telling the truth about ourselves

lessons from Peaky Blinders

Grant and I are completely sucked into Peaky Blinders, a show I never thought I would watch, let alone enjoy, about a family of gangster-types in Birmingham, England after World War I. One of the main characters is Arthur, and one of the show’s reoccurring themes is how Arthur continues to wrestle between his desire to be seen as a good man and owning his mobster roots that lifted him and his family out of poverty. His wife and sister are continually trying to rehabilitate him, but he seems to (at least thus far - the show isn’t finished) backslide into his old ways, beating himself up all along the way (there is also a ton of PTSD from the war thrown in, but that isn’t where this analogy is going).

This show has actually been a great distraction from the state of the country, but I can’t help but see parallels between Arthur’s continual identity crisis and our own identity crisis as a nation. We like to think of ourselves as the “shining city on the hill,” but we are also the people who committed genocide on millions of native people that lived here first. We idolize hard work and say that we’re a nation of people who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but our nation is literally founded on stolen land and stolen labor. For as many beautiful, ground-breaking things we could say about our country, we could likely find a longer list of sins.

All of our wisdom traditions teach us that there is no reconciliation without accountability. Psychotherapy says so as well, if you don’t find the collective spiritual traditions convicting. This is something that we as a nation need to learn. We have never adequately even named the sins of our Founding, so we’re doomed to keep having to deal with the repercussions.

Arthur is in the same boat - he keeps wanting to be seen as a new man by taking up gardening and fatherhood or quitting booze, but he can’t free himself of the shackles of his past until he faces the pain of his past, shows some accountability for his actions, and faces the consequences that come. I find myself wanting to yell at the screen as he keeps trying do enough to be seen as good, when what he really needs is to stop and face his pain and mistakes head on.

Pema Chödrön says, “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know,” and I think Arthur and our country are in the same boat: we’re stuck dealing with the same stuff over and over again because we haven’t taken the time to learn the lesson it is coming to teach us.

Of course, I’m not just talking about our Founding. I’m talking about the ongoing coup we are facing because Republicans are unwilling to name what is going on for what it is. When President Nixon’s lies and cover-up became completely obvious, Republicans in the Senate made known their disapproval and nominated two leaders of their party to meet with President Nixon and demand that he resign. What President Nixon did pales in comparison to what President Trump did to get impeached the first time, let alone what he did last week to incite an insurrection to keep our legislative branch from doing its Constitutional duty.

2020 is over, but the failures of leadership continue. I don’t know what the answers are, in large part because there isn’t just one answer to the problems we’re facing. But I think Pema is right - both for us communally, but individually, as well. The invitation in this moment is to sit with what is coming up for us, to name our communal and individual complicity in how we got here, to humble ourselves regarding any necessary consequences, and to imagine together new possibilities for a way forward.

Rants and raves

👍I copied out this prayer for our dinner table that Sarah and Beth shared on the coup episode last week - it seems perfect for these days.

👎Leaders unwilling to tell the truth - to themselves, to their constituents, to each other.

👎I usually like to set aside the first few weeks of the new year for reflection on the year that has passed, but I’ve been…distracted to put it mildly. So this is me talking to myself and sharing with you in case you need to hear it too:

There is no time limit on reflection. In fact, winter supports us all season long in a mood of reflection and contemplation, but you can reflect whenever the spirit strikes. Don’t give up on the good work of looking back just because of the date on the calendar doesn’t fit your (or society’s) ideal.

👍Pantsuit Politics continues to save my life these waning days of the Trump administration.

👍We are learning so much more about what really happened last week. If you’ve turned off the news, and I don’t blame you, you haven’t seen some of the more egregious atrocities. But you’ve also missed people like Eugene Goodman, who should be President Biden’s first Presidential Medal of Honor recipient.

👍I’ve loved Dinner: A Love Story for years - I love Jenny’s writing, their family’s cooking ethos, and I haven’t met a DALS recommendation that I didn’t love. At the beginning of the pandemic, she started posting weekly “Project Pantry Purpose” posts, with a recommendation for one of each category to help keep us grounded. I loved them, but I stopped keeping up with them sometime in May (when I stopped keeping up with all sorts of things to be honest). I lost myself in catching up on the last several months of PPP posts, and it was a lovely way to lose an hour if you’re in the mood for some comfort scrolling.

Worth sharing this week

• I subscribed to Tangle last summer, and it always delivers some great education along with that week’s top stories. In this week’s edition, they invited an infectious disease expert to address some of the top vaccine related questions. If you are concerned or have loved ones who don’t want to take it, be sure and read this first. Also, this Pantsuit Politics episode with an epidemiologist from John Hopkins was an excellent listen on the same topic.

• The Daily has been spectacular (if terrifying) in this last week since the insurrection. Part of healing is naming what went wrong, so I think listening to The Daily’s reporting on what actually happened is a good first step.

• I needed this refresher from Seth Haines on the First Amendment after so much chatter about it over the weekend.

• The conservative David French (highly recommend his newsletter too) with our and Congress’ marching orders:

  What do we do? We take a page from the counterinsurgency handbook. We separate the insurgents from the population. Through precise applications of lawful power (including vigorous prosecution of the January 6th murderers and rioters), you defeat the leader, you punish his closest confederates, and you give the rest of the population a chance to come to its senses, to see the con man for what he is.

• If you only read one thing on the events at the Capitol, make it Caitlin Flanagan.

Seasonal view of the week

Some weeks just require that you find a place in the grass where the sun can shine on your face…

Cheers to telling the truth in the week ahead!

Sara