The Mob Won’t Stop the Beautiful Song of American Pluralism
January 8, 2021
I have a deal with my younger son. I won’t ride him too hard about zoom school (are those video games I hear when he’s supposed to be multiplying fractions?) if he will read and discuss a poem with me every day. In this way, we have worked our way through an impressive amount of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Carlos Williams, and a little Walt Whitman, poets of American diversity, dignity, and possibility.
In this way, we have conversations about the beauty of a national song made up of many different voices. That American song can be heard in so many places. In grocery stores and in hospitals, where essential workers of all backgrounds risk their own health to keep us fed and to help us heal. On sports teams, where diverse athletes have had to adhere to rigid regimens to keep playing so that we can keep watching.
The song is heard most profoundly during elections – where we truly become ‘the American people’, engaging in the sacred act of electing the people who will govern and represent us. For centuries, “a people” meant those of the same race, ethnicity, or religion. In America, we are a people because we hold to the same principles, ideals outlined in our founding documents and enacted in the sacred acts of a common life together, the holiest of all being voting.
Several months ago, the American people did their best singing by voting in record numbers during a pandemic and electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
At the U.S. Capitol this week, a cathedral of the song of pluralism, the blood-curdling screams of a mob did their best to drown out that American song.
