Facebook Publication Date: 8/15/2020 12:08

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Hamelin, Egypt and Gangotri: The Plague of Evading Accountability – By our very own Radha Lath

Every time someone mentions the debacle of whether to send our children back to school or not, I picture The Pied Piper. It’s really interesting, in a grim way, how many references to ye olde times we are able to conjure up now that we are living in the era of a plague of sorts.

So. I picture the children following this magnetic persona. In 2020, he represents a few things: the promise of economic resurgence (because, in sending children back to school, parents can hearken once more to their work); a return to the normalcy of learning and play; and maybe even the teachers and healthcare workers upon whom we are counting to assume risks that are propelling them to write their wills. Remember how the Pied Piper vows revenge for lack of payment (lack of accountability)?
In the context of 2020, the story serves to teach us that when we look for miraculous solutions to problems that actually require communal responsibility, we can end up losing our hopes for the future.

I’m fascinated by how many stories involve people with disabilities who testify to the truth. In this one, depending on the version one reads, there is either one physically disabled boy who gets left behind, or there are three (one physically disabled, one deaf, and one blind), and they tell the villagers what happened—the Pied Piper led the band of entranced—abled, if we are being honest—children away.

Everyone is in church when it happens. Isn’t that interesting? What unfolds when we are busy paying lip service to higher ideals, but not actually living out our praxis? What happens when the thing we fear does not care about money and influence, or even displays of piety, but spreads virulently no matter who gathers? There are no rats to blame now. We are all the source of pestilence, every exhalation, every word we utter carrying the possibility of tragedy for someone else.

After a recent Board of Ed meeting in our town, a friend of ours said in frustration that we should not even be talking about ways to return to school. No more hand sanitizer theater. Everything should be about making remote learning accessible, and better. Give teachers and students workable resources. Close the gaps. When he said that, I thought of how Lace enabled us to play a small part in Kinfolk Kollective’s Chromebook initiative, and why it is so crucial to be led by the right Pied Piper, one who won’t get us lost forever in a cave of self delusion, but who will show us how to become instruments of communal good.

Because, as many have pointed out, the families that will be compelled to be first in line to acquiesce to schools reopening will be those with the severest financial constraints; and those whose special needs children have seen their IEP goals evaporate into nothingness. We are so used to the have-nots putting their lives on the line that a reasonable horror in the face of murderous inequity is perceived as whining, and a reluctance to pull up one’s fraying bootstraps. Why are you so unwilling to die for me? the privileged have always scolded the marginalized throughout the ages. Except these days the scolding is prettily dressed up as: We need to build herd immunity! We have to learn to live with COVID! The economy shall live again! You first!

The real question, of course, since we are on the issue of plagues, should be asked back: Why are you surprised that your child might be sacrificed just as easily as mine, when you will not curtail your tyrannical impulses? What else does the Great Equalizer have to do to force our attention? We are skipping over many steps in disease containment, in our desperation to return everyone to their desks and work stations.

What makes a person believe that COVID and its attendant need for precautions are behind us, or fake? I suspect that when we opine that people don’t understand science, we are skipping over a step. That step is the one where people don’t always know how to sift through information and arrive at which is the most plausible, and actionable. We see it in some discussions on Lace on Race, so why not in our communities and ourselves? It is the most beribboned, and the most sinister of the gifts of the past four years, this purposeful muddling of sources of news and information, the disarming of agencies which were intended to be above the bitterness of partisanship. Galileo-like, Dr Fauci is threatened as if he is a traitor because he presents evolving scientific findings. It is unconscionable, and a sign of how low we have fallen.

I am both the daughter and wife of scientists, and can attest to how, even though people have a tendency to deify or demonize scientists, they represent their work, not themselves. Are there egotistical scientists? Sure. But their work is still subject to peer review.

We are not in a collectively receptive frame of mind. It’s as if we were court ordered to attend National Anger Management, and we said no, and went to the gun range and the bar instead. But we have to trust in an unmanipulated reality if we are to emerge from this pandemic.
If we are in such a state of collective clench, how we are to heal from trauma and injustice? It is impossible to do so without stepping up to the accountability plate. We have watched with anguish, as every move that might mitigate harm to the marginalized has been read as Treason. Violence has been the swift reply—legislative, law enforcement, and even discursive violence. Right here on Lace’s page, several people, called kindly to accountability, have responded with psychic violence. It is steeped in the water we drink, this refusal of the invitation to return.

Why, though? I believe the times when we do not want the gift of atonement are when we do not believe that the person offering it to us is our equal. Plain and simple, we do not value their leadership and their assuming any right to call us out; and we are afraid that our selfhood and agency will be ground into the dirt, which—truth—is what we knew all along was their lot, but we watched it dispassionately and claimed not to know that we were the cause.

The scriptures of the world teach us that true accountability is only possible when we intend for our return to the ways of righteousness to be a blessing to everyone around us. I’ve always been intrigued by how the deities in these stories get invested in the affairs of one specific clan. Besides the fact that the human characters are Everyman, it has to be because that clan has immense future promise, but also because the impact of their misdeeds or familial ruptures is felt by more than themselves.

I am thinking specifically of two stories—the story of Joseph’s reconciliation with his brothers (in the early stories of the Israelites); and the story of how Ganga came to earth (in Hinduism).

As a result of being deeply resented by his brothers, Joseph ended up being sold into slavery in Egypt. After a great many mishaps and adventures, he made good, and rose high in the Pharaoh’s court. When he encountered his brothers again, he engineered a situation where, presented with a similar set of circumstances, his brothers were invited to make a different (and better) choice. And they did. T’shuvah is that choice to do better than we have done before, and in so doing, we achieve ethical self transformation.
The brothers became about more than themselves, though. Joseph, whose dreams used to enrage his brothers because they lacked context and made him seem like a powermonger, learned to interpret the dreams of others. What does it mean to interpret dreams for people? It means that you see them as they really are; you show them to themselves; you help them not to fear the messages from their own psyches; you open the way for them to see what ideas they hold in tension; and you do not abuse the vulnerability they have shown to you, instead accompanying them as they process the deepest truths and desires in their own hearts.

I cannot possibly delve here into what imagery I perceive in each brother’s portrayal, but they participated in their own release from the pain inflicted by parental favoritism, and were transformed willingly by their experiences. This idea that we might heal collectively, and be tenderhearted and vulnerable again with the very people who are at the heart of our primal trauma, is the nugget of gold that is revealed when we dig deep into the story of Joseph. Racial justice and reconciliation are not so far away from this site of healing, are they? Are we prepared for the work it will entail, to lose the boundaries we thought were inevitable and eternal, to embrace people we thought had closed off from us forever? Partly, like the brothers, we have to acknowledge that some aspects of our inherited identities will never transform, just like they knew that Jacob, as their father, would never give up on his partiality. But if we name that hurt we all come from, we might be able to move past the hold it has on us.

The story of Ganga (or the River Ganges) is one of ending the cycle of inter generational trauma. Bhagiratha performed many spiritual penances so that Ganga would come to earth to flow over his sinful ancestors’ ashes, thus releasing them from their pasts. There are a lot of details I must omit so that my essay does not turn into a novel, but I want to focus on how, if even one person in a clan decides that the trauma and violence will end with them, many elements in the universe inevitably rush to aid in the possibilities.

So we can see the penances that Bhagiratha put himself through, as his openness to being active in changing the destiny of the clan. The fruit of these difficult penances was that Brahma appeared before Bhagiratha, and told him that Ganga was the needed purifying element, but that Her force would be too strong for the earth to bear, so Bhagiratha must go to Shiva, and ask Him to intercede.

This image of an irrepressible instinct kept in check by a greater, more steadying force—it is timely. A massive undertaking whose goal is to bring about a collective shift cannot afford to be rendered futile because of unchecked impulses which might wreak devastation on an already beleaguered land and its people. I won’t lie—I love also the image of female power being called on to absolve people of sin, and not offering to hold Herself back.

Shiva agreed to take on this labor, and, after many efforts on Ganga’s part to stymie Him, He held Her in His locks of hair, and the mitigated flow of water cleansed away the sins of Bhagiratha’s ancestors. People continue to bathe in the Ganga, and to offer their departed loved one’s ashes to Her waters. The mitigation of harm, if it is to be true repentance, can never only be for ourselves. It must offer salvation to all, right here on earth, not in some promised hereafter, and it must contain the possibility of lifting up from oppression even people we may never meet or know, so unconditional must our actions to end violence be.

These days, some other countries are starting to peek out from under strict lockdowns. Their numbers are down. I read their news as if it is utopian fiction, because of the escape it affords me to the fantasy of better possibilities. The US has a lot of work to do if we are to quit being the diseased flotsam of the world. A lot of that work is internal. The mirror that has been held up to how we really are has not revealed much splendor. We look like brothers who would sell their own brother. We look like kings who defied the Gods and are willing to see our descendants pay the price. We look like people who talked grandly about higher ideals, then ran away from their realization.

What will it take for us to come back to the table, but with the conviction that the future is worth transforming for?

Radha.

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