Grist for the Mill
Today is New Year’s Eve, 2022. I’m sitting in my living room, paneled in redwood, the only
original part of our family home acquired in 1971. I tell people it was first a small cabin on a
large lot, and now it’s a large house on a small lot that still has twenty trees including six giant
coast redwoods and a now towering English Oak grown from an acorn brought here from
England by the previous owners.
Each year the holidays start when I clean the multiple cobwebs in the rafters. All the little
spiders scurry into their hidey holes when they sense my grime-covered cleaning ball of death careening toward their intricate lairs. I know it’s a hopeless endeavor because they begin their
rebuild immediately. As I clean walls, I come across random little holes. Worm holes? Ooooh…creepy. For less than a nanosecond I know we live in a delusional world, imagining that what we don’t see doesn’t exist.
After I clean, I decorate. The Christmas tree, a Noble Fir, almost makes it to the ceiling. The lights go on, then the ornaments, all the sentimental glittery creatures with an occasional
slithery silverfish come out of their boxes, to create tiny scenes of worlds within worlds. All
surfaces are lit with fairy lights, little houses, bottle-brush trees, cute animals, elves, santas and
angels. When the lights are plugged in, our holiday simulacrum comes alive.
I look out the windows from my cozy living room. It’s all evolving every second on a scenic macro and invisible micro level. This room is filled with my family’s stories, and out there all over America are trillions within trillions of stories within stories evolving.
I’m thinking ahead to 2023. I gave up on New Year’s resolutions because they’re like diets, but I do try to be hopeful, only this year that seems more difficult than usual. I let my mind wander and I think about what has bothered me the most in 2022, which is racism, education in
America, and what the complicated subject of Woke is all about.
I decide to look up what my favorite historian, Jill Lapore, has to say about any of this in her March 2022 essay in the New Yorker entitled “Why the School Wars Still Rage.” I’m comforted when I understand how national issues evolve, and not just erupt out of nowhere.
After reading Lapore’s article and interview with David Remnick about originalism I learned
some things that helped me focus my thoughts.
The 1925 Scopes trial is known as the “Trial of the Century,” upon which the 1960 movie, Inherit the Wind, was based. In 1925 a biology teacher, John Scopes, taught Darwin’s theory of evolution in a Dayton, Tennessee public high school. That same year Tennessee passed a law
which made it against the law for teachers in publicly funded schools to teach the theory of evolution. Only the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible was allowed.
I know what you’re thinking! But get this.
To complicate the issue, the textbook Scopes used was the 1914 edition of George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology, which emphasized the science of eugenics, suggesting that those best fit for life were superior to others – a slippery slope into the racism already abounding with Jim Crow Laws. Not unlike today, a hundred years later, as we Americans are once again divided about what should be taught in the public schools. Only today, it’s not about biology; it’s about history. It’s also interesting to note another comparison: the evolving divide in 1925 came right
after another pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920.
So, both sides had a point.
Today’s book bannings aren’t just about books, just as the creation vs. evolution debate wasn’t
just about religion. It’s about what we all know is at the heart of learning and the heart of democracy written as the First Amendment of our Constitution.
Today, the debate is about critical race theory and anti-racist language that became mainstream after the murder of George Floyd, and the 1619 Project (journalists placing the
consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the U.S. narrative).
Lapore urges all of us to hear the ongoing debate whether on MSNBC or Fox News with an ear to the nuances embedded within what deeply divides us, as in 1925. The piece of information that stood out for me was how Darwin’s theory of evolution was being taught through the lens of eugenics. That bit added a serious wrinkle to the complexity of the debate.
I look out the windows from my cozy living room. It’s all evolving every second on a scenic macro and invisible micro level. This room is filled with my family’s stories, and out there all over America are trillions within trillions of stories within stories evolving.
American history includes each of us whether anyone likes it or not. We can argue whose story
is better or worse, but we can’t argue that each of us has a right to be included.
As my little creature friends whisper from the walls, “We’re all grist for the mill.”