The Sunday Poem

A time of testing

We live in a crucible. This era of American history will test, sooner or later, each one of us. In the fires of our raging civil conflict, we will all find out who we are—and declare it down through the generations.

I feel lucky in this way. There’s something exhilarating about being summoned by events to account for yourself as a citizen, to be called as a witness for yourself and stand before the judgment of your own grandchildren, even before they are born. Who are you? they ask from the future. Tell them. Now.

To be honest, I have felt this exhilaration (along with a host of many less invigorating and more stressful emotions) since the moment ABC News fired me. A door closed; a door opened. I feel I’m working now not for the bottom line of a corporation that employs me, but for my country that needs me. That sounds self-important, I know. But with every passing day, it feels truer. We all have purpose-driven lives now, and that’s a privilege. It’s also electrifying. Our lives are vivid with consequence.

Of course, I am heartsick about what is happening, day by day, in our beloved country. Donald Trump is out of control, intoxicated with the license he has from a lickspittle Republican Party, a cowardly Supreme Court, and tens of millions of Americans lost in the fog of his lies and hungry to end all opposition to him.

Trump doesn’t even try to hide his authoritarian impulses any more.

“She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly,” he barked at Jonathan Karl, my friend and former colleague at ABC News, when Jon asked him about Attorney General Pam Bondi’s rabid promise, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

Then on Saturday night, posting in the whiny key of a mad king, Trump revealed even more transparently the raw, corrupt, anti-democratic id at the heart of his whole political existence:

The next few months are critical. Trump’s poll numbers are deteriorating on account of his crackpot economic policies that are already doing real damage in many people’s lives; and widespread disapproval of his crackpot anti-vaccine policies; and increasing concern about his brutal immigration policies. Trump knows he’s on a clock. He must consolidate power over the democracy before it rises against him. Thus his urgency.

And thus ours. It’s America’s high noon.

In that movie, Gary Cooper saves the day, alone—Hollywood-hero style. That’s not going to happen in this real-life struggle for our country. It will take millions of us: those already in the fight, those on the sidelines, and ultimately many of those who currently support Trump. That’s going to be the only way we secure a lasting democratic peace for our riven nation.

This moment differs from a Hollywood story structure in another way. There’s no guarantee of a happy ending.

On Sundays at our house (at least those Sundays not fractured by kids’ sports), we do a little Bible study. We read a passage or a story, taking turns with the verses, and have a talk. Sometimes we’ll talk about what we’ve read, and sometimes it will just set the background for a conversation about something else.

Last Sunday, we read the famous passage from Ecclesiastes:

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die…

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.”

We passed the Bible around, each of us—me, Helen (13 years old tomorrow!), Michael (11), Mary Lou (9), and Johanna taking turns with the verses. Then we talked.

We rarely discuss current events. But it was a few days after the killing of Charlie Kirk, and the kids were hearing all about it at school. So we talked, and the shadow that lengthens across the country by the day settled around our kitchen table. There were tears. Helen brought up the senseless, vicious killing of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte a few weeks ago; she’d just heard of it. Sobbing, she told us what truly frightened her, broke her beautiful heart.

“The people didn’t help her. They didn’t do anything.”

Nothing is guaranteed.

I told my children there is evil in the world, but more good than evil. I believe this. I also know sometimes the darkness prevails.

But that cannot be cause for despair. The truth is always worth fighting for; it seeds the future, whatever that future may hold.

Our poem this week was written as a message to the future from a man who lost his country: Czesław Milosz, one of the great Polish poets of the 20th Century; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

Milosz wrote this poem in 1950, after fleeing Poland to escape the brutal Communist regime that came to power after World War II and the occupation of Poland by armed forces of the Soviet Union. The poem is an indictment of a tyrant, and a pledge that the poem itself will hold him accountable in history. Truth will out.

You Who Wronged

By Czesław Milosz

You who wronged a simple man

Bursting into laughter at the crime,

And kept a pack of fools around you

To mix good and evil, to blur the line,

.

Though everyone bowed down before you,

Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,

Striking gold medals in your honor,

Glad to have survived another day,

.

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.

You can kill one, but another is born.

The words are written down, the deed, the date.

.

And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,

A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.