Opening Salvo // Keep on Climbing
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
Volume 4 // Issue 1 // Summer 2023 // Higher Ground
Soldiers, keep on warring
World, keep on turning
— Stevie Wonder, Higher Ground
Stevie Wonder’s seminal album Innervisions came out in 1973, the year I was born.
I listened to it a few times the other night as I cooked dinner on the Fourth of July. The familiar music pulsed into me while I cut the potatoes, and it began to coax the stress out of my body. Soon I was dancing around the kitchen to “Higher Ground,” in between seasoning the potato salad and sautéing mushrooms and onions for the burgers—it’s nearly impossible not to dance when Stevie Wonder himself is insisting on it.
I danced away the war in Ukraine, rising inflation, the pandemic, the January 6 testimony, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and a debate about the circumstances under which we can use the word “woman” and remain in polite society. World keep on turnin’.
But not all the news was bad: I was also celebrating from afar my friend Diksha, who’d just passed her citizenship exam after nearly 20 years living here in the States. She’d been studying earlier in the spring when I got a question via text.
“Some things I still don’t understand,” she wrote. “What does ‘freedom of assembly’ mean? Assemble where?”
I laughed—really, truly, out loud—in part because it felt like there was a party she didn’t have the address to. But also because of the utter dysfunction our country is in right now. Assemble where? Around what issue? To what end? I wouldn’t know where to start.
But she needed a real answer, and for a very real test that means a great deal.
“So, it basically means that we are free as Americans to gather together for whatever purpose we choose: to celebrate, to protest, to organize, to attend religious services, etc.,” I told her. As I typed, my appreciation for this inalienable right grew. “It protects us from the government saying that we can’t choose to get together and organize against it!”
She easily connected the dots; it was just the strange, truncated phrasing that had been in her way. Once she understood, she told me that she’s been scared for years to join protests, because her lawyer had told her that if she got arrested, she might be sent back to Mumbai. It’s where she’s from, but this is where her home and her life are, and we’re lucky to have her. The night before her test, I sent her another message: “You are an American whether you pass the test or not,” I reassured her, and myself. But she passed, and now she plans to protest whenever she wants.
Knowing that she’s been a lifelong vegetarian, I teased her that night. “It’s your first Fourth as a citizen!” I texted. “We won’t make you eat a hamburger or anything.” She sent back a picture of herself throwing a peace sign, dressed in a blue shirt with stars and stripes in the shape of a heart that she said she wears every year on the holiday. (For the record, she was in front of a mobile cannabis truck in Brooklyn decorated with a giant leaf that said “Fort Greener” on it. Higher ground, indeed.) We’ll make sure that there’s vegetarian food when my family celebrates with her at the end of the month during a graduation party for my nephew. (Luckily, his school is “The Patriots” so we’ll already have a red, white, and blue theme going.
I recently had the opportunity to go to my own 30-year high school reunion. You might be able to locate Bloomsburg on the map of Pennsylvania on the cover if you know where to look along the east fork of the Susquehanna River.
We did not talk about politics. We didn’t debate vaccine policy. No one even mentioned the pandemic, come to think of it. We joked around and checked in on each other’s families and reminisced at the VFW Hall. It’s hard to think about the fact that on a different day, we might be on opposite sides of the barricades, each believing we have the moral high ground.
But even if we did meet under those circumstances, I would not be able to unsee my classmates as the people they are. Trust builds up among people in small towns, and it will never completely dissipate, no matter the distance. But what do we do when we don’t have that basis to start from?
One idea, promoted by the Ideos Institute, is to come to tricky conversations armed with empathy. Julia Galef, another helpful voice on this topic, asks us to explore a similar option: interpreting the sometimes ugly realities of life as a catalyst for discovery—what she calls “scout mindset”—instead of locking into our ideology and aggressively defending it. Soldiers, keep on warrin’. It never ends.
Moral people who share many of your values can easily come to different policy positions, different life choices, and can—even when you agree—have different priorities. That’s the case even when you grow up side-by-side, and, in the case of families, cheek-by-jowl. It’s a theme that was explored at the Heterodox Academy conference this summer in Denver, that mile-high city. It’s an organization whose whole mission is to expand the number of political, philosophical, and moral viewpoints in academia. They’re a staunch supporter of another American right: freedom of speech.
It turns out that this makes for a great party. All weekend, there was a lot of laughter, which has been in short supply lately. I was able to connect there with the assembled friends and colleagues, meet some great new people, and participate in a pre-conference panel discussion as an arts fellow with the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
But one early morning, our Ideas Editor Walter Foley and I were whisked away by our colleague Brian Kors from FAIR, who asked us to join him for a morning jaunt to the mountains, and we had breakfast in Nederland. The mountain water was incredibly cold, and moving fast. Signs along the side of the road warned: If flooding occurs, get to higher ground.
It may be a good metaphor for what to do when conversations go off the rails: When you’re in danger, go one step above where you are. Look at the conversation from a higher place, and try again to understand where you’re each coming from and why. Reaffirm what you agree on, and what connects you. As Mitt Romney recently wrote in The Atlantic, given our political dysfunction, everyday people2 need to take the reins in their own communities. “That will require us all to rise above ourselves—above our grievances and resentments—and grasp the mantle of leadership our country so badly needs,” he wrote.
While the small town I grew up in was a river valley, I appreciate the mindset of the mile-and-half-high Nederlanders at the gateway of the great Continental Divide. Their town motto, like Stevie Wonder’s advice, gets at the relaxation and joy we feel in our bodies when we’ve let go of pain, and have really connected with ourselves or someone else on higher ground: Life is better up here. //
1 We’ll soon be releasing last year’s Root Roundtable on why philosophy, art, and humor are important aspects of conversation and life. We were joined by Dominic Green of The Spectator, April Kornfield (née Lawson) of Braver Angels, and Erec Smith of Free Black Thought and York College of Pennsylvania.
2 The 1968 Sly and the Family Stone song “Everyday People” was also on the radio quite a bit when I was young: “Sometimes I’m right and I can be wrong / My own beliefs are in my song / The butcher, the banker, the drummer and then / Makes no difference what group I’m in.”
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YOU ARE FREE TO ASSEMBLE, SPEAK,
AND MAYBE DANCE ON AUGUST 6
Join us August 6 from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Philly PACK (233 Federal Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147) for a low-key social evening with RQ staff, contributors, artists, subscribers, and a Stevie Wonder soundtrack. Bring a friend who isn’t yet a subscriber but should be. We’d love to meet them. There may be dancing. Stevie said so. //
For full text and images, consider reading RQ in print, on a Sunday afternoon, sun streaming through your window, coffee in hand, and nary a phone alert within sight or in earshot… just fine words, fine design, and the opportunity to make a stitch in time. // Subscribe or buy a single issue today. // Print is dead. Long live print. //