Among the Quislings
Every age, probably, gets the martyrs it deserves.
For us in the widening rift that passes for the US nowadays, since we are degraded in so many ways - in the sharpness of our minds, in the warmth of our hearts - we are more intent on hollering across the chasm to denounce the wrongheaded, flinty-hearted monsters on the other side than we are on much of anything else. The rift that separates us has grown so wide that that stones we chuck at each other can no longer even reach our targets. Which might be fine - who among us doesn't grow weary of getting pelted by rocks?
The cost of this widening rift, though, the real cost, is not measured in the soreness of our throwing arms. Or in the sad tiny bragging rights of nudging those on our side of the rift and going "You see me almost hit that one guy?" The actual cost is that in order for the rift to widen, its edges must crumble. Meaning that those of us standing at the rim will fall into the pit that separates us from what we imagine is the other side. The screams of those claimed on our side the pit are the same as the screams on our side. The roil and burble of the molten rock at the bottom of the pit, a roil we have taken as evidence of our own righteousness, since it is so delicious when one among their number burns and bursts.
On one crumbling wall of the rift, a farmer, betrayed by economic policy, drops into the pit, on the opposite wall, a trans person whose existence has been criminalized, plummets; along one wall, a gleeful racist with cancer decries her medical bankruptcy as she plunges, along the other, a professor with the temerity to wonder aloud if we should maybe ease off on genocide hurtles down; on one side, a divisive pundit, on the other a middling comedian. And we, on our side of the rift, whichever that might be, shriek ourselves hoarse - galled by the loss of one of our own, heartened by the culling of one of theirs.
And we grow so taken by the unfolding spectacle, so consumed by the seeming need to tweeze apart its supposed meanings, that we fail to notice the ground underfoot. The edge of the rift is crumbling, yes, and is claiming those reckless and radicalized enough to stand at the rim, but that isn't me, we tell ourselves, my patch of ground is here, well away from the edge, a position of safety. Mine are moderate views, and my rhetoric measured and respectful, I am not vengeful or reactionary. All the while, the edge of the rift - which not long ago had seemed ever so far away from us is, well it's not near to us, because, again, we're not like those crazies over at the rim, after all, but it sure is seeming less far, that rim. At the risk, perhaps, of sounding a little alarmist, I could swear that just yesterday as I'd been rolling the trash bin to the curb, or washing a glass, that that edge had to have been a couple miles away at least. Now it feels like it's on the next block, right by the park. But that's crazy. That can't be, can it? I'll ask the neighbors about this when I think of it. If I run into them.
The rift for sure, though, was not this wide when you and I were little. Was it? I don't believe it was. Even though as a kid I didn't understand the details, I feel sure I can remember when my dad could call across the rift to a dad on the other side and be heard plainly. And that dad over there could do likewise. And the molten rock inside the rift? Back then, I want to say it honestly wasn't more than a glow, really. It didn't even throw much in the way heat, did it? No. No, of course it didn't. I think my old man and that dad over on the opposite edge could hear each other okay, still, because each of them did their little to keep the rift narrow.
Because whatever the differences they might have had, the dad on this side and the dad on that, they could agree about the ground beneath their feet. He'd never do this, would never actually say this, but for the sake of example, you understand, my old man could sound off to that dad over there, like "We can each say whatever the fuck we want, yeah?" And that dad - no hesitation, no indecision - would go "Every goddamn day!"
And who knows? Maybe it was because their dad or granddad had gone off overseas and fought and maybe died so that their sons could do exactly that - say whatever harebrained numbskull bullshit that crossed their minds, hold whatever batshit beliefs they wanted without anybody ever telling them they couldn't. So maybe my dad over on this side and that dad over on that one - even though they maybe didn't go fight and die themselves - held a kind of collective memory about what was down there underneath the ground they stood on. Or maybe these dads had been taught enough of the same kinds of ideas and information when they were little themselves that they could kind of peer through the ground and hold in their minds that what we mistake for bedrock, something steadfast and permanent, is actually liquid. And moving. And made of fire.
And so maybe these dads on so-called different sides of a then-narrow, barely warm rift, were better able than we are to both yell at each other, even bitterly, on matters of opinion and policy and right living, to regard it is a privilege to shut their window on that idiot neighbor, to close the blinds and shake their head about how naive and foolish he is, and to recognize the reality that in order to retain such a privilege they had to hold a mutual respect for the magma they knew to be roiling unseen beneath their basements and water mains, to acknowledge that their naive and deluded neighbor did the same.
Maybe the key to this whole experiment, of living among one another, even in if its only in rancor and contention, maybe the key to not getting claimed by widening floor of fire at the base of the rift, which as we now see does not have the fixed rim of a canyon, but is actually a conveyor belt that's picking up speed, is our reacquaintance with some truths that must reemerge as self evident. Maybe we must each hold fast to some ideas that are larger than ourselves, larger than our livelihoods or property, larger than our hatreds and pieties. I'm not talking here about civics class abstractions, nor about the virtue signaling impulses that make situational Constitutional scholars of us all. I'm talking about an urgently practical measure of literal self preservation.
We need binoculars, now, to even see those monstrosities lining the opposite wall of the rift, so hearing them nowadays is out of the question. As you peer through those lenses at one of them, though, dialing to sharpen focus on him red-faced and mutely screaming, tilt down a bit to look at the receding ground beneath him. And recall that the solid-feeling ground under you is disintegrating at the same rate of speed.
There are forces poised to benefit from his tipping into the void; those same forces that will profit from your own fall into that pit of their making. You're both subject to the same gravity, both vulnerable to immolation. I'm not asking you to love that guy across the way, or even like him, and I'm not asking him to like you - luxuriate in your freedom to hate each other, but subordinate that scorn for each other to some commonly held sense of the ground you both stand on. Because if we can't, we consent to the conveyor belt, capitulate to its advance, concede to those forces nourished by our destruction.
Ian Belknap is a Chicago writer presently living in Baltimore, both places deserving, apparently, to be occupied by federal troops.
