Shame, at Scale

I sat in a little desk and gazed at a chalk board, learning about rules and buildings constructed 200 years ago. 

I gobbled fruit loops and smiled at episodes of School House Rock.

I swelled with pride the first time I cast a vote.

I traveled to Europe and saw the alternatives, coming home to a Great Experiment I believed in; one that I loved. 

And yesterday I watched as that Experiment seemed, at last, to fail. 

We're all saying things today for the sake of saying them, using words like: sadness, disbelief, despair, shock, anger, healing. We reach into our Vocabulary Bags in pursuit of an adequate expression for complex emotions. 

The best word I've heard yet is this: shame. Shame is the center of gravity in my solar system of emotion. It pulls all other emotions to itself; it shines brightly on sentiments and activities that I've tried to hide in darkness. 

Yesterday, I watched as white men completed their own Middle Passage and made themselves slaves to fear. I own a part of that journey. I abandoned empathy and made people into enemies, relieving them of their humanity and reducing them to a caricature of hatred. In so doing, I gave them license to do the same with me. 

What formed between two sides was a No Man's Land, in the ruins of a vanishing class of moderates. No one could see both points of view, everyone had to choose. As things got worse, the No Man's Land expanded and expanded and ate up the whole field, until (in the view of each side) there was nothing human left. 

I don't know the way forward, I don't know how to reset this system and heal. I don't trust people who say that they do know. Perhaps that makes me a coward. History tells me that medium for resetting these kinds of things is violence, an explosive dissolution of two sides and the emergence of something new. This is the kind of thinking that got us into this situation in the first place, but how do we break the loop? 

Today, I feel what we all should feel: shame. 

Tomorrow, I hope I can feel empathy. I hope I can see a human being in the terrified eyeballs on the other side of No Man's Land.