John Lewis and Me

When I was nine, our church had a father and son banquet, and the speaker for the evening was Wray Carlton, a running back with my beloved Buffalo Bills. I made quite a fuss about how unfair it was that I couldn’t meet him because I was a girl, so my dad arranged for me to help in the kitchen and then introduced me to Carlton at the end of the evening. I was in seventh heaven for weeks!

I’ve met a few other famous people over the years, including Marilyn Quayle, the vice president’s wife who toured our Salvation Army building in Cleveland Hough, and actors Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen on the political trail. But when I think about who I would like to sit down with for a long conversation, high on my list is Freedom Fighter and Congressman John Lewis. We didn’t meet in this life, and now, with news of his death last weekend, I will have to settle for the stories told by others. 

John Robert Lewis packed lots of living into his eighty years. The stories flowed this week, as many shared their memories of a man who made a powerful impact on each person he met. As a child, Lewis dreamed of being a preacher but struggled with stuttering, so he lined up the chickens for his impassioned sermon. At eighteen, Lewis wrote a letter to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., telling of his interest in the civil rights movement, and King purchased a bus ticket for Lewis so the two could meet. “Dr. King, I am John Robert Lewis,” he remembered saying. “And that was the beginning.” John Blake described the place John Lewis held in our day: “He is that rare unifying political figure who commands respect from the left and right, someone who can call his political foes ‘brother’ with virtually no one questioning whether he means it.”

Beyond his leadership in the civil rights movement and in the halls of congress, these days of remembering give us a glimpse into the spirit of John Lewis. One video clip shows him dancing to Pharrell’s “Happy” during a campaign event in Georgia – at the age of seventy-eight, he could still “bust a move.” Michelle Obama noted: “Even as he spent a lifetime marching, and sitting in, and getting arrested, his feet kept on dancing. Congressman Lewis shows us that while the struggle and pain is all too real, fighting for each other – and paving the way toward something better for our kids and grandkids – can and should be a source of real and lasting joy.”

My favorite Lewis story describes his relationship with a young boy. In 2018, Tybre Faw begged his grandmothers to drive seven hours so he might see the famed Civil Rights leader at the commemoration of the 1965 march for voting rights on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Ten-year-old Tybre had his sign ready: “Thank you Rep. John Lewis. You have shown me how to have courage, raw courage.” 

Reporters Dana Bash, Jeremy Moorhead and Bridget Nolan remember that day. Noticing Tybre and his sign, they connected the congressman’s staff with the boy and his grandmothers so he could meet his hero. “Tybre’s eyes welled up with tears the minute he saw Lewis, who came over, read the sign and hugged him as he spoke quietly to the boy who hung on every word. None of us who witnessed the meeting could keep from crying. Even Capital Police officers there – trained to be stoic – were unable to hold back their tears. It was one of the most powerful moments any of us had ever witnessed, and we all knew it.”

Unlike Tybre, I never met the iconic congressman, but Lewis’ words remain. “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” Even in death, his friend John is still teaching Tybre – and all of us – about courage. Dance on, Mr. Lewis.

Can You Believe This?

A Facebook friend shared a copied post from Linda who told about her mother who knew a nurse who supposedly submitted unused coronavirus tests that came back positive. Linda concluded: “it’s beyond greed and money for hospitals.” My friend wondered: “is this true?”

My first rule of thumb on gossip, whether face-to-face or through social media, is this: consider the source. Who is Linda? According to her profile, Linda is a white-haired woman in leopard print who quotes Diamond and Silk: “Are we all being played, hoodwinked and bamboozled? You be the judge.”

But the source of this report isn’t Linda. No, it was posted by someone else whose mother supposedly knew a nurse, and Linda just copied it, blacking out the name. Her rationale for posting: “I don’t forward posts unless I see them and feel led.” 

Just this week, a major furniture company was accused of child trafficking because their website listed expensive industrial cabinets and overpriced pillows. Now, thousands of concerned consumers are ready to boycott the company because “I think it’s true.” “It’s disgusting.” The original source? Newsweek traced it to a Princess Peach, a Reddit user. I wonder if Princess Peach knows Linda?

A second rule of thumb to determine what is true is this: does this fit with what I know about the world? Is the coronavirus just fake news invented by the Dems to control the next election? In this case, what I do know is that my friend in New Jersey died from complications of the coronavirus. Nick Cordero, a Broadway actor whose wife is a dear friend of my neighbor, died of the coronavirus. Is it all a dream like the Wizard of Oz, and I will wake up someday, pinching myself in relief? No. The coronavirus is real.

A third way to consider the truth of a particular theory is to ask, might there be another reasonable explanation? If a pillow is listed at $999, is it possible the seller made a mistake in pricing? As in forgetting a decimal point? If a website lists fourteen million items, could the name of a missing child somewhere in the world possibly be associated with a product without implicating it in a trafficking conspiracy? Consider the core of Ockham’s Razor, first posited by William of Ockham: other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones.

Please understand. Child sex trafficking is horrendous. The coronavirus is horrendous. We must do all we can as a society to stop the spread of both. But the cavalier way that conspiracy theories are inspired, spewed and relentlessly shared tends to make these bad situations even worse.

Remember Pizzagate? It began with hacked e-mails spread by Wikileaks, with supposedly coded trafficking messages, calling attention to a pizza parlor’s logo “resembling” satanic symbols. Edgar Welch thought it made perfect sense, so he traveled to D.C. with an AR-15 rifle to shoot up the pizza place and rescue the trafficked children held  captive in the basement. Except there was no basement, no trafficked children. When asked about her part in promoting the conspiracy, one writer said: “I really have no regrets and it’s honestly really grown our audience.” Wow. 

Tim Marcin commented on the accused furniture company. “Again, the internet has churned out a wild, potentially hurtful conspiracy theory that caught fire with scant evidence. Just another day online. People find a coincidence, or something odd, then twist and dig for more coincidences, and before you know it, people are jumping to wild conclusions.”

Feeling led to share like Linda? The following counsel is attributed to Rumi, an ancient poet and mystic. “Before you speak, [or tweet or post – my addition] let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, ‘is it true?’ At the second gate, ‘is it necessary?’ At the third gate, ‘is it kind?’” 

An additional question from Hindu teacher Sathya Sai Baba challenges me: “Does it improve the silence?” My own faith tradition echoes from Ecclesiastes: “There is a time to keep silence and a time to speak.” Now, if we can only draw upon the wisdom to know the difference.

At the Opera

In high school, a date took me to Kleinhan’s Music Hall in Buffalo for the opera. I cannot remember what we saw, only that the highlight of the evening was the hot fudge sundae on the way home. That night, I discovered that opera was definitely not in the top three of my favorite music genres. 

Yet the idea of telling a story fully through song is powerful. Washington Post opera critic Anne Midgette suggests that unlike the stereotype of opera as the fat lady in the Viking Helmet, opera has historically been “a thrilling, contemporary, immersive stage presentation that’s a union of story, text music, image and movement, and that gets under the skin and into the blood of a wide audience that feels it speaks profoundly to them.”.

If Midgette is right in her description, then Larry and I went to the opera this weekend, as did the majority of my Facebook friends. As one friend commented, “I scrolled through Facebook tonight and realized some people didn’t watch “Hamilton.” I don’t know what to do with that.” Since 2015, it’s been nearly impossible to get a ticket for the Broadway production, but thanks to Disney+, “Hamilton” came to our own living room – and we loved it. This week’s hot topic at the waterer cooler would have been “Hamilton” if only we weren’t avoiding the water cooler like the corona plague. 

With the closure of the cinemas and the darkened lights on Broadway, Americans are thirsty for theater, a thirst not satisfied by re-runs of Property Brothers (sorry, Jonathan and Drew). Whether we call it an opera, a musical, or simply an amazing experience of theater at its finest, Lin-Manuel Miranda has allowed us to drink deeply of the magic of “Hamilton.” Originally scheduled to be shown in movie theaters in October 2021, Disney+ decided to release it early, a gift of sorts to American audiences staggered by the dual viruses of corona and racism. Thanks, Walt.

Of course, the show – and film – has its critics. Some take issue with Lin-Manuel’s voice, perhaps forgetting that any man who can write lyrics and music with the skill and emotion he did is surely welcome to sing anytime he wants, even if he’s tone-deaf, which he’s not.  

Others express concern with the glorification of founding fathers who were slaveowners, and the failure of the show to address the question of slavery in a more comprehensive way. Perhaps if Miranda had been writing the script in the summer of 2020, it would be different, but “Hamilton” was birthed more than a decade earlier. Miranda creatively covered a lot of ground in the show, and the challenge of a 2.5 hour screenplay doesn’t allow every facet of a story to be explored. Hamilton II?

Yet as Roxanne Gay noted, [Hamilton] is not “some vulnerable upstart. The show can handle critical engagement and the performances and book and music will still be absolutely incredible.” That critical engagement is already happening, and will continue in the weeks ahead. Chec out Miranda’s Twitter threads.

History, whether form the late 1700s or the last seventeen days, is as much story as fact, influenced by the perspective of both the storyteller and the listeners. A good history presentation, whether seventh grade American history or a Broadway show, leaves the student with as many questions as answers. 

That is my hope with “Hamilton.” As we watch it and re-watch it, belt out its songs in the shower or on the street corner, and imagine what it would be like to be in “the room where it happened,” we can also use this magnificent work of art to invite dialogue about wealth and poverty, about principles and compromise, and about slavery and privilege. We do see the glaring reality of flawed people, but we can also appreciate the ideals they cherished and the sacrifices they made. 

After working a full day in 2009 on a two-line couplet about George Washington, Miranda tweeted: “Hamilton is slow-going, my friends, but I promise you it will be worth it.” Thanks, Lin-Manuel, for keeping your promise. You did not throw away your shot.

Flawed Yet Faithful First Ladies

Mary Jordan, a journalist with the Washington Post, has recently released a biography entitled, “The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump.” Mrs. Trump is quoted as saying this in 2016: “Not a lot of people know me,” which still seems to be the case, even after her 3½ years as FLOTUS. But she is not the first female inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to struggle to develop her role, often in lives tinged with tragedy. 

As a young girl, I was fascinated with the first families of our country, especially with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the beautiful wife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Until I looked up her biography, I hadn’t realized that she was only thirty-one when she and Jack moved into the White House, bringing with them the three-year-old Caroline and the two-month old “John-John.” I can remember the news of her second son’s birth in August of 1963, and how the nation grieved with the young family when the premature infant died two days later. Our collective grief was far deeper when the dashing president was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and we watched in days of non-stop television coverage as the weary widow, heavily veiled, bid a sorrowful farewell to her husband. 

For Jane Pierce, the death of her last surviving son Benny in a train derailment shortly after her husband was elected president was devastating, and she never recovered. Mary Todd Lincoln struggled as well, saying, “What a world of anguish this is and how I’ve been made to suffer.” Her son’s death in 1862 took a huge toll on her, and according to the White House website, the assassination of her husband “shattered” Mrs. Lincoln.

Ida Saxton McKinley, from Canton, Ohio, also experienced the assassination of her husband, but even before his death, her life had been suffused with tragedy. Both of their daughters died in childhood, and Ida had epilepsy, euphemistically referred to as fainting spells. 

Frances Cleveland faced the challenge of youth, only twenty-one when she married the president in 1885 and moved into the White House. In her later, post-White House life, she was against women’s suffrage, infamously saying: “women weren’t yet intelligent enough to vote.” 

In our attempt to sort through the facts of the complicated racial history of our country, we note that a number of presidential wives personally owned slaves, as many were wealthy in their own right, often having inherited enslaved people. Martha Washington brought nearly one thousand dower slaves to her marriage with the man who would become our first president. Especially troublesome was the experience of Julia Grant. General Ulysses S. Grant led the Union Army during the Civil War, and later became president, yet during that same war, Mrs. Grant either owned or had the use of her father’s enslaved people. Yet others, like Ida McKinley, were staunch abolitionists. 

Think too of the words of Michelle Obama at the 2016 Democratic convention, “That is the story of this country. The story that has brought me to the stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, who kept on striving, and hoping, and doing what needed to be done. So that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”

In 2020, the role of “first lady,” or “first spouse,”(I can only hope) remains a strange one, most similar to the traditional role of a minister’s wife. Unpaid, yet with expectations to be fulfilled, it truly is life in the unforgiving fishbowl of public opinion. Yet still, few have taken the advice of Bess Truman: “A Woman’s place in public is to sit beside her husband, be silent and be sure that her hat is on straight.” 

Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter explains the alternative: “Do what you can to show you care about other people, and you will make our world a better place.” This Independence Day weekend, I’m saluting these flawed yet faithful women who sacrificed their own well-being, bravely looked tragedy in the eye, and made our world a better place.