Voices: 21st Century Ice Age
It takes about 15 minutes for an average ice cube to melt in the warmth between two clasped hands. I discovered this on Election Day eve as I sat between two poets in a circle of about 40 of those who had gathered to celebrate artistic freedom of expression.
We were invited to Scranton’s Test Pattern gallery the night before “the most important election in our lifetime” by America Coming Together or ACT. In return for an evening of free, fabulous performances, they hoped we might help get out the vote in Lackawanna and Luzerne County. Even now that Kerry has conceded, more questions face the country than ever . Whether ACT achieved its goal is not one of them.
Forced to accept a decision certain to please only half of the country, America remains suspended in limbo. The Nation’s David Corn has suggested this division is a good thing. A notorious critic of President Bush, Corn is admittedly disappointed. Yet, he claims to find solace in the fact that “Nearly half (of the U.S. electorate and voting public) saw the emperor buck naked and butt ugly. Nearly half said no to his rash actions and dishonest justifications… Nearly half knew that Bush has led the country astray.”
I, too, would like to find solace in this. But I can’t. Not yet. I’m still too freaked out by the huge number of voters who prioritized the issue of “moral values.” I am haunted by a vision of “cultural conservatives” poised to mandate their religious beliefs in legislation. I see before us an even more deaf and arrogant W. He stands legitimized as a hallucination of God smiles down on his crusade. He will proudly appease the evangelical populace that Karl Rove summoned to the polls to prohibit gay rights.
No. I find no solace in this. Because while I don’t care how the cultural conservatives choose to live their lives, they are threatened by any choice to live differently.
Presently, I can only find solace in the positive energy that illuminated Test Pattern on Monday night. One spirited, smart and soulful performer after another shared his and her stunning talents for more than two hours. We laughed and vented and marveled and imagined together until, finally, artist John Bromberg asked us to sit facing each other in a circle and join hands. We were given ice cubes to hold between our hands and told to wait for all of them to melt before attempting an arabic woman’s shrill sound of joy.
I pushed away my initial skepticism hoping to understand why we had been asked to do such an odd thing. Ice is cold. It is uncomfortable to hold it. Why continue to do so?
In my mind, I reviewed Bromberg’s words preceding the ceremony. Great work would be required of us no matter the outcome of the election, he warned. I looked around at the others, like me, who weren’t sure they understood what was happening. Some of us giggled silently as we grasped our neighbors’ hands strategically, to make the ice melt more quickly.
You discover while holding an ice cube in your palm that the cold doesn’t numb so much as it does burn. Remember that ache of your cold, wet jeans after playing in the snow for hours? And when you peeled off your pants to reveal bright red legs and climbed into the hot bath, the stinging was unbearable. That’s what holding the ice cube felt like to me. Suddenly, I felt like I had been transported back to Kindergarten. It was wonderful! The weight of thinking I had any control was gone. The overwhelming sense of responsibility I carried seemed to be melting with the ice. We could try to create friction, increase the heat between our hands, but otherwise, all we could do was wait.
Social change, too, is gradual. The more lasting the change, the longer it takes to materialize. Longer than it does an ice cube does to melt in the palm of your hand. We have to be patient and steadfast in our hope that circumstances will improve, I realized.
Bush doesn’t care that nearly half of the country would have dethroned him in the middle of the war — an action unprecedented in America. I have no hope that he will come to care. But his predecessor will have to care. American can’t get any more divided than it is now — right down the middle. We can reach out to the stranger next to us or insist upon an idealistic distance. Either way, the ice between us will still melt. It’s not a question of whether change will happen, but how much positive energy we can generate while we wait.
-- alicia grega-pikul, 04 November 2004
Send e-mail to apikul@timesshamrock.com.
