street ideal of celebrations of difference in which we all get be friends now. I still want that to be true. I want you to have a childhood in which race and class politics in the United States have undergone meaningful positive change. I want the world to be a more just place, within the next decade, because of a lot of brave young people taking to the streets right now.

And I want the republic to survive. If it can.