I wrote this essay in the immediate aftermath of the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol but was uncertain whether I should share it. Today, however, three weeks since that assault, it is all too clear that the public’s attention is already moving on. We are drifting into national forgetfulness, as we have done so often before and as we must not do again. It is crucial that we remember what happened on January 6th and that it has happened many times before. Otherwise, it will happen again.

The storming of the Capitol by a violent mob on Wednesday, January 6^th, left many Americans stunned. It should not have. Violent white supremacists committing insurrection with impunity is business as usual in the United States of America. January 6^th was simply a repetition of one of the oldest themes in our history.

“Let not man glory in this that he loveth his country, let him rather glory in this that he loveth his kind.”^[i]

A little over ninety years ago, in the fall of 1929, the U.S stock market crashed. The world at the time was far less interconnected than it is now, but ties of mutual dependence were already so tight that, like a string of pearls sliding down a drain, once one country went over the edge, the rest were doomed to follow. Over the next ten years, the nations of the world tried every remedy they could think of—raising tariffs on imported goods, creating welfare states, nationalizing industries, putting fascist dictators into power. None of it helped. The Great Depression lingered on. Why? Because the Great Depression was a global crisis—perhaps the first in human history—and the solutions put forward were, one and all, national solutions.

What do the humanities do in a crisis? Are they—and the humanists that practice them—useless in the face of great human suffering, or do they still have something to offer humanity?

Lately it seems that I am being repeatedly confronted by my own ignorance. In keeping with that spirit, I must now admit that I only this year learned that Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered  on August 28, 1963, exactly ten years and one day before my birth. Continue reading ““I have a dream today!””

[UPDATED 8/14/2017] I woke up this morning to the news of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. Charlottesville is not merely a random place on the map to me. I spent four years there as a graduate student at the University of Virginia. Like many people who move there, I quickly fell in love with the town. Continue reading ““So powerful is the light of unity …””