Jenifer’s Journal: The hollow days

Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it. — Frances Wright

Here it is, just days before Christmas, and I must apologize up front — not only for this column’s title (seems I can’t resist a pun no matter how lugubrious the subject matter) — but also because the above quote is a re-tread from an earlier column. 

However, considering the Dec. 8 issue of this paper which contained the comprehensive article, “Swastika report alarms Islanders” by Julie Lane and the heartfelt “Our View” editorial, both concerning the discovery of small swastikas carved into benches in the Heights, I have my reasons.

In Julie’s article, she writes: “No one responded [to the discovery of the swastikas] with a vengeance. But in an age when the rise of antisemitism has been reported nationwide, Islanders have called for education and whatever other actions might prove to be appropriate …”

By last week’s Reporter, there was no more mention of the incident, either in letters or in reportage. There’s no finger-wagging going on here, trust me — antisemitism is heinous — it deserves attention, censure and consequences — but so do the many other heinous incidents of prejudice.

This one was not responded to “with a vengeance,” but another flavor of bigotry might have been: sexism, ageism, racism, homophobia, religion, ethnicity, take your pick. It may seem wise to continue compartmentalizing every grotesque permutation, tailor-making our approaches to each specific prejudice, tackling them one at a time. You know, like breaking down a big job to its component parts to make it easier to handle?

That might work with setting goals for spring cleaning or studying for an exam, but with these entrenched engines of discrimination, that approach simply hasn’t worked, except to the extent that it dilutes our impression of the imminent danger they pose to us individually and as a nation.

I’ve found that depending on whom I’m speaking to, an attempt to discuss any single one of these issues can cause some people to break out in hives, so maybe it’s time  to stop parsing prejudice in any and all of its forms and just call the whole toxic stew what it is: Inequality.

“Diversity training”?  We need “equality training,” because in order to deal with inequality, I guess we’d have to define “equality”  first. The problem is that beyond what we learned in elementary school math, most people don’t really have much of an understanding about what equality, let alone inequality, is, at least not regarding how it operates, or doesn’t, in our nation.

Much as we love to claim it, who among us can fully explain that storied but mysterious sentence from our Declaration of Independence, “All men are created equal.” 

It’s ironic that, in a nation that has built its entire foundation ethos on of universal equality, that we should have such a hard time agreeing on what precisely equality means.

Maybe that’s why we find ourselves clutching our pearls so often, shocked by the daily expressions of prejudice of all kinds — from mild to murderous — that seem to speak, instead, to a systemic inequality in our country that most of us refuse to admit.

If “equality is the soul of liberty,” yet our country is shackled by the weight of a terrible national hypocrisy, one that flies in the face of what we thought we stood for, then yes, there’s a hollowness in the celebration of a sacred holiday that clarions “Peace on earth, good will towards men.”

Shackled. The word puts me in mind of two different kinds of chains that I connect with Christmas.  There were the paper ones my girls made in kindergarten to put on our tree  that along with all the sacred-to-me ornaments made by them, were wrapped up and stored by yours truly year after year like priceless artifacts from the Met, until they emerged the next Christmas, playful and gay and only a little bit worse for the wear.

And then there are the chains that Dickens’ Jacob Marley “forged in life,” the ones he was doomed to drag throughout weary eternity. 

America seems to be dragging the wages of our species’ original sin behind it — that of a lustful, insatiable and inborn need for one group of humans to assert dominion over any other. Inequality.

Is there hope that it can be otherwise?  Is there an authentic kind of equality that can be achieved among humans?  Among Americans?  We need to define our terms.

I’m no biblical scholar, but the Bible has one prescription for equality that, in the meantime, might at least put the “holy” back into “holidays”: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Happy Holidays.