Carol Bergman

 

Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.

 

-Martin Luther King Jr. Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech December 10, 1964

 

The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.

 

-President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10 2009

 

    

 

I've been listening to Martin Luther King Jr.'s  and Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speeches—available on the Nobel site. The speeches are biblical in their exalted intensity, though Obama's is sometimes grounded in descriptions of the particular challenges his administration was confronting. Although he sometimes sounded like a preacher, he was not a preacher; he was a politician. King was a schooled preacher, then and now an unsurpassed orator. Both men led their flock to activism and hope.

 

I thought of both of them today after receiving texts and emails from friends in New Paltz about a disturbing incident that took place just steps away from my home. It has not, as yet, been officially designated a hate crime—motivation must be established—and the perpetrator is at large, but it feels and looks like one to me. Indeed it is reminiscent of the swastikas scrawled on Jewish businesses and homes in Germany as Hitler rose to power.

 

Here is an excerpt from Terence Ward's report in the October 10 issue of Hudson Valley One:

 

The New Paltz town council member was setting off to drop [Esi] Lewis' nine-year-old at school when the pair saw the graffiti scrawled in dark spray paint on their house, which included crude sexual imagery, a profane instruction regarding an intimate act, and that nine-year-old's name. They were both deeply disturbed, Lewis confirmed. "We are afraid to be home." 

 

An image of the "graffiti"—a  regrettable use of the word as it implies street art—appeared in the paper. I won't use it to illustrate this blog post, for obvious reasons. 

 

Just a word about Esi Lewis—a lawyer, the DEI officer for Ulster County, a member of the Town Board, a devoted parent, and the President of the evolving Margaret Wade Lewis Cultural Center in New Paltz, named after her mother, a founding faculty member of the Black Studies Department at SUNY New Paltz. Indeed, none of my description fully describes Esi's energy and devotion to the town where she was born and raised; she made a conscious decision to return here. As a parent, I cannot imagine what it must have felt like to see the verbal attacl on her home with her child in tow.

 

I have interviewed Esi, and crossed paths with her at various events over the years. I trust her deeply-felt concerns about racism in this ostensibly "liberal" town. When I first arrived here in 2018, there was little recognition of the history of enslavement, for example, or the legacy of Jim Crow after emancipation. Much has changed in the intervening years, and awareness is evolving, particularly on Historic Huguenot Street where signage of stone houses with their slave quarters has been updated. 

"People of color are afraid to be involved in public life…We are not honest as a community about racism — it's a real problem. This country was built and founded on racism. We are not immune," Esi told Terence Ward.

 

I reflect on this dissonant reality often, especially in the current fraught social media-driven climate. The breakdown of civil discourse, the cruelty we witness every day with round-ups and deportations, is inflammatory. Those who hate have been given permission to speak their hatred aloud, or to act on it. Peaceful existence and co-existence cannot be achieved, or re-established, in such an unsettling and unsafe climate.

 

To understand a working definition of hate speech, and the best protocols to counter its potentially violent effects, consult the UN's Fact Sheet:   https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/notohate_fact_sheets_en.pdf

 

 

I wasn't old enough to know how to pretend that everything was fine.

 
-Richard Powers, Playground

 

 

I was listening to the #SistersinLaw podcast on the way to the swimming pool. Joyce, Kim, Barbara and Jill have become my best friends of late. Imagined, of course. I turn to them for calm assessment and hope that the "rule of law," as commentators iterate and reiterate ad infinitum, has not been utterly sundered. But on this Saturday morning, the Saturday of which I speak, the sisters were chitchatting as they usually do before they launch into their chosen legal topics of the week, and I was paying close attention to the prompt: what do you do to relax?  The answers were variable, of course. Lots of word games, sports, and walks. Joyce has her chickens, Barbara is a football fan, Jill and Kim enjoy their dogs. The prompt got me to thinking: do I ever relax? Well, I was on the way to the pool to swim my meditative laps so I was confident in that moment, at least, that I do. But there are days when I am not attentive enough to self-care, especially if the news is so engaging, albeit painful, that I cannot quit reading articles about it, or listening to podcasts. PS: I begin my day with a BBC podcast as opposed to NPR these days. "Happy Talk News," has now permeated the American media sphere, corporate overseers are editing copy, firing and shifting personnel, succumbing to pressure, etc. Well, here I go again, and still.

 

Unlike many in my cohort of friends and family, I have a high tolerance for bad news. I've reported on war, atrocity, discrimination and cruelty often over the years. Indeed, I started writing about tough stuff when I was very young, and the protective callous has rarely been pierced. But I'm older now, feeling more vulnerable, and the cumulative witnessing has taken its toll. Not to mention that the news is more excruciating than it has ever been in my lifetime. Self-care, as modeled by my #SistersinLaw, is essential to continue important work, write freely, and remain steady. To this end, I have established new guidelines for myself and initiated new activities:

 

   *Fresh air and sunshine, or cloud watching, daily.

* Regular coffee/tea dates with kindred spirits.

*Reread Jane Austen to honor her 250th birthday.

*Visit art galleries with a sketchbook, no words allowed on the page.

* Indulge in restorative naps.  

*No news after 6 p.m.

* Study French yet again.

    *Study German yet again. 

 

I hope, dear reader, you enjoy my 8-point plan, which is fluid, and will change and amplify, as needed. It requires no diplomacy, abnegation, secrecy, or ultimatums. I thank the #SistersinLaw for leading the way to rest and recovery, by example. I dedicate this blog post to them.