03/28/2025
This poem speaks to what is happening in the US daily. Don’t be overwhelmed by fear and the seemingly endless stream of lies. Stand in who you are and do whatever you’re able.
I last posted this poem five years ago (mid-2020), along with these words:
“Here’s an American classic—a poem of hard truth and hope written in 1935 by one of this nation’s literary giants. Sadly, it reads as if it were a response to today’s headlines. Every day, the president of the U.S. makes our country more toxic for people of color, and for white people like me. In the words of the Scriptures he and his supporters claim to believe, ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together…’ Hatred repeatedly expressed from on high (and low) will eventually engulf everyone. It’s happened before and it can happen again. It may not come in the form of mass armed conflict, but in a perpetual state of animosity and fear that drains the ease and joy from everyone’s life.”
I don’t know about you, but at age 86, as a member of a deeply diseased American body politic, “ease and joy” feel like they will be out of reach for the rest of my life. I’ll do everything I can to serve as an antibody against this disease, and to find personal sources of peace and joy to keep myself going. But for me, watching white supremacy—white, straight, male Christian supremacy—take another victory lap, once again bending the arc of the moral universe toward evil, is like taking multiple gut punches every day. We are becoming a nation of men, not laws, and the men (and women) in question are among the most morally bankrupt I’ve ever seen.
We are only 10 weeks into the second term of the same thug who was president in 2020, and already we can add to the list of those who suffer from what Hughes calls “the rack and ruin of our gangster death.” Students snatched up from campuses by Federal agents for reasons that the powers that be refuse to make clear. Chained men flown to a maximum security hellhole in El Salvador without a chance to prove themselves innocent of the charges. People of color, including asylum seekers, turned away at our border without being given a hearing. Transgender people, young and old, as well as others in the LGBTQ+ community, being defamed, endangered and denied healthcare.
Who’s next? Look left, look right, look in the mirror. At this point, nothing is beyond possibility if you do or say or be something that the regime does not like.
If you, too, are experiencing all of this as an assault on your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, please join with me in taking the Langston Hughes oath: “I swear this oath: American will be! From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, we must take back our land—and make America again!”
[On April 1, those of us in Wisconsin have a chance to deny Elon Musk the State Supreme Court he’s trying to buy for his boss. Please vote for Susan Crawford, the candidate who will reject an 1849 law re. reproductive health and free us from those who continue to lie about the 2020 election. My 10 books are at https://tinyurl.com/mry4tp8a and https://tinyurl.com/bdfxr7by.]
