Harry Belafonte sums things up better than any "closing speech" could (NY Times, 11/7/2016):
“O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America
to me,
And yet I swear this oath
—
America will be!”
— Langston Hughes, “Let
America Be America Again”
What old men know is that
everything can change. Langston Hughes wrote these lines when I was 8 years
old, in the very different America of 1935.
It was an America where
the life of a black person didn’t count for much. Where women were still
second-class citizens, where Jews and other ethnic whites were looked on with
suspicion, and immigrants were kept out almost completely unless they came from
certain approved countries in Northern Europe. Where gay people dared not speak
the name of their love, and where “passing” — as white, as a WASP, as
heterosexual, as something, anything else that fit in with what America was
supposed to be was a commonplace, with all of the self-abasement and the shame
that entailed.
It was an America still
ruled, at its base, by violence. Where lynchings, and especially the threat of
lynchings, were used to keep minorities away from the ballot box and in their
place. Where companies amassed arsenals of weapons for goons to use against
their own employees and recruited the police and National Guardsmen to help
them if these private corporate armies proved insufficient. Where destitute
veterans of World War I were driven from the streets of Washington with tear
gas and bayonets, after they went to our nation’s capital to ask for the money
they were owed.
Much of that was how
America had always been. We changed it, many of us, through some of the
proudest struggles of our history. It wasn’t easy, and sometimes it wasn’t
pretty, but we did it, together. We won voting rights for all. We ended Jim
Crow, and we pushed open the Golden Door again to welcome immigrants. We
achieved full rights for women, and fought to let people of all genders and
sexual orientations stand in the light. And if we have not yet created the
America that Langston Hughes swore will be — “The land that never has been yet”
— if there is still much to be done, at least we have advanced our standards of
humanity, hope and decency to places where many people never thought we could
reach.
What old men know, too,
is that all that is gained can be lost. Lost just as the liberation that the
Civil War and Emancipation brought was squandered in Reconstruction, by a white
America grown morally weary, or bent on revenge. Lost as the gains of our labor
unions have been for decades now, pushed back until so many of us stand alone
in the workplace, before unfettered corporate power. Lost as the vote is being
lost by legislative chicanery. Lost as so many powerful interests would have us
lose the benefits of the social welfare state, privatize Social Security, and
annihilate Obamacare altogether.
If he wins this Tuesday,
Donald J. Trump would be, at 70, the oldest president ever elected. But there
is much about Mr. Trump that is always young, and not in a good way. There is
something permanently feckless and immature in the man. It can be seen in how
he mangles virtually the same words that Langston Hughes used.
When Hughes writes, in
the first two lines of his poem, “Let America be America again/ Let it be the
dream it used to be,” he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a
hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to
be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint,
“America never was America to me,” and through the rest of this remarkable poem
he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great
dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished.
Mr. Trump, who is not a
poet, either in his late-night tweets or on the speaker’s stump, sees American
greatness as some heavy, dead thing that we must reacquire. Like a bar of gold,
perhaps, or a bank vault, or one of the lifeless, anonymous buildings he loves
to put up. It is a simplistic notion, reducing all the complexity of the
American experience to a vague greatness, and his prescription for the future
is just as undefined, a promise that we will return to “winning” without ever
spelling out what we will win — save for the exclusion of “others,” the
reduction of women to sexual tally points, the re-closeting of so many of us.
With his simple, mean,
boy’s heart, Mr. Trump wants us to follow him blind into a restoration that is
not possible and could not be endured if it were. Many of his followers
acknowledge that (“He may get us all killed”) but want to have someone in the
White House who will really “blow things up.”
What old men know is that
things blown up — customs, folkways, social compacts, human bodies — cannot so
easily be put right. What Langston Hughes so yearned for when he asked that
America be America again was the realization of an age-old people’s struggle,
not the murky fantasies of a petty tyrant. Mr. Trump asks us what we have to
lose, and we must answer, only the dream, only everything.
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Harry Belafonte is an artist and
activist.
