526 Seconds
In America, all 1.5 million high school teachers nationally earned $87 billion. At the same time 25 most successful financiers – all men - pulled in $12 billion.
Inequality has been written into the DNA of civilization ever since humans first settled down to farm the land. DNA neither knows nor cares. Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake, and by the time these crises had passed, the gap between rich and poor had shrunk.
Alexis de Tocqueville warned that the greatest threat America faced is the tyranny of the majority. His account of his travels through America in the 1830's, at the age of twenty-six, which is often called the greatest book ever written about America, is both an appreciation of American democracy, and a cautionary tale about its fragility.
The holiest of intellectual grails is to discover a “pattern in the data”—to arbitrage what everyone sees against what only you see. In America, Tocqueville saw and praised people who enjoyed an unprecedented equality of conditions and political and civil liberty without endangering order or prosperity. Democracy, argued Tocqueville, spreads passion for the equalization of power, property and status among people. Theirs was a “prouder, better, stronger” place. Of course, Americans were seduced into believing that inequalities were purely contingent, and so alterable. Tocqueville also saw and criticized the way ‘white’ majorities supported the institution of slavery and the unjust treatment of ‘free’ Blacks and Native Americans. In fact, the greatest danger Americans faced was inherent in their treatment of unpopular minorities.
The simplest way to activate someone’s identity is to threaten it, to tell them they don’t deserve what they have. We are experiencing uncontrollable violence, fuelled by a range of hatreds - of immigrants, minorities, and various designated 'others' - that have now become part of our political mainstream. Ours are now dystopian scenes of people being wheeled on gurneys, filling out unemployment-insurance forms and standing in long lines while wearing surgical masks.
Covid-19 has shattered our perceptions and caused fear, grief, and loneliness; it has also led us to appreciate compassion, resilience, selflessness, and adaptability. I myself have been thinking more deeply about the balance between self-determination and interdependence, individual freedoms and responsibility to the common good. This has been our most challenging year by far - in 2020, living in a plague. Camus speaks to us in our own times not because he was a magical seer who could intimate what the best epidemiologists could not, but because he correctly sized up human nature. He knew, as we do not, that “everyone has inside it himself, this plague, because no one in the world, no one, is immune.”
We really know how dark it is, reading the story of an ordinary, middle-aged man who died sitting in a chair at a hospital because they didn’t have a bed. He sat there wheezing for 24 hours - his daughter Marcela saying on the telephone from her flat “Try to be calm. You are strong and we are together in this!” Calm is a superpower.
The novelist Faulkner said: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” Remember the riots in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of police who had beaten Rodney King. We haven’t resolved anything since then. Instead, since then, the country’s dominant political coalitions have sorted by ideology, race, religion, geography, psychology, consumer behavior, and cultural preferences. Since then, political institutions and actors, however complacent, adopt more polarized strategies to both respond and appeal to a more polarized audience, which further polarizes the audience.
Social media is a polarizing accelerant. We no longer compromise. Social media can build different narratives from the same patterns. Our president uses Twitter, a platform that brings out the absolute worst in people politically. It has the incentive structure of a high school cafeteria, coupled with an algorithmic virus.
Again, there is so much at stake in this moment—our humanity, our democracies, and our planet. What a truly great country America could have been if the privileges enjoyed by those who happen to be white were instead opportunities extended to everyone. But we have not yet advanced to the point when black Americans can take their safety for granted, or assume they will enjoy equal opportunity. In the past five years, Minneapolis has seen three other controversial police shootings: of Jamar Clark, in 2015; of Philando Castile, in 2016; and of Justine Damond, in 2017.
Floyd’s death while in police custody in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, punctuated by a gruesome viral video of policemen subduing him on the ground for 526 seconds, has set off protests across America. The pandemic, which has disproportionately claimed minority lives in America, has made racism even more obvious. George Floyd’s horrifying death shocks our shared conscience and indicts our shared failure. I feel about the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the much longer list of unarmed black men, whose lives have been taken by police officers. Their senseless deaths must remind us of other similar killings and of the racism, prejudice, and bigotry too pervasive in society today and throughout America’s history. African-Americans have been free in America for less time than they were enslaved. Slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration and the war on drugs, and police brutality have ensured that African Americans know pain and loss intimately. The record of state failures to protect African Americans and others against police brutality is all too full. Ours is a country where firearms are accessories.
Since the start of this pandemic, fear has been very much with us, but not just about the virus itself, and not among us equally. Fear is powerful, damaging, and unpredictable in its effects. Racism is a virus in America. Racism of every kind is unconscionable. The images and news stories we are seeing about the treatment of African American people in America today are incredibly tragic. It has never not been obvious. Yet there are those who continue to deny it. People protect themselves by not remembering - by pretending things didn’t happen. No amount of outright lying or disinformation can change the truth of it. And there are clearly those who propagate it. Every society has its own ‘fraternity of the indifferent’. Defenses of white supremacy have been more frequent, having been given license by statements and tweets by our president.
Today especially we have had this re-set, this rare gift of seeing the world, as we would like, to think about difference. Our vast losses we have experienced prompt us to wonder, who we are, what norms we ought to live by, and what we want from the future. I think there is too much hatred, bigotry, and prejudice in the world. Social media has only amplified this.
I was raised to believe that love is bigger than anything else. Hope must triumph over despair. Only civility can heal us. Last week my daughter whose name means hope, was confined to a stay at the hospital, I learnt so much about the people in my life, their attachments, and my own need to re-set, reflect, and re-imagine. I saw nurses, doctors, support staff, and volunteers act with courage, selflessness, and compassion in a city otherwise foreign to me. Today is our chance to ask ourselves some of life’s most relevant questions: “Am I doing my part to make this vast world better?” People are always focused on the ‘highlights’ instead of appreciating all the behind the scenes work to make us whole. There are just four words I know that define any relationship: love, honesty, truth, and respect. The boundaries are that clear. I know when I do go, I’d like my children to know that love is bigger than anything. If you know who loves you, you know exactly who you are - these were words my mother used to say. With love, you only learn more love. We must stop feeding fear and anger every day.
The beauty of life is, while we cannot undo what is done, we can see it, understand it, learn from it, and change so that every new moment is spent not in regret, but in understanding. I can only hope that more reflection, particularly today, on our parts, will lead to greater openings in our hearts that find light and peace in the midst of the darkness in this world.
After months of the coronavirus and days of civil unrest, Americans are bracing themselves for more chaos with our toxic president stoking the polarization. Some fear a risk that Covid-19 could spread among large groups of protesters, leading to a second wave of infections. We are seeing the worst unrest since the civil-rights era. Without evidence, our president said 80 per cent of the Minneapolis protesters were from out of state. Any move to put troops on American soil would require our president to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. Just like 1992. If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America? Of course, our “law and order” president – who never resists the temptation to incite – is already running his own Covid-19 ad, “American Comeback,” which credits him for preventing two million deaths, complete with clips of health workers praising his heroic response.
Demography is not destiny. In 1960, John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon by only 112,000 votes — less than one vote per precinct. He won by the margin of hope. By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 of our 50 states, and 50 percent will live in just 8 states. The Electoral College will be less responsive to the popular vote, and we will likely have more elections where the winner of the popular vote loses the presidency — and it could be by five million or six million or seven million votes, not the 500,000 margin for Al Gore in 2000 or the three million margin for Hillary Clinton. At some point, the fundamental legitimacy, which Tocqueville so admired, ought to be challenged.
This is a time of incalculable mourning in America. Like before, keep hope alive. Like always, false hope is expensive.