By Rabbi Ben Kamin
OCEANSIDE, California — The other day in my car, I came to an intersection at the same moment another driver appeared opposite. Our eyes met—he was a black man, a little younger than me, and he looked deeply into me. Two strangers transecting in an America where, it seems, we suddenly have permission to hate one another.
I honestly thought he had the right of way and waved to him to pass—with a smile. He nodded, not showing anything in his face but the fact that we were potentially at odds just because of our skin colors. I felt the permutation in our society even though the incident was benign.
My daughters and so many friends are heartbroken, shocked, and try to dispel disillusionment about the country they love. How could that man have won? What about the last fifty years of social legislation in favor of justice? What about the founding principles of this nation of immigrants and the realization (we thought) that diversity is our very strength? What about the dignity of the American presidency itself?
But I heard a white Uber driver a few months ago tell me not long ago, unsolicited and within an assumed racial kindred spirit, that “you can’t get anything any more if you’re a white man.” This haunted me after the Electoral College delivered the presidency to the whitest man in America. As David Remnick has written in The New Yorker, Trump was apparently “tuned in” to “the frequencies of white rural life, the disaffection of people who felt overwhelmed by the forces of globalization, who felt unheard and condescended to by the coastal establishment.”
Maybe so. But we will survive. One of the problems with American society is that our media-saturated national memory is weak and short-circuited. The Union endured in 1865 after a four-year rupture and brutish Civil War during which 600,000 Americans died—more than in all the other wars we have fought combined.
A young American president was horrifically shot and killed in Dallas fifty-three years ago; the republic continued in constitutional order. We suffered the criminal malfeasance of President Richard M. Nixon—democracy prevailed and the disgraced executive flew off in resignation and we continued shopping and going to ball games. Even the apocalyptic nightmare of 9/11 failed to stop this nation from breathing even as we remain cognizant and grief-stricken.
America has a resiliency about it that we need to draw from once again. We have always had the ability to correct ourselves—about slavery, about a woman’s right to vote or run for president, about the rampant consumption of energy and fuel, and even about the cosmically misguided war in Vietnam. In my own lifetime as an immigrant to this nation, I have seen more inspired corrections than mistakes mark the national story.
Yes, we are at a low point. But Americans have never failed to look skyward and will never surrender that freedom to anyone or anything.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer based in Oceanside, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com
Rabbi, from your lips to G-D!