Land in our Hands

All we are saying is give peace a chance

Lennon, Ono 1969

“You know I’ve talked to groups of thousands about lots of subjects over the years. I’m pretty good at speaking extemporaneously. But this time, I actually made some notes. Because as many groups of people as I’ve spoken to about as many topics, I have never spoken about a topic that is more important than the one that we bring today, that we face today, which is that this era has our names on it.”

Crescent Dragonwagon gave a talk this past Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist entitled “This era has our names on it: How do we grow resilient while resisting?” Since Crescent was billing it as the most important talk she has ever given and had made notes for, I made the pilgrimage up Elk Street for the most enlightening experience I have ever witnessed in a church. 

Crescent requested “When I’m Gone” by Phil Ochs to open a ceremony of free thought. A man named Bryan played it on his acoustic guitar, while the nave that was packed sang in unison:

“I won’t feel the flowing of the time when I’m gone

All the pleasures of love will not be mine when I’m gone

My pen won’t pour a lyric line when I’m gone

So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.”

Crescent said we know this era has our names on it because we are the ones who are alive right now. “Here we are,” she said. “This era must have our name on it. Now, many of you walked through the worst event of my life with me, which was when my husband Ned Shank went out on a bicycle ride and instead of coming home to me, bicycled into eternity.

“I heard a range of things then, a lot of different responses. At that time there was nothing shielding my heart, I could see who was genuine. One of the things that really aggravated me was when people would say, ‘It must have been his time.’ Well, duh. When somebody dies, clearly their time was up. It was their time. 

“This is our time. That’s another way that we know this era has our name on it, because again, here we are.”

Crescent admitted that she doesn’t know how humanity is going to turn angry events around. “I don’t know, but I am good at hanging out in the space where we don’t know. I am good at being comfortable with being uncomfortable and uncertain. That is a thing that I know.”

She shared a recollection of a lasting impression she had picked up with from her travels in Italy. “We were in the city of Bologna, which was called Red Bologna. It was the most left-wing of all Italy and had been the heart of the resistance against the Nazis.

“In the town square, there was a tiled wall of images of the resistance fighters who lost their lives fighting the Nazis. Each tile had a permanent photograph that showed the image of somebody who fought back.

“Maybe they carried messages. Maybe they planted explosives. Who knows what they did? It didn’t say that, it just had their names.

“Many of them were young, but there were a lot who were old, as well. And at that moment, it hit me. That those people died without knowing how it came out. I think about that all the time.

“They were directed in their actions, in their hearts, in their minds, in their commitments. They were directed by doing what was right, not because they knew they had a winning strategy. They didn’t. They died not knowing.

“We are now in that position. Where we can choose passivity or activism.”

She said that everybody has something that they can do even if they are dealing with despair, fear or uncertainty, and one of the ways we can resist is through encouragement, magnifying the good.

“What made us think we were going to get off scot-free from the long and horrible, bloody, tribal history of our country? Not our country, the world. The rivalries.”

Crescent talked about her mother’s caregiver who was a genocide survivor from the Fulani tribe in Mauritania.

“When Mauritania was a French colony, they would stir up the inter-tribal hatred,” she said.

“Mother’s caregiver had three children and was pregnant with a fourth. She crossed the river where bodies were floating among back-and-forth gunfire. To get to Senegal. To get to a U.N. camp.

“She came to America because when she was in that camp, the burlap sacks of rice had USA stamped on them. The woman thought to herself, ‘Why don’t the French help us, when they have taken so much from us? The USA must be a nice country.’”

Crescent used that story of the African woman’s journey to freedom to ask the crowd, what made us think that we were going to be exempt from having to fight for ours?

“Let me add that the USA was the first to aspirationally want freedom and equality,” she said. “All the things that we have loved and revered. The idea of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, for all. Aspirational, but we’ve never lived it.

“As we look in shock at what is happening, what made us think we were going to be exempt from the big questions or big struggles?”

Crescent then asked her husband, Mark Graff, to tell a story about his father.

“My father was a World War Two veteran who lived into his eighties,” Mark started. “A remarkable man. In his last year, I pointed out to him in conversation that over a long life he’d actually observed a third of this country’s history. Watched it very closely. I asked him what conclusions he had drawn from his close study of America history. Here is word-for-word what he told me.

‘Every generation gets its chance to lose the country. For my generation, our chance was with Hitler. We took him on, and we beat him. I don’t know what your chance will be, but you will. You will know. And when you find it, don’t let us down,’”

Graff is a cybersecurity practitioner and trainer, former chief information security officer for NASDAQ and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and board member at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow.

Crescent reminded us that we are not immune from being responsible for protecting our rights.

“I understand that anything can happen to anyone at any time.,” she said. “This is a harsh truth. And those of us who have dabbled or have lived in the idea that everything happens for a reason or that if you visualize it, it will all come out how you want it, it’s a slap in the face. Anything can happen to anyone at any time. Those are the conditions of life. Because of the things I have personally endured, I understand that.

“Writers make something out of nothing. We take it out of the ether. We have no clue. Our tools are imagination and thought. I teach a class called Fearless Writing and the first step of Fearless Writing is explaining that fear is a part of the process.

“I understand that you are afraid. I am afraid, too. I understand the temptation to give way to despair.  The temptation is not like sin as we usually think about it. But the temptations are to pick our phone to doom scroll, to be passive, to not take action, to feel helpless, to believe what the other side is telling us. Those are the temptations that we must turn away from now.”

Crescent, the fifty plus books she has authored, and her writing classes can be found at Dragonwagon.com.