Every generation has days where they remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. John F. Kennedy’s assassination was one for my parents. The earliest one I remember is the Challenger explosion; also Princess Diana’s death, maybe. 9/11 is, of course, one of those days as well, and still very much in recent memory.
11/9 is, I think, going to be another one. It already has been a day of note in past years; 9 November 1938 was Kristallnacht, and 9 November 1989 was the fall of the Berlin Wall. It remains to be seen just what kind of a marker 9 November 2016 will be remembered as; one way or the other, though — as I tell other historians — we are seeing periodization in action. This is close of one chapter and the beginning of the other; 11/9 is a day we will see as a dividing line of some kind.
So where was I and what did I do on 11/9?
We had been up watching the returns since the first polls closed Tuesday night. We watched his speech, and at 3:30 in the morning turned in. I got up to go chant Orthros and Divine Liturgy for St. Nektarios of Aegina, praising God and his saints with my voice as best I could, and then I went to go teach the undergraduates taking my Ancient Greek History survey course.
I walked in and saw a lot of low, low faces. Some of them were gathered around a laptop. “She’s speaking right now,” one of them said.
“Right,” I said. “I’ll put it up on the projector screen.”
We watched her concede.
I had a lesson planned for the day. I thought to myself, screw it.
“Okay, folks, obviously today is going to be a little different –”
“The next four years are going to be a little different,” one of my students said.
“Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you what.” I pulled up an article from “Patriotic Folks dot Com”, one of the alt-right sites to which some of my ultra-conservative Facebook connections are always posting links, and put it up on the projector screen. “You know why I’m always harping on questions like audience, genre, agenda, view of the past, and so on? Because of pieces like this.” I show them the article, which seemed to assert that some famous Hollywood actor had posted a picture of himself holding up a pro-Trump sign, and then aggregated tweets from both right and left showing their reactions. Of course, the headline presented it as “Liberal Twitter melting down”. Of course the picture is fake, and the article even acknowledges that it’s fake, at the very end. The only point of the piece is to point out how the image punks the “other side”, while naturally ignoring that “their” side got punk’d, too.
“I make you think about those questions precisely because we all get bombarded with this stuff every day, and unlike the tabloids when I was a kid, where you could distinguish based on format and location in the store, everything looks equally authoritative when shared as a Facebook link. You have to evaluate based on content, not format, and if you can’t do that, we’re all going to be in trouble. My generation has not been well-educated about this, neither has the generation before mine. You have to figure it out. The point isn’t really whether Thucydides is ‘more reliable’ as a ‘scientific historian’ than Herodotus; the point is, that’s an exercise that will help you evaluate garbage like this. If a historian five hundred years from now sees this website and can’t answer those kinds of questions, then this is going to be useless as a source; but if you can think about it and answer those questions, then it can tell you a lot.”
A Mexican woman told me, We’re not rapists and criminals. And nobody gets “sent” here in the first place.
An African American woman told me, I grew up in Boston. I had heard about racism and xenophobia as issues, but I had never really seen the extent to which they were things real people actually did.
“See, for eleven years, I lived twenty minutes south of the birthplace of the KKK, right on the edge of what is, for all intents and purposes, rural and culturally Southern. That’s an experience that means I’m surprised by this outcome, but not blindsided. I’ve seen this face to face.”
Then I showed them the video from Monday night of Pres. Obama in New Hampshire telling the story of the woman in Greenwood, South Carolina, one of twenty people at one of his early 2008 campaign meetings, who got the room excited for him by saying “All fired up! Ready to go!” This was the woman, he said, who made him realize that “…one voice can change a room… And if it can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”
Be the voice that changes the room, I told them.
Then I went to a rehearsal and sang beautiful music as best as I could.
That is how I spent 11/9. What did you do?
And then, today, on 11/10, the real question — what are you and I going to do? Because there’s a lot to be done.
Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist 