Chris Jepson: Hope's Plot

I took my 10-year-old grandson last Friday to see the new movie, “The Butler,” starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey. It is the story of a White House butler (Whitaker) who, as a boy, witnessed the murder of his father just after his mother is raped by a plantation overlord. It’s the Jim Crow South of the 1920s. He eventually lands a job in the White House and the movie is a running commentary on the Civil Rights movement from the 1940s on. Whitaker and Winfrey capably portray the terror, the excruciating difficulty of successfully navigating (without personal harm) a white racist America.

I pointedly took my grandson because he needs to comprehend what it was like to be black in America, once-upon-a-time. I want him to realize what “is,” too. I want him to understand the black indignation over New York City’s Stop & Frisk policy and the collective sorrow associated with the murder of an unarmed Trayvon Martin.

American history is rife with injustice. From slavery to Jim Crow to current day Republican efforts to limit minority voting under the guise of ensuring against voter fraud, our story, the American experience has too often been a deadly, demoralizing account of humiliation and suffering. This includes, too, the experience of many Native Americans, Hispanics, gays, and for women of every color, race and persuasion. But America is much more than an historical account of “minority” disappointment.

America is an amalgam of competing interests. It is a rich story that has no historical equivalent. Every day we function as a democracy is another one for the record books. We cannot focus exclusively on our failures as a people, for there have been great national successes (progress), too, that resounded to the benefit of all Americans. Our story, our national narrative, what we tell ourselves needs to reference how we “the” people organized and achieved meaningful change. The American labor movement, unionism, is one sterling example of people organizing to achieve a better, more equitable America.

America with its progressive, democratic (small “d”) society is the “best” governing arrangement because our democracy allows for competing beliefs to exist while attempting to construct a public community.

I fault contemporary Republicans for taking giant antediluvian steps backward from ensuring progress towards a casteless, classless America. Philosopher Richard Rorty observed of the GOP, “It's hard to take them seriously. If you had a Republican program for narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor, that would be one thing, but they have no interest in any such program.” Republicans are fine with an America segregated into exclusive gated-communities of the well-off, public schools defunded and to use one Central Florida example, toll roads for those who can afford them and something less for the rest of our community.

Richard Rorty asks, “Nowadays, to say that we are clever animals is not to say something philosophical and pessimistic but something political and hopeful – namely, if we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming. This is to set aside Kant’s question ‘What is man?’ and to substitute the question ‘What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?’”

It is my hope that America’s future is one of a mobilized, compassionate electorate, one pursuing better prospects for all our children. For all of America.

Imagine that.

Jepson is a 27-year resident of Central Florida. He’s fiscally conservative, socially liberal, likes art and embraces diversity of opinion. Reach him at [email protected]