Open Sesame
Shazam
Presto chango
Keys to the city
Meeska, Mooska, Mickey Mouse
Alakazam
Abracadabra
Keys to the Kingdom
Olly, olly oxen free
Alla peanut butter sandwiches
Up, up, and away
Hocus pocus
Heigh O, Silver
Get ’em up, Scout
Bibbidi-bobbidi Boo

I’m sure there are other words or phrases you may know, often part of children’s games or magic shows.  These are harmless mantras that we believe will let us do magical things or endow us with powers greater than could ever be imagined.  Currently, in this country, there are new magic words, however, routinely invoked in serious, even fatal contexts–I THOUGHT MY LIFE WAS IN DANGER.  This “motto” falls easily off the lips of police people, usually white and male, when they are being accused of or on trial for murdering  another person, usually black and male.  Hearing this phrase moves juries to acquit such individuals in the face of physical evidence that shows the victim to have been carrying a snack from a grocery store or driving with one light bulb burned out or trying to find a gathering to which they are invited.  The phrase convinces juries to ignore overwhelming evidence that a horrendous wrong has been committed.  It relieves police who are trained in all sorts of techniques for defusing situations short of firing their guns.  It also instantly justifies assaulting women or the very young, while yelling words or phrases that carry no “magic” at all, just terror and grave bodily harm to the recipients.

Enough people have written about the increased shooting of black people by law-enforcement officers across the country for us to understand that the horrible phenomenon is related to a long and gory history of criminalizing black people.  So when police officers find themselves in the vicinity of virtually any black person, fear and suspicion are default emotional responses.  The problem turns around their having found the magic words that give them a carte blanche excuse to go directly to the last item on their list of “to do’s” when handling suspicious civilians.  If they have a similar meeting with a white civilian, most of the time, they trust their training and work to defuse the situation.  Because the suspicious character is white, they are not instantly and irretrievably scared.  They do not think their lives are in danger.  There are even instances when the white person in question had a gun or other hurtful weapon and the police still found a way to control and arrest the individual.

Some race theorists speak about how blacks at this point in our long and abusive history have become a caste rather than just a minority member.  They mean that the mere sighting of a member of the group triggers an automatic defensive and aggressive posture, so that no time is taken to look at the particular person in the particular circumstance.  If North American culture has reached such a point, dire outcomes are almost guaranteed.  So the next time an innocuous magic word like “abracadabra” or “presto change” comes into our minds, maybe we could replace it with “I thought my life was in danger.”  Then we might realize just who is being given permission to do what to whom with seeming impunity.

I’ve had a kitty in my life, off and on, since I was about eight.  My first was a black male with four white feet, so I called him Mitten Foot.  There’s an old photograph showing my holding Mitten Foot against my child’s face, looking as happy as I ever got those days.  When Mitten Foot died, there was a long dry spell with no kitties until I began living in Minneapolis.  Since about 1965, however, I’ve enjoyed close bonds with nine or ten cats, male and female, each with special qualities that drew and held me.

One of these companion animals keeps coming back to me at unexpected moments.  His name is Buff and he lived with me over ten years during which time I sobered up and came out as a lesbian.  That means he endured some of my least responsible behaviors as I sunk further into my alcoholism.  It also means he saw me begin a journey of  self-acceptance and rejuvenation that continues into the present.  He was faithful, beautiful, and wise.  And he forgave me instantly for the times I made him wait too long for dinner because I needed to finish my second Jack Daniels neat.

Here is my homage to magical Buff.

            For Buff

one April Sunday afternoon
you slide away to somewhere other, 
away from me and all my love

loudest purr I ever knew
stilled forever–
I feel you brush me–bless me–
silent, present,
full of power

ochre velvet fur
ancient whorls along your sides
sad eyes–wise eyes–
no more looking into mine,
asking for release from me
and all my wishes to preserve you

like the light that pours through my window
then slowly leaves the room,
you slide away–
loudest purr I ever knew

A book has been published recently that looks at utopian writings by four late-19th century authors with limited name recognition:  Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  The book’s author, Michael Robertson, examines contradictions and paradoxes that pepper each author’s conception of what it would take to build an ideal world.  For instance, slaves exist in some, women are restricted in significant ways in others, privilege based on money or birth flourishes in still others.  As I finished the review, I knew I won’t be reading the whole book though I’m glad Mr. Robertson has written it.  But I will continue puzzling over why people ponder the physical and psychological and political landscape necessary to call a place or culture an utopia.

Because I’ve been rereading Greek drama in order to facilitate a discussion group in my living room, Plato has found his way into my consciousness again.  When I worked at the University of Minnesota, I often reminded students that we are still suffering from his insistence on an “either/or” theory of human behavior/consciousness.  What would it have been like for us, as inheritors of much of classical Greek (and Roman) thinking if some leading philosopher of that period had advocated for a world order based in “both/and” instead, I would ask my earnest students.  Recently, however, I see another deep problem underlying Plato’s definition of who and what are necessary and forbidden in his conceptualization of an ideal state.  Of course, this has taken me back to his work, The Republic, published around 380 B.C.  In it he states quite emphatically that two kinds of people are not to be admitted if there is any chance of an ideal state–poets and musicians.  His reasoning is clear even if disturbing:  poets and musicians create works that enter our consciousness so fast that we are unable to exercise rational control over our responses to their work.  That means we might prefer to listen to Aretha Franklin rather than going to work, or we might read Mary Oliver’s poetry rather than learning the latest catechism purveyed by the church or state of our choice.  This would in turn create disorder and Plato is quite clear that any ideal community must have order and agreement about how to think and behave along certain fundamental principles.

Mr. Robertson surely is pointing out a similar requirement proposed by his four more modern authors.  Utopias require a kind of moral and behavioral adherence to a set of laid down rules or protocols or norms.  Some cultural scholars interested in today’s world are telling us that democracies are messy enterprises because they are systems that keep reaching out to include more kinds of people and ideas. This requires an ability to keep expanding our definition of “citizen” and opening ourselves to those we are inclined to label “strangers.”  In contrast, cultures that organize around some form of tribalism or clannishness tend to limit who or what can be tolerated or even admitted.  So those cultures may well be, whether their adherents know it or not, arguing against democracy in favor of utopias.  “Make America Great Again” implies a paradise lost somewhere along the way, some idyllic place where there were no “strangers” or, if they existed, they were easily consigned to some outer circle that was under the control of the founders who drew up the blueprint for the utopia.

I’m glad Michael Robertson has written his book because, whether he intended it or not, he invites some of us to continue knowing that those imagined or nostalgically recalled “paradises” or utopias either never existed in any mundane sense or, as John Milton believed, were not a place where mere human beings could learn who we really were and then work to become better.  At the end of the review that got me started on this blog idea, its author says:  “We always want to get past the room we’re in in order to break out and change the universe.  The lesson that life tends to teach is that change begins at home, and that we can’t escape rooms on our way to worlds.  The world is made of rooms.”

At my church, between the homily and the Eucharist, a member of the congregation stands in the pulpit and reads a series of petitions to which we in the pews respond “Lord, hear our prayer.”  Though all the rest of the service follows a beautiful ritual that is the same every week, these petitions offered in our name are a moment of profound spontaneity.  I find myself wondering as the reader mounts the steps just what the liturgist will have asked us to focus on this week.

Today, the 12th of August in the year 2018, I knew that there was to be a march in Washington, D.C. later in the day, held by the same group that just a year ago marched in Charlottesville, VA, carrying torches and chanting obscenely racist, anti-Semitic, zenophobic slogans. This group of hateful people ended up killing one young woman–Heather Heyer–and wounding about a score more counter-demonstrators.  I thought we might be asked to pray for an end to violence in the world as some sort of general plea for sanity.  I was wonderfully wrong.  Here’s what we were asked to pray for: 

For all those who believe in the God of Abraham–Jews, Christians, and Muslims–and that our leaders will work to build harmony among all faiths.  For an end to discrimination of all sorts, especially on the basis of skin color.  For the original inhabitants of this country, that our governments will treat them with dignity and respect.  For early immigrants who crossed our borders looking for a better life.  For immigrants crossing our borders today, especially for the children.

As each wonderful invocation followed the next, I just stood there and wept with gratitude to my church for finding a way to respond to the violence and hatred by too many for people different from them in some important way.  I also stood a little taller with pride to be a member of a congregation that responded with genuine energy as we made our usual response.  Several people near me seemed to be speaking with more volume and conviction than usual, so I choose to believe they were feeling some of what I was feeling.  Our priest has asked us on several occasions as he has been speaking to the many deep flaws in the hierarchy of Roman Catholicism to “be the church you want the church to be.”  This is not just a palindromic clause–it is a mantra to live by, day by day and in all avenues of our lives.  This morning, our group prayers to the God of our varied understandings achieved that lofty goal with clarity and conviction.