In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves, and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
I am lucky to have a livelihood that can adjust to the pandemic in relative safety. I teach creative writing at a university. For me, working from home is merely an inconvenience, while many of my fellow citizens are unemployed or at risk at work.
The University of Maine has welcomed students back on campus (and seen at least one COVID-19 outbreak). But I won’t be in a classroom this fall. Half of my classes were online before the virus, and it wasn’t hard to convert the others.
Maine isn’t a bad place to be marooned in. We’ve been spared the worst of COVID and we have, so far, avoided the violence around street protests in other parts of the country.
We see the confrontations mostly from the comfort of our homes (or phones). The rioters and vigilantes and police and protesters are characters in a drama. But for the people who live in Kenosha, or Ferguson, or Minneapolis or dozens of other American communities, it’s a true story.
And we see them through the lens of our life experience. We choose sides quickly, and are reluctant to acknowledge the merits of opposing viewpoints. But humans have invented other lenses. Literature is one of them.
The best justification for college students to read and write fiction is that it forces them to consider things from a perspective other than their own. Create a character that isn’t you, and tell a story from that person’s point of view.
It’s that simple, and that hard. Imagine yourself in a different body, a different family, in a different place, with a different set of experiences. How will that character react to threats, challenges, and obstacles?
It’s hard because most of us are not used to thinking that way. It takes practice and effort of will. Most people aren’t writers. Most of my students won’t write fiction beyond college. It’s not a practical course of study. Only a handful of writers make a living at it. So why does it matter?
I’ve always resisted the notion of college as a linear path to a career. College students should write, not because the skills will be sought after in the job market, but because writing engenders empathy, which will carry over into responsibility, in any occupation or endeavor. Some of my best creative writing students have been science majors. Some students struggle with sentence structure or the courage to present written work to an audience. But the value is in the attempt, not the finished product.
And most importantly, creative writing taps the imagination needed to see, and perhaps begin to understand, another person’s thoughts and feelings, in literature and in the real world.
The police in the rural Maine of my youth were benevolent figures who knew my parents, and when I ran afoul of them I would be in trouble at home, too. I’ve had other encounters, good and bad, with other police in other places, but I was never harmed or threatened. In San Diego, where I edited a neighborhood newspaper, the foot patrol cops were friends who stopped by the office to chat.
But imagine growing up black in a poor neighborhood where police sometimes shoot people dead for shoplifting, or some other minor offense. What would be your overall impression of the police? You would watch how they treated you and those close to you – your friends and family – and you would begin to form impressions and make judgments, and, in moments of crisis, you would act on them. You might, for example, make a calculation to run from an officer rather than submit to arrest.
A white man from rural Maine finds that rationale hard to resolve. But I’ve never had a gun pulled on me while reaching into a bag for my driver’s license. I’ve never been forced to the ground in a case of mistaken identity. I’ve never had my door kicked in because the people one door down had drugs.
Black Lives Matter did not spring from nothing. To deny that they have legitimate grievances is to deny reality. There are bad cops, and people of color are abused and sometimes killed by them. Citizens have the constitutional right to gather in public to protest this.
At the same time, there are bad criminals who need to be apprehended. The job of the police is to arrest them and guide them into the funnel of the criminal justice system. But is this best accomplished in military gear, with military weapons, and a “shoot first, ask questions later” attitude? Are the cops executioners?
And what’s it like to be a cop, in this gun-happy culture of ours? To be alert all the time, making life-or-death decisions in split seconds? Perhaps the police are calmer in Europe, and don’t shoot as many citizens, because they don’t have to operate under the premise that everybody’s armed and that their lives are in constant danger. This is the mentality of war, not law enforcement.
Is that where we are in this volatile season: on the brink of war? What else can you call it when a mother drives her 17-year-old vigilante son to the “front” (in this case, Kenosha), where he will engage in battle with people he has never met, but nonetheless despises? Millions of Americans seem all too eager to fight it out in the streets of their cities and towns. Our current president seems eager to encourage it.
It’s all too easy to cast political disagreements as battles between good and evil. Police brutality, vigilantism, looting, and destruction can all be justified when an argument is framed in terms of war. We’re a good ways down that road already.
In the face of all this, we have story. We have the arts. We have fiction, and the central lesson of fiction, which is empathy. Humans have the ability to think outside of themselves, to imagine their world through the eyes of another. If this is lost, then so is civilization, and humankind will descend back into the savage collection of individuals and tribes it has been for most of its history.
