Joy Is a Weapon: Thoughts on an America Yet to Be Born
Joy was in the streets.
On Saturday morning after the news of Joe Biden winning the Presidency, a wave of celebration swept the nation. There were scenes of exuberant crowds dancing and cheering outside the White House in D.C., folks doing the electric slide in Atlanta, and a spectacle of collective relief and exhilaration reminiscent of VE and VJ days in the World War II era.
In Philly, the crowd sang “Hey, hey, hey goodbye!” to Trump while popping champagne bottles and gleefully chugging them in the streets while Pride and Black Lives Matter flags mingled with American ones in similar scenes in San Francisco, Los Angeles and elsewhere across the country.
Here in San Diego, my phone blew up with ecstatic messages from friends and fellow activists sharing tears of joy and words of disbelief that America had finally woken up from its nightmare. I heard my neighbors howling and screaming happily, and cars driving by honking horns.
During my jog, people in Golden Hill waved and pumped their fists as I trundled past, and bikers waving flags with music blaring from a boom box cruised by jubilantly.
Some young women were dancing on the corner of A Street and an elderly couple yelled encouragement to them as they strolled by. I nodded to a guy sporting a Kaepernick jersey at the local diner, and he pumped his fist in return. Car parades made their way through Hillcrest and other parts of the city, and the rain that briefly poured on San Diego after months of drought felt like a baptism. It was a new day dawning.
As I pondered the significance of this historic moment, I thought back to something I had written in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests earlier this year:
Hope is in the streets. In the midst of a pandemic that brought an economic collapse during which a series of police murders inspired an international wave of protests, a new era is being imagined, one that would rise out of the ashes of a dying, corrupt order. And it’s a beautiful thing.
Yes, the ugliness is still very much with us in all its myriad forms, but amidst the teargas, rubber bullets, fascist tweets, and posturing, the young are demanding the impossible. What is wonderful about this is the fact that they don’t care what those who “know better” are telling them. They don’t care about what’s realistic or likely to move the needle in the November election. And they certainly don’t care whether you approve of their rhetoric and demands.
After a month of watching spontaneous protests, rallies, and solidarity events pop up out of the blue, it’s clear that something is happening that is larger than this moment. Some of the biggest protests locally and across the country have been driven by teenagers or others not much older engaging in real time on social media whose response to watching George Floyd’s murder on a closed feedback loop was to insist that it not stand, that this not be their future. Time to stop police brutality. Time to end racism, now. Time for a better world than the one we are leaving them.
Indeed, what unites the heart of those protests and this moment of celebration is the fact that both are motivated out of a sense of love for our neighbors. Only that kind of love can create real joy. And what distinguishes the energy of the present from the fury of the Right is the difference between malice and love.
Moving forward I think if anything can save us it will be that feeling of joy that comes from connection to the greater self.
Coincidentally, I happened to be teaching the Transcendentalists through this purgatorial election week, and I told my students, many of whom confessed to being in great anguish at the prospect of another four years of hate and division, that one of the things about reading great American writers like Thoreau and Whitman was that they were courage teachers whose words spoke of an American idealism that guides the best of who we are into being.
As I read Whitman to them over a Zoom, I had to fight back tears at the lines that counseled, “Long have you dreamed contemptible dreams/Now wash the gum from your eyes/You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.” Looking at my students’ faces in little boxes on a screen, I thought of their future at stake and that of my son and hoped like a prayer for redemption.
And on Saturday, as I watched the beautiful crowds, I thought “And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them/And such as it is to be of these, more or less I am/And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.” So, despite the world outside, hungry as a tiger, full of disappointment and future peril, I hope that we all pause to revel in this moment of relief and happiness for each other.
There will be time for more stern analysis, but there also needs to be time for joy. As Van Jones aptly put it on CNN just after the Biden call as he watched the crowds pouring into the street, “Joy is a weapon.”
He’s right. A politics driven by joy and a sense of radical love for the greater self is subversive to the hegemony of hate, resentment, and bitter division that has afflicted us. Long enough have we dreamed this contemptible dream. Let us go forward into future battles with an eye for the joyful, beloved community that we want to build.
We can make it real.
Lead image Jonathan Borba via Unsplash