I lived in Pittsburgh for nine years. I know Squirrel Hill well. It’s a storied neighborhood of big sycamores, winding streets, and lovely old houses. It’s near Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, where I used to spend a couple evenings a week teaching writing to eager and not-so-eager freshmen. It’s close to WQED, where I used to work, editing Pittsburgh, the city’s magazine. Fred Rogers worked in the same building and lived nearby. I used to drink and eat at the Squirrel Hill Cafe, aka the “Squirrel Cage,” a great old neighborhood bar.
So when the news of a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue appeared on my laptop last Saturday morning, I didn’t have to imagine the scene; I could easily visualize it. The latest episode of the American Horror Story was playing out in one of my old haunts — just as it’s played out in Las Vegas, Charleston, Parkland, Sutherland, Texas, and 151 other American hometowns since 2016. Just as it also played out in Kentucky, last week, and in Florida, where a would-be assassin attempted to kill two former presidents and a host of other notable Democratic politicians with pipe bombs.
The Squirrel Hill Cafe | Facebook
America is infected with hate and violence, and the disease is spreading. Most presidents, when they have seen a divide in the country, have sought to heal it. This president sees the divide and seeks to exploit it. Polarization and rage have become the new normal, and it’s coming from the top down.
Can we change course? Yes, but it’s going to take dedication and commitment and time and unrelenting activism — the kind of citizen involvement that drove the civil rights movement and stopped the Vietnam War — the kind of activism that jams the gears of power and changes the country’s direction. As Patti Smith sang, “the people have the power.” We just have to tap it.
It’s easy to be cynical, but if you doubt the power of activism, I point you to Memphis, Tennessee, where in just the past couple of years, activists have stopped the city council from letting the Memphis Zoo take over Overton Park’s Greensward for parking; brought down Confederate statues in city parks; stopped the TVA from drilling wells that would tap our precious aquifer; joined with ACLU to stop the Memphis Police Department from surveilling citizen activists; and halted (as I write this) the city council from using tax-payer funds to promote three self-serving ordinances.
That doesn’t include the women’s marches, the Black Lives Matter march on the I-40 bridge, the marches against this administration’s inhumane immigration policies, and numerous other citizen-led movements. The pot has been stirred. The people are woke. And we are a week away from judgment day — or, better said, the first judgment day, for this will not be a quick change.
I do not for a minute allow myself to believe there will be a magical “blue wave” that will transform the country’s zeitgeist next Tuesday. I do believe there will be gratifying and surprising victories, just as I believe there will also be depressing and frustrating defeats. But I am hopeful the pendulum has swung as far as it can toward “nationalism” and the open promotion of ethnic hatred and divisiveness. And I am hopeful the plague of angry male white supremacists wreaking havoc and terror on innocent Americans on a weekly basis can be stopped, or at least forced back into the sewers from whence it came.
After the attack on the Tree of Life, the Pittsburgh Muslim community immediately offered aid and comfort to their Jewish brothers and sisters. That is America at its best, and it’s who we can be if we resist seeing each other as “globalists” or “nationalists” or “bad hombres” or “Fake News” purveyors or “Pocahontas” or whatever other hate-boxes the president seeks to put us into. I believe Americans are better than the president thinks we are. We just have to show it. Starting next week.