"Look where you are!"
I pointed at the pickup truck, which was doing its best monorail impression as it idled on the lane line that divided right from center. The driver, a white male in his forties or fifties, had one forearm on the wheel and the other resting on the open window. His gaze never wavered. He looked like someone who had a real job - if he finished the day in clean clothes, he'd probably get fired. He repeated my comment, though without incredulity, like it was just a statement about the weather.
"Look where you are."
I looked. My bike was on the inside of the lane line, closer to left than right but firmly in the center. It was legal. I must have had something to add but I never found out - the light turned green, and so it was that those words became the first and last of our interaction.
I hadn't thought about him for a few months, possibly a year, but I remembered him last Wednesday. I remembered that he was wearing glasses, though I'd never describe him as bespectacled. I remembered his nondescript hat, the kind you wear because the people you spend time with wear hats. I remembered thinking that the irony of him trying to run me off the road in my own neighborhood on Columbus Day would be lost on him, if not an outright provocation. I remember his seeming ignorance of his role in our little holiday parade down Charles Street, which had started a few blocks back at Revere Street with honking, then swerving, and finally tailgating, my fear at the front giving way to an appreciation of self-defense arguments. I remembered him speeding off, cutting across Beacon Street like a stock car driver exiting pit row; he'd get that reference. I remembered just enough to realize that my rough idea of what he looked like wouldn't help me recognize him anywhere - in his truck, on the street, or from FBI footage. But even as my wildest hypothesis threatened to derail the recollection, I remembered how we had arrived at a red light on Beacon Street and we'd both slowed, stopped, obeyed. I remembered a moment of equality between Americans (forgive my assumption) that had allowed us to demonstrate what must pass these days for the wisdom of common sense - agreeing to disagree.
I use equality here in the sense I noted a few years ago when I read Simone Weil's First and Last Notebooks - equality means obeying and commanding one's equals. It was a fresh insight, and the definition has clearly stuck with me, perhaps because thanks to the fluke timing of my reading habit I came across it at just the right time - it's as if fate itself knew I required the definition of equality to help me navigate the next chapter of my life. I encounter the word with increasing regularity these days, whether it be on the pavement, in conversation, or in print, but in these interactions I sometimes suspect that equality is being used by people who have not made much additional effort to define the concept beyond the parameters of its most common applications; the insight from reading Weil has been a foundation in my mind for more challenging thinking on the matter beyond trumpeting equality for equality's sake.
But what does it mean to obey and command one's equals? In surface terms it implies a world where I tell you what to do, and you tell me what to do, and compliance is the secret to happiness, which is shared equally among all. Of course, I don't need to waste your time, reader, explaining why this doesn't quite work - nobody likes being bossed around. What's less obvious is that in modern society the basic structure forces us all to hold up our end of this bargain in one way or another, with the necessity of obedience implied by an escalating chain of command that forever lurks in the shadows of everyday life; they say that everyone is equal before the law. Most Americans, or I should say most combinations of Americans, have no issue respecting the equality of their fellow citizens, and trivial disputes rarely boil over to the extent that the courts must intervene in the situation. It's why every morning we can make the trip from one end of Charles Street to the other using all the hidden examples of obey and command necessary in making modern life possible - we excuse ourselves as we brush past, we drive or bike or walk in compliance with the rules of the road, we cede our claim to the right of way if it spares another from harm. And in those rare incidents when two idiots - yes, that's right, two idiots - can't get down the street without all the honking and fuss, the mutually acknowledged fact of the traffic light is a great equalizer, and everyone stops in respectful obedience of a collective's command.
It's this line of thinking, perhaps, that's made an aspect of the past week and a half difficult for me to understand, or even accept - the catalyst for the storming of the US Capitol was a fiction. I know this because the notion that the election was in some way rigged, compromised, or stolen has come up in courtroom after courtroom all over the country, and the cases have been thrown out one after the other; I'm told judges appointed by President Trump himself have sometimes presided over such proceedings. It's vital to recognize that a persistent myth is at the core of this attack because a society incapable of separating fact from fiction is unable to enforce the obey and command social contract that defines equality within modern civilization, which means that the event was an indirect attack against the institutions that protect, preserve, and promote equality; the fact that no power higher than our courtrooms exist to end such myths is what elevates the current situation from a tragic incident to an urgent crisis. I don't bring up this point as a way to dismiss the real concerns of anyone who openly supported President Trump over the past four years, or voted for him in November, or even showed up in DC on January 6 with only good intentions. I bring it up because it's extraordinary - the spark that formed the violent mob, the cause of what is being called a riot or insurrection, the first domino to fall in the build up to January 6, was a fictional idea about the legitimacy of the election, decisively refuted, and you would know this is a new level of crisis if you thought for three seconds about why we have the judiciary at all; you would know that when the wisdom of common sense eludes us commoners, the courts exist to reinforce the command and obedience of equality.
A country where the people cannot agree on the established facts has no future. This is the missing piece of the commentary since January 6 - which is so fundamental, so obvious to the core of the violence, that it's shocking I haven't heard more about it, though perhaps it bores those who write about this stuff for a living and tempts them to explore far more complex or tangentially related implications; it may indeed be too simple for our heady, hyperlinked times. But the simplicity of the statement belies the complexity of the reality I am trying to describe, which has been looming on the horizon for my entire adulthood - when the facts do not fit our worldview, we discard them for more convenient or consistent interpretations. I don't mean to generalize as a precursor to including other arguments, events, or examples - certain decisions made in isolation by one courtroom should be disputed and appealed if the circumstances allow for it, and my assertion that the rule of law plays an indispensable role in preserving the democracy isn't to be confused with the "law and order" trope that serves as code for excusing extrajudicial or vigilante justice. What I mean is this specific case as it relates to last Wednesday - an allegation of election fraud, a series of court cases, and the unanimous conclusion that should have established, for a change, a set of clear facts from which we can move forward rather than more of the paralyzing nonsense that has proved the immovable obstacle on the path to meaningful progress.
There is not, it seems, much hope for common ground in a situation devoid of common sense, where verdicts only reinforce worldview - either you are proven correct, or you have proof of a vast conspiracy against you. It's the real world governed by the logic of social media, where the only currency is the digital nicotine of approval - facts remain unpopular, and outright disapproval is the impetus to seek a more like-minded crowd. Those who've ignored all this to make a call for unity in this chaotic time have my respect, but also my skepticism - where is unity possible when established facts come under such fire that it sparks riots in the nation's capital? It seems that the only way to get all Americans to agree on the fact of the election might be to have every voter stand in a line, Biden on the left and Trump on the right, with each participant holding proofs of citizenship and residency in clear sight, so that the skeptics can personally count each legal head until all suspicions are put to rest. But then new allegations of forged papers, or of confusion regarding where to stand for third-party candidates, or of voters sprinting ahead of the counters to be tallied again! It will never end.
I must acknowledge, however, that no matter how bleak the prospects of unity under the current circumstances, there are scattered examples of unity in the national history, and this offers hope in the sense that history is alleged to repeat itself. The past examples of national unity seem to rely heavily on some outside scourge toward which we can direct our collective spirit, though my definition of "outside scourge" may be wider than the standard - the response to the pandemic represents a missed opportunity to me, but perhaps it reflects a difference in the way I define external threats. There are other such challenges on the American doorstep if you follow my thinking - the refugee crisis, the climate emergency, the ongoing question of extreme global poverty - but we can't pretend this nation in its current state has the prerequisite unity to effectively contribute to solutions, in the present or the future, for problems domestic or global. The only shared perspective I see at the moment is that of denial - there is no recognition from either side that the way political views are being expressed these days demonstrates not just disagreement, but a hostility that is reserved for when you think an opponent's view simply should not exist. I fear that the mentality is on the cup of a twisted logical leap - if the opponent's view should not exist, then why should the opponent exist?
This isn't us, we're told, by those who insist on expressing their denial with eloquence, insight, and optimism. But look where we are. The sense of compromise that defines common sense of the highest order - agreeing to disagree, no matter how grudgingly - has been replaced by a conviction that agreement is possible only among the like-minded; we are in denial of the fact that we only meet someone in the middle so that we can drive them off the road. We have an incoming President who calls for unity as if it will happen by decree, in denial of the fact that unity is about as elusive to the American experiment as resting a boulder at the summit was to Sisyphus, and in denial of the fact that the best way to reach his goal of unity is to create, explain, and execute a plan for improving the lives of his opponent's supporters. We are in denial of our refusal to listen to someone with a different perspective to our own, political or otherwise, and we are in denial that we lack the skills to do so in the unlikely event that someday we were to change this attitude. We are in denial that our reactive nature means we create, encourage, and enable the worst of our opponents. This isn't us, we say, but look where we are. This isn't us, we repeat, like the green leaves who watch their neighbors turn into foliage, united by a state of denial that seems to be the only thing we all have in common. This isn't us? It's not you and it's not me, but it's definitely us.
