Poetry Pushback

From the time of the Hebrew prophets to Zora Neale Hurston and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, poets have used the power of the written word to push back against oppression and enunciate what the times require. It was the poem "Invictus," written by William Ernest Henly in 1875, that gave Nelson Mandela courage to endure his eighteen years of imprisonment on Robben Island and emerge victorious as the leader of South Africa's liberation movement. Poetry rises up from the depths and fortifies the soul.

Here is a poem titled "I Look At The World," by African American author Langston Hughes, written in 1930 but not published until 2009 when the verses were found penciled into the back of a book from his archives.

I look at the world

From awakening eyes in a black face—

And this is what I see:

This fenced-off narrow space   

Assigned to me.

I look then at the silly walls

Through dark eyes in a dark face—

And this is what I know:

That all these walls oppression builds

Will have to go!

I look at my own body   

With eyes no longer blind—

And I see that my own hands can make

The world that's in my mind.

Then let us hurry, comrades,

The road to find.

With the Smithsonian Museum of African American History under fire from the Trump administration and its director terminated for pushing allegedly "divisive narratives," we must continue to celebrate the literature, art and music of our nation's past, acknowledging America's shortcomings and failures in order to build a brighter future. "Let us hurry, comrades, the road to find."

American Greatness

 Trump Orders Smithsonian Institution to Promote ‘American Greatness’  Headline in New York Times, March 28, 2025

America's true greatness has always lain in its ability to acknowledge and then mend its own defects.  The ideals we prize - liberty, equality, justice for all - have always been aspirational, more prescriptive than descriptive.  Facing the dark chapters of our history is what enables us to overcome our own shortcomings and do better.

To end the robber capitalism of the Gilded Age,  for instance, it took muck racking journalists to expose the horrors of the sweatshops and slaughterhouses where immigrant workers, many of them youngsters, toiled long hours at starvation wages.  Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.  It's not a flattering picture of life in the Chicago slums.  But by exposing the grim reality of American urban life at the turn of the twentieth century, a movement arose to end child labor, to create a minimum wage, to insure the cleanliness and safety of factories that had previously churned out tainted meat and disease-ridden food.

America has always improved when it's been willing to see its ugly underbelly.

In the town of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I grew up, there are now memorials and museums and cultural centers dedicated to telling the story of the Greenwood Massacre, the worst race riot in U.S. history.  In 1921, over three hundred residents of the prosperous section of the north end known as "Black Wall Street" were murdered by white vigilantes, while law enforcement collaborated or, at best, did nothing.  Shops and churches and homes were torched.  Yet for decades, this atrocity was concealed by town fathers, considered unmentionable, censored from textbooks that I read in high school.  Only seventy-five years after the fact did a Truth and Reconciliation commission finally emerge to interview living witnesses and consider the question of reparations.

When I returned to my home town not long ago for a fiftieth high school reunion, it seemed to me that Tulsa was a much healthier city than the one I remembered from adolescence.  Segregation was gone.  Soon after my visit, Tulsa elected its first black mayor. No monetary reparations were ever made.  But the city had moved forward - not by cloaking its past, as had once been the case, but by confronting its history head on.

Through his executive orders, Mr, Trump would like our museums and historical monuments "to focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people," rather than dwelling on the painful episodes of the past.  Similarly, our national parks should showcase "the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.” (Never mind that his other executive orders slash funding for these parks and open protected public lands to mining, logging and drilling.)

Owning up to our society's failures is essential to our common progress.  In prayerful words written by Katherine Lee Bates over a century ago, "America, America, God mend thine every flaw."  In that work of repair and mending,  God needs our help, and we need an honest reckoning of how far we've come, and how far we have yet to go.  

The Real Danger of AI

 The real danger of AI?  It will turn us into pets!

Think how thousands of years ago, ancestors of today’s canines gathered round human campfires, hoping to scavenge a bone from these bipedal apes.  A symbiotic relationship eventually emerged.  As pets, dogs began to worship the Master species, following people around and more or less willingly doing their bidding.  Why?  Dogs no longer had to hunt.  People met their animal needs and, in return, canines gladly became subservient.

Now imagine a not too distant future when people begin to worship their devices: smart phones and large language models that are so clever they can think for us!  They solve our problems, do the hard work of hunting for answers.  Like dogs who trot at the heel of their owners, people will begin to carry their phones and laptops everywhere they go.  (In fact, this could already be happening!)  The devices entertain us. They make us feel empowered.  They feed our hungers for affirmation and attention, even a kind of intimacy.  In return, the machines ask so little of us: just endless kilowatts, plus our slavish devotion.  

Yes, artificial intelligence poses other dangers too, like battlefield munitions that fire without human operators, perhaps ready to morph into Terminators. But my guess is that the human race will succumb to seduction–the dominating spell of the gadgets–without a shot being fired.  Like dogs (another highly social creature), people will happily subordinate themselves to the pack leader, the Alpha of AI.

Only some folks may remain feral, like those canines of the last Ice Age who chose to stay wolves rather than change into Great Danes or chihuahuas.  These wild ones will continue to read newspapers and to write poems without ChatGPT.  They will solve important problems–like Einstein did–with tools no more complicated than a pencil and paper.  They will frequent religious assemblies that ask questions where algorithms fail and they will ponder Gods that cannot be carried in a side pocket.  And they will have real friends, even though they are not on Facebook.

The dogs will look down on these unplugged souls as benighted, uncivilized and anti-progress.  And the wolves will regard the dogs as what they are: unfree, less than and degenerate.

Is this prophecy, prediction or just crazy talk?  Who can say?   But if your first impulse is to ask Google, you already know the answer, just like you know how to shake hands, lie down and stay.  

Good Boy.