Nevertheless, the case can be made that she created him. Intentional injustice spawns the agents of its own downfall. Certainly not an immaculate, but let’s call it payback, conception. And now she’s trying to destroy him. Let’s call that an attempted very-late-term abortion by smear campaign.

Back in 2002, Susan Collins voted for the Iraq and Afghan wars. Platner, intent on serving his country, served four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, He came home suffering from PTSD—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—and exhibited many of the symptoms that are being exposed currently in the media: anger, substance abuse, dysfunctional relationships, etc. Like the current Iran War, the Iraq War was a war of choice (war of choice is a euphemism for a crime against humanity) promoted by the George W. Bush administration. They were lying about the reasons for the war. Senator Collins knew that. For political and economic—or what we might call military-industrial complex—reasons, she supported the war, betrayed the soldiers’ sense of duty, and sent young men like Platner into the cauldron of atrocious violence for a cynical lie. The violence and hypocrisy really screwed him up. Thank you for your service.

So, in effect, she gave birth to Platner. But the delivery pains were all his, not hers. No war, no Platner.

Politicians hate consequences; an exposed lie interrupts the flow of corporate donations. Politicians get by on a daily dose of political mifepristone so mistakes don’t come back to haunt them. Platner is the baby that’s come home to haunt her, the baby that comes in with the bath water. She will deny him and attack him for all her billionaire backers are worth, but the connective tissue of historical DNA can’t be fudged.

An ethical law is at work in this maternity case. It’s called Sacred Trust. The idea is the sacred trust that must exist between soldiers and their government in a democratic society. Soldiers agree to sacrifice their bodies and lives, and agree to take onto their souls the stark responsibility of ending other’s lives to protect the state’s Constitution, that is, committing murder with a government blessing. In turn, the state agrees to require such sacrifice only when absolutely necessary. If the state breaks that trust for imperialist or frivolous reasons, where does that leave the soldier? Then nothing can morally justify the atrocities committed or witnessed. The soldier is mired in a morass of anger and guilt, in the grip of what’s called moral injury. Graham Platner is one such soldier. The chicken has come home to roost.

If Susan Collins had the courage to look Graham Platner in the eye, she’d know; a mother always does. And she’d beware the wrath of her betrayed child.

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At that time I had resolved to paint 50 people with whom I could surround myself, people whose struggles to insist that we live up to our proclaimed ideals of justice and equality had made a difference, people who modeled the courageous citizenship which we need now. 2004 was the year I hit that 50 mark, and realized I was just getting started. It was the year that I realized that not all of my heroes were historical figures but that I was living amidst many inspiring people who were alive and willing us toward becoming a more perfect nation.

Kozol stood out to me because of his life-long devotion to exposing and improving the brutal inequalities in public education. Despite Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, our inner-city schools are largely as segregated and underfunded as they were 80 years ago.

I am now 79 and Kozol will turn 90 in September—time to catch up with him and find out what he is up to.

Turns out he has not “retired” but is still driven by love and rage—love for the students, rage at the system that serves them so poorly. He is fighting to convince the American public that we have not yet realized the aspirational promise of equality in education. In his most recent book, he argues that we are, in fact, headed in the opposite direction. Released in April 2026, We Shall Not Bow Down, Children of Color Under Siege: An Invocation to Resistance is described as the culminating work of Kozol’s career, where he directly confronts President Trump’s assault on diversity and independent thinking and the dignity of teachers in the public schools.

And this from the publisher, Seven Stories Press:

“[Kozol] takes aim directly at the disparate agenda that denies Black and Latino children the right to question their oppressive education and the system that rewards compliance instead of creativity. This extreme degree of authoritarian instruction, Kozol writes, has robbed too many of our children of the power to think independently at a time when it is desperately needed in the face of an administration that is threatening the very essences of democracy. Kozol calls for a passionate resistance to these forms of inequality.

“In this book, Jonathan also confronts the assault by Donald Trump on the dignity and autonomy of teachers. ‘I have always believed,’ he writes, ;and I still believe today, that teachers in the classrooms of young children are the front-line soldiers in the defense of our democracy.’ And he portrays dozens of warm and loving and ethically courageous teachers who refuse to genuflect before an oppressive and autocratic order.

“It is with Jonathan’s permission that I tell you that he was so worn down by the writing of this book that he landed in Mt. Auburn hospital in Cambridge a month ago with a minor seizure. He was in the hospital for five days but fortunately was released without any damage to his speaking or writing ability. He is now at home recovering, surrounded by his friends.”

I’d also like to share an excerpt from a Q & A with Kozol that resonated for me. Asked “If a young teacher were to read your work in 10 or 20 years from now, what would you most want them to carry with them into their classrooms and their lives as educators?” he replied:

“I would want to tell young teachers never to genuflect before an autocratic ethos that robs them of autonomy and denies their students the right to learn for the joy that learning brings them. I would ask them to turn their backs on punitive agendas that atrophy the curiosity of children, to celebrate their sense of whim and wonderment, and create a feast of riches in their classrooms.

“Most of all, I would urge them to listen patiently to children, even when the questions they may ask us threaten to delay the pacing of our lessons and may bear no obvious connection to the standardized objective we’re pursuing.

“My closest friend and mentor in my work in education was not a grim and data-driven academic icon laden with self-confident abstractions and statistics. It was a wise and gentle man whom I badly miss today. I’m speaking of Fred Rogers. When we went together into the classrooms of young children, he listened to them carefully and didn’t interrupt them when they told us stories that meandered without endings.

“I’d like to think I’ve followed his example, and I’d hope that teachers 10 or 20 years from now would think of children’s learning as an act of exploration rather than a forced march to a goal or ‘outcome’ that’s already been determined and allows no room for unexpected detours. It’s often in those unexpected detours that a child’s soul reveals itself.”

AWTT honors Jonathan Kozol, for his love and rage, for his decades-long persistent championing of neglected students and their teachers.

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Years ago, in the 1970s, when I was first living in Maine, industrial logging, clear cutting, and aerial insecticide spraying by paper companies were contentious issues. The nascent environmental movement raised the alarm about the health ramifications of these practices for humans, as well as everything connected with the ecology of the forest—plants, animals, birds, insects, water. For many people, though, the first awareness of clearcuts was their dispiriting ugliness—that snarl of utter decimation suggesting the brutality of war: blitzkrieg. Clearcuts mimicked Hiroshima and Dresden. They exemplified ruthless, efficient exploitation in the service of maximum profit. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, the United States was defoliating the lush forests with the persistent poison Agent Orange—not to harvest the trees but to harvest the soldiers hiding under them. In Maine a clearcut harvest exemplified a willful ignorance of the interdependence of humans and nature.

Paper companies were sensitive to the charge of violently laying waste to Maine’s identity as the Pine Tree State with its mythic northern forest. They tried as best they could to make the devastation invisible. Along the roads traversing the north woods, loggers left a “beauty strip,” a fifty-foot deep hedge of trees. That concession attempted to shield sensitive motorists from witnessing, as they whizzed by, the ruination of the woods beyond. If a driver slowed down, the clearcuts were visible through breaks in the trees. The paper companies were like little kids who, holding their splayed fingers over their eyes, think they are invisible. And most passersby played the game, shut their eyes to reality. Who wants to admit, while enjoying Vacationland, to be surrounded as far as the eye can see by a desolation of stumps, roots, and slash strewn about in the muddy ruts of the skidders that dragged the forest away? There’s a synchronization between people who would rather not know with the interests of those who would rather they not know.

As critical as forest management practice is, it’s not that woods I want to explore—except as a metaphor. What concerns me is the kind of beauty strip pulled in front of a political or moral atrocity to keep us from seeing, or that gives us permission not to see what’s really there—and take responsibility for it—as we go on our merry way. The world’s current atrocities are partially obscured by thin scrims thrown up in front of them. These beauty strips are woven with financial interests, propaganda, prejudice, power, and denial, blinding us to the overwhelming death and misery we are complicit in. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are the objects of genocide— industrial clearcut, you might say. Iranians are, too. And Lebanese. U.S. weapons makers, our merchants of death, are making billions from slaughter. Our major media, whose responsibility it is to shine a light on the truth, equivocate, enabling the continuation of genocide. In the name of “fair and balanced,” they give equal time to the justifications for demented barbarity. “Fair and balanced” is the beauty strip that relieves the sighted of sight and redirects us to the refuge of moral indecisiveness.

On the environmental front, also behind the scrim of balanced reporting, mass extinction of species and climate change accelerate. We are encouraged to celebrate beauty in a diminished world. Ironically, then, the diminished world is its own beauty strip.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was famous for saying, “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.” This statement is a profound, cosmic wish fulfillment of an oppressed people. It’s the belief that goodness is imprinted deep in the genome of the universe. For people struggling for justice, that moral arc is the North Star fixed in the celestial night. It’s Hope itself. Looking at the world today, that statement about the moral arc seems sentimental at best. What we witness behind the wish-fulfillment beauty strip are people of power—leaders, we call them—relishing cruelty, destruction, dishonesty, corruption, atrocity. These people delight in proudly, righteously bending the arc toward injustice. And they, like circus contortionists, want to bend it so far that you’d think it can never bend back. Why? What grudge do the super-powerful and super-wealthy have against the world—the less powerful, the less rich, the non-white? They use power to teach futility, bend the arc into a cul-de-sac of despair. They seem to prefer a world where hope for the unprivileged is a black hole from which no light escapes.

The point here is that people struggling for justice cannot allow themselves the soporific hesitation of fair and balanced, cannot allow themselves a doubt that maybe the injustice isn’t really so bad. Harriet Tubman carried a pistol—not so much to protect fleeing slaves from stalking slave hunters and their dogs but to warn the fleeing enslaved that the beauty strip of doubt and fear would not be countenanced.The arc of freedom is a one way transit. The weak of heart slipped off the arc.

The wrongs in the world today are enormous, and most of us feel that our agency to affect them is tiny. It seems that we are obliged to carry the weight of its darkness, while those who create darkness are oblivious to their crimes. As a result we suffer from moral injury, a term used to describe people, often soldiers, who have committed or witnessed acts of extreme violence, acts that conscience abhors. As citizens, internalizing our violent, racist history causes moral injury. To ignore it, though, erases the truth of our identity. Choosing to remain “unwoke” may insulate us—as a beauty strip does—from our disturbing past but also renders us incapable of fixing the legacy of problems the past created. For an empathetic person, merely being conscious of our current atrocities causes moral injury. Moral injury is a kind of original sin—not one all humans are born with but one engendered by avoidance and complicity.

As I was writing this, I was thinking of the final lines of Mathew Arnold’s great 19th century poem “Dover Beach”:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The philosophical sentiment of these lines denies a moral arc bending across time toward justice. Instead, hope for compassion and kindness is reduced to a woebegone appeal between lovers. Mathew Arnold speaks with clear-eyed pessimism as a witness from the lightless “darkling plain.” His pessimism becomes a kind of dismal invitation to remove the beauty strips. The ugly clearcut is the truth; the violent rapacity of the powerful is the truth. The worst that human beings do is the truth. That truth is the ruination of us all . . . except the meager hedge of decency between individuals.

One cannot deny the omnipresent pathology of the ignorant armies. Yet, I prefer the image of Harriet Tubman, chasing the North Star, wading through a swamp at night, the star reflected as a pinprick of light on the barrel of her pistol. Courage is its own light, creates its own arc.

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And then came, just a few days ago, the shocking revelations of Cesar Chavez’s abuse and raping of girls and women who were part of the United Farm Workers (UFW) movement. Like Chomsky, Chavez (1927-1993) was one the early portraits in this project. Chavez was—and is—an icon of our civil rights and labor history. His leadership proved that with militant, nonviolent organizing, protest and boycotts, poor workers could confront their racist exploitation by corporate power and win better wages, housing, health care, education, working conditions, respect and dignity. Chavez’s persistence and courage on the behalf of people suffering debilitating discrimination was on a par with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Chavez shared the guidance of the UFW with Dolores Huerta, the less prominent, but equally important organizer. I am embarrassed that when I painted Chavez I did not paint Dolores Huerta, too. Chavez was the more famous figure and, I thought, sufficient to make the point about the power of organizing migrant workers. Now we find out that among Chavez’s victims was Huerta herself whom he abused and raped. Huerta, still living at 95, tells us that she kept her rape a secret for fear of tarnishing the reputation of Chavez and the migrant workers movement. To her, the success of the movement was more important than accountability for Chavez.

We will treat Chavez’s expulsion in the same way we did Chomsky’s—taking the portrait out of circulation but leaving up the record of important civil rights and social justice work. And in the next few months I will add a portrait of Dolores Huerta.

At AWTT we say that our mission is to provide models of courageous citizenship. We stand for justice, truth, compassion, equality, and the dignity of all people. We had previously used the inspiring struggle of Cesar Chavez against corporate farmers to take that stance. That will continue. But now we also take that stance against Cesar Chavez on behalf of the girls and women he abused.

I wanted to add an interesting comment we received recently from Emily Albee, a high school social studies educator. Her comments highlight the teaching opportunity that this difficult moment in American history offered:

“Recently, our classroom was presented with a very challenging learning opportunity to confront a mainstream historical narrative requiring analysis, truthtelling, and reflection. Working in collaboration with Americans Who Tell the Truth, our school was fortunate to receive eight truth teller portraits on loan to incorporate into various project based learning activities. One of these portraits was Cesar Chavez. Chavez has been revered and celebrated professionally for his work with engaging in community organizing, non-violent resistance, and achieving labor rights for farm workers. On the morning of March 19, 2026 about 30 seconds before I planned on teaching my students the impacts of Chavez’s accomplishments to civil rights and labor history in the United States, a news story about Dolores Huerta and Chavez’s other victim broke.

“After discussing Huerta’s painful story, I reminded my students they are living through a historical reconciliation of including all of the stories and truth tellers to challenge the original narrative. As educators, we are required to pivot and reexamine our thinking and instructional strategies constantly. I chose to engage in careful conversations with my high school students that day about why our Cesar Chavez lesson was not going to be taught the way I had originally planned. The difficult and necessary truth telling of Dolores Huerta demands acknowledgement that Chavez was a man in power who engaged in horrendous and criminal acts of violence against women and children. Huerta was required to sacrifice her truth, safety, and well being for the greater cause and to protect the image of Chavez’s character and leadership that many relied on.

“In the 1960s, the truth about Chavez’s behavior would have destroyed the farm labor movement built by many. Moving forward, the narrative of Cesar Chavez’s accomplishments is forever changed and it should be. Including the truth telling of Dolores Huerta and others recognizes the painful moments and intense sacrifices that are interconnected with the labor achievements for farm workers. These narratives can no longer exist in isolation. This truth telling also requires the reconciliation of current men in power with similar allegations of abuse not being held to the same accountability standards creating massive injustices in society and the dismantling of the rule of law. As students of history and critical thinkers, we are required to have these difficult conversations to reflect and reevaluate our thinking when new information arises, include multiple perspectives, and allow room for the truth to prevail in order to live in a just society.”

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One of the hardest truths to understand about Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is the deliberate targeting of children. Children and babies have been bombed, burned, mutilated—killed in homes, in schools, in hospitals, in tents, in UN safe places. Shot in the head and heart by Israeli snipers while scavenging for food in the desolate, apocalyptic streets. Over 20,000 children have been murdered in Gaza; many thousands more horribly injured.

The hunting and massacre of children is deliberate. But who would do that, and what message does it send? To kill an enemy’s children is to kill their future, kill the possibility of their hope. Killing an enemy’s children tells them that nothing is sacred, tells them that no ruthlessness, no hatred is forbidden. Tells them that eradication is the goal, that no law, no morality, no decency will protect the most vulnerable of them. No cruelty is out of bounds. Tells them that neither God nor man can protect them. Tells them that their sacred rage at the murdering of their children will end in hopelessness because they have no ability to stop the slaughter. Such is the ethic of genocidal power. It inflicts a deep, guilty shame on parents because they cannot protect their children.

One of our deepest primal fears is to be attacked by the ogre who eats children, the all powerful monster that thrives on consuming innocence. And an essential aspect of that fear is that we are helpless to stop it.

It comes, then, as no surprise that one of the first targets in Iran was the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school. At least 170 died, mostly young girls, and over 100 more were injured. The US may claim this was an unfortunate mistake. That would be a lie. This is a war crime.

The United States and Israel have the most sophisticated targeting systems in the world. These little girls were killed at the same time as Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many Iranians despised this old religious despot and were not surprised to have their country, so to speak, decapitated. But what purpose to cut off the tail?

Whatever excuses are professed for the just cause of a war, all are made obscene when the ogre’s jaws are dripping with the blood of children.

Many commentators have speculated—undoubtedly correctly—that one of Trump’s motivations for attacking Iran was to get the subject of the Epstein files out of the headlines. The official reasons for the attack—just like the war on Iraq in 2003—were lies. Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. Iran was not making a nuclear bomb, nor did they have missiles capable of reaching the U.S. What is true is that Israel wanted Iran to be rendered powerless, and Trump was happy to assist.

And, ironically, the damning revelations in the Epstein files are about the trafficking and raping of girls by powerful men, girls just a little bit older than the ones in the obliterated elementary school. Those revelations expose a ruthless, willing indulgence by powerful, immoral men to injure children. Some of those same men are blowing up children in Gaza and Iran. So murdering Muslim children in the Middle East, rather than diverting our attention from Epstein, is reinforcing it.

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When I was a college student in the late 1960s in Boston, I went to a teach-in at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge to hear Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky talk about the context of the Vietnam War—the history of the United States backing French colonialism in Vietnam, and, after the defeat of the French in 1954, how the U.S. subverted the national elections that would have unified the country, resulting, finally, in eight atrocity-filled years of U.S. war in Vietnam, 1963-1975. Then the terrible toxic legacy of Agent Orange.

As a student with the potential of being drafted to fight in that war, I wanted to know as much as possible about what was going on and what I should do—join in or resist. Both frightening choices. Zinn, a professor at Boston University, and Chomsky, at MIT, were considered left-leaning experts on U.S. foreign policy and imperialism. This teach-in was my first exposure to the real history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and helped me, after another year of studying the situation, decide to refuse to fight in Vietnam.

And for years afterward Zinn and Chomsky were reliable guides when I needed to separate truth from propaganda while assessing U.S. behavior in the world. Both of them modeled the long struggle in this country for civil rights, against militarism, for economic equality, against nuclear weapons, for environmental sanity, and for telling our true history. They taught how unjust power worked and how it could be confronted. (By the way, Zinn and Chomsky were right about the U.S. lies and corruption supporting the Vietnam War—in which over 58,000 Americans died, as well as 3 to 4 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. The U.S. government has never encouraged any accountability for its war crimes.)

When I began painting the Americans Who Tell the Truth portraits in 2002, Zinn and Chomsky’s portraits were among the first ten—right up there with Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Mother Jones. They were contemporary icons of courageous truth telling, and although constantly maligned by mainstream politicians and media, they were steadfastly undeterred by criticism. Zinn died in 2010; Chomsky is alive at 97 but has suffered a major stroke.

Noam Chomsky’s ideas have shaped moral, political, and economic thinking around the globe. He’s been referred to as the world’s greatest public intellectual. He fearlessly exposed the deceit and brutality of power, the exploitations of capitalism, and how the corporate media use propaganda to shape and control how citizens think.

It came as a shock to me and millions of others to discover that the Jeffrey Epstein files contained numerous mentions of Chomsky, disclosing that Chomsky had traveled on Epstein’s private jet, stayed in his New York and Paris apartments, accepted financial help, and had enjoyed his insights and glitzy company. Epstein embodied the ideas, the morals, and the behaviors that Chomsky spent his life condemning. And yet Chomsky continued the friendship even after Epstein had been indicted for sex trafficking and pedophilia. There’s nothing in the files to suggest that Chomsky was involved in Epstein’s sexual crimes. But it would have been impossible for him not to have known. It seems that Epstein used his wit, intelligence, money and charm to surround himself with prominent people—to, in effect, greenwash himself, hoping, I guess, that enough power and prominence would protect him from the law. That, unfortunately, is not an altogether unreasonable supposition.

Epstein asked Chomsky for advice about how to deal with negative press. Because of his political views, Chomsky had extensive experience parrying bad press. Epstein wanted to know if he should counter or ignore it. Of course, Epstein’s media antagonists were not attacking his political views; they were exposing his long history of sex trafficking, raping and prostituting girls. Chomsky, it seems, had to have known this and yet maintained the friendship, suggesting to Epstein that he ignore the press.

Epstein was a criminal reprobate. What does that make Chomsky? Probably not an enabler exactly, but certainly a coddler. Is that a distinction without a difference? The enabler actively makes continuing criminal behavior possible; the coddler looks the other way. Or was Chomsky incredibly naive, and we don’t know enough about the relationship?

A similar case might be that of George Mitchell, the famous judge, then senator, then international peacemaker from Maine. He was often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and greatly admired for his quiet rectitude. (He was often suggested, too, as a good candidate for an AWTT portrait.) Turns out George was also in cahoots with Epstein, but worse than Chomsky, enjoying the trafficked girls. MItchell, 93 years old now, denies this, but numerous institutions and scholarships named for him are jettisoning their affiliation. Chomsky/Epstein may be less flagrant than Mitchell/Epstein, but still . . . .

If I had painted MItchell, I would remove him from circulation unless his denials were proven to be true.

Numerous times during the life of the Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait project, people have pointed out to me the discrepancy between various portrait subjects’ admirable, courageous public acts and their occasional hypocrisy and character flaws. Shouldn’t I remove the portraits of people whose lives are, often seriously, blemished? Martin Luther King, Jr. had affairs, Susan B. Anthony was a racist. I say that no one is perfect, that the good reasons I painted them for are far more important and lasting than their flaws.

And, importantly, we all have flaws. In spite of flaws they, and we, can act for justice. If we are ever to have a just society, a beloved community, it will be created by fallible people. When, though, flaws transgress into criminality, the decisions about inclusion have to be made.

Jeffrey Epstein was the opposite of a truth teller. He was a creator of injustice—not a flawed person who did some courageous good but a person whose acts were so reprehensible that no good could offset and redeem them. He was the rotten apple that infected the entire barrel. He was a corrupt, moral monster of a man, a black hole sucking willing prominent people (mostly men) into an enormous honey trap of sex and money. Chris Hedges, a great moral voice against war, against government and corporate corruption, and a long-time friend of Chomsky, said this about Chomsky’s involvement with Epstein:

“Noam, of all people, knows the predatory nature of the ruling class and the cruelty of capitalists, where the vulnerable, especially girls and women, are commodified as objects to be used and exploited. He was not fooled by Epstein. He was seduced. His association with Epstein is a terrible and, to many, unforgivable stain. It irreparably tarnishes his legacy. If there is a lesson here, it is this. The ruling class offers nothing without expecting something in return. The closer you get to these vampires the more you become enslaved. Our role is not to socialize with them. It is to destroy them.”

It would be a mistake to negate the rigor and truth of Chomsky’s intellectual and political work because of his association with Epstein. To do so would be to erase Chomsky’s insights into the power and corruption of the forces that shape our lives, and how to combat them. Chomsky’s legacy, though, is tarnished. There’s no tarnish remover for that. A courageous and brilliant man was also foolish and weak. He chose friendship with a conniving predator over protection of his hapless victims.

And yet, who are we punishing if we say, “Don’t read Chomsky; he was a friend of Epstein’s!” The answer is ourselves. When I was a student struggling with what to do about the Vietnam War, Chomsky’s counsel helped me make one of the most consequential choices of my life. I am grateful for that. To remove his portrait from the AWTT collection would not be saying, though, don’t read him. It would say his character is seriously compromised, so much so that in support of Epstein’s victims, we’re removing him from this community.

To keep his portrait in AWTT would not be saying we forgive him. We don’t have that moral authority. It would be saying that we think his ideas are the truth.

I’d like to hear your thoughts about this ethical dilemma. As with many ethical things, viewpoints are various, and the more we consider, the wiser we are. I’m reminded of Claudette Colvin saying, “ I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’ And I did.”

We want to do what’s “right.” What is it?

Please share your thoughtful perspectives by submitting a comment form.

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Believe your eyes, believe your eyes, and not the eyes of those who would deceive you – believe your eyes!

Hold out your hands, hold out your hands, across the land to neighbors who are frightened – hold out your hands!

Come move your feet, come move your feet, take to the streets and march against injustice – come, move your feet!

Chorus

Here we stand, together we are strong!

Rise up and let the whole world know

That all God’s children here belong.

Believe your heart, believe your heart, it’s torn apart because you love so deeply – believe your heart!

Lift up your voice, lift up your voice, you have no choice so make it loud and mighty – lift up your voice!

Believe Your Eyes was a brand-new song written the weekend of January 24th & 25th, 2026 by Thomas Keesecker, a long time composer and church musician. Congregations across the country were asked to sing it on February 1st as part of a musical collective witness. My church in Orono, Maine, was one of those congregations. Every Sunday we sing beautiful hymns with meaningful lyrics, but this Sunday was different. The idea that we were singing with hundreds, maybe thousands of others, sending the same message brought tears to my eyes after the first “Believe your eyes.”

And then I immediately thought about a conversation I had had with Americans Who Tell the Truth’s portrait subject David Rovics about the power of music at protests and rallies – the idea that music touches our hearts and our minds simultaneously. It makes us feel united in ways that maybe standing and holding a sign, calling our representatives and senators, writing this blog post don’t quite do. In my conversation with him in early 2025, he bemoaned the fact that protests in the U.S. are void of music – something that made the protests of the 60s feel very different and have an energy that moved us all toward change.

Good news, David! I think that music is returning – not just in this one example of churches uniting in song but in groups around our country who are coming together to protest AND to sing! Will this make a difference? I have hope that it will give energy, hope, a bit of light to what we all need to mount a movement towards truth, justice, change. We need not only Bad Bunny, but we need Matt Watroba who brings a community together to sing weekly at his local library in Michigan. We need Lucas Richman, Bangor Symphony Orchestra director who composed Symphony: This Will Be Our Reply for orchestra and chorus, a work inspired by composer Leonard Bernstien’s words: “This will be our reply to violence.” We need all of us!

We need to remember other AWTT portrait subjects – Pete Seeger, Noel Paul Stookey, Sandy O, Pat Humphries, John Alston, Con Fullam, Reggie Harris, Kim Harris, Bruce “Utah” Phillips, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Woody Guthrie. And maybe it’s time to make the last three verses of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land as well known as the first one:

As I went walking I saw a sign there,

And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”

But on the other side it didn’t say nothing

That side was made for you and me.

One bright sunny morning, in the shadow of the steeple,

By the relief office, I saw my people.

As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if

This land was made for you & me.

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;

Nobody living can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.

So, do this – look at their portraits, read their stories, but most of all, listen to their music! We need them all right now, but mostly we need you to find a song, sing it at the top of your lungs, join with others, keep hope alive, move us toward justice, let your little light shine, and, as the lyrics of one song I recently sang say, “This is what democracy looks like!”

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The image I really can’t shake is of Trump as our hairball and that we are in the paroxysms of heaving him up—and out. It ain’t pretty. He and his snarled mess of acidic bigotry, pomposity and cruelty have festered too long in the gut of this nation. And when we see clearly what we’ve expelled in all its dishonesty and corruption, even the MAGA folks won’t want to look back. Sure, political anthropologists will exhaustively excavate the discharge with their long noses and magnifying glasses: we have to know and own our history so we don’t repeat it. But just imagine the relief! We’ve been suffering this hairball for too long—calling it President, obsessed with its gaseous exhalations, pretending that having a waste product as leader is in some way rational.

The good news is that the whole world now sees that having a hairball in the White House (sounds like a joke!) is a catastrophe. For the planet. It’s been a hairball with immense power and connivance. A narcissistic, mean, racist hairball. A hairball that wants to own everything. A hairball that would destroy the world for profit. A hairball dictator that hates the pluralistic values of democracy and hates the equality of law.

I’m ready to praise the cat that walks away. Scratch its ears.

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“This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown.”

These commandments of Walt Whitman, the great US poet of the 19th Century, left out one thing: he charged me --- me, in particular, it seems --- to paint an open ended catalogue of portraits and call it Americans Who Tell the Truth. I didn’t want to do that. I’d never painted a realistic portrait. But I think Whitman knew I was deep in an angry, grief-struck funk. I was Jonah swallowed by the whale of despair. He could help me escape. Instead of ranting at a government lying us into the Iraq War, I must surround myself with courageous, compassionate souls who insisted we love the imperative language of the Founding Fathers more than the Founders themselves. Starting with him, paint the intrepid spirits who dared leap across the dark gulf between what we say about equality and what we do. Whitman knew about alienation and cynicism, he knew about hypocrisy, he knew about the corruptions and cruelties of power. He knew that the forces of darkness are defeated by tightening one’s embrace of the best of humanity. He knew that a primal rage at injustice is engendered by an insult to love. He knew the remedy is more love.

I want to talk about Whitman’s commandments and first consider where he begins. He doesn’t, like the Biblical commandments, order us to bow down before one mighty and jealous God. Whitman begins where any intelligent species should: celebrate the miraculous place where you find yourself and that enables your life, understand and accept that you live best when you live in harmony with all the creatures and forces of this miraculous place. Love the Earth, don’t exploit it and your fellow travelers. If he were talking to birds, he’d say if you want to care for yourself and your nestlings and for the continuity of your species, tend your nest; tend the apple tree you’ve made it in; tend the apples; sing songs of praise for the gifts of sun and rain.

Failure to understand that we live at the mercy of a healthy planet, failure to want to share it with all the rest of creation, thinking that we can pillage nature, profit at its expense, thinking that our arrogance is a force stronger than the laws of nature --- that kind of blindness has brought us to the dark, windy precipice where we are now. Whitman is reminding us that before we consider any other aspects of our human lives, we have to agree to accept the laws of the amazing place we find ourselves in. Love the earth the sun and the animals! Otherwise, nothing else will matter.

Next, Whitman commands us to “despise riches.” Accumulating riches accumulates greed. Greed incites suspicion and fear of our neighbors. Suspicion and fear undermine community. Having riches breeds elitism and the thirst for power. The first lesson of Nature is that Nature doesn’t hoard. Nature cycles and recycles. The tiger shares its spent body with vultures and worms. The worms share their castings with the oak. The oak shares its wood with the woodpecker and the bark beetle. The billionaires don’t want to share anything, they want everything. We live in an era of Never Enough. Do we despise the riches themselves or what they do to the people who crave them?

Give Alms to anyone who asks. I used to be uneasy when confronted by people begging on the street. Our culture teaches us disdain for beggars. Should I give them something or not? How much? Will they use my dollar to buy food or drugs? What’s the responsible thing, the moral thing? I don’t ask myself those questions anymore. Whitman cleared my head & conscience of persnickety qualms. Just give what you can. I have no business qualifying my generosity based on circumstances I can’t know. If a person is brought, by whatever circumstances, to the humiliation of begging, at least allow them the dignity of knowing what they need. Don’t wait for the state to bring help. Be the generous heart that doesn’t blame or ask questions; don’t judge, give.

Whitman urges us to “Stand up for the stupid and crazy.” All of us struggle to construct lives of meaning, usefulness, love, responsibility, creativity and joy. How much harder that is for the stupid and crazy! Standing up for them is a lesson in empathy and patience. Even though we praise a political culture based on equality, that equality is based on two functions --- the law which we want to be equal for everyone and spiritual value which we cannot judge. Actually, people are unequal in a million different ways --- intelligence, attractiveness, physical prowess, luck, and family support. If you believe in equality, do what you can to lessen the unearned inequalities. Everyone does better in a society that cares for them rather than shunts aside those deemed inconvenient or bothersome.

Devote your income and labor to others. Our culture fetishizes watching out for numero uno. What a sad place results when everyone cares little for the common good, but wants to make a spectacle of their individual accomplishment. The triumph of the self is highly overrated compared to the triumph of the community. Practice measuring the success of the self in relation to how much one has helped the community rather than risen above it. Or, do we want to be known for aspiring to power more than generosity?

Of all of Whitman’s commandments perhaps the seemingly most obvious is to ‘Hate Tyrants.’ Don’t we all! Or do we? Tyrants are the enemy of democracy, the enemy of people having the support and dignity of becoming unique selves with personal responsibility. Tyrants demand regimentation of thought and feeling. Tyrants use and exploit people for their own --- often violent --- ends. And yet, many people curry favor with tyrants, they hope to be rewarded for playing to their good side, obeying. They willingly give up their personal autonomy for the security of being told what to do and how to be safe. We Americans now have a tyrant eviscerating democracy. Half the country, it seems, likes it. An essential lesson of any high school history class is the havoc tyrants have wrought in the world. And yet, here we are. It’s a shock to find out how many of one’s fellow citizens cozy up to tyrants.

Ours is a many faceted society that includes people from all corners of the world, people with a variety of religious beliefs, creeds, spiritual values and notions of how to name what “God” is. We are well advised to argue not concerning god. Such arguments can shred the fabric of an otherwise viable political society whose rules for functioning we can all agree on --- the equality of laws, the right to vote, free speech, etc. People are entitled to their religious beliefs, but not entitled to impose them on anyone else. Inquiring into the nature of people’s beliefs is fascinating and respectful; attempting to change them by argument is not.

Why does Whitman say, “have patience and indulgence toward the people?” Doesn’t that sound condescending and, for that reason, anti-democratic? As though the people are undisciplined dullards toward whom the elites need to practice patience? I think Whitman knew that masses of people are easily swayed by diverse opinions and by propaganda. He knew that the character of democracy is defined by patience as it struggles to find a coherent voice. He sees himself as both observer and observed. He himself needs the benefit of patience and indulgence. If we must hate tyrants who demand immediate obedience, we must practice the patience necessary for self governance.

An essential requirement for a democratic people is the recognition of spiritual equality --- not just for all people, but all species. Who is to say that a yellow warbler is more or less important, more or less valuable, than a giant redwood tree, or for that matter, more or less valuable than a congressman from Missouri? Or a homeless person in LA?

Whitman insists we not take our hat off to anything known or unknown. By using the word ‘unknown,’ he opens up the realm of speculation, of the metaphysical. We are equal with all living beings and all ideas. As living creatures we participate in the great mystery of life in which all things are equally important and necessary, equally evolving.

These admonitions of Whitman came from the preface to the Second Edition to Leaves of Grass, his magnificent collection of poems that he wrote & revised for most of his life. They contain his accumulated wisdom. And are a good place to begin when encountering all the portraits in Americans Who Tell the Truth.

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The history of this country cannot be told without telling the courage and wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, etc., are our political deities. Their relationship to this project is in direct relationship to their words, but inverse relationship to their deeds. They were exceptional yet flawed men who profited from slavery, considered women to be less than equal, and promoted the genocide of Indigenous people. They provided the brilliant philosophical basis for establishing a political society based in justice, freedom, unalienable rights, treating all people equally under the law, and promoting the common good. However, because they could not live up to the demands of their own words, they created the necessity for the people honored in these portraits. In essence, they created the necessity for an ongoing founding, an ongoing American Revolution, and continual additions to the founders. Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rachel Carson, Rosa Parks, Emma Goldman, Daniel Ellsberg, Helen Keller --- all the portraits, in fact --- become Founders as they struggle to insist that our deeds align with our words. The process of revolution is a journey toward justice. As the goal seems to recede, the passion to arrive must increase.

What I will do in these posts is tell the stories of some of the people I’ve painted, why I chose them, my personal interactions with them, and where they fit in the narrative of our country’s evolution toward justice, equality, and harmony with nature. In many cases I will simply discuss the meaning to me of the quote I chose to scratch into the portrait.

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– Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues

One of the curious aspects in the videoed Minneapolis murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents is the behavior of the killers after the murders. Following their brief frenzy of violence, they seem nonchalant, they back away, or approach the victim slowly. They offer no assistance. They seem bored by what they’ve done, saying, in effect, “Well, that’s done, Life is cheap; who cares?” Or, is it the slow, lackadaisical strut of “Mission Accomplished?” What we see is calm, unrepentant power snatching away life. They appear to feel nothing—the murders as consequential to them as stomping snow off their boots. Sort of like I imagine some rapists must feel: “It’s over, I feel good, what’s all the fuss?” We’ve witnessed aggressive murder, provoked by the lust to dominate, that is not unlike rape. Literally a gang bang.

I watched those murders—played in a loop on TV news—and that haunting line from Johnny Cash’s song “Folsom Prison Blues” began playing in my mind along with the images: “But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

I heard the same song while watching the videos of the small open boats in the Caribbean being blown to bits by missiles from U.S. drones. I sensed Pete Hegseth and Trump leaping from their overstuffed chairs, like a touchdown had been scored, at the instant the boats and the men in them flashed into oblivion, shouting, ”YES!!!” Trump and Hegseth are men whose deepest sensation of life springs from domination and destruction. Both have also been accused of rape. Both want to be admired and feared for their power and their willingness to take life. Both flaunt the freedom and power of their amorality, their immunity, their murderous, white nationalist ideology.

In Cash’s song, we learn that the singer was urged by his mother to be good, to stay away from guns. For reasons we don’t know, the warnings, the morality vaccine, never took. The singer never felt the sanctity of life. His connection to life is his morbid curiosity of how it feels to end it. Like a kid squashing ants.

The government killers made accusations to justify the murders: their victims were guilty of “domestic terrorism;” the killers “acted in self-defense.” Bystander videos disproved their lies. And Trump and Hegseth claimed the men in the boats were narco terrorists at war with the United States. We have no idea if that was true. No facts were presented, no due process performed. And even if they were transporting drugs, that’s not a capital offense. What we do know is that Trump, Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi and everyone connected with this administration lie pathologically. Even when the lies are absurdly transparent, they clutch them as though the lies are life preservers. One of the bizarre characteristics of facism is how stupid it is.

In the song, the prisoner hears a train whistle blowing. He hangs his head and cries. The train’s receding, mournful whistle tells him that life outside prison goes on without him. He squandered his. The remorse he feels is for himself, not his victim. He realizes his actions have consequences beyond the brief, satisfying climax of power. Ultimately, others hold power over him. Even in prison his narcissism is unabated.

The masked thugs and political gangsters who run our government are one and the same. They seem a fundamentally different species of human than the protesters. The protesters are invigorated by love, by courage, by concern for victims being stalked by fascist killers. The protesters are nonviolent, practice free speech, and persist in their solidarity. They are the strongest threads of the community’s fabric. The gangster-thugs are animated by hate—a mutant species relishing their perversity, murderous aliens programmed to shred communal fabric. Allowing them to stay in power is a death wish for us all, an acceptance that violation of our ideals, our laws, and our persons is permissible. An acceptance that we’ve imprisoned ourselves with them.

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I loved the competition, the practice—loved improving my competence, loved team camaraderie. I enjoyed winning; I accepted losing. I argued the calls of umpires and referees but accepted their decisions. Even in the passion and intensity of the games, players knew we needed objective rule keepers. Otherwise a game would disintegrate into chaos. The games were a measure of our achievement and that achievement depended on following the rules. Our physical safety also depended on the rules; intentionally injuring another player was illegal. Being able to compare performance historically depended on the constancy of the rules. If our team did well and we were invited to a postseason tournament, we could be confident that our opponents from other areas played by the same rules. Sports are not activities where might makes right.

Strength may make success, but rules make it right.

Recently I watched a TV interview with Trump. He was on Air Force One standing in the doorway between the executive section of the plane and the press area. Behind him, before someone pulled a shade, viewers could see a football game playing on a large screen. Presumably Trump had been enjoying the game before he came to talk with the press. And, presumably, he would agree that enjoyment in the game depends on its rule-based structure and competent referees.

And then I thought about how routinely he ignores domestic and international rules, ignores the courts, ignores Congress, ignores the Constitution, ignores the UN Charter, ignores the laws of science, ignores treaties. He routinely lies, and proceeds on the basis of might—his—making right. In other words, he makes the rules that are convenient and that enhance his power and wealth.

But that is not quite accurate. If one person is making the rules, they can’t really be called rules at all. Rules are shaped by people and organizations and states agreeing to a set of behaviors that work for everyone. Trump enforces behavior that works for him. Might is not a rule. And might doesn’t make right. Might makes dominance; it makes exploitation. Might makes misery. Might enforces injustice. Might makes retaliation inevitable. Might ends in instability. Might is about ego. Might is cruel. Might overpowers to make order but ends in chaos. Might sabotages peace. Might makes wrong.

Finally, no one wants to play the “might” game. One must only resist. That’s the rule.

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There are a lot of famous people in the Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait gallery, but one of the least known epitomizes the intent of AWTT as much as anyone, and that’s Claudette Colvin who died yesterday at the age of 86 in Texas.

On March 2, 1955, seventy years ago, at the age of fifteen, in Montgomery, Alabama, her hometown, Claudette refused to move to the back of the bus when ordered to by the bus driver so a white person could take her seat. Six months later, in August, Emmett Till, would be murdered in Mississippi, and then on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks would refuse to move from her bus seat in Montgomery.

Everyone remembers Rosa Parks because her civil disobedience launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and that boycott triggered the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s.

When ordered to move, Claudette announced, “The Constitution allows me to sit here.” No one in the front of that bus was interested in Constitutional niceties that might prohibit Jim Crow segregation. They wanted this uppity Black girl arrested—and she was.

Claudette’s all-Black “separate but equal” high school had recently celebrated Negro History Week inspired by the great Black educator Carter G. Woodson. In order to eradicate internalized racism in Black folks, Woodson wanted students to be taught about illustrious and courageous Black people. Claudette relished learning the stories of Black heroes. Years later, when asked why she refused to move on the bus, she said that she wanted to move but when she tried to get up, she felt Harriet Tubman’s hand on her shoulder pushing her back down. She tried again and this time it was Sojourner Truth’s hand. She had to ask herself, what would those women do? There was only one answer. Claudette said, “History glued me to my seat.”

The case that went to the Supreme Court about Montomery’s bus segregation was Claudette’s, not Rosa’s. And that case ended Jim Crow on the buses.

Claudette’s heroism bends the arc of the moral universe toward justice. Without Negro History Week, Claudette would not have been exposed to the role models of Harriet and Sojourner, and they would not have been there to guide her actions. We want the people honored in AWTT to be the glue that enables other people to be like Claudette. If the teaching of history is not fully “woke,” there will be no role models. Claudette is gone, but she is now as present for us as Harriet and Sojourner were for her.

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I have perhaps read too many “recaps” of 2025 – a year of assaults on democracy, decency, dignity, decorum and probably ten other words beginning with “d”. I started to feel overwhelmingly depressed – another “d” word, but before that set in, I realized that defeat would not be another “d” word that would take over my being. I realized that 2026 needs, more than ever, to be the year that people learn about the more than 280 Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait subjects who have fueled my belief in America’s democratic ideals for almost two decades.

Communities, libraries, museums, universities need to see these faces and learn the stories of courageous citizens who have worked and are continuing to work for the common good. But, I believe, the people who really need to have the opportunity to learn about these models of courageous citizens are children and young people – those future leaders in grades K-12, the ones who need to find their voices to stand up for all of the good “d” words.

These students need the windows and mirrors that AWTT portrait subjects offer. They need to know how Barbara Johns found her voice to fight for education equality as she realized that her school facilities were “separate” but not at all “equal”, how Jaysa Hunter-Mellers found the courage to shut down a coal-fired power plant affecting the health of children in her community. They need to understand the bold effort of Tim DeChristopher to protect fragile land in Southern Utah from corporate damage, and the enthusiasm of Becci Ingram to start a theatre group for young people with special needs providing a safe, non-judgmental way to explore their creativity.

What are the issues that concern students today – environment, LGBTQIA+ rights, racial equity, gun reform, immigrants and their rights, education, peace? College debt, the cost of housing, decent jobs, affordable health care, a political process that brings people together rather than setting them against each other? Leaders who lead rather than bully? They need a space where they can talk freely about their concerns – ask questions, have discussions, understand the “other,” find courage. While some of us can look inside to find the power to act, most of us need some models, some people who have seen injustice and taken action. These people are not perfect; they have made mistakes, taken actions they have not been proud of, but in the end they have found a way, a voice, to change the world for the better. They have found a way to look around them and take that first step to address their fear, their worry, their anger.

Perhaps most importantly these AWTT truth tellers have come to the understanding that it is something they love that is being threatened. Their actions have been fueled not by anger or hate or greed, but by love. Dr. Mona Hanna’s love of her patients (children) led her to uncover the Flint water crisis. Jonathan Kozol’s love of his students fueled his writings about the racial inequities in public schools. Dave Zirin’s love of sports energized his attack on the corporate packaged and politically driven sports culture.

These are but a few examples of models available to students – people who have found a voice, taken action, made a change for the good. In a time when we all need to find our voices to keep democracy alive students need to realize the power of their voices. They need to know that their actions matter and that courage often comes in small steps.

Teachers can bring Americans Who Tell the Truth into their classrooms in so many ways – share the website, participate in AWTT’s education programs, like the Samantha Smith Challenge and Show Us Who You Are, watch Speak Truth to Youth videos, or bring AWTT portraits to your school with the School Partnership Program.

But the important step as we enter 2026 is for all of us to find our voices to keep those critical “d” words alive. Find the courage to speak truth to power and take that first step to realize America’s democratic ideals and work for the common

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And I’ve made it clear before how important it is to teach the reality of our past—for three reasons: one, we don’t know who we are or what we’re capable of doing—good and bad—if we suppress the truth of our past; two, if we make policy based on fabrications, it will undoubtedly fail; and three, we are inspired by the determination and courage of those who refused to accept inequality and injustice. Rather than teach guilt or shame, we teach pride by modeling courageous citizenship. We teach how meaningful it is to be part of the struggle—to make real the professed values of this country. If we don’t teach the uncomfortable part, we miss the saving grace of the redemptive courage.

My determination to remain Woke deepened recently after Trump’s disgusting racist tirade against Somali immigrants in the U.S., and particularly his attack on Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American. He called them “garbage.” This sort of virulent trash talk from Trump is not new. He has been attacking and demeaning immigrants of color for his entire public life. What’s new is the intensity of it. What a horrible spectacle to witness an American president proudly spitting out, like acid, inflammatory racism. It’s as though Trump envisions himself as the incarnation of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy—and in his mind the Confederacy, with its ideology of white supremacy, has prevailed. This is where anti-Woke history leads—refusing real history so you can embrace your own version. The bad guys, who were traitors to American ideals, take over and call themselves the good guys. They flaunt their racism like it’s an entitlement.

Everything Trump doesn’t want taught because of its burden of guilt and shame, he mimics, he teaches. Curiously, he has proven that the past is not and cannot be erased because it’s alive and well, like a nasty parasite, in the man himself. The worm turns, but does not die. From the oval office of the White House Trump rants like a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon. Why would anyone give this man the dignity of calling him President?

I am—and I hope millions of other Americans are—deeply disturbed and ashamed by this racism and misogyny. The struggle of this country to evolve from the pit of prejudice and white male superiority to a society based on pluralistic justice has been purposely flipped by Trump back into that stinking, unevolved pit.

I titled this little essay “When Woke Meets Affordable” because, just like “woke,” “affordable” is another buzz word now. We hear constantly that the most important issue for millions of Americans is affordability. What’s to be done about the rising prices of healthcare, food, clothing, energy, etc.? Trump promised lower but has delivered higher prices. Democrats hope that this is the issue that will sink Trump in the 2026 congressional elections. The assumption is that the prime concern for American citizens is the price tag.

I frame the question of affordability differently. As real and disturbing as wealth disparity and higher prices are, they aren’t the value questions that disturb me the most. More disturbing to me is a moral question, the condition of our minds and hearts. Can we morally afford to have a president who is a racist, a serial abuser, and a corrupt, compulsive liar? Can we afford complicity in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians? Can we afford to be a country that murders people in small boats in the Caribbean with no legal process?

The price of eggs is important; the price of arrogant, violent bigotry is soul crushing.

Our Civil War was the tragic, reckoning invoice of the struggle to end slavery and white supremacy. Lincoln at Gettysburg said that the world would never forget what was fought for there. Was he wrong? How do we climb out of that pit again? We can’t afford not to.

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I was talking about this dilemma with Betty Burkes, one of the great teachers and peacemakers in the AWTT portrait collection, and we came up with a list of suggestions about how to have conversations with kids who are troubled about what’s going on. (These suggestions are equally valuable when talking with anxious adults.)

Betty began by quoting to me a passage from Howard Zinn, author of The People’s History of the United States:

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Howard Zinn’s words beautifully reflect the guiding mission of Americans Who Tell the Truth—”providing models of courageous citizenship”—which is another way of inviting you into a community of people who struggled through hard times without giving up, without sacrificing their ideals and compassion. Just about all of the portrait subjects felt at times overwhelmed—angry, frightened, and lost—but decided to act for the common good anyway.

But, Betty said, before we start presenting role models, we have to listen carefully to the kids. What is at the heart of their troubles? We shouldn’t presume to know, and unless we know, our advice may only confuse them and add to their burden.

What many kids feel is that adults are mishandling the world, which means threatening their future. The kids need to be reassured that we love them and will do everything we can to protect them and allow them to flourish in a safe world.

Loving them does not mean we sugarcoat the truth. Tell them as much truth as you think they can handle. They suspect or know much of the truth anyway, but it’s important for them not to think we are editing it, hiding it, or being condescending. Having their suspicions verified by loving adults is actually reassuring. If adults don’t admit what the real issues are, how can they fix anything? We should not protect children from reality. Most governments and the people running them are in denial about reality—the realities of the deteriorating environment and governmental corruption. We prepare kids for asserting agency by presenting reality, not pretending the problems don’t exist or will fix themselves.

Talk about history and tell them about all the times when the world looked just as bleak as it does now and people survived. In the telling of that history, we remember that people survived, indeed, triumphed, because they resisted injustice, they built resilient communities, they organized, they refused to let other people take away their chance to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives. Show them examples from the gallery of AWTT portraits, and enumerate the possibilities. People did what is right, what’s fair. Read the history of Samantha Smith or Rachel Carson or John Lewis or Mother Jones or so many others and discuss the trajectory of their emotions and actions. Help them find organizations they can join. And join with them.

Practice joy—loving, singing, playing games, embracing beauty. A joyous spirit is the strongest bulwark of resistance. What’s the point of our lives, anyway, if we aren’t as joyful as we can be? It’s not an accident that Thomas Jefferson named the pursuit of happiness as one of our unalienable rights.

Model courage. Nothing reassures a kid more than an adult’s honest courage.

Model kindness, generosity, tolerance and gratitude. Model the attributes that we admire in others, that we want to see in our communities.

Have kids make art expressing their feelings. Talk about that.

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In some movies the sheriff’s wound was mortal—his death tragic, but he had liberated the town from its terrorizing menace. We shed tears of grief mixed with tears of relief.

I was thinking of those scenes when trying to assess the degree of serious wounding the United States now suffers from. Imagine that the handsome sheriff is Uncle Sam, but the duel is with himself. He plays the bad guy pretending to be the good guy. In an elaborate suicide pantomime, he argues with himself then shoots himself four times!

What? Are you kidding me? Uncle Sam shoots himself?

Yep. And not in the foot. This Uncle Sam seems determined to destroy the country, which is the real intent of the 2025 Project. The first shot is embracing fascism—in the head. The second is supporting genocide—in the heart. The third is ignoring climate chaos—in the lungs. And the fourth is gratuitous violence and cruelty—in his stomach. If he’s still standing, he’ll celebrate the end of democracy by shooting himself in the knees to blast the Bill of Rights. The audience is awed by Uncle Sam’s stupidity. He’s us and we’re doing it to ourselves. Our tears are tears of grief, disbelief, and rage. But why were we surprised? We elect a mendacious tyrant for president, we provide weapons and profit from genocide, we know climate science but refuse to curtail our use of fossil fuels, and we know cruelty rots a society and engenders bad karma. What did we expect?

“How bad is it, Doc?”

Bad. Very bad.

Just a few years ago, fascism seemed inconceivable in a country that claimed to be the world’s greatest democracy. Even during our years of the most intense and violent racism, the overall political system—no matter how hypocritically flawed— maintained the pretense of democracy and equality. There was a gulf between appearance and reality, but the government never questioned the importance of claiming democracy. And pretense was the rope we used to pull ourselves out of the ditch of our own hypocrisy—at least until now. Now the blunderers in chief are steering us purposely into the ditch. Pretense is gone. Democracy is an obstacle to the consolidation of wealth and power and entitlement. That’s how bad it is. Trump is a corrupt fascist and the people with him and behind him are frightening human beings—comfortable with obvious lies, comfortable with laying waste to people, environments, and all living species.

As partners with Israel in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinains in Gaza and the West Bank, we are burdening ourselves with the guilt of a moral atrocity we can never justify or be forgiven for—anymore than we can forgive slavery or indigenous genocide. These are the facts of moral culpability that define us. Declarations of exceptionalism to the contrary.

Nevertheless, people survive fascism. They can survive, too, however damaged morally, after committing atrocities. But they may not survive denying the science of climate change. How does one measure the stupidity of that? And what kind of brutish people relish cruelty? Trump falsely claims his cruel police state tactics are necessary to deport lawless immigrants and bring crime-ridden cities under control. There is a crisis of crime—in the White House.

The primary attributes, it seems to me, of a successful society are threefold. One is the ability to define a problem and devise a solution securing the most good for the most people. Another is the empathetic imagination—the ability of people to share the trials and tribulations of their neighbors—their struggles, dreams, joys and tragedies. That empathy allows people to appreciate that their consciousness is like the consciousness of everyone else, each aspiring to love and understanding, some measure of success, and self-actualization. This is a very old idea—walk a mile in another’s shoes before you make any judgments. When that attribute is lost or in scant supply, how does a society rejuvenate it? Without it, society will disintegrate into rancid and perpetual cruelty. Third, justice with dignity must be the common denominator of all interactions. These attributes must be the first and continuous lessons of schools.

How do we change the script? How do we get rid of the self-destroying Uncle Sam without losing ourselves? We must resist the injustices and model the rejuvenation of the common good. Rev. William Barber says, “We should ask are policies constitutionally consistent, morally defensible, and economically sane.” The Americans Who Tell the Truth portraits are composed of people who courageously answer that question in the affirmative. But when you have to ask if your own government is operating with legal, moral, and scientific sanity, you don’t really have to ask, “How bad is it , Doc?”

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This afternoon, standing on the main street of Blue Hill, Maine, in a silent demonstration protesting the genocide in Gaza, some questions of moral equivalency occurred to me. For instance:

1. How should we value the State of Israel versus the value of a three-year-old Gazan toddler purposely shot through her head by an IDF sniper—especially when we discover the sniping deaths of children are intentional?

2. What is the value, to a Palestinian community, of its blown-up hospital versus the economic value, to a U.S. community, of its General Dynamics plant—building the bombs that blow up the hospital?

3. If we think of the State of Israel as the refuge of millions of Jews escaping hundreds of years of pogroms in Europe and the WW II Holocaust, how is that equivalent in value to the State of Israel perpetrating ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinians?

4. What’s the equivalence of the delight of kids throwing bits of stale bread to mallard ducks in a park pond versus the delight of grown men refusing bits of stale bread to starving Palestinian children?

5. What’s the moral equivalence between collateral damage and murder? When innocent people are killed as a result of a policy not really intended to kill them, we call it collateral damage—as absurd as that sounds. If the same innocent people are killed intentionally, that’s murder. In Gaza there is no collateral damage; all civilian deaths are intentional.

6. How should we think about a country that claims to believe in a free press but intentionally kills as many journalists as it possibly can in the country it’s waging war against, while not reporting those killings in its own press?

7. About 83% of the dead in Gaza are civilians, at least 20,000 children and over 40,000 adults. The number of injured is much higher. And thousands more may be dead, uncounted, under the rubble. The casualty equivalence is about 2,000 Israeli soldiers killed. And 1,200 civilians. These are statistics. The lopsided statistics are explained by the lopsided distribution of arms. Israel is heavily armed with the most sophisticated weapons in the world including ships, planes, tanks, missiles, etc. Not to say nuclear bombs. Hamas had some primitive missiles, but mostly just rifles and grenades. Statistics tell us nothing about identities of victims, social worth, suffering, horror, justice, cultural harm, despair, desire for revenge, repercussions, trauma, etc.; they are merely scratched figures on a wall. Perhaps the statistics are the stupidity quotient for people who refused to negotiate intelligently. Or, in this case, they reflect the power differential and the stronger power’s obsession with ethnic cleansing. An indiscriminate massacre has no equivalence. It plays out as long as the stronger power’s voracious appetite for genocidal killing is unquenched.

8. The world watches, horrified, seemingly unable to intervene. Well, that’s not quite true. One country has the power to intervene non-violently and end the massacre—the United States. The U.S. supplies Israel with weapons. We could cut the supply. Unless we are willing to do that, we are equal partners in the genocide. Israel’s genocide is our genocide—another equivalence. Blood brothers. Brothers in blood. Brothers in shame.

9. For the weapons manufacturers, this is not a moral question; it’s financial—supply and demand. They (Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc.) make billions as merchants of death. The evil twist is that the U.S. government gives Israel many billions every year to buy those weapons; i.e., U.S. taxpayers are buying the weapons for Israel, subsidizing our arms dealers to commit horrendous crimes.

10. The endgame—forced starvation and famine—has no equivalence. Unless we compare it to the Black Death in the Middle Ages. But the Bubonic Plague was not purposely inflicted as a weapon of extermination by one people on another.

11. There is also no equivalence between history and cleansed history, or what we might call de-loused history. History that doesn’t tell the full truth is not history, but propaganda. The louses make the version justifying themselves. It’s like the difference between an apple tree and an artificial tree. Only one provides sustenance. The real history shows 76 years of violent occupation and ethnic cleansing of Israel in Palestine. Only the truth explains how the world works and shows how resistance can change criminal policy. Paraphrasing Voltaire: “People who can be made to believe absurdities will be made to commit atrocities.”

12. Democracy is built on an idea of equivalence: the majority’s wishes are supposed to be equivalent to its government’s policy. A majority of Americans are outraged and repulsed by the genocide; they want it ended. But our government justifies it, and our corporations profit. Our ethical behavior is being held hostage by our own government. So when we talk about hostages in this conflict, the real hostages are morality and its sister, truth. Call your congresspeople! Demand that the genocide stop.

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How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?

— Edgar Lee Masters

The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join the madness of others, the one who vainly tries to resist.

— Eugene Ionesco

The history of martyrs is the history of people who have expanded to their faith. Indeed, men have shaken destiny because they felt they have embodied it. Patriotism, the Cause, Humanity, Perfection, Righteousness, Liberty, — all of them large and windy abstractions to outsiders, are more powerful than dynamite to those who feel them.

— Walter Lippman

People who treat other people as less than human should not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

— James Baldwin

I

I’ve been painting a portrait of John Brown and the process has been deeply challenging, troubling and revelatory for me. As the song says, John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave. And since the meaning of John Brown’s life still lies a-moldering in the soul of this country, I needed to disinter him, look him in the eye—or, rather, dare myself the test of being looked in the eye by him—and listen to him. Who was this man? What to make of his violence? Why was he so important? Why marginalized as a maniac?

Begin, not in 1800, the year of John Brown’s birth, or 1856 and 1857, the period of the battles in Bleeding Kansas, or, on October 16, 1859, at Harpers Ferry, but on May 20, 2012 in Chicago at the protests called by Veterans for Peace against the NATO meeting. Some forty U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan ripped their war medals, medals awarded for their service in the “Global War on Terrorism,” off their chests, shouted statements to the huge crowd, and threw those medals down the street toward the building housing the NATO meeting. Here is a sample statement:

My name is Vince Emanuele, and I served with the United States Marine Corps. First and foremost, this is for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Second of all, this is for our real forefathers. I’m talking about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I’m talking about the Black Panthers. I’m talking about the civil rights movement. I’m talking about unions. I’m talking about our socialist brothers and sisters, our communist brothers and sisters, our anarchist brothers and sisters, and our ecology brothers and sisters. That’s who our real forefathers are. And lastly—and lastly and most importantly, our enemies are not 7,000 miles from home. They sit in boardrooms. They are CEOs. They are bankers. They are hedge fund managers. They do not live 7,000 miles from home. Our enemies are right here, and we look at them every day. They are not the men and women who are standing on this police line. They are the millionaires and billionaires who control this planet, and we’ve had enough of it. So they can take their medals back.

The brave words and act of Vince Emanuele made me think of John Brown because of what he said about our “real forefathers,” the people who insisted that we live up to our ideals. Not the people who wrote eloquently about justice, equality and unalienable rights who also owned slaves and refused women the right to vote and practiced child labor and called indigenous people savages and encouraged their genocide. But the people who identified with and had compassion for the victims of this hypocrisy and dedicated their lives to making those beautiful words beautiful for everyone. Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth are our forefathers; Emma Goldman and Mother Jones are; Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Rachel Carson. And many of our forefathers are not dead, did not live before us, they are alive today, out in the fore, in front: Wendell Berry and Ralph Nader are our forefathers, Amy Goodman and Kathy Kelly, Diane Wilson and Ann Wright, Van Jones and Grace Lee Boggs, Medea Benjamin and Ray McGovern, Chris Hedges and Cornel West, Sandra Steingraber and Chelsea Manning, Bill McKibben, Bryan Stevenson, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Camilo Mejia—and so many more—all living forefathers who call to all of us to be our own necessary forefathers.

And why do we need to be continually breeding more forefathers? Vince Emanuele said our enemies are not seven-thousand miles away; they are among us, the super rich who control our political system so that it profits them at the expense of the common good. This is the same problem John Brown faced—an economic and political system that had accommodated itself to slavery, found ways to justify it, so that the profits kept rolling in as reliably as the waves of the Atlantic for the slave owners in the South, the slave traders and textile mill owners in the North. We cannot have too many forefathers because this problem of wealth and power is always before us.

II

Slavery is an act of war. It is usually referred to as one of the “spoils” of war—the defeated being captured and exploited as slaves. Paradoxically, the slave trade reversed this process. The European countries and the United States did not declare war on West African countries; they skipped the conquest part and simply went and kidnapped prisoners, transported them to the U.S. and the Caribbean (killing millions on the way through sadistic disregard), and then waged terrorist war on them with chains, branding irons, whips—raping them and legalizing their inferior status, removing their human rights so that they might be another person’s property rights. White people built an economy based on the slave labor of millions of African prisoners of war. This was a long war: 250 years. And it would require John Brown to light the fuse of another war to end it. Fire to fight fire.

For many years John Brown was called a lunatic and a terrorist. How many people would say the same of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man of equal religious zeal as Brown and a pacifist, who tried to blow up Hitler with a bomb? A terrorist? A traitor? In Brown and Bonhoeffer, we’re talking about men who attempted to intercede in genocide.

III

Just as Bonhoeffer, eighty-five years later, lends a kind of context to John Brown’s life, it’s interesting to go back to1493 for another sort of context. That year a Papal Bull established the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. After Columbus’s first voyage, the Catholic Church and European governments were aware that some issues may come up around explorers “discovering” lands that were already inhabited and “claiming” the resources of these “new” lands. How to see what we would eventually call imperialism as legal and moral? The Pope’s Doctrine of Discovery worked just fine. It said “savage” pagan people, because they were not Christian and were therefore a lesser species, could have no legal or moral right to ownership of land or resources. In fact, no matter how many of these natives lived in a place, it was essentially empty, terra nullius. Who could object to colonizing an empty land? Or, for that matter, removing the legally and morally invisible people to be your slaves. The blatant racism and opportunism of this “doctrine” did nothing to deter Western imperialism on three continents. Rather, it enabled the genocide of the indigenous peoples, justified slavery, and was the precursor of another useful doctrine: Manifest Destiny. Its remnants, like the remnants of a vast hurricane, are still creating moral havoc in U.S. legal and foreign policy. Many protesters of the Iraq War in 2003 carried a sign that asked sarcastically: “What’s Our Oil Doing Under Their Sand?”

World history, as defined by Western Christian countries since 1493, has depended on the Doctrine of Discovery. It’s the sword of the crusader, the mask of the imperialist, the whip of the slave driver, the justification of the racist, and the truth behind the slogan “Making the world safe for democracy.” It is interesting to note that state imperialism, which is justified by religious fiat, which makes the ethically obscene both moral and legal, is the perfect marriage of church and state. In what sense, then, have they ever been separated?

IV

Until the Civil War, slavery was like a poker game the North and South had agreed to play, pretending to be antagonists, but both profiting. A series of “compromises” tweaked the rules now and then, reshuffled the deck, but the game went on. John Brown wanted a hand in this game. He wanted a seat at that table, he wanted to rip the mask of hypocritical rectitude and racism off the players; he wanted to name the crime. How does a poor man, a man in debt who is having trouble supporting his family, will himself into a position of power to affect politics, conscience, policy, and, ultimately, history? He knew the only way to get his seat was by the shedding of blood. Many abolitionists were preaching against slavery, but nothing was changing. It had to be a white man spilling white blood over a crime done to blacks. It had to be a white man exposing white hypocrisy. And he suspected that the only hand he might get that would give him power would be the martyr hand.

V

Compromises. The U.S. political system makes a fetish of compromise, as though compromise is its highest good—higher than truth, higher than morality because compromise creates its own morality, higher sometimes than reality. It’s the trump card. Today politicians applaud themselves for the compromises they make between those who “believe” that climate change is not real and those who accept the science that it is. “Compromise” between a fantasy and reality, between what’s false and what’s true, is not good, is not moral; it’s monstrous.

In the years before the Civil War, a number of such “compromises” forced John Brown to act. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed Missouri into the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. But no other states north of Missouri’s southern border could be slave. Part of the game the North and South were playing was to keep an equal number of slave and free states in the Union so neither side could dictate policy. Both sides won; the war on Black people continued. The Compromise of 1850 allowed California to enter the Union as a free state, but the North had to accept the Fugitive Slave Act, which criminalized any northerner who helped a slave who had already escaped to the North. Now slaves had to travel the Underground Railroad all the way to Canada to be safely out of the land of the free. For John Brown, one of the great conductors on the Underground Railroad, this law was outrageous and criminal, a compromise with the devil. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed the people of new states entering the union to vote to be free or slave. One reason for this “compromise” was to enable politicians to avoid the question of whether they were anti-or proslavery. Let the people decide! Of course, letting the people decide led to a near civil war in Kansas. And then the Dred Scott decision in 1857 was the last straw for John Brown. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in this case that people of African descent—either slave or free—could not be citizens of the United States nor have any rights under the Constitution because of their inherent inferiority. The court also dictated that slaves were private property, and, therefore, a person owning a slave who happened to move to a free state could continue to own his property. The notion that property rights are superior to human rights plays the same role in our history as arteriosclerosis plays in the health of the heart.

VI

Theodore Roethke’s poem “In a Dark Time” contains these lines:

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair.

The problem of a noble soul is that it is always at odds with circumstance. The world does not operate on nobility or purity; both are attributes of martyrdom. The noble soul rejects domestication, refuses to graze in a succulent field while lambs are being slaughtered in the next. It refuses to relax into complicity with atrocity, to sigh, and ask, Oh well, what can one person do anyway? The noble soul is uncomfortable with any level of avoidance of responsibility. To be aware is to be responsible, to witness is to feel—and feel it as the victim does. If language employed to describe injustice is to be fully real, it implies an action needed to confront the injustice. This is what is meant by “the word made flesh.”

Thomas Merton’s startling essay A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann considers what society calls sanity. Merton begins by commenting on the fact that before Eichmann stood trial, he was examined by psychiatrists and pronounced “perfectly sane.” That is, he was conscientious about his work, orderly, respected the system of law and order, was obedient, loyal, he slept well, had a good appetite, and was, incidentally, a mass murderer. Merton goes on to ask about the much touted sanity of the men who make atomic bombs and consider using them—would use them and consider it sane. Merton explains how moral values, spiritual values, love and compassion, are not part of the equation of sanity—in effect, how a rational approach to defining sanity leads to an acceptance of barbarity and genocide as sane. Or how insanity is deemed sane. And, inversely, how the people often branded as insane by the dictates of social order are martyred for their true sanity. Such, then, is the insanity of John Brown, a man so attuned to the suffering of slaves and to the hypocrisy of a system of “justice” sanctioning slavery that he has to act to end it.

So, when Victor Hugo said about the execution of John Brown, “You preserve your shame, but you kill your glory,” what he meant was that all the huffery and puffery of federal and state and military law and power was concentrated to condemn and kill John Brown so that slavery—our shame—could continue. And John Brown, who embodied the glory of two simple ideas, The Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence, was killed.

VII

The vehemence with which John Brown was denounced, North and South, was in direct proportion to how close he cut to the bone of America’s hypocrisy. Abraham Lincoln said that John Brown must die because, whatever we think of slavery, violence must not be used to alter the social order. What’s interesting about Lincoln is that a year later, in his first inaugural address, he said that as president he would not act to end slavery. Such a course would be counter to the Constitution and states’ rights: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He said he couldn’t act to end slavery if he wanted to. So, in effect, while condemning John Brown for acting with violence outside of the rule of law, Lincoln also believed that there was no non-violent legal appeal to end slavery. Lincoln reiterated his support for the Fugitive Slave Act while washing his hands of it, saying that the law is the law until it is repealed. He is a perfect example of the kind of systemic sanity described by Merton—the absurdity of not allowing oneself the possibility of moral action because the law forbids it. Conversely, Thoreau said, “The law will never make men free. It is men who must make the law free.”

Ironically, four years later, nearly at the end of the Civil War, Lincoln, in his second inaugural, said:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Lincoln is saying that because slavery is such an immense crime against morality, against God, this war must continue as an act of God’s judgment until all the wealth accumulated by slavery is lost and every drop of blood whipped from the backs of slaves is matched by the blood of soldiers from the North and South. An eye for an eye—not because man’s sense of justice demands it but because God’s does. Lincoln, in both inaugural speeches, maintained that powers beyond his control—first the Constitution, second God’s justice—determined his behavior. John Brown felt that he had to act to heal the moral insanity of those same powers.

On the morning of his execution, December 2, 1859, as John Brown was led from his cell, he passed a note to his jailer. It said: I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but by blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.

Did the dead John Brown write Lincoln’s second inaugural address? In 1864, would Lincoln still say that John Brown must die? Or would he simply say that we killed the messenger?

VIII

An irony: In the summer of 1859, at the same time that John Brown, under an assumed name, had moved his men to a farm in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry to prepare for the attack, a man named Edwin Drake was drilling for oil—the world’s first intentional oil well—in Titusville, Pennsylvania, not far from Brown’s hideout. On August 28, Drake succeeded. Oil’s immense energy would make slavery unnecessary, would drive cultivators and tractors, fertilizers and harvesters, reapers, cotton gins, trains and trucks, create an economy in thrall to oil’s 300-million-year-old energy. As John Brown was the lever that tipped the balance of slavery toward freedom, oil was the pivot toward a new kind of freedom, a new kind of slavery, one that we don’t know how to throw off now. Where is the oil abolitionist with the courage of John Brown?

IX

The historian Truman Nelson describes John Brown as “the stone in the historians’ shoe.” We are, as a country, painfully hobbled until we stop, sit down, take off the shoe and examine the source of this pain. Malcolm X said, “You know what John Brown did? He went to war. He was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves. . . . And any white man who is ready and willing to shed blood for your freedom—in the sight of other whites, he’s nuts.” John Brown will always be the stone in the shoe until we come to terms with what Malcolm X is saying. We don’t like our wars started by righteous prophets and martyrs. Wars—at least, Constitutionally—are supposed to be declared by Congress. A rational act by rational men. John Brown, in his willingness to shed blood, ripped off the mask of denial and hypocrisy. That mask, not John Brown, is the stone in the shoe of U.S. history. Some people would rather continue hobbling, in fact, be crippled altogether, than contemplate that mask. The mask is difficult to contemplate because it combines racism with profit, Christianity with oppression, idealism with decadence.

The problem of John Brown is not John Brown’s problem. His duty was clear and moral. The problem belongs to those who want to focus on anything but the rightness of his cause, focus on his violence, his poor strategy, his ideological certainty, his unwillingness to let time—time, the great healer—solve the slave issue. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” The oppressors know this equation better than the oppressed, who prefer to think that supplication based on the injustice of their victimhood will soften the hearts of their oppressors. The oppressors are pleased to offer compromises that change nothing.

In a sense John Brown’s conscience, or his obdurate insistence on acting out the demands of that conscience, is the eye of the needle of our history. If we refuse that passage, we refuse our ideals. John Brown’s conscience allows no wiggle room for racism and hypocrisy, no exceptions to equality, and offers only rage at the idea that among a white man’s unalienable rights is the right to make a Black man his property. John Brown says the words of our Declaration mean what they say or mean nothing. He says, if you can thread those fine words through the eye of my conscience, you can stitch up the integrity of your history.

X

Strategy. Frederick Douglass argued with John Brown for three days before the attack on Harpers Ferry, trying to convince Brown that he was creating a trap for himself. Douglass was right—as many armchair quarterbacks since have been right. But, it seems to me, there are two issues here. One is that sometimes the effrontery of a foolhardy plan does succeed. For instance, think of Fidel Castro coming ashore in the Sierra Maestra of eastern Cuba in 1957 with twelve men, one of whom, Che Guevara, had been shot in the neck. They were shortly out of food and water. Gambling was legal in Batista’s Cuba; what might have been Castro’s odds?

But the success of John Brown did not depend on sparking a slave revolt, even though that’s what he said he hoped for. His success depended on the clarity of the statements he was able to make after his capture and before his execution. Those statements clarified his martyrdom and exposed “the crimes of this guilty land.” At his sentencing, he said:

Had I interfered [at Harpers Ferry] in the manner which I admit . . . in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right, and every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, is no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood farther with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.

John Brown here skewers several masks of our hypocrisy, the first being that the law is fair and just. That is, ,if he were acting on behalf of the rich and privileged instead of the poor and enslaved it would be unlikely that his head would be in a noose. The second is his reminder to a “Christian” nation of what their religious teachings require of them: the Golden Rule and the necessary allegiance with the enslaved. And lastly, John Brown does not plead for his life, but nobly offers it up in the service of justice, preferring, it would seem, to be in the company of the righteous dead than the hypocritical living.

John Brown’s military strategy was as naive as it was flawed. His moral strategy was as brilliant as it was true.

XI

Now, the issue of violence. This is an extremely important and difficult subject because the most severe and horrible violence committed by John Brown was not at Harpers Ferry but at Pottawatomie, Kansas, three years earlier in the late spring of 1856. And it is for this violence that he is called a terrorist. Wielding broadswords weighted with mercury, John Brown and four of his sons, plus two other men, hacked five proslavery men to death—James Doyle, his sons William and Drury, Allen Wilkinson, and William Sherman. Late at night Brown and his men entered the houses of their victims, forced them outside at gunpoint, ignored the screams and protestations of children and wives, and began their deadly work.

People who condemn Brown as a terrorist for this act are correct. It was terrorism—the intentional grisly killing of unarmed people for political effect. However, in contemporary twenty-first century terms, the five victims, who were supporters of the proslavery vigilantes and in another country, would have been considered “enemy combatants,” and they probably would have been killed by a drone missile, not face to face murder, along with the women and children—all of them dismembered and burned. Brown’s attack achieved the effect that he intended. It sent a bloody message to the proslavery vigilantes who had so far been terrorizing the anti-slavery, Free State Kansas settlers with impunity. The message was that the anti-slavery people were now going to fight back. As mentioned earlier, the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed territories to vote democratically to be free or slave states. Although more free-staters moved to Kansas than pro-slavers, the proslave states hired mercenary vigilantes to fix the elections, terrorize the people with murders, and lay siege to the free-state community of Lawrence. Free-state people appealed to the state congress, to the governor, and to President Franklin Pierce. Nothing was done because all the people in power were in favor of Kansas becoming a slave state. After the Brown murders, the free-state majority stood up to the anti-slavery vigilantes.

Later, Charles Robinson, the first governor of the state of Kansas said, “I had never much doubt that Captain Brown was the author of the blow at Pottawatomie, for the reason that he was the only man who comprehended the situation and saw the absolute necessity of some such blow, and had the nerve to strike it.”

Anthony Burgess, in an essay about his book The Clockwork Orange, said, “It is always evil to kill another human being, even though it is sometimes right to do so.” Is John Brown’s situation one of these “sometimes” moments? It’s hard to hold in one’s mind and conscience the idea of an act being both evil and right at the same time.

XII

But still, how do we weigh this murder? Brown, who, until this event, was not a murderer, justified it by weights and measures. He thought like this:

Slavery is an absolute evil. Slavery is institutionalized, racist terrorism that has been going on for over 200 years. The personal and moral cost of slavery is incalculable and an abomination to God while it also mocks our political ideals. If by killing five men guilty of slavery, I can accelerate the process of ending slavery, it will be a necessary and good thing. If there were another method, I would use it. But now the entire legal, military, and congressional weight of this country is determined to support slavery.

John Brown was no stranger to such calculations. He had abandoned his wife and youngest children—whom he loved—with no money and little food on their cold, isolated farm in the northern Adirondacks because the suffering of three million slaves was of greater magnitude to him than the suffering of his family. Asking his grown sons to take on their souls the weight of these horrible murders was nothing for him compared to the weight of not striking a blow to end slavery.

We are rightly appalled at John Brown’s terrorism, and right to wish there had been a non-violent solution to slavery, but can we really presume to think that non-violence, had it been organized amongst a constituency that did not believe in it, would have had any leverage? Remember that the noble justification of the Civil War, in which over 625,000 people died and millions more were physically and mentally wounded, is that it freed the slaves—John Brown’s goal. Many sincere pacifists believe that violence is never justified, that a non-violent way can always be found even if it takes many more years. For instance, maybe secession should have been allowed to proceed, and then slaves could have escaped into the north as a foreign country. No fugitive slave law. But what if the “compromise” of secession had included closed borders? John Brown probably considered the option of waiting, but how many more slaves would be brutalized in the meantime?

XIII

Three more ironies:

1.The first person killed at Harpers Ferry by John Brown’s men was Hayward Shepherd, a freed black slave, a baggage handler on the B & O Railroad. They shot Shepherd when he attempted to run away, possibly to alert the town of the attack on the train.

2. The federal troops who arrested John Brown were under the command of Robert E. Lee, whose task it was to enforce the law against insurrection against the national government.

3. Harriet Tubman believed in John Brown’s raid and would have been among them except that she was ill. What if she had been caught and hung next to John Brown? Would her death there have erased her subsequent halo? Or would her death have changed the way generations have viewed John Brown?

XIV

And remember these lyrics from Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic written as a marching song for the northern armies in the Civil War?

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

What she is not saying overtly, as we rarely do, is that in order for us to die to make men free, we have to engage in the process of killing other people. And call it God’s work. The work of church and state.

XV

In his memoir of his time in the Weather Underground during the late 1960s and ‘70s, Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers writes about coming to understand the difference between state sponsored violence—whether the death penalty, police brutality, or the atomic bomb—and citizen-sponsored violence to promote justice. The former, as in dropping napalm and Agent Orange on civilians in Vietnam, is acceptable to most Americans. The latter, as in using violence—even violence limited to attacks on property—to oppose illegal and immoral war that drops napalm and Agent Orange on civilians, is seen as criminal. State-sponsored terrorism in war is legal; citizen-sponsored terrorism to end war is criminal. Why? Thomas Jefferson, who said that we need to have a revolution every twenty years to avoid the inevitable tendency of power to become self-serving, would have seen it differently. John Brown did. He saw that a recently revolutionary society that fought a war to end inequality was now using violence to maintain inequality.

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”
—Thomas Jefferson

XVI

I was recently in Louisville and had the opportunity to hear Dr. Blaine Hudson, a professor at the University of Louisville and the author of Two Hundred Years of Black Louisville, speak. When describing some of the festering social injustices in his city he said, “The measure of a society is its ability to identify a problem and solve it.” What could be simpler as a definition of a successful society and its government?

Prior to the Civil War very few people were identifying slavery as a problem, and most of those who did were trying to find a way to co-exist. Most abolitionists were opposed to slavery while they continued to be racist. They wanted slaves freed to end northern economic competition with free labor and they wanted Blacks to be returned to Africa or settled in the Caribbean. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison decried slavery but were only willing to use moral persuasion to end it. So, the problem was vast, both genocide and a crime against humanity, but for the most part it was not being identified and certainly not being solved. A society which is intrinsically flawed and corrupted by an immoral institution woven into its economy, which is justified by its legal and religious systems, and which can neither identify nor solve its problem, is a failed state. Only Nat Turner and a few other Black insurrectionists had attempted a solution. Slavery was a white crime and John Brown stood alone as a white man determined to heal his country. Until his attack, no white person in the United States could claim not to be complicit with this evil.

How should we today attempt to take the measure of our society that refuses to identify the seriousness of the problem of the climate crisis and offer no solution? A failed state?

XVII

Of course, proponents of non-violence believe in a harder and higher courage, the courage that would have them die to make men free while not killing other people. I’ve painted many of those people from our history—Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Kathy Kelly, Dorothy Day, Jim Harney, Philip Berrigan, Father Roy Bourgeois, John Lewis, Murphy Davis, and Colman McCarthy, to name a few. But as you can see, these are people of our modern era. Non-violence as a method of social change, whether as strategy or belief, was not an idea much talked about in John Brown’s day except by Quakers, and never employed by groups of people intent on social change. And how could it have been used to end slavery? John Brown was literally all alone in nineteenth-century America as a white man who took on himself the burden of the uncompromisable crime of slavery, determined to act and to end it. It does us little good to correct or condemn his behavior. He acted from the limits of his own knowledge and imagination, rage and love. When a crime like slavery is so deeply rooted in the economic system, the legal system, and in moral belief, removing it is necessarily cataclysmic. The tumor required surgery, not talk therapy.

After the Civil War Frederick Douglass said of John Brown, “His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine—it was as the burning sun to my taper light—mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

Of what use is a state if it does not strive to ensure justice and if it relegates four million people to the status of real estate while not providing a single square foot of real estate on which a just person can stand? Of what use is a state that trumpets the fanfare of prosperity while keeping time with the lash? And what choice does such a state have but to label a person who challenges its hypocrisy as insane, a traitor, and to execute that person?

“Most codes extend their definitions of treason to acts not really against one’s country. They do not distinguish between acts against the government, and acts against the oppressions of the government. The latter are virtues, yet have furnished more victims to the executioner than the former, because real treasons are rare; oppressions frequent. The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries.” —Thomas Jefferson: Report on Spanish Convention, 1792.

XVIII

It seems to me now that John Brown’s life—so circuitous, so difficult, so unlikely, so heroic, and, finally, so impossible—was not really his at all. It’s a rare person so fully endowed with empathetic imagination that he or she must act out the imperatives of another’s suffering. In such action, one’s life ceases to be one’s own and becomes the moral spirit of the time. The man hung was not John Brown, but the spirit of freedom, the spirit of equality, the spirit of love, the spirit that cannot die but will, wounded, set up such a howl that many others in their alarm, concern, and shame will come running. That spirit still howls. And when we say Long Live John Brown!, what we mean is long live that spirit that refuses to keep company with systemic evil, refuses hypocritical compromise, refuses the dangerous and totalitarian notion of my country right or wrong, and embraces the lonely obligation to return a country and its people to sanity. How could one person do that?

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