The Subject Is Courage

Cold midwinter is the time to call on your sisu!

A good friend commented recently that citizens of the United States are now becoming “accustomed” to living with daily fear and uncertainty, adding, “Black people have lived this way for centuries.” The same can be said for Native Americans (and indigenous peoples in all parts of the world invaded by Europeans), certain (but not all) immigrant groups, gay people, etc. To survive and thrive under constant threat requires courage, and now is no time now for anyone to be fragile.

Former enslaved people who fled the South in the Great Migration knew fear both in the homes they fled and on the road north, and danger did not stop when travels ended. Whether the ultimate destination was the northern States or Canada, equality of opportunity was not granted upon arrival. Nevertheless, those migrants saw improvements in their lives. Perhaps most importantly, they gained hope. Courage they had all along.

Isabel Wilkerson‘s book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration tells this story beautifully and is a good book to read, if you haven’t already, during Black History Month.

I am only about halfway through Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life (and less than halfway through Jimmy Carter’s presidential memoir, Keeping Faith), because at bedtime and in the middle of the night I turn usually to fiction. The King biography, however, is quite readable, and when I sit down with it in the late afternoon or early evening, the pages turn quickly. It is not, let me make clear, a hagiography. The author presents MLK’s flaws and self-doubts along with his courage and other virtues. (People often say of some admired person that he or she “was not a saint,” forgetting that those elevated to sainthood by the Catholic Church were all human beings, and none was perfect.) His personal courage inspired others.

 

King’s fervor lit a flame in many of those who heard him. Jesse Jackson, who was fifteen years old at the time of the 1957 Lincoln Memorial speech and would go on to become a minister, activist, and presidential candidate, said King’s emergence offered concrete hope that racism could be fought and beaten. Before King, there seemed to be two options: “You could go into a deep dark hole,” Jackson said, or “you could adjust—adjust to be the best pool player, adjust to be the best singer, the best barber.” Now King offered a realistic third option, Jackson said: “You could resist.”

 

A younger friend once asked me, “What were the Sixties really like?” I told her that depended on who you were, how old you were, where you lived, and what was going on your life. The Sixties were not the same for everyone, and neither were the Fifties.

 

Many historians would describe the 1950s as a time of tranquility, a time of prosperity, a time when the gap between the Left and Right narrowed and Americans, for the most part, agreed that they were fortunate to live in the greatest and most powerful nation on earth. But such descriptions overlooked many who did not feel so fortunate. Once those who were overlooked began to express their discontent, once they began to yearn for more, the picture-perfect image of America in the 1950s showed cracks. Where would the fight for real freedom spread next? It would spread almost everywhere, including Mongtomery.

 

When Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a sermon or spoke at a rally, people were inspired by his fervor. No demagogue, King was also persuasive in his reasoning and offered a hopeful vision of the future. 

 

Fear is contagious. It resides in the most primitive part of the human brain, always ready to be activated by threat, real or perceived. Survival of the prehistoric group depended on the contagion of fear. 

 

But fear can be overcome, and courage, like fear, can also be contagious. 

 

Courage was contagious in Mongtomery, Alabama, in 1963. It was contagious during World War II in the French village of Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon, where villagers took a united stand. I’m sure everyone reading my words today can come up with examples from personal experience, as well as from history. Real leaders are courageous and inspire others to be brave. 

 

“Courage is like a muscle,” in the words of John McCain. “The more we exercise it, the stronger it gets.” Before he died, McCain worried that America’s cultural courage muscle was growing weak from lack of exercise, and that, he warned,

 

…means trouble for us all, because courage is the enforcing virtue, the one that makes possible all the other virtues common to exceptional leaders: honesty, integrity, compassion, and humility. In short, leaders who lack courage aren’t leaders.

 

--Here I want to shift gears, so hold on! Let’s take a look at standup comedy! What? Yes! 

 

Historically, jesters in a royal court, besides telling jokes and performing acrobatic tricks, were permitted to speak their minds freely, even going so far as to criticize the monarch. At times they were trusted advisors to kings and emperors, while at other times speaking truth to power meant they risked their lives. Their courage provided both a safety valve and a warning. 

 

And so it is fitting that in a country whose government is supposedly “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” comedians all over our land provide criticism of nominal leaders (I really do intend that adjective), along with more general entertainment, and my favorite these days is Josh Johnson. This young man is both brave and funny! He makes me laugh! 

 

Laughter—how subversive! We are never thoroughly beaten down if we can still laugh. (Do you think Winston in Orwell’s novel 1984 ever laughed?) When someone tells important truth in a way that provokes spontaneous laughter, our courage can get a big boost.

 

Where do examples of courage in our world today, in the United States, give you inspiration and hope and make you feel a little braver yourself? I take heart from the examples of U.S. House of Representatives minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, California governor Gavin Newsom, and others. Even Senator Mitch McConnell—and I am no fan of his political views in general; quite the contrary—managed to locate his cojones and speak out against January 6 and vote against the abominable Hegseth nomination. The City of Brotherly Love has stood out en masse. Who stands out for you?

 

As for those of us who are not in Congress, not governors or mayors or ministers with large congregations, we can still spread the contagion of courage among ourselves and to others. Yesterday morning an old song came into my head, something my sisters and I learned as a hymn in Sunday school when we were little girls. Take a listen, and tell me if this doesn’t strengthen your resolve to do whatever you can, day by day.

 

Another Sunday school song: "Open up your heart and let the sun shine in!"

Everything is Different Everywhere

Wednesday morning, 12/13/23

Everything is different not only from year to year but also from day to day. Yesterday’s fierce, bitter west wind made the air feel ten degrees colder than the temperature reading. Today is still cold, but the sun is shining, and there are more smiles on the faces of even the most rushed pedestrians in Northport. I did my village errands before opening and then found contentment in adding ornaments to my little Charlie Brown tree.

Happy in the bookstore window, sunny today

 

A Recent Encounter and Thoughts It Sparked

 

“It’s not the same town it used to be,” the salesperson muttered bitterly. I was trying on boots and had asked specifically for footwear made in the U.S. or Canada. Her remark about change in Traverse City came as a response to my request and followed her more immediate response: “You won’t find them. No one here wants to work any more. The only boots we can get from China or Vietnam or ….” I forget the third Asian country she named, but in the moment I thought instantly about the wage scale in China, where factories workers are housed in clusters of high-rise dormitories in the middle of nowhere, and so I remarked, “Well, people here don’t want to work for nothing,” but that was the wrong thing to say, because although my tone wasn’t angry, the words were argumentative. I wish it had occurred to me then (and not an hour later) to ask curiously, “Why do you say that?” Maybe we could have had a conversation. Instead, she countered quickly, “They don’t want to work at all!” I still could have asked the question, if I hadn’t let her words and demeanor put me off so completely, but next she made that remark about Traverse City not being the town it used to be, adding, “And it isn’t the same country it used to be, either.”

 

Of course, she was perfectly right to say that Traverse City has changed. Nothing like the small town I moved to in 1970, Traverse City now seems to exhibit growth as such a fast pace that the Artist and I were always exclaiming over new buildings whenever we made the trip to town. Big condominium complexes everywhere, multistory hotels, city traffic! Downtown is still attractive and walkable, and the sidewalks are usually filled with foot traffic (a good sign for a downtown), but the newfangled parking arrangement – meters that take credit cards instead of quarters – discourages some (I am one) from making the effort to shop downtown. Maybe it’s out-of-town visitors in the big hotels who shop Front Street boutiques these days.

 

Luckily, when I inspected the label on the inside of the second pair of boots the gloomy salesperson brought out (the ones I’d initially pointed to in the display), I saw that they were made in Canada. They fit. They were warm and snug and simple. No need to look further. So I got what I came for, and we ended with smiles, but the transaction as a whole left me feeling sad and discontented over a missed connection. I wish I’d had my wits about me in the moment. But going to Traverse City overwhelms me, too, most of the time….

 

Stores and restaurants and traffic and high rises are hardly unique in the American landscape. When I am back in Kalamazoo, there are parts of that city that I barely recognize, and the same is true of Joliet, Illinois, where one of my sisters still lives. Cities everywhere are sprawling outward. Growth in Tucson and Phoenix made those cities’ outlying areas look different from one week to the next as I traveled from ghost town to city hospitals and back in early 2022. Apartment buildings and condos are rising skyward in all American cities. Shops and restaurants have become more expensive (and more like New York) than they ever used to be.

Nothing is the way it used to be. Anywhere.

Part of this sea change is population growth. The world population, 3,695,390,336 in 1970, had grown to 8,045,311,447 by 2023, more than doubling. The population of the United States went from 203,392,031 to an estimated 339,996,563 in the same time period, not doubling but greatly increasing. How could we ever imagine that the world would not change with so many new people in it, including the babies we welcome so joyfully into our own families? 

 

Another aspect of changes, however, as I see it, has to do with expectations, which are much higher than those of the postwar twentieth century. Is it also a greater willingness to carry debt? Refusal to delay or do without gratification? Resignation to “just the way things are”? The average new car today costs two and a half times what my first house cost and five times what my parents paid for their first house. Not that my parents ever bought new cars, and I never have, either, and both of those first houses, I should note, had three bedrooms and a single bathroom -- but who expected more? Our family’s vacations in the 1950s consisted of two weeks in Ohio, one week with one set of grandparents, a second week with the other set – and that was a summer vacation. Winter vacations were unknown except for “jet-setters,” back when only the rich and famous flew around the world for pleasure.

 

Materially speaking, the growing world population on average is richer than ever. Many middle-class Americans are drowning in their own toys! (Are they happier?) However the average is calculated, though, many are left behind, as what was a gap between highest and lowest income levels threatens to become a chasm.

 

Somehow – and I have no basis other than intuition for saying this – I doubt that the unhappy salesperson in the shoe store and I would agree on which changes we see as the most negative or what might be done to mitigate negative effects. Of course, I don’t know that, and obviously she was having a bad day. I remember a day 28 years ago when I had to close my bookstore early, realizing that my mood was not one that walk-in customers should have to meet, and a couple years after that, during summer tourist season, annoyed by being asked the same questions over and over, I had to slap myself upside the face, metaphorically, and tell myself either to get a new attitude or find a different line of work. Attitude is what I changed.

 

I’ve moderated both my moods and my expectations since those early years and grown accustomed to the rhythms of the calendar. I’ll never be rich, but I manage to make a modest living doing something I love in a place where I feel comfortable and visible. A first-time visitor recently assured me that no reader need ever leave my bookstore empty-handed, as there is something for every reading taste. “Write in my guest book!” I urged him shamelessly. Everyone loves to be appreciated! I certainly appreciate my customers and am happy that so many have become my friends over the years. What more could I ask? I am a lucky human being.

 

Welcome!

Additions to Top Recommendations From My 2023 Reading

 

Added to my top fiction and top nonfiction book picks of the year are now: 

 

For fiction, it is, of course, The Waters, by Bonnie Jo Campbell, which I read in an advance review copy, though the release date was pushed from October to January 2024. I’ll be writing more about that novel after the first of the year and hope the author can come to Northport! 

 

For nonfiction, it’s Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, published back in 2020. I read The Warmth of Other Suns earlier but only very recently Caste. Such a brilliant writer and thinker she is, and while you probably know, as I did, the basic historical events, her analysis puts them in a new, pitiless light. How did 2016 happen? Read Chapter 26. That is, read the first 25 chapters, and then Chapter 26. Every American needs to read this book. If you need more convincing, here's an article for you. 

 

Time Is Slipping Away!

 

How does it happen? One day the holidays are visible on a distant time horizon, with weeks available to plan and make ready, and then suddenly  Hanukkah is almost over, and it's less than two weeks until Christmas! Whatever the day on which these thoughts occur to us, however, we are here now. Take a deep breath. Sun or clouds, you are here now.