Category Archives: Political

Nomadland: Wanderings through Late-Stage Capitalism and the American Psyche

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“The purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire.”

– Wilfred Bion

I don’t really understand the influential nineteenth century psychoanalyst Bion, but his words suffused me as I watched Nomadland, the widely acclaimed film based on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book and starring the brilliant Frances McDormand.

An article about Nomadland’s director Chloe Zhao describes the essence of her film-making: “Zhao tried to make herself porous, immersing herself in life there and attempting to get past the familiar narratives offered up to expectant visitors.” This porosity feels akin to Bion’s philosophy. It is hard to achieve. 

Just how hard struck me while watching Nomadland. The film is about a widow, Fern, who loses not only her husband but her job, house, and town in the Great Recession. She takes to the road along with a proliferation of older itinerant Americans who live in their vehicles as they travel from one short-term, low-wage job to another. I expected it to be a searing indictment of America’s winner-take-all system that creates down-and-out losers I could pity from a distance of privileged political righteousness.

There are traces of that, but I encountered something quite different. More accurately, I confronted within myself assumptions and biases that got in the way of truly listening, truly seeing each individual. It reminded me a lot of psychotherapy.

Nomadland begins with an economical background sketch: U.S. Gypsum shuts down its plant in Empire, Nevada. A few months later, the town’s zip code is discontinued. It’s like an intake form; we know the broad outlines and can begin to develop a story, but we are ignorant. Unless we have memory apart from the film, we may not even know about the 2008 housing crash and economic collapse that wiped out so much more than a zip code: people’s jobs, savings, homes, and lives. 

The murkiness of our comprehension is accentuated by the film’s naturalistic lighting: so many scenes are shot in the dark, it is hard to discern what’s happening. We form impressions of the people we meet, but it takes time to get to know them, especially if our preconceptions obscure. 

I expected, for example, to feel the heavy horror of victims frozen in trauma and was instead startled by the film’s gentle sweetness. Grief is etched in people’s faces but so are easy laugh lines and the pleasures of ingenious solutions for cramped spaces. The sense of community and resilience often overshadows the pervasive loneliness and precarity of the nomads’ lives. 

The film seems like both a triumph of empathy for each person’s complex humanity and a glossy valorization of overcoming hardship. One critic notes in “What Nomadland Gets Wrong About Gig Workers” that “it feels less like artistic license than a betrayal of workers’ reality.” Perhaps Zhao, by downplaying the structural societal context, obscures something important. Yet what do our socioeconomic-political lenses miss about what the film gets right about grief, the interplay between closeness and distance, resilience and brokenness, freedom and confinement?

I couldn’t help but ponder Janis Joplin’s, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” or my ambivalence about our resilience fetish. Every time we lionize heroic coping, our complicity in tolerating a system that demands it mounts.

Nomadland’s emphasis on deep character exploration rather than the larger cultural context reminds me of psychotherapy’s shift from the intrapsychic to the interpersonal to the importance of externalities. I think of the optical illusion:

Do we see two profiles or an urn? Is our vision flexible enough to take in the totality? 

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Originally appeared in Impulse, an online publication of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Our National Holiday

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Groundhog

Finally, the day you’ve been living over and over again for almost a year is officially here! I’m referring, of course, to Groundhog Day, hitherto an obscure and underrated holiday whose elevation I’ve proposed as an apt celebration of the American character.

But I didn’t quite intend this level of elevation, this much capturing of our experience! Seriously, I could do without Groundhog Day as a national meme baked into our collective unconscious because of COVID Times. Like Bill Murray in the famous film, the alarm goes off and we are eternally trapped in the same day. Also with the same people, same four walls, same conversations, same Zoom screens, same Netflix stupor, same quiet unraveling. And that’s if we’re lucky!

The tedium is broken up by panic attacks about paying the bills, homeschooling the kids, elderly parents dying alone, sniffles spelling death–you name it. Not to mention anxiety about armed anti-maskers storming state capitols and militant anti-reality mobs staging an insurrection at our nation’s Capitol under the direction of Donald Trump. So much for subscribing to the “What’s the downside to humoring him?” theory.

This got me thinking about whether groundhogs are harmless hibernators who sometimes bite people who haul them out of their slumber, or if there’s a darker side to these reluctant rodent celebrities. As one gardening website asks, “Can that cute groundhog really cause damage?”

Yes, as it turns out. Much like insurrectionists and their leaders, “If not properly controlled, groundhogs can cause serious structural damage when burrowing. Their tunnels break apart building foundations . . . ” An easy Google ramble further reveals the answers to some of the most vexing questions, including my favorite: “Are groundhogs good for anything?” This is artfully evaded with a sort of “All God’s Creatures” vibe, plus a passing note that they’re vegetarians.

More pragmatically, we learn how to get rid of a groundhog:

–Sprinkle blood meal, ground black pepper, dried blood, or talcum powder around the perimeter of your garden.

–Puree and strain hot peppers and garlic, mix them with water and enough liquid soap to make it stick, and spray it liberally around the garden.

Would that these methods worked with insurrectionists and conspiracy theorists!

Anyway, today’s news is that the groundhog foretells 6 more weeks of winter. Had it been cloudy, it would have been slightly shorter. Since the daffodils are currently blooming where I live, and since the calendar notes that Spring will be here no matter what in about six weeks, I smell a hoax. Or some kind of rodent.

At any rate, we did wake to a slightly new day on January 20. President Biden has a plan to bring us out of our long, dark winter. No groundhog can tell how long it will take to emerge from Covid Times based on the presence or absence of its shadow. Assuming vaccination rates continue to improve, here’s a better predictor of how many more deaths will occur depending on how we (and Congress) all act in the meantime.

As Bill Murray learned in Groundhog Day, he had choices within his trap, choices that led to remaining stuck or breaking free. So do we.

Hallelujah

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On the same day our country marked the milestone of more than 400,000 people dead from COVID, we were finally able to collectively acknowledge and grieve our loss. President-Elect Biden reminded us, “To heal we must remember. . . . It is important we do that as a nation. That’s why we are here today.”

In the brief space between sundown and dusk, the simple and somber pre-inauguration memorial was electrifying. Lori Marie Key, a Detroit nurse, sang “Amazing Grace”—the same as she did on her shifts tending COVID patients to lift spirits amid all the heartbreak. Gospel singer Yolanda Adams then sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Along the entire length of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, 400 light pillars—each representing 1,000 lives lost—began to glow as darkness descended. The camera slowly zoomed out to reveal the illuminated waterway, Abraham Lincoln frozen in marble and time, the Potomac beyond.

“In Hebrew, the word hallelujah means to rejoice in praising God,” I soon learned from Kyson Parks’s The Origin and History of the Song “Hallelujah,” by Leonard Cohen. Parks continues:

It is a bitter lament about love and loss . . . “Hallelujah,” the song teaches us, is a refrain worthy of times of celebration, of mourning, of regret, of catharsis, and reconciliation. Cohen’s song tells a story of broken love, true love remembered and mourned, guilt, penance, and of finding peace in the vicissitudes of brokenness.

How fitting for what we have been through. In our nation’s capital, the last line of the song—“It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah” soared over the Reflecting Pool as the lights came up.

For some of us, Leonard Cohen’s song marked the beginning as well as the end of Trump’s  presidency. On the first Saturday Night Live after the 2016 election, Kate McKinnon–who had played Hillary Clinton throughout SNL’s 2016 campaign skits–performed it for SNL’s Cold Open.

When McKinnon finished, she turned to the audience as Hillary and said, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you.”

Tomorrow Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in as our new President and Vice President.

Hallelujah.

This, Too, Happened

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Far, far down the very long list of Donald Trump’s transgressions, which range from petty insults to treason, is something trivial that nonetheless bugs me no end: His ability to suck all the oxygen out of everything, grab the narrative, and destroy anything good.

After Biden’s clear victory in the days after the election, my brief period of joy and relief quickly was subsumed as Trump’s and his enablers’ lies about election fraud sparked widespread denial and defiance among his supporters.

“I thought at least we’d get a bit of a mental health break,” my husband said, “but things just get worse and worse.”

Reality played out on a split screen: election officials counting ballots while white mobs screamed at them; many, though not all, GOP state legislators accepting the results while most Republicans in the U.S. Congress acquiesced to the President’s lies; the courts—including the Trump-packed Supreme Court–holding firm against ridiculous claims; Georgia Republicans Brad Raffensberger, Gabriel Sterling, and even the detestable Brian Kemp–all of whom voted for Trump—becoming unlikely Resistance heroes. Biden’s 7 million plus margin in the popular vote coexisted with the depressing possibility that once again the Electoral College would have rendered those votes irrelevant if a slice of votes in a few swing states had gone the other way. But in the end, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, then Georgia all flipped from red to blue.

Georgia!! Thanks to demographic changes and more than a decade of on-the-ground organizing, mostly by Black women, this deep red state turned a lovely pale shade of blue. Georgia in Biden’s column was thrilling though not decisive. But a tantalizing opportunity emerged: the fate of the U.S Senate rested entirely on the outcome of Georgia’s January 5th run-off elections. Could it happen again?

I didn’t think so. I thought it was unlikely that the Democrats could win one race, let alone the two that would be necessary to pry the Senate Majority Leader’s gavel out of Mitch McConnell’s hands.

Stacey Abrams, founder of the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight, likes to say, ““I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic—I’m determined.” I tried to channel her attitude. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, sending postcards through Reclaim Our Vote and phone banking once or twice a week. My husband and I sent a little money to Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, more money to grassroots organizations on the ground .We were among millions who did the same. Whether or not it would do the trick, at least it would be good for my mental health.

Phone banking is not glamorous. Mostly it’s a tedious exercise in marking “Not Home,” occasional hostility, depressing levels of disinterest. Every now and then, though, a conversation makes it all worthwhile. Calling Georgia for the run-offs had very little of the former, lots of the latter. Caller after caller picked up the phone, especially in the early weeks before every organization under the sun was calling multiple times a day.

Almost everyone was fired up and ready to go. People expressed appreciation for our efforts all the time. They eagerly agreed to get their friends and family to vote. “Don’t worry, we’ve got this,” one man told me right before Election Day. “We’ll be there with our whole block.”

They were, and then some—voters who mailed in their absentee ballots, put them in a drop box, or stood in long lines for early voting; newly minted 18-year-olds casting their first ballot ever; a robust Election Day showing. Turnout was high among Republicans, too, but it was higher among Democrats—with impressive gains not only among Black and suburban voters, but also among young people, Latinx, and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders.

By the time I went to bed Tuesday night on the West Coast, Warnock had been declared the winner, and it was clear that Ossoff, too, was well on his way to victory. The first Black and Jewish senators from Georgia, running on an unapologetically liberal platform.

All our hard work paid off. Particularly impressive were the tireless and creative efforts of on-the-ground organizers and volunteers who have rolled up their sleeves forever for Georgia and the country. Stacey Abrams, Nse Ufot, LaTosha Brown, and Cliff Albright, of nationally known Fair Fight, New Georgia Project, and Black Voters Matter, are the stars of this movement, this moment. But so are those lesser known who got it done. Abrams noted, “We beat voter suppression.” As Rembert Browne, host of the wonderful “Gaining Ground” podcast summed up, “People stepping up from every corner of Georgia is what turned Georgia blue.”

On Wednesday morning, even though it was cold, I put on my flimsy peach-colored T-shirt to mark the occasion. I had not felt so jubilant, so emotional, since Obama’s 2008 victory. What a glorious day!

Or at least it was before it all turned to shit, joy and hope once again snatched away. Shockingly but not surprisingly, the Mob Boss incited his mob to violently storm the Capitol to stop Congress from formalizing the Electoral College votes. Of course this insurrection is the most important story

But it is not the only one. Remember what happened in Georgia, not just once but twice. This, too, is real. We have the power to help it grow and endure.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 2020 Edition

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“The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, is as relevant as ever. “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” the essay begins. We have certainly seen this, particularly during the Trump years in which grievance, chaos, and division have reigned. At times it has felt crazy (and crazy-making), but Hofstadter is at pains to state that he is borrowing the clinical term “paranoid” to describe “the heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” among more-or-less normal people that’s existed from the country’s founding through the present day.

Hofstadter’s essay was published in tumultuous times, with the anti-communist fervor of McCarthyism serving as his contemporary exhibit of the paranoid style and its capacity for wreaking havoc.

Hofstadter notes the phenomenon’s “apocalyptic and absolutistic framework”:

Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated.

Hofstadter notes a key phenomenon of the modern right wing–feeling dispossessed (or at least knowing how to manipulate others experiencing or frightened of dispossession):

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.

Hofstadter then brings his socio-political commentary into the psychological realm: “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.”

This dovetails with the hallmark feature of clinical paranoia, as described by Nancy McWilliams in Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (1994,The Guilford Press): “The essence of paranoid personality organization is the habit of dealing with one’s felt negative qualities by projecting them; the disowned attributes then feel like external threats.” (p. 205). McWilliams also notes the reliance on denial and high levels of innate aggression among those who skew paranoid. They struggle with anger, resentment, envy, vindictiveness, and—most of all—fear:

The paranoid stance is a combination of fear and shame. . . Paranoid people use denial and projection so powerfully that no sense of shame remains accessible within the self. The energies of the paranoid person are therefore spent on foiling the efforts of those who are seen as bent on shaming and humiliating them. (p. 208)

Paranoia, whether clinical or socio-political, is difficult to treat. It remains to be seen how much the passions of the moment will dissipate if not constantly stoked, or if a dangerous fringe that has made it into the mainstream has metastasized beyond control.

Breakdown Break

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My favorite Voting Plan comes from my friend Tina, who posted on Facebook: “I plan to fill out my absentee ballot as soon as I get it, put it in the nearest drop box right away, and watch cat videos until after the election.”

I, on the other hand, even though contemplating how to follow Tina’s example and calm my nerves as we approach E-Day, couldn’t help myself. On my therapeutic walk this morning, I made the mistake of listening to The Daily‘s latest podcast, “The Spector of Political Violence.” It featured Americans of every political (and apolitical) stripe buying guns because they are nervous about everyone else having guns. I suppose it’s a comfort that the story’s angle was deliberately non-partisan. But hammering home the point that people who are scared arm themselves to feel safe–despite all the evidence that the presence of a gun increases the risk of violence–made me even more anxious. I’m a member of a very large club.

I recommend following Tina’s lead. So in that spirit, here’s some reminders of goodness and beauty from my daily walks of the last few months that are helping me get through:

  • Swinging ducks
  • Sharing
  • Teddy bear scavenger hunt

  • Pandemic baking

Remember to vote, and remember to set your clocks back Sunday. You’ve got your choice about how to spend your extra hour: sleeping, insomnia, doom-scrolling, watching cat videos. Choose wisely, and see you on the other side!

With a Little Help from Our Friends

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You know what motivates me more than almost anything? When someone I know and trust asks me to do something! I joined Weight Watchers with a friend. I took a job I wasn’t looking for because my friend recruited me. I served on our school district’s foundation—and even became its co-chair—because so many people I admired were involved and urged me to get involved, too. I make countless donations, go to events, and buy unwanted wrapping paper and grapefruit from friends’ children. I like to joke that my political activism consists of doing whatever my friend Ruth asks of me.

It’s not that I’m a pushover or a mindless follower. My parents never had to say, “Would you jump off a cliff just because your friends were?” It’s just that people I know and trust inform and inspire me. They provide good company, hold me accountable, and make me a better person.

It turns out I’m not alone, and that this has big ramifications for voter turnout. Research shows that the best way to get somebody to vote is when someone they know reminds them. Call it a helpful nudge, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), or benevolent peer pressure–it works! That’s why one of my very favorite acts of political work this season has been Friend-to-Friend Voter Outreach.

It’s a simple and fun organic way of growing a network of voters not from campaign lists but from within our personal circles. All it takes is asking three people you know in battleground states and districts who share your views to vote, and to ask them to ask three more people. Follow-up with a couple of pre-election reminders, and that’s it!

Of course, if you’re an overachiever, you can ask more than three people—I’ve cast a wide net, and have also asked people not in battleground states but with roots there to participate.  But three is a perfect number—not too much to ask of anyone (including yourself!), and enough to make a real difference. It’s also a nice way to catch up with friends and relatives where contact might not extend much beyond birthday and holiday cards.

I’ve had some lovely exchanges with far-flung cousins, Facebook friends, and my daughter’s college roommate. My husband’s best friend, not normally political, agreed to contact his mother and all his high school friends in Cleveland. I’ve never in my life participated in a single chain letter, but this is a chain I love to build, link by link.

Please join me. Use the resources below, have fun, and let me know how it goes.  Let’s win big.

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– A good step-by-step guide (you don’t have to attend the ongoing workshops offered by the organizer, though you’re welcome to contact him for next date if you like).

–If anyone needs voting information, iwillvote.com is a great state-by-state resource.

-Here’s a handy chart for voter registration deadlines. Note that several have passed, but many states offer ways to register and vote after the deadline:

-A good read.

-Stress-buster:

Crunch Time

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I clipped this cartoon from The New Yorker soon after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and it’s been on my refrigerator ever since.

The first week of this Administration seems practically quaint compared to what’s happening now. Those were the days of a flurry of executive orders loosening environmental protections and going after immigrants; lies about crowd size and voter fraud; Kellyanne Conway’s injecting “alternative facts” into the Trump Apologists’ Lexicon; and, most notoriously, the Muslim Ban.

It took three attempts to craft a travel ban that passed muster with a willfully obtuse U.S. Supreme Court. It’s a useful model for the trajectory of the last four years: Initial incompetence–along with intense resistance by an outraged opposition not yet exhausted by relentless provocations–contained the damage for awhile, until it didn’t.

But the only ways in which Donald Trump and his enablers have gained competence is to divide and better manipulate the considerable levers of power they control for corrupt, unlawful, and dangerously destructive ends. The takeover of the spineless Republican Party is complete. Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr, the Scylla and Charybdis of the whole treasonous enterprise, guard the rot with a competency and smooth veneer that will forever elude the obviously unfit Trump himself.

The resistance is still strong, but exhausted.

It is Labor Day, the traditional start of the home stretch of every presidential election. November 3, 2020–the day we have been waiting for since November 8, 2016–has taken forever to come but it’s almost here.

So imagine the word “term” instead of the word “week” in the cartoon above.

Summon everything you have in the next few weeks to make sure it doesn’t come to pass. Talk to similarly inclined people in your circle to make sure they are registered to vote, and that they do vote, either with enthusiasm or holding their noses. Sign up for phone banks, text banks, letter and post-card writing. Make donations if you can. There are a million opportunities available, and participating in them may save your mental health as well as the future of our country and planet.

This is it. Let’s do this thing.

Smoke Obscures Hope: What’s That Strange Thing I Felt for a Moment, and Can I Get it Back?

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Perhaps the real point of this blog post is to warn against letting too much time elapse between starting and finishing time-sensitive writing. I started it August 21, and here it is, just 10 days later, which might as well be a century. I guess it’s in keeping with how time feels these days: both endless and unchanging as well as perpetually upended moment to moment. So I’ll just throw this into the latest time warp, trusting that (a) things will change again and (b) I can get back what was true not so long ago, despite the smoke.

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Last year, I couldn’t wait to watch the Democratic debates, and put every single one in my calendar. The first one, with all those candidates crowded onto a stage, made me feel proud of my party and hopeful about how many serious, good people there were in this country. Our alarmingly narrow bench was actually quite wide, even minus the ludicrous contestants (here’s looking at you, Marianne Williamson).

My older brother and I would touch base about politics once in a while, him from western Massachusetts, me from California. He was a Biden stalwart from the get-go, arguing that a return to decency and normalcy were just what the country needed. I begged to differ (probably not that politely): Biden, I maintained, embodied the benign patriarchy, which we’ve all learned is not so benign. Despite having a fondness for Obama’s VP, I found him too arrogant and defensive, too old and diminished, a man from a bygone era who could not rally enough young and progressive voters to offset the swing voters in key states he maybe could.

I loved these conversations with my brother. Subsequent Democratic debates? Not so much. My pride from the first one quickly changed to dismay as month after month we mostly witnessed a made-for-TV-but-not-for-democracy spectacle, the surprise appeal of Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer’s tie notwithstanding. In one of our calls, I asked my brother what he thought of the debates.

“I think the Democrats should stop having them!” he said.

At last we agreed.

So it was with considerable trepidation that I put two hours into my calendar every single night from Monday through Thursday a couple weeks ago for the Democratic Convention. How much of a disaster would it be?

I loved it—every inspiring and cheesy moment. Well, maybe not Tom Perez’s manic energy from Milwaukee Central and the overhead shot of John Kasich at a crossroads, or was it a fork? Plus, I was distracted the entire first night by Eva Longoria’s totally smooth and seamless bust line, wondering if I really should consider Spanx.

But the wide-ranging panoply of America and people who call it home really moved me, from Black Lives Matter protests to the many (some would say too many) Republicans for Biden. I loved the focus on ordinary Americans, one apparently recording himself from what seemed to be a toilet (it was really just a stool). How many shapes, colors, outfits, accents, and tattoos there were, how many different walks of life! But united in common purpose. The tone of somber urgency as well as lightness was just right. Joe Biden and his small chats with people beamed in made me wonder if we will move from someone in the Oval Office who does nothing but watch FOX News and rage-tweet to someone who will spend his days personally calling every American for long, empathetic conversations. Sounds like a pretty good trade-up.

And, of course, the wonderfully weird and moving roll call, a much-needed travelogue for the housebound. Who knew that Rhode Island is the country’s calamari capital? Not to mention the effective telegraphing that wearing masks is the decent thing to do.

Some of the VIP speeches were great, some forgettable. Joe Biden more than cleared the bar of not dropping dead or uttering gibberish. The man from a bygone era really is the man of the moment.

Again, though, it was ordinary people who stood out: The young woman whose father died from Covid-19 because he had trusted Trump; the little girl reading her letter after her mother was deported; the boy with a stutter.

Four nights expertly packaged for maximum manipulation. And yet it felt real. It awakened something in me that’s been dormant for a long time, particularly as the Covid-and-Trump-coping protective numbness has settled in: Feelings of hope, pride, joy.

Then the Northern California fires picked up. Smoke, heat and terror blanketed everything, only to be supplanted by the Republican Festival of Lies and Fear-Mongering. Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times in front of his children by a White cop in Kenosha. The city predictably exploded, with a 17-year-old White militia wannabe killing two people. The teenager is being lionized by the right-wing. Jacob Blake is paralyzed, but not so the racial-violence-incitement machine of Trump and his enablers. Horrors compounded by the added horror that this strategy might just work.

Meanwhile, there are 183,000 dead and counting from the pandemic Republicans choose to ignore. Millions out of work, millions at risk of losing their homes.

By the end of the week, I was so distraught I had to mainline Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” on Netflix. It was the perfect antidote, reminding me of what we had, strengthening my resolve to fight harder to become better again. I made more donations, signed up for more phone banks, more text teams, more outreach.

That is the hard work that drives away the smoke and restores hope.

March On

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I don’t take the time these days to let in much emotion. On a day-to-day basis, I feel fine. I am fine. My immediate life is not too visibly touched by the ravages of the coronavirus and Trump’s reign of terror. I worry about others who are more directly in the line of fire, mostly with a sense of numb horror. I channel that horror into a kind of grim determination, signing up for another phone bank, donating again to the food bank or ActBlue. Mostly I maintain an even-keeled numbness, aware of how much energy I put into keeping feelings at bay so as not to get overwhelmed by the grief and rage and despair lapping at the edges.

It’s the exact opposite of how John Lewis lived, and lives on even in death. Beaten almost lifeless countless times; arrested more than 40 times; leading a sit-in on the floor of the U.S. House at age 76 demanding action on gun legislation in the wake of the Orlando massacre; embracing the tens of thousands of young activists pouring into the streets after George Floyd’s murder–John Lewis never succumbed to despair, nor did he stray from the principles of non-violence. The day of his funeral, the New York Times published a piece Lewis wrote just before he died. It’s an homage to today’s protesters and a call to action. It’s a testament to how John Lewis keeps on giving, even in death.

There have been many homages to the civil rights icon himself in the last few days. I read some, heard snippets of others. But I took the time to watch President Obama’s eulogy in full. I needed the piercing of numbness I knew his presence and his words would bring.

Watching President Obama is a heartbreaking balm for the soul in the midst of Trump’s unending and crass malevolence. I, like millions of others, miss him every day. He knows that he would never have gotten where he is without John Lewis. As he delivered the eulogy, he did not mask his grief and anger. Nor did his grief and anger overwhelm his grace and buoyancy of spirit, his ability to lift us up.

Most compelling was his direct linkage to John Lewis’s lifelong work for racial justice and what is happening now, including how often might crushes right. Until it does not. Describing the scene in 1965 Selma, President Obama said, “I imagine initially, that day, the troopers thought they’d won the battle . . . Except this time there were some cameras there. This time Americans saw—bore witness to—black Americans who were asking for nothing more than to be treated like other Americans.”

President Obama helps us see that a nonchalant cop’s knee on George Floyd’s neck is today’s reincarnation of Bull Connor, that federal troops in Lafayette Square and Portland wield the same bloodying batons; and that voter suppression tactics, including sabotaging the post office, echo poll taxes and unpassable tests about how many jelly beans are in a jar. “John Lewis devoted his time on this earth fighting the very attacks on democracy and what’s best in America that we’re seeing circulating right now,” President Obama said. “As long as we have breath in our bodies, we have to continue his cause. Everybody’s gotta come out and vote. . . We can’t treat voting like an errand to run if we have some time.”

And then: “You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for.”

President Obama concluded by saying that Lewis “could not have been prouder of this new generation. John, these are your children, they learned by your example.

Thank you, John Lewis and President Obama. And thank you to all those now rising up and persevering in the fight for justice, whether grief-stricken, enraged, grim, weary, exuberant, numb, and–dare I say?–hopeful.