CommentsPOLITICAL FOLLIES-Indulge me for a moment. I want to tell you a little story, which might — just might — contain a tiny grain of truth about the challenges before us now, and what it takes to meet them. It goes like this.
In those sweltering monsoon summers, before the rains came, there was only one thing to do for relief: a cool, cool drink at the market. After carefully wearing a blazer, putting a handkerchief in the pocket, and having a close shave my grandfather would put me — just a little boy — in the car and off we’d drive. It was a sleek, black 1950s Cadillac. The only one in this wartorn, tribal country, all dirt roads and beggars — a strange thing: out of time, out of place, from another planet, juddering down the pocked streets.
It had been a gift I think — I can’t recall accurately — from the State Department or maybe he’d bought it himself. My grandfather was trying to help build a democracy, you see, and so he’d been invited to tour America — where he developed a lifelong soft spot for, among other things: Omaha, Buicks, and the American way, which was to say, freedom, justice, and equality. Ironic, then, that he ended up with a mere — to him anyways — Cadillac.
Of course, there were those who found this strange. Not just the car but my grandfather’s admiration for these grand, perhaps hubristic, American ideals. Even then, they pointed out to him the absurd contradictions therein. “But this is a country that supports dictators, just next door! Freedom? Pah! War after war. Slavery and segregation. The American way is a lie.”
Now he was in that place (which was our dining room) with those people — some members of parliament, some ministers, some old wizened noble grandees, some heads of tribes, some columnists and journalists, all of them leaders of kinds — what might be called a conservative. Some of them were socialists, some were communists, some were liberals, some were tribalists, and so on. Each one attached to their “-ism,” their ideology. Each one fixed and stuck, a butterfly on a pin, in a certain way of thinking. They were all old friends, of a kind, these men trying to build a new country where before there had only been kingdoms, and then a holocaust and so night after night, this was what they’d talk about. What mattered more than this?
The plates would roll in, piled high with spicy food. The tea would steam. Time for dessert. Time for wine. Time for drinks. 3 a.m. The hours would fly by. And the debates would rage. Was it a lie? Which side did the truth fall on? Freedom, justice, equality — did these things matter at all, when a nation hadn’t completed the journey towards them? Did they matter at all, for a poor, desperate nation like this one, in which an empty belly and a starving child came first? Or why should such people matter at all? Who was right? Which way, which way? The eternal cry of the lost soul — and that is what this art called politics is, I began to understand. A search not just for progress, which is so often a jagged illusion — but those lost in the wilderness finding their improbable way home. How funny and strange to say such a thing. Or perhaps you know exactly what I mean.
The debates would go on, night after night. And I’d sit there watching, though I didn’t know it then, the difficult, fractious birth of a country. To me, it was just how I grew up. Surrounded by men — old men, from another world, a lost one — who were trying to build a society, from the ashes of genocide, devastation, war, and ruin. Nobody teaches you that at school — or at least they didn’t then (and if they do now, they’re probably wrong.) Night after night, I’d watch, hear, just listen to these exchanges, understanding a little here and there.
Some of you might find this intriguing, some of you, strange, and some of you might suppose I’m boasting. Not at all — one is born where is born, and in the next chapter of the story comes my grandfather’s vicious fall, at the hands of extremists, authoritarians, and fascists. So while other kids played hide and seek, I learned, by this strange, nightly osmosis, what a deficit and a budget and a parliamentary system versus a presidential one were, just by listening to these endless debates — which, once I picked out who was the socialist, who the communist, who the capitalist, and so on, began to even be something like predictable.
My grandfather, though, was different. He wasn’t wedded to an ideology, it seemed — but what arched above them, the way a bridge spans whitewater. He’d look at his old friends gently, with a twinkle in his eye. It seemed to me that he understood something that they didn’t. But he would never answer them directly. He’d laugh with them, gently, accepting that perhaps they could only see hypocrisy, superficiality, blinded by their own ideologies, circumstances, lives.
Now, the debates — which happened every dinner, every evening, like clockwork — had been especially fierce last night. My grandfather’s great opponent, who was also one of his best friends, had struck an especially fierce blow, which went something like this: “How can you speak to us of freedom, justice, and equality?! We are a country that needs bread and water! You are an overprivileged old fool!”
So, there we were. The summer heat searing the baked, cracked walls of the ruined city as old as time. Driving in this stately old automobile through it’s narrow, pocked streets. We arrived at the market.
My grandfather stopped the car and rolled down the window. He beckoned a little boy over — a runner, whose job it was to bring people drinks, from the little crowded stalls in the jumbled market.
He was just my age — perhaps a touch older. Maybe seven. Disheveled hair, dirty face, stained brown clothes, a little hat. A winning smile rippled across his face.
“What can I get you, sir?” he asked, with a calculated eagerness.
We ordered two ice cream floats, I think, and away the boy ran to get them. As he brought them over, my grandfather tipped him absurdly handsomely — something close to a month’s income. But not out of pure generosity, we were both to discover. For a truer reason still. As the little boy stuttered profuse thanks, my grandfather asked, “Son, where do you live?”
“Over there,” the boy said. “The next town.”
“How far is that?”
he little boy frowned. “Eight miles,” he said.
“How do you get here?”
“I walk,” laughed the boy. “How else would I get here?”
Now, neither of them looked at me. I felt a cutting emotion. Was it guilt? Was it shame? Anger?
“Don’t you go to school?” my grandfather asked, gently.
“Of course not!” the boy laughed.
“Why not?”
The boy frowned. “I have five sisters. I’m the oldest brother. My father is too old to work much, and my mother is ill. So that leaves me.”
I see,” said my grandfather, kindly. “What is your home like?”
“We live in one room, above a shop just like this one,” the boy said pointing at the stall we’d ordered our drinks from. “I pay for it, mostly,” he added proudly, wagging a little finger, his little face glowing.
“Are you supporting the whole family, then?”
I became aware, right about now, that my grandfather was trying to teach me a lesson that would stay with me a lifetime. A lesson that his friends would never quite understand. Too old, too rigid, too trapped in their ways of thinking. “Isms.” This one, that one, another one. But perhaps I would see something they couldn’t, new, unsullied, a little boy as open as a summer sky.
The boy’s laughter turned suddenly serious. Not sullen, perhaps, but something more like angry, suffused with sorrow.
“I wish that I could support them all. But I’m just a boy. This is the only work I can do. One day, I will.”
HIs little eyes burned. The searing feeling in me caught fire. I still couldn’t name it. But it felt as hot and true as the sweltering, endless summer.
My breath caught in my throat. There I was, in this fine car, on a polished leather seat. There he was, disheveled, dirty, walking miles to feed his family. I don’t want to tell you trite stories of destiny. But for the grace of God go I, and so forth. What struck me in that moment was not just how lucky or fortunate or privileged I was. But how precisely alike we were. Brown eyes, black hair, skin and bones. Two fragile little boys, in a ruined city as old as time. One walking miles to pay for a hovel, the other driven in a Cadillac to be fetched a drink. Mirror images, standing on different sides of a window. What had made all the difference?
“Thank you. We’ll come and see you again,” my grandfather said.
We sipped our cool, cool drinks. I was silent, frowning, trying to understand.
Any old fool,” my grandfather said, finally, “can talk about freedom. Justice. Equality. Now you understand what they really mean.”
My little mind tried to grasp something it couldn’t quite hold. Almost as if he sensed me struggling, my grandfather continued. “They are ideals. But that doesn’t mean they’re theories. Anyone can debate them those from a book. But not everyone knows what they truly are. This is what they mean. That little boy. He is what they mean. And you. You are what they mean, too.”
I was lost, and at the same time, something in me understood perfectly — though it would take me a lifetime to be able to tell you this tale. Let me put it like this.
The test of us is now. The question is not whether we are for freedom, justice, and equality. Almost everyone will say that they are — save the most reprehensible and foolish. Tyrants and dictators through history have said they were acting in the cause of freedom, to deliver justice, to promote equality, after all. The question is whether we are for freedom, justice, and equality substantively, genuinely, authentically. In our marrow and our bones, our habits and our acts — not just in our words and our sentiments.
You see, these things are ideals. Which is to say that in this imperfect world, they are ever imperfect, unrealized things. What my grandfather was trying to say to me — I think — was that even in the country he admired so, America, these ideals had not been fully realized, made flesh, come true. But had them it did — and so the tension between ideal and reality was the struggle to ever mature and expand democracy itself. Yes, many were subjugated. Yes, many were oppressed and viciously kept under the heel and boot of old, foolish ways. Yes, in places, violence and stupidity ruled — and maybe they would forever. Yes, the critics were perfectly right. But they were also perfectly wrong.
These ideals provided something like a great and shining beacon in the dark, dark night, guiding all lost souls home. If, that is, home is where they wanted to go — instead of further out to a rough and heaving sea. Remember when I said that politics was something more like a journey of lost souls seeking their way home — than some arid, strategic, partisan debate? That is what I mean. I’m not sure that I can put this feeling into words, precisely — so I think by now, either you understand me, or you don’t.
The question before us, in this troubled age, where every kind of regression and folly is rising, is whether these ideals are guiding us home. Whether we are wise enough to understand that just because freedom, justice, and equality have not been perfectly realized yet is no reason to give up on them, sneer at them, scorn them, or turn them on their heads — it is a reason to redouble our pursuit of them.
Giving up on freedom, justice, and equality — as shared and authentic things — just because they have not been realized well enough, fast enough, or wholly enough, after all, is the spark of today’s authoritarian movements.
Democracy, in other words, is not really what we think it is. It is not a state, a set of rules, or even a legacy. Nor is it just a set of institutions and structures and codes. It is an attitude, a mode, a way. An attitude, as in a predisposition, an inclination, a struggle of a certain and very specific kind.
Perhaps it is the most difficult attitude, the worthiest and greatest struggle, of all. It requires us to hold two deeply contradictory thoughts, emotions, beliefs — not just for ourselves, but for all. No, we have not realized freedom, justice, and equality perfectly. Perhaps we never will. For precisely that reason, we mustn’t give up on them, at the very moment we find them lacking, short, deficient, absent. We must hone them like a blade, reveal them like a sunrise, carry them like a child, tend them like a garden. We must always be working on freedom, justice, and equality. Always working, always working — because it is at precisely the hardest moments of all, when it feels like they have never meant less, that they have never mattered more.
Perhaps that is why democracy is such a difficult thing to hold onto, historically. Not just because it needs educated people, or good information, or even trust in one another. But because it requires us ourselves to be able to grasp this terrible and beautiful paradox — and hold it a little closer every day.
Do you see what I mean when I say the test of us is now? Perhaps, perhaps not. Maybe my little story has been just a bittersweet tale. Let it be.
I thought I understood something of all this then. And yet, somehow, I’m still learning the lesson of that day I spent with my grandfather. That summer day, when I began to know the purpose of struggle and the meaning of grace.
(Umair Haque’s essays appear on Medium.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
