Thoughts for 2024
2024 has begun, and, like most writers, I feel the urge to say something about how the coming year is going to be better, or at least more hopeful, than the one that just ended. But looking at the landscape around me, I don’t see how to write anything like that with any honesty.
When I was very young, no more than ten or eleven years old, I think, I first heard a quote that inspires me to this day, and has gone a long way to sustaining and directing my work ever since. As it’s been for many of my and subsequent generations, the words that inspired me were uttered (though not originated) by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
That phrase, first articulated by the 19th century theologian and abolitionist Theodore Parker, sustained me through dark times, renewing my determination to work for a better world. I recall a few years ago reading an opinion piece by MSNBC pundit Chris Hayes, one of the very few mainstream commentators worth paying any attention to. Hayes opined that the statement was noble but incorrect because the arc of the moral universe does not naturally bend in any direction. It must be pushed.
I like Hayes, and I do take his point. But I think he missed something. Of course any historical arc is not an independently evolving thing, and it is our actions that determine its course. The point that Parker, and later King, was making was that succeeding generations yearn more and more for justice, and they will work in ever-increasing numbers for it. Hayes felt that Parker and King were not accounting sufficiently for backlash, but I think they were saying that, despite some defeats and steps backward, the momentum would grow steadily over generations, and eventually overcome even the fiercest reactionary resistance.
Yet, one of the points Hayes raised about the common use of the “arc of the moral universe” phrase is that it offers comfort to liberals who can then, as he put it, see the story of the United States as “…a story of progress, often painful or slow and sometimes stalled but always moving in one direction: towards equality and a more perfect union.”
Hayes called that assessment wrong, and he was absolutely correct in doing so. Liberal Americans like to believe they would have spoken out against slavery two centuries, but the truth is that, though they are lionized as heroes today, abolitionists were not the liberals of today, but the radicals. Even the mainstream liberals of the day, even if they thought slavery was wrong, felt abolitionists were “impatient,” asking for too much too fast. That is a dichotomy that plays out today in resistance to the reduction of policing in response to the murders of unarmed people of color and it plays out in the shrugged shoulders of too many as they turn away so they don’t have to see what their tax dollars are doing in Gaza.
It also plays out in what I see as the misinterpretation of King, who was a radical thinker but one who was, for much of his life, determined to reach toward that liberal center. But his disappointment with white, liberal allies was well-documented.
I am desperately trying to cling to the belief that we are still moving toward a more just world while my country fully supports a state that purports—falsely—to represent my people, the Jewish people, as it carries out ethnic cleansing aimed at genocide. But it’s hard to ward off the despair I feel at the indifference, or even support for this heinous action that I see all around me, not from religious nationalists or vocal anti-Arab haters, but from ostensible liberals.
Whether it is the glib, condescending, and, frankly, racist statements that blame Palestinians for Israel’s actions or the silence of millions of Americans in the face of a cataclysmic scene of murder, the scope of American complicity in the killing, so far, of more than 1% of Gaza’s population (and that’s a conservative estimate) is stunning.
It begins, of course, with Joe Biden, a president who has always represented the worst of the Democratic Party. The long-time “Senator from MBNA;” crafter of the most racist incarceration bill of the modern American era; long-time opponent of funding women’s right to control their reproductive systems; presider over the humiliation of Anita Hill; and champion of our invasion of Iraq has given Israel full backing and even bypassed constitutional limits on his presidential authority to get Israel even more weapons to carry out its brutality in Gaza.
In typical fashion, Biden and his minions have made noises about objecting to some of Israel’s actions and statements, but have only increased their material support. This political sleight of hand is, unfortunately, not only a common trick of Biden’s but of mainstream Democrats more broadly. It works because many liberals are satisfied with nice-sounding words, even if they have no relationship at all to a leader’s actions and policies.
Ultimately, though, what’s happening in Gaza can only happen because the perpetrators and their many supporters, both Israeli and American, don’t see Palestinians as fully human. Only then can they see the killing of over 21,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, and mostly women and children, as acceptable. Only then can they willfully blind themselves that everything Israel has done in Gaza runs contrary to both the stated goals of eliminating Hamas (this kind of violence only breeds more hate, more people who feel justified in doing what Hamas and others did on October 7) and freeing hostages (which quite obviously necessitates a cessation of violence, especially since we already have seen that Israel’s onslaught has led to numerous hostage deaths).
Israel has made no secret of its intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and it’s hard to imagine anyone is fooled by the Orwellian term they use for it: “voluntary migration.” Some of us stand up and loudly object to this, but most are staying silent. If you can stay silent in the face of genocide, if you can, in good conscience, vote for a man who has devastated two million people with death, starvation, thirst, disease, and homelessness simply for who they are, then you are bending the moral arc of history in the wrong direction.