by Alice Bernstein
As people the world over celebrated the arrival of the new year – 2014 – another quieter, less visible tribute, filled with deep yearning, was also taking place – the 151st Watch Night service, or Freedom’s Eve. The first watch took place on New Year’s Eve 1862, when enslaved men, women, and children gathered to see with their own eyes the dawn promised by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, when they would be “thenceforward, and forever free.” With every passing hour, they joined in asking “How long, Watchman, how long?” It means a great deal that congregations of African Americans and others, in churches and homes across the land, continue the New Year’s Eve watch these 151 years, asking “How long, Watchman, how long?”
Much has been written about Lincoln and the Civil War with its legal ending of the barbaric economic system of ownership of other human beings. And further strides towards justice were propelled by the great Civil Rights movement. Yet, it is clear that racism and economic inequality continue to be rampant today. Is there an answer? YES!
Aesthetic Realism, the education founded by the great philosopher and poet Eli Siegel explains the cause and answer to racism, and I want everyone to know it!
How should we see people? — “our personal civil war”
The deepest desire of every person, Aesthetic Realism teaches, is to like the world on an honest basis. But the desire for contempt – the feeling we add to ourselves by making less of something else – is attractive to everyone. And this desire for contempt, Eli Siegel explained, is the cause of racism and every human injustice, from a child’s sarcastic taunt or “put down,” to lying, bullying, economic exploitation, and war. Contempt is the cause of all racial injustice, from the dehumanization of slavery and lynching, to the everyday forms of ethnic slurs, humiliation, voter suppression, and the vicious cycle of the “cradle to prison” pipeline which minority youth are experiencing – a form of cultural annihilation.
The enormous, ongoing interest in the Civil War and civil rights history is evident in books and movies – for instance, Lincoln, 12 Years a Slave, and Fruitvale Station – and apps for mobile devices which send daily historical real-time updates. That is because the conflict between contempt and respect brings up a question Aesthetic Realism sees as central in every person’s life: How should we see people? In her commentary on the Civil War, in the international periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #916, Ellen Reiss writes definitively:
The great cause of the Civil War – despite Southern fakery on the subject – was slavery. And slavery is a form – utter, elemental – of man’s seeing man with contempt: it is the epitome of the feeling, You are less; I do not have to see you as real; and I have pleasure looking down on you…. And the fight, Shall I see the world and people with contempt or respect? is the fight within every individual right now; it is our constant, inward, personal civil war.
I am convinced that racism will end when every one of us studies contempt in ourselves and learns, as I am so grateful to be learning, that there is a greater pleasure: the pleasure of respect, of seeing that we are more through wanting to know and be fair to the outside world. Poetry is a means of our seeing this.
Poetry about Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and America
In January we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Day, to honor the man who is loved for his bravery, sincerity, and enormous energy in fighting for social and economic equality for all people. And soon after, we celebrate, too, the life of Abraham Lincoln, for ending the murderous injustice of slavery. History records that Lincoln said, “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do signing this paper. If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.”
In various ways Dr. King expressed esteem for Abraham Lincoln. In a 1962 speech he stated: “Lincoln achieved immortality because he issued the Emancipation Proclamation… [which] dealt a devastating blow to the system of slaveholding and an economy built upon it.”
Dr. King himself was outspoken about current events, speaking early and steadily against America’s brutally unjust war in Vietnam:
“This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with
orphans and widows,…cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation
that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on
programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Dr. King led the Poor People’s Campaign to end poverty, marched and was jailed with many others seeking the right to vote, and was killed in Memphis while speaking in behalf of the livelihood and dignity of striking sanitation workers.
In my travels interviewing unsung pioneers for “The Force of Ethics in Civil Rights,” oral history project, I’ve been privileged to be invited into the homes of people – Black and white. Frequently, on the walls are images of Abraham Lincoln and of Dr. King. I believe the reason for the enduring relation of these men is explained magnificently in poems by Eli Siegel. I quote two instances here from Hail, American Development (1968), his second volume of poetry.
In “Litany of Presidents, Mostly Unfortunate” there are these lines:
And we come now to the most fortunate President of all: fortunate in death. Abraham Lincoln had America speak well of him in a time of uncertainty and pain. There was something in Abraham Lincoln that saw what America hoped for. He is a fortunate President.
In these quiet, yet passionate lines, Eli Siegel, with simplicity and musical exactitude, explains the greatness of Lincoln and why he is loved to this very day. With all that our nation and Lincoln himself endured in the Civil War, including death by an assassin’s bullet, he is described as “fortunate” by Mr. Siegel, three times in four lines. To have America speak well of the man elected our president in a time of uncertainty and pain, and to feel he had seen what America itself hoped for, is a mighty and rare thing.
In 1968, just hours after Martin Luther King’s assassination became known, Mr. Siegel, in an Aesthetic Realism class, read his poem “Something Else Should Die.” I had the immense privilege of being in that class, and will always remember Mr. Siegel’s emotion as he read it and spoke of Dr. King’s large meaning.
Something Else Should Die: A Poem with Rhymes In April 1865 Abraham Lincoln died. In April 1968 Martin Luther King died. Their purpose was to have us say, some day: Injustice died.
Stark facts, stated simply, musically, make for large emotion. Two men of different races, in different centuries, are shown to be akin, united in opposition to injustice. This poem has us feel both men are alive, warm, near.
What would it mean for injustice to die? I think it would mean that every person – world leaders and private citizens – would honestly try to answer the question Mr. Siegel asked: “What does a person deserve by being a person?” Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln tried to answer it in a way history sees as true, beautiful, undying.
“Injustice will die,” Mr. Siegel wrote, “only when an individual no longer can feel that individuality is more served by injustice than by justice; by ugliness rather than non-ugliness.”
When America studies Aesthetic Realism there will be a new celebration, and we will no longer have to ask, “How long, Watchman, how long?”
Alice Bernstein is an Aesthetic Realism Associate, journalist, and oral historian of civil rights, who “unearthed” several speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, described as significant by King scholars. To learn more, visit www.AllianceOfEthicsAndArt.org.
