Zora Neale Hurston has a great scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God when her heroine, Janie, finally realizes that her critical grandmother, a former slave, her domineering first husband and one or two others who influenced her so much had been poisonous influences that made her doubt and hate herself.  She sees them as a row of idols, suddenly revealed not be be special at all, falling off a shelf one after another.   That moment of clarity, as the false idols lay smashed on the floor and Janie no longer was bound by their strong opinions about her life, was the beginning of her self-discovery.

People treat you the way they do because of their inner lives, not always because of yours.  Advice is as often as not given from fear, from jealousy, from resentment, things that may have nothing to do with the object of that advice.  Follow such advice at your own peril, or learn which advice to spit out.

Human affairs are not primarily guided by logic or consistency, nor are the ideals we claim to hold always what we hold them out to be.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator, blah blah blah” for example.  The genius who wrote those lines owned 300 men, women and children who were his property, bought with money inherited from his wealthy parents. Nobody would seriously claim those poor souls were endowed with the same unalienable human rights their master was.  Rhetoric is one thing, reality something more rugged.

We recently celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington.   Pious, eloquent speeches were delivered, reaffirming our deepest held American values: that all humans are worthy of respect, dignity, an equal chance at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  The president made a fine speech, full of feeling and passion.  It almost sounded like commitment to the things he was saying.

But, please, don’t try to sell that empty speechifying to the doomed children of Harlem, Appalachia, inner city slums and rural areas every where.  Sing it from the mountaintops, from the rooftops.  Yeah, right on, baby.

I shuddered recently to see some footage from 1964 where Malcolm X points out, irrefutably, that in the ten years since the Supreme Court ruled “separate but equal” to be in violation of the US Constitution and ordered the integration of public schools “with all deliberate speed” that the schools were as segregated as ever. Now, going on fifty years later, much the same can be said about “all deliberate speed.”   The only thing moving with deliberate speed now is the determined campaign to dismantle public schools and place education, like much of the prison system, in the hands of profit-driven private entrepreneurs.

Some lament how far America has come from the golden age when there was actual democracy here, where groups of now powerless people could unite and have their voices heard.  It may be slightly worse now, or slightly better, depending on your point of view, but representative democracy is still a flawed and difficult experiment and, as a wag once had it, the worst form of government, aside from every other form.

During the golden age of American freedom we did a lot of terrible things to millions of people, many of whom died, or wished they were dead, as the great wealth of this nation was created for the enjoyment of a smaller and smaller group of people.  Advances were made toward greater equality, then backwards steps smartly taken.  

Right now, for some reason that is hard to understand, particularly in light of recent regrettable American military decisions, American warships stand poised to rain down perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars worth of powerful Tomahawk missiles, targeting with powerful explosives certain areas of Syria and the inadvertent “collateral damage” surrounding each target.  Let us not think, for a second, of the hideous irony of naming these weapons of mass destruction after the war axes of a native people our great democracy systematically all but wiped out.

Whatever thinking people might think about this course of hands-off military action against Syria, nothing is likely to dissuade those in charge from doing it.   We are told that the Syrian dictator used poison gas against his people.   We are told this is unacceptable under international law and that we must teach the Syrian dictator a hard lesson.  Let’s see how he feels about US missiles destroying a bunch of his infrastructure, killing a number of his people.   We will teach tyrants about killing people just because they feel like it.

The mask drops away as we hear the official voice of America yell:  Do as I say, not as I do.  Freedom is on the march, for some.  And democracy shall be spread, as long as it’s the democracy we want to see spreading.

“Doesn’t this make you glad to be an American?” the sardonic skeleton of my father remarks from his lofty grave on a hill outside of Peekskill.