“As is so with every story, once the end reveals itself the beginning and the middle can be understood anew.” —James Carroll (Constantine’s Sword, 2001)
I’m reading James Carroll’s fascinating history of the battle between the Christian church and Judaism. Carroll reminds us how much we learn about a story in hindsight. Of course, the outcome of this election is not an ending. It is an unfolding of a political process with a long dark history. There is considerably more to come, more to reckon with. This is a transitional moment, worthy of our humbled and full attention. We don’t know what will happen.
Not knowing is what we face about our own mortality and a lot else. Uncertainty is difficult for everyone. After we have done what we can to effect the change we want in our governance, we let go, look around to see who is in here with us, and go to work.
About the presidential election, there is grief to be reckoned with no matter the outcome. Grief that so many neighbors, friends, family members, and leaders here and across the country are targeted and imperiled by the openly hateful rhetoric of the campaign. How can so many people embrace such a stance?
I’m looking beyond the words and behavior of those who have inherited a history of trauma, hate, and scarcity. Each of us is responding out of a longing for a safer, better managed nation and world. How did we get here? And what is next to be?
The recent production of a play by James Carroll, Rachel DeWoskin, and Wesley Savick, inspired by Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, reminded me that activism is essential. Our assignment is to work together, each in our own way, to address our collective disempowerment. The ending to this story is unknown to us. All we can do is live our values by looking out for one another.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on Nov. 7, inaccurately referred to a recent staged reading in Wellfleet as a production of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. The production was of the play It Can’t Happen Here — Again, which was inspired by Lewis’s work.
