American Resistance: A Mayflower Meditation

After Trump was elected in 2016, we took to the streets in our pink hats, with righteous enthusiasm. Though we wondered how we would keep it up for four years, the moment contrasts with the exhausted present, when even reading the paper can feel like too much. After having campaigned in Pennsylvania most weekends in the fall of 2024, I have attended exactly one protest this year. Like many, I am overwhelmed; it is hard to know how to fight effectively.  

But there may be more to the story. At the ROOM 2.25 Roundtable in April, Rina Lazar, Mohamad Kebbewar, and Anastasios Gaitanidis looked at the life-sapping loneliness that comes with being both a victim and perpetrator. In our discussion, we explored the effect, both internally and in the world, of passively looking away as a particular form of hatred.  

I have been haunted since childhood by concerns about being a “bystander.” As a descendant of Puritans, I am interested in the possibility that this preoccupation is woven, at least in part, from transgenerationally transmitted American themes of vitality and guilt, and also from deeply embedded questions of ostracism. Riddled with this toxic mix, we slip and drift. Perhaps, then, we fail to access the energy we had in 2016, or even last fall. While my people hold no monopoly on passivity, I am thinking about how to reclaim our capacity to work in this moment.  

 

A Puritan Perspective

As a child born in the late 1950s, I was haunted by two related images: I wondered if I would have done enough to stand up to the Nazis if I had lived in pre-war Germany. I also fretted over an ad from an international aid organization that offered the possibility of sponsoring children, which featured the picture of a starving girl, and the text “You can help Ana for $12 a month, or you can turn the page.” Of course there are familial reasons for my preoccupations, but today I am interested in exploring cultural strands in my background.

On first blush, my worry made little sense to me. While I knew we were flawed, I thought of my people as hardworking, intelligent, and committed to democracy and fairness. I grew up on the story of “Tanglefoot Cutter,” an ancestor who fell outside a house while being chased by the British in the Battle of Lexington and Concord. He pretended to be dead; the redcoats stepped over him and killed those who had entered. I understood that we beat the British because we learned from the Native Americans, and hid behind trees rather than marching in formation. My favorite book was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the story of a New England family of girls growing up and struggling to do what was right.  

But my ancestors were also  perpetrators of injustice. My family participated in the Native American genocide. As Bostonians, we benefitted from the China trade, and from an economy built on slavery. My mother’s family had moved South, and I remember asking her if they had owned slaves. She admitted that they had, but said that they had treated the slaves well. Her face turned serious, though, as she added, “At least I hope that they did.”  It was a solemn moment, and we never talked about it again.  

The patterns were set long ago, and even as we try to do better, we continue to benefit at others’ expense. Whereas in 2016, we may have felt connected to the morality and strength of our ancestors, perhaps now we feel either orphaned or disconnected by having let them down. As the leadership is more explicitly self-serving, we may recognize ourselves in them and let go.   

 

Damnation and Ostracism

I have also noticed in myself a deep-seated terror of being cast out, and a corresponding mirror image: an often subtle but pervasive tendency to look away and hold myself aloof.  

In the Calvinist Puritan doctrine of predestination, one has been chosen as saved or damned for eternity. One cannot know which, however, so one anxiously lives as morally as possible, hoping this shows one to be part of the elect.  

“Fling the useless servant out into the dark, the place of wailing and gnashing of teeth”—Matthew 25:30 (NEB)

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him … He will separate men into two groups, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. Then the king will say to those on his right hand, “You have my Father’s blessing; … come, enter, and possess the kingdom that has been ready for you since the world was made.… Then he will say to those on his left hand, ‘The curse is upon you; go from my sight.’”—Matthew 31-41

Despite not having been brought up religiously, these images plagued me. It is my sense that the threat of never-ending isolation is at the core of some of these embedded fragments.  

On the flip side, loving the romance and the keenly drawn characters, my other favorite book was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Published in the early 1800s, and set in late seventeenth-century England, Austen’s novels describe an aristocratic society with individuals who feel and grow. Though thinking of themselves as superior, they respect the farmers and servants they grew up with.  The nouveau-riche, however, are depicted as crass interlopers. Soldiers and sailors weave through the plots; I was an adult before I recognized the unmentioned colonialism and slavery that sustained this world.

I grew up in Pittsburgh (though my mother always stressed that we were really from Boston). Like a character from Austen, the steelworkers’ families that filled the city were partly unreal to me, though I also envied what seemed like their hardy groundedness. I wonder now if this unreality is part of an internal dance that has to do both with a quiet shunning, and with the threat of being cast out. 

Neuropsychologically, a sense of unreality is a mechanism that is set off in situations of extreme helplessness. Near death, it can be good to be anaesthetized. While members of the dominant class are far from impotent, perhaps chronic failure to act on the awareness of another’s pain can lead to pathways of de-realization and paralysis. This collapse may be particularly likely if one is haunted by the threat of ostracism.  

It seems possible that this dulling may contribute to my current state of political fecklessness: while before I felt able to fight, now, with the situation seeming so much worse than in 2016, there are times I wish it would all just go away. I am used to being at least externally “okay,” even when many others are not. Whether rising above or cowering in fear, I lose my capacity to act from a grounded center.   

 

Cross-fertilization

I have noticed that it is not only WASPs who are experiencing lassitude in the face of the current administration. Perhaps those who benefit from and assimilate into this country take in our perpetrator fragments. Maybe they are American versions of universal tendencies. Many rail against income inequality but benefitted quietly as the stock market came back after 2008 and boomed during COVID. Where an Ivy League education has arguably replaced WASP ancestry as an essential pedigree, cancel culture, with its capacity to freeze dissent, may have roots in the fear of the Protestant damnation of ostracism.  

The wish to look away and continue life seems tempting, partly adaptive, and perilously ubiquitous, though not everyone succumbs. Our hope of reclaiming our vitality may lie in recognizing the mix of rage and helplessness within us, and in doing our best to turn to each other and repair what we can.