By Robert Azzi
”Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one — that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was,” Anthony Doerr writes in Cloud Cuckoo Land, a book that sits atop all others on my bedside table. “Then a moment arrives and everything changes.”
That morning comes along as an unexpected tsunami and washes over all that’s believed to be true.
Everything changes.
Everything changes, and we’re called upon to wonder if we’re up to the challenge to clean up and overcome the damage left in its wake.
Sadly, to this very day such moments, foreign and domestic, have often overwhelmed our ability to control them, sometimes unleashing demons in their wake that thrive on fear, ignorance and division.
Moments like the Civil War, Trail of Tears, Tulsa, Pearl Harbor, Army-McCarthy Hearings, Vietnam, JFK’s and MLK’s assassinations, 9/11, Charlottesville, the insurrection of January 6, 2021 (especially the Insurrection) challenge our willingness to openly confront our history in order to fully excise the demons that haunt our democracy and inhibit our ability to fully realize our national aspirations.
Everything changes, or nothing changed, but nothing is as it was.
Over the past few years, I’ve occasionally paid visits to high school classrooms, invited by teachers to discuss, from my perspective of being an Arab American Muslim photojournalist who has traveled and worked in many lands, with their students books they had recently read. Together, we have discussed race, religion, politics, gender and sexual orientation without rancor or incident, and we all learned from respectful encounters.
Children, particularly high school kids, I’ve come to learn, are, when treated with respect and dignity, pretty intuitive and curious, often attracted not just to stories but to literature and its transformative power. Often edgy, often bearing the biases of their families, as most young people in an uncertain world are, they are mostly unafraid of equal rights, inclusion and diversity and I’ve come to enjoy our exchanges and often trust them more than I do many of the polarized adults I encounter who presume to know better than teachers how to engage young people.
The issue today is not whether we allow kids to read Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, John Irving, Ibram X. Kendi, Isabel Wilkerson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jeffrey Eugenides, Michael Crichton, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Margaret Atwood, William Styron, and others, authors being challenged, among many others, across America, by Know-Nothings, by white nationalists, by Christian nationalists, by malign interests invested in maintaining the myth that America is a white nation.
Malign interests determined to deny American students knowledge of their birthing stories.
Of course, we empower the students and we guide them and support them with context and love, support them when inspired, comfort them when triggered.
The issue is whether we are willing to teach kids how to read critically, how to wrestle with new concepts and critique works that challenge them and permit them to mature as enlightened Americans committed to the principle that all people are created equal.
The issue is to trust teachers, alongside families and other institutions, to light fires of passion for knowledge in students. To light fires that inspire children to overcome prejudice and evil with good, the good that comes from inquiry and intellectual challenge, the knowledge that comes from a full understanding of our history — good and bad.
The good that comes from teaching 1619 alongside 1776.
“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is,” Doerr writes. “That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest …”
History that for too long in America has been written and taught with prejudice in order to protect the self-interests of peoples for too long invested in marginalizing Indigenous and minority communities and communities of color. History that even today is attempting to protect vested interests by denying the franchise to millions of Americans.
We must recognize that America, suspended in tension between heroics and hubris, aspiration and arrogance, revolution and resistance, is in danger, threatened by what seems to be too many Americans willing to abandon our democracy in order to protect their privilege and vested interests.
We must resist.
Each morning, as we rise and bask in the beauty of first light, as we brew coffee or tea and begin our day I hope, especially in this season of beauty and light, that not only we will be safe and our families well and alive but that life, while different, will be fulfilling and full of warmth and surprise, all clad in the panoply of love.
Each morning, remember, to paraphrase the Gospel of John, that we must continue to struggle to assure that light will always triumph over darkness, that darkness will not overcome it.
That is our call.
Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at [email protected].
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