Rowing the Stone Canoe: A Few Words About a Resistance that Looks Beyond Denial and Hate to Healing

None of it was true about our enemies.

We have none.

Women never birth enemy faces.

An enemy face is never born…

– Meridel Le Sueur

So many words have been written about what’s going on in America, and yet so few seem to speak to our condition. Partly it’s because of the preponderance of information and analysis, which seems to preclude us from seeing things steadily and seeing things whole. (“The velocity of knowledge is inversely related,” David W. Orr hauntingly states, “to the acquisition of wisdom.”) Partly it’s because of our attention spans, which—whittled down by our screen use, our habit of speed, and our jangly nervous systems—apparently are so short as to be anathema to the harnessed focus and sifting discernment essential for shapely, slow, holistic reflection. (Are you skimming this yet?) And partly it’s because of the mentality of partisanship, which makes us see reality bluntingly, subtractingly, shearingly. Each side presumes itself to be the sole possessor of the Truth. Each side bandies about passionately defended, often thinly pondered shibboleths. Each side has created boundaries for what is thinkable, speakable; self-surveillance, self-censorship, and self-righteousness reign. In sum, we seem to’ve created ideal conditions for what sociologist Thomas Cushman terms “prevention of mind,” and our published words (in journals, magazines, newspapers, Substacks, and on social media) often reflect that prevention.

Hoping that I won’t fortify any divisions, partialities, fanaticisms, and mind-preventions and hoping that I won’t add mere noise to the buzzing blooming confusion that is the Internet, I offer below a few thoughts about what’s happening now. (And I understand if someone thinks such an offering presumptuous, for who cares what I think? And if, as Lao Tzu says, the one who knows does not say and the one who says does not know, then I am clearly among the benighted.)

Before I offer my possibly presumptuous and benighted thoughts, I believe it’s important to mention that I understand why people voted for this administration. Many thought this administration would help them afford their lives. Many thought this administration would be less prone to warmaking (and proxy warmaking) and our ambiguous habit of interventionism. Many felt angered by the previous administration’s Covid protocol. Many felt upset over what politicians on both sides agree is a broken immigration system. Many decried what they saw as government censorship. Many were put off by “cancel culture” and by the Left’s habit of sanctimonious sensitivity. Many wanted Big Food and Big Pharma to be checked. And many had other reasons besides, some entirely ignoble, some amorphous. And I do acknowledge, for whatever it’s worth, that there have been successes insofar as checking Big Food and Big Pharma. Writer Aaron Vandiver notes (in our correspondence) positive changes to the nutrition guidelines; efforts to strengthen food additive regulations and eliminate harmful food dyes; state and federal policy changes to reduce taxpayer subsidies for junk food and soda; the addressing of conflicts of interest in the medical and pharmaceutical industries; and the raising of awareness about the relationship between our food and our health and the raising of awareness about alternative approaches to healing. Indeed, these are laudable developments, but they are overshadowed by the wider context of corrosive pandemonium.

Okay, now for my two cents regarding the corrosive pandemonium. From my point of view the administration is generally acting recklessly and harmfully. Telling other nations to “fuck around and find out”; threatening to invade Mexico, Greenland, and Cuba; invading Venezuela and kidnapping its president (and killing Venezuelans in the process); violently disappearing suspected illegal immigrants; killing citizens protesting such violent disappearings; greenlighting the widespread use of various harmful chemicals (the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is now run by former chemical and pesticide industry lobbyists); repealing—for the sake of deregulated, breakneck, near-sighted economic growth—the central scientific finding that underpins much of the nation’s climate pollution rules; opening up large tracts of beautiful protected wilderness for fishing and oil drilling; and, in general, approaching our nation’s sacred finite “resources” (ugly word) as if we will have no offspring, as if we are the last ones alive, as if there is no God—these actions (and others besides: the self-dealing; the normalized habit of cruel speech; making fear a style of government) are highly disturbing and should be strongly resisted. These actions (and others besides) contribute to the intensifying social and ecological disarray.

Yet it’s vitally important, I believe, for us to see that Donald Trump is not anomalous, is not inorganic, is not separate. Rather, he seems a logical symptom of our unwell status quo, a magnified image of some of our habitual—and most damaging—tendencies, an exemplar of the “thoughtless, heartless, greedy plunge” (Wendell Berry’s words) that characterizes much of our history. Our collective bipartisan patterns of livelihood and consumption and our collective bipartisan devotion to the expansion of expansion, to the charade of endless growth: these realities do not lead to sane, magnanimous relations to this world of which we are part. The imperatives of our economy arguably all but demand leaders of violent, imperialistic, resource-stealing rapacity. (And an imperium of violent, resource-stealing rapacity tectonically disrupts the lives of the people—and plants and animals—in the regions it plunders. And the disrupted people often migrate en masse to the imperium, hoping to be saved by its riches and seeming security. And then heartbreaking chaos ensues.) If there were a Truth and Reconciliation Commission it would have to enumerate sins committed (often unconsciously) by all of us. If there were a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it would have to inconveniently demand of us a party-blind turn of mind awake to large patterns, to exquisitely susceptible, interrelated systems, and to the sense of wholeness that is necessary for healing. If there were a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it would have to slow us all down so we can actually see.

In other words, the president and his administration are not solely responsible for the hell currently breaking loose. In Buddhism they say, This is, because that is. Trump is, at least partly, because of how we are (and how we’ve been). “The man enacts and embodies much of our own mythologies,” social thinker Barry Spector notes. “Trump is us. We created him. We are not innocent.” We cannot draw too hard a line between us and this administration, and we cannot confuse ornately hating this administration for edifying citizenship or for confronting the totality of our predicament. “The industrial era at climax,” Wendell Berry writes, “has imposed on us all its ideals of ceaseless pandemonium. The industrial economy, by definition, must never rest…. There is no such thing as enough. Our bellies and our wallets must become oceanic, and still they will not be full.” This administration appears to be the industrial era at climax compelled by various ideals of ceaseless pandemonium. This administration appears to be the natural fruition of a nation of hungry ghosts. (And the energy, mineral, and water demands of America’s latest, bipartisan episode of technological somnambulism—“Artificial Intelligence”—will make it harder to forswear imperialistic rapacity and ceaseless pandemonium, the devil take the hindmost. According to Aaron Vandiver, one American company, OpenAI, “projects electricity use by 2033 comparable to that of India’s 1.5 billion people.” The various destructive implications of that single possible reality baffle the mind.)

So while we must strongly resist many of the actions (and values) of this administration, we should not assume that such resistance is the extent of our work. In reality, we face rougher weather than many anti-MAGA folks suppose. The even bigger challenge is to see that our problems (borrowing words from David W. Orr) “are systemic and can only be solved by changing the system.” The even bigger challenge is to conjure a new American dream—or at least exhume and dust off an older, nobler, healthier one.

Now what might a nobler, healthier American dream look like? How do we, invoking David W. Orr again, build a decent civilization that fits harmoniously into the ecology of North America over the long term?

“When the soul wants to experience something,” said the medieval Christian thinker Meister Eckhart, “she throws an image out in front of her, then steps into it.”

What image might we throw out in front of ourselves now to step into?

Some words from the poet-philosopher David Abram might be helpful for us to consider. Writing about the French novelist Jean Giono, Abram throws out this extraordinarily fertile image:

Giono’s insights into the consequences of a way of life that elevates itself above the rest of nature, and his insights regarding the contours of a truly ecological culture, hold vital clues for our contemporary situation. His early novels call us toward the primacy of place, and the importance of bodily engagement with the creatures and the seasons of a place. They encourage a renewal of small-scale, face-to-face community, and stress that no human community can be healthy without honoring its thorough embedment within a wider, more-than-human community of animals, plants, and earthly elements. For Giono was convinced that our social bonds inevitably fray and falter if they’re not fed by interactions with the living land; that the best chance for a just society, and the only prospect for a meaningful peace, lies in renouncing the dream of mastery and dedicating ourselves—wherever we find ourselves—to the replenishment and flourishing of the local earth.

“But if we don’t resist ICE, the EPA, and the Department of War there will be no local earth to replenish!”—I understand such a reply. I see that we need to resist to be able to ultimately address the rotten system. Phrased differently, we need to grapple with the symptom before taking our time to carry out a complete diagnosis and treat the entirety of the illness. Otherwise, the diagnosis might also be an autopsy.

As for what a healing “resistance” looks like, I myself don’t quite see it yet. I can’t identify with much of what I hear from so many people—in conversation and via this screen. We seem to hold that political engagement is an opportunity to discharge our unprocessed suffering, an opportunity for full-throated hate and zealotry, for the ill meaning derived from war. “The zealot,” Richard Rohr writes, “is always looking for the evil, the political sinner, the unjust one, the oppressor, the bad person over there. The zealot permits himself or herself righteously to attack them, to hate them, even to kill them.”

“It is possible,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, counseling against such zealotry, “to stand up against an unjust system with all of your might, with all of your body, with all of your soul, and yet not stoop to hatred and violence.”

“The beginning of a more realistic realism,” David W. Orr adds, “is in the recognition that violence of any sort is a sure path to ruin on all levels and that the practice of nonviolence is a viable alternative—indeed our only alternative to collective suicide.”

“When two parties listen to each other,” elaborates the Buddhist activist and social thinker Sulak Sivaraksa (a man who has been tested mightily, a man not prone to sticky platitudes), “and see one another not as enemies but as human beings, the animosity between them can be dissolved. So much can be achieved through dialogue. Overcoming dualistic thinking that sees the world as good or evil, friend or foe, is the basis of nonviolence, and nonviolence is the basis of peace.”

The Iroquois, a people with a rich spiritual and political life who endured a holocaust in our country’s early history, possess wisdom regarding zealotry, hatred, nonviolence, and peace, potentially greatly helpful wisdom, should we respectfully avail ourselves of it.

Said by some to have created the first participatory democracy (a democracy which informed the creation of our own democracy), the Iroquois not only humblingly hold seven-generations-distant in their collective field of care when making important decisions (a noble habit of the heart that sadly has come to merely refer to a toilet paper company), they revere Deganawidah, the Peacemaker, a mythical figure who, memorably, rowed across Lake Ontario in a stone canoe (slowly wisdom arrives, slowly!) to save a broken, divided, violent people at war with themselves—to remind them of the Creator’s “original instructions.”

And one of the ways the Peacemaker brings about healing is through dialogue. He facilitates contact, facilitates meetings, among the warring chiefs. He gets them to speak to each other directly. Let’s, rather boldly, imagine the scene. Let’s imagine those leaders suddenly encountering each other face-to-face after years of bloody conflict. Let’s imagine them on the same patch of earth, breathing the same air, standing in silence in a circle in an effort, however remote, however unlikely (as unlikely as rowing a stone canoe), to move beyond hate to healing.

Though all are genuinely afraid and hurt (whether they admit it or not), they are not totally spiteful; they agreed to meet after all. Some are carefully contained; some are haughtily aloof; some avoid eye contact and look down at their hands; and all, one way or another, take each other’s measure. No one speaks. No one moves his arms about in finger-pointing chastisement. No one yells, Shame on you! It is an exotic moment, strange. They look around the circle and see other human eyes looking back at them. Someone coughs. One man tugs at his left ear. Another looks overhead to swiftly moving clouds.

And what words does the Peacemaker speak to these human beings gathered in this sudden strangeness? One is tempted to invoke lines from American writer Meridel Le Sueur as a possibility:

None of it was true about our enemies.

We have none.

Women never birth enemy faces.

An enemy face is never born…

And upon hearing such bare, open-hearted, terrible words, these humans fall into an even deeper, more awkward silence.

Overhead a yellow moth shingles through the pines. A red ant walks across a boulder. One man notices this ant and for some reason thinks of his youngest daughter, thinks of her face. Another man hears the man next to him wheeze while he breathes. Another man, the oldest, who is looking around the circle, suddenly feels it is no longer appropriate to nurse enmity and continue to bring these other humans harm. In fact, he feels embarrassed—embarrassed for having furiously nurtured, for so many years, such deranging hate, that collective irrationality masquerading as realism.

“It’s good to see you,” this older man says to another. The rest of the circle looks on. The silence grows, becomes even stronger and stranger. The moment does not know which way to go.

The addressed man is unsure. He looks like he’s been caught in a net. His eyes widen. He opens his mouth, and for a moment makes no sound. Then he says, “Thank you.” Then he musters: “It’s good to see you, too.”

Despite themselves, the two smile at each other.

The others continue to look on. Overhead iris clouds tumble north.

Thus begins the counteraction to the pandemonium. Thus begins the restoration of a nation.

Image Credit: George Inness, “Sunset” (1865)