Some words of reassurance

This scene from Ken Burns' brilliant documentary, Mark Twain: Known to Everyone, Liked by All - captures much of the work I think humanity has to make any genuine progress.



And I love Twain because he understands, more than most, that does not and cannot happen because a thumb is placed firmly enough on our heads. To the contrary, this generally makes us more likely to fight efforts to do or be better. Often for good reason. Because big thumbs are generally attached to flawed and, too often, not so big people. Including my own great big, overdrawn thumb. Just ask my kids.

What Twain understood well, as a former Confederate and a young man prone to a conventional racism of his day and more avowedly committed, by the end of his lifetime, to ending racism than most people of his time - was that any important learning also involves unlearning.

And generally, among adults, more unlearning still.

And the most important thing that everyone has to unlearn, today, is that any of us has all the right answers. Now or ever. Or that any of them will be arrived at with just enough aggression. And that particular mistake, that aggression is the source of our solutions rather than the source of most of our problems, is the most important idea for us to unlearn, right now.

And no amount of force will ever do all that learning and unlearning for us. To the contrary, it is as often, if not more often, used to defend our mistakes - like slavery and racism, if we were to ever get honest with ourselves about the law and its uses and misuses - as it is ever to correct them.

And that is the reason that the wisest among us have liberal commitments. Commitments to liberty.

Because the one most serious thing in the way of all that learning is our own miserable and manipulative efforts to force one another to be something different.

Force has limited purposes. And no more. No matter what other romantic notions we might have on the matter.

And this period has been one long referendum on whether that dark romance is one that will animate us in perpetuity. Or be the long, ugly legacy that we finally put behind us.

And, interestingly enough, it is not my faith in how people are behaving, currently, that gives me confidence that we get this figured out.

It's that long history of fumbling forward, two steps at a time and one step backward, that convinces me that we will turn out alright.

We just need to get more honest with ourselves about what steps are forward and which ones are backward.

Some words of reassurance. We're not moving forward. Not until we figure out that moving forward means treating each other better. Not worse.

Not the hardest standard for progress to get our noggins wrapped around, I don't think.

Just some unlearning is all. And some appreciation for ourselves and our propensity to be jackasses, in the process.