Is this what the 1850s was like?

After last week’s events, I was all in the mood to give a Sunday sermon. Then John Pavlovitz reposted one of his from April. He was trying to get a sense of the nation’s mental health after a year in isolation:

I’ve tried to put my finger on how I’m feeling lately, how I think so many of us are feeling out there.

It isn’t outrage. We’ve been there for a while now if we’ve been paying attention at all.
It isn’t anger. That’s familiar territory for people whose eyes have been open to the ugliness.
It’s isn’t grief. We have collectively and individually mourned for years at this point.

It’s something else. I think it’s exhaustion.

I sense a corporate emotional weariness in kind people these days, the accumulated scar tissue created when you’ve absorbed more bad news, predatory behavior, and  attacks on decency than your reserves can manage. Sustained cruelty will do that to the human soul.

There’s only so much contempt for humanity our minds are able to process, until one day something snaps and we lose the ability to respond with the same urgency and resilience we once had.  A low-grade hopelessness sets in, slowly replacing our activism with apathy and one day rendering us immobile: cruelty sickness.

Prolonged exposure to this kind of seemingly tireless barbarism begins to rob us of energy, to dishearten us to the point that we stop caring and opt out. This is of course, by design. That is what those manufacturing this incessant enmity are counting on.

The fatigue of decent humans is the plan: inundate us with a million tiny crises, assail us with countless daily culture war battles, and batter us with endless legislative assaults—until we are gradually but decidedly crushed beneath the weight of it all. Eventually, we succumb to the numerous wounds of their boundless hatred, the suffering of those they victimize, and a steady stream of the unanswerable questions about how and why human beings can be this perpetually cruel.

Maybe it’s a bit of necessary resting after the the last four ferocious years, perhaps an understandable emotional letdown afforded by the arrival of an adult human president and the feeling that we are not in a continual state of imminent threat from our government, or maybe it’s the welcome distraction of passing through the worst of a brutal year in isolation—but it feels as though our collective passions are waning and we cannot afford this.

Pavlovitz goes on to urge that we reconnect with community and let it renew our strength.

I’ve been trying to do that, deliberately, with people I haven’t spoken with for some time.

There was a local party meeting Saturday morning — the second in-person affair in 20 months. Even masked, it was good to see people I had not seen in that long. I spent over an hour on the phone with a colleague Saturday afternoon reviewing recent political developments. It was soothing to hear her voice on the line.

Only a handful of local restaurants in this tourist town are open to the vaccinated only. They check. After a takeout-only year followed by a summer of beer served in plastic cups outside at picnic tables, we can now — safely — eat indoors at our neighborhood brew pub and have a beer in a proper glass. It feels almost normal and like early Christmas. A neighborhood attorney I hadn’t seen in a couple of years gave a thumbs-up from across the room last night, smiled, and asked if he was late for the Republican meeting.

The fatigue and emotional beat-down cannot win. Pavlovitz suggests, “We fill in the gaps among us, and we let those of us who feel strong enough today to engage the fight for those who need to catch their breathe and renew their strength.”

Old times there are not forgotten

I wonder these days if this is what the 1850s felt like.

“There is nothing more frightening in America today than an angry White man,” writes Baltimore native CNN’s John Blake:

There is nothing inherently violent about White men, or any human being.

But recent events have convinced me it’s time to put another character on trial: A vision of White masculinity that allows some White men to feel as if they “can rule and brutalize without consequence.”

This angry White man has been a major character throughout US history. He gave the country slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, and Jim Crow laws. His anger also helped fuel the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

And he fought like the devil to preserve slavery, to undo Reconstruction, and to enforce Jim Crow for 100 years. His flag-waving and pocket Constitutions cannot conceal that his commitment to preserving this republic as a democratic one is merely cosmetic.

There is some scary shit on the horizon. More menace and more threats. We’ve touched on it here, and here, as well as here, here, here, and here.

What the angry White man counts on is that the rest of us will not see that his bluster and sidearms are there to conceal his deep insecurity. That HE is the one who is more scared. If we falter, the country does. So, take a breath, shake it off, and do not falter.