The other day, Michael came home with three beautiful old books that had belonged to his great-grandfather.
His great-grandfather emigrated from Italy back in the day and settled in Syracuse. We have an antique standing radio that was his as well as a collection of old Enrico Caruso records. The radio is now in our living room between the two windows with the album on top. We also have an ancient leather strop of his hanging in our bathroom that he once used to sharpen his razor.
So much of the stuff that we keep seems to have no meaning, and yet these few objects are all we have from the man. Michael never met him. He’s the only one of Michael’s eight great-grandparents that we have any tangible objects from.
Our dining room table belonged to one of my great-grandfathers on my father’s side. He bought it on sale from a store that was going out of business well over a hundred years ago. I also have an old leather travel kit and an eyeglass case that were once owned by one of my great-grandfathers on my mother’s side. He was in the military and wrote down each of the places he’d been stationed on the outside of the eyeglass case. I also have a lovely set of Shakespeare’s plays bound in red leather that the same great-grandfather had given to my great-grandmother in the short time they’d known each other. She died of Blackwater fever right after my grandfather was born. “To Nora, love Mac,” is written inside each of the little volumes.
I have been trying to understand the nuances surrounding the present-day conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In a discussion between scholars representing both sides of the equation that was recently published in the New York Times Magazine, the panel seems to reach a consensus that post-World War I is when everything started going to hell.
In 1917, while the war was still being fought, the British published a letter from Arthur Balfour, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, to Lord Rothchild, who was a figurehead in the British Jewish community. The letter, now known as the Balfour Declaration read in part, “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
Everything about this, beyond the basic sentiment, was vague. How, where, and when were questions left unanswered. The British wrote this to encourage Jewish support for the war effort. In 2017, the British Government finally admitted that maybe the document should have also mentioned something about the protection of Palestinian Arab rights.
The League of Nations, established by the Allies following the great war carved up the former Ottoman Empire into protectorates, each overseen by a different European nation. Britain was given the mandate to govern Palestine and Iraq and France was put in charge of Lebanon and Syria.
None of this has turned out well. Nobody alive today, however, had any part in the creation of this mess. This is something that we have all inherited. Dead people chose this path and now we have to follow it.
There is quite a lot around us that none of us ever had a say in. Capitalism, for one. None of us chose to live in this capitalistic economy, we were born into it. Unless we opt to move to another country, it becomes our lot to figure out how to live by the rules we’ve been given.
Our religions are another. We were all born either into a religious community or outside of one. In neither case were we given a choice. As we grew older the opportunity to switch presented itself. Often, the choice we made was to abandon or flee from what we grew up with. That’s not quite the same thing as creating something new. That’s having a reaction to something that was already there.
Christianity is only just two thousand years old. Before that, our ancestors were born into a world that worshiped a different god. Or gods. Judaism is older, but not by a lot, historically speaking. God sent down the Torah through Moses on Mt. Sinai about three thousand three hundred and twenty years ago. Islam, in case you’re wondering, is younger than both. The Prophet Mohammed only began preaching in Mecca during the Seventh Century.
Nobody these days is being born into households that still worship the Roman or the Greek gods. I say nobody, but there might be an outlier or two still following along. A few millennia ago, those old myths were exactly the stories you’d be navigating if you lived within the boundaries of the Roman or Greek Empires. A few centuries ago, the African American population would have been under the thrall of a whole pantheon of gods. These days, while they might inherit echoes of those ancient beliefs, one of the current big three has probably taken their place.
One of the techniques that producers often use to get their casts to do things they don’t want to do is to offer them what seems like a choice. You can do this horrible thing OR you can do this horrible thing. By giving their companies something that seems like a choice, though, they can usually get what they want out of them without as much of a fight. Whichever way it goes, the producers are still going to get what they want. I’ve resorted to doing this same thing many times. It’s amazing how effective it is. Horrifying, but amazing, nonetheless.
That’s where we are now. We find ourselves choosing between things that few of us really want either way. We think we are making these huge choices but, in reality, the big choices have already been made – and not by us. We have inherited the idea that there will be two candidates running for President who will represent different ideologies and we can choose between them. What if we don’t want either? What if we don’t like the whole idea of our government at all? There’s nothing on the ballot that represents that choice.
The two-party system is a recent phenomenon. Abraham Lincoln was elected from a field of four candidates, each representing a different party.
It takes an enormous amount of energy and determination to put forward a choice that is radically different from anything we have been born into. To shove us even slightly off the course we are taking takes a lifetime of unrelenting push at least.
During the French Revolution, the humble students and general population overthrew the monarchy and then started something new. The new was new for a while until it became just the thing that was, and people started feeling trapped by it.
The same thing happened during our own American Revolution. Instead of being beholden to a distant monarch, Americans decided that they would make the choices about how they were going to live their lives themselves. They fought long and hard to win the right to do that. Countless people lost their lives so that could happen.
As it turns out, the people behind that revolution weren’t thinking about everyone, they were only thinking about themselves. They created a government by and for rich white men. Everyone else was left out. We still haven’t properly evened out the playing field.
Two hundred and fifty years later, none of the people who decided what our new government would be back then are still alive. None of us, living in the United States now, had any say whatsoever over how our government should be built and structured. There was nobody to speak up and say, well what about the women? What about the enslaved? When we want to try something new, the reaction is always, well, that’s not what’s in the Constitution so we can’t do it. That document was written 237 years ago and agreed to by our eighth or ninth great-grandparents. They didn’t even have electricity.
If you are a real estate developer, you can put up a new building in Manhattan, but it must fit within the existing framework of what is already here. You can’t just put something up wherever you feel like it, you might end up blocking a street. The design of a new building often relates to what is surrounding it. It is either trying to blend in or to stand out. It is never just there on its own – it’s in a constant artistic dialogue with everything surrounding it.
Governmentally, it is much the same. You make decisions and advocate for legislation within the lines of what is already there. When there are disputes, they aren’t usually over the big things but rather between things that, in the end, don’t really matter all that much.
Whatever choices we make today are limited by what our Founding Fathers created. Yes, there have been alterations and accommodations made, but it’s all still much the same as it was. 237 years later, we still haven’t been able to make women equal. We aren’t choosing how we want to be governed today – that choice has long been made. Instead, we are often choosing between two things that don’t really matter in the long run. The rich white men still get what they want.
The wars we are in all over the planet have almost all been started by people who’ve gone. They made the early decisions that set us on the path to wherever we are going now. They made value judgments. They narrowed our options down to something manageable for them. Then they died and the people who came after were saddled with what was left.
In the case of Israel vs. Palestine, there’s far too much history behind it all to make any sort of easy decision to solve it that anyone at all will find acceptable. We didn’t start this war, but we now find ourselves in a place where we need to try and stop it. We have traveled down so many windy, treacherous roads that it’s impossible to go back now. The only thing we can do is keep pushing forward. Not because we want to at all. We’d like to be doing something else, but a whole bunch of dead rich white people decided to do things a certain way and that’s what they left us. We find ourselves saddled with a choice between a path that will take us into quicksand or one that will send us over a cliff. How do we choose between two equally awful options?
Michael’s and my apartment was built in 1941. When we moved in, we pretty much had to take it as it came. We did end up knocking down part of a wall between the kitchen and the living room. It was an absurdly expensive thing to do because some long-dead developer had decided to run our electrical system through the very spot we wanted to be open. In 1941, we might very well have agreed with the builder to keep the wall up to separate the kitchen from the rest of the apartment. Eighty years later, however, we wanted something else, so we paid some folks to change it.
When everything is said and done, our current apartment doesn’t look that different from how it must have looked in 1941. We took down a railing, changed some plumbing and light fixtures, and painted the walls a few colors that would probably not have been acceptable all those decades ago.
The pieces we have from our great-grandfathers fit in perfectly with everything else we have. We’ve figured out how to make them work.
That’s what we all do – we make what we’ve been given work. Whether it’s our religion, our government, or just a box of some old stuff, we will find a way to live with it. At least that’s what we try to do. None of it may be what we’d choose if we started from scratch, but we are never starting from scratch. We are so far away from that point of inception; we make do with changing a few cosmetic things and call it a day.
I was trying to think about something that has been added to the world that is brand-new at least in terms of having begun in my lifetime. The internet is what comes to mind. Our nieces and nephews have already been born into a world where it exists. They will never know one where it doesn’t. In a couple of generations, everyone who was around at the beginning of the internet will be dead and buried. Their great-grandchildren will be sitting around wondering how the hell things got to be the way they are and how they make peace with it. Sorry.
The three books belonging to Michael’s great-grandfather are remarkable objects. They do need to go somewhere which means that something else in the apartment will have to go. I just did a major purge a month or two ago and already things are creeping back in. There are a couple of things in my line of sight that I think can go. Sometimes it’s easier to clear things out in steps.
Not everything we inherit is bad. Some of it is amazing. We sometimes just need to adjust it a bit to make it work.
It does feel like we might be coming up on the tail end of capitalism. I don’t know that Michael and I will live to see what follows. Our nieces and nephews might. The seeds of whatever that may be are already in the ground and germinating. By the time they see the light of day, the people who planted them won’t even be memories. “How did this happen?” everyone will say. “I dunno,” will be the answer, “It is what it is.”
“We can’t fix everything,” the new owners of our apartment in those far-off days to come might say, “but we can certainly block up that ridiculous hole between the living room and the kitchen. What on earth were those queens thinking?”
Wonderfully thought provoking!