Azzi: We're in a civil war for America's soul

Eight months ago I wrote: "For much more than a decade, I have been witnessing walls being built, screens being erected, communities being partitioned by ignorance and prejudice — and it frightens me... At no time have I been more frightened than today ... "

I was wrong.

I am much more frightened today than eight months ago, more frightened than I was 55 years ago when, together with some friends, I was turned away from the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the evening of June 5, 1968.

We, a clutch of Senator Eugene McCarthy supporters, had driven to join friends working for Senator Robert Kennedy, and share in their celebrations: McCarthy had, after all, just lost the California presidential primary, and Bobby had triumphed.

Or so we believed.

Bobby, we learned as we arrived - no one I knew called him Senator - had been shot. He was declared dead the next day.

Hate, had triumphed.

1968 began quietly.  After responding to a draft notice and being deferred for health reasons, I decided to become more active in protesting the Vietnam War and volunteered to be "Clean-for-Gene" when he visited Manchester, NH in January.

I remember meeting his press secretary, Seymour Hersh, who asked, in a perfunctory manner, "What do you do?"

"Well," I stuttered, "I'm studying architecture, I'm a freelance designer. I'm really into photography."

"We don't need an architect or designer. We need a staff photographer. Can you do it?"

"Yes."

The job was mine. I stayed by McCarthy's side until Chicago's Democratic National Convention in August '68; my first legitimate job as a photographer, a job that instilled a passion for photojournalism, justice, and underdogs that persists to this day.

Days later, on January 31, 1968, the Tet Offensive began in Vietnam.

Days later, it seems, the Orangeburg Massacre happened when Highway Patrol officers opened fire on the campus of SC State, targeting about 200 protesters who had previously demonstrated against racial segregation at a local bowling alley. The officers murdered three protesters and wounded 28.

Days later, MLK was assassinated.

Days later, Bobby was assassinated in The City of Angels.

By the end of 1968 many Americans were wondering if the country would survive the upheaval, the violence, Vietnam, and Richard Nixon.

It survived because most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, at that time subscribed to a common narrative and shared an affirmative belief that all citizens - regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or gender,  were endowed with inalienable rights that could never be denied or diminished.

Today, far too many days later, it appears that Americans are further apart than they were over 50 years ago; further apart, I believe, in understanding what the gift of such rights means, in understanding for whom they were meant.

This past week, I watched in wonder on MSNBC as political commentator Mike Barnicle wondered out loud about "ordinary people" who have "immense fealty toward Donald Trump" and wondered why they believe as they do.

Why, I suspect he was struggling to understand, do they have an unreasonable dedication to a criminally-indicted, twice-impeached, insurrection-inspiring, racist, grifter and sexual abuser who has expressed a patriarchal right to grab women if he so desires.

You're not able to understand it, Mike, because your "ordinary people" look like you and not like me; they probably look like people who live in your neighborhood, not like people in Dorchester or the South Bronx.

You don't understand it, Mike, because I believe you are mirroring what your white privileged life has conditioned you to see: that people who look like you will be rational and reasonable according to your definition of what is rational and reasonable.

Mirroring, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz explained to Vanity Fair in 2003, is assuming that enemies like Saddam Hussein “will be rational according to our definition of what is rational,” the outcome of which were faulty assumptions and a failed occupation in Iraq.

Barnicle's "mirror imaging," perhaps a form of white myopia, is dangerous as it induces a form of blindness that limits one's perspective and imagination to what has already been seen.

Implicit, I believe, from Barnicle's perspective, is that if we try to understand their grievances and resentments, if we're sympathetic to their affection for Trump's racism, authoritarianism, and greed, then America can negotiate some sort of path of accommodation or reconciliation and healing.

That's not going to happen.

Not only is that not going to happen, but even wishing it to happen is dangerous because it legitimizes the discriminatory and ahistorical narratives embraced by nativists and xenophobes.

The America that made it through the turbulence of the 60s has been fractured over the last decade and no longer exists.

There is no common ground to be negotiated with bigots. Days later, now years later, we must acknowledge we're in a civil war for America's soul, a battle between Americans who no longer share common geography or intimacy.

Barnicle's privileged speculation about "ordinary people" suggests a differentiation from the non-ordinary - the Other - who presumably aren't part of the discourse but who are most at risk.

The Other - the non-ordinary, caste-defined, minorities, non-cisgendered, unhoused, undereducated, vulnerable and hungry Americans - those who are most at risk in America - are the targets of a fearsome, fanatical white evangelical nationalist movement.

“Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningless actions," Judith Guest wrote in her first novel Ordinary People. "Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.”

Be very afraid.

While I believe it's beyond forgiveness I fully believe, at this moment, days and years later, that Donald Trump has a good chance of being America's next president, swept back into power by "ordinary people" easily swayed by demagogic visions of an authoritarian state embracing white supremacist ideals.

Such an election would have nothing to do with American values; it would have everything to do with whether we will continue to define ourselves as a constitutional republic or as an autocracy.

Over the years I have been told to believe - to paraphrase Thomas Paine - that to secure my own liberty I must guard even my enemy from oppression.

Will my enemy, in return, guard me?

Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Azzi: We're in a civil war for America's soul