I dutifully tuned in to Kamala Harris's respectful and conciliatory speech yesterday conceding the election. For the most part, I was still too numb to take it in at an emotional level—except, there was one moment when "my heart was shaken with tears," to borrow a phrase from Siegfried Sassoon.
This came when Harris repeated the simple line: "Never give up. Never give up." It wasn't so much the familiar phrase that got to me. It was the way that Harris's voice frayed and cracked slightly on the line—reflecting the strain of weeks and months on the campaign stump. My heart swelled and broke in that moment. It was shaken with tears.
The idea that "sometimes the fight takes awhile" spoke less to me in my current emotional state. I'm not really ready to take in promises of change and progress. I find I can't quite believe in them just now. I'm tired of pretending I can predict the outcomes of history when I can't. I don't feel like I or anyone else can guarantee them.
We can't actually promise that democracy will triumph around the globe. We can't know that liberalism is destined to succeed. It's quite possible that, to the contrary, liberal democracy is the historic exception—a short-lived experiment that, in Ortega y Gasset's phrase, was so "acrobatic" in the moral athleticism that it demands that it was never destined "to take firm root on earth."
What spoke to me about the "Never Give Up" line, by contrast—was that it didn't make any empty promises about the unknowable future. And it shouldn't. Because we can't control the future. It may be that, as Matthew Arnold put it, the world in fact "Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain[...]"
But what we can control—even in such a world as this—is our own spirit. We can control our own will and action.
And that is all the "Never Give Up" line asks us to do: Don't give up; don't despair. Not because you know you will eventually win. But only because you know that the fight is worth doing for its own sake. No matter what comes in the next four years, we can at least do this: keep fighting. Trump can destroy the body but he cannot destroy the soul; our soul is ours to control.
In other words, where I'm at right now is in the spirit of "Invictus." The point of the classic poem is not that there will be a hopeful outcome. There might not be. It might, in fact, be the case that "Beyond this place of wrath and tears/ Looms but the Horror of the shade," in Henley's phrase. But one can refuse to give up even in the face of that knowledge.
Even if the worst comes—even if Trump proves to be precisely the dictator that the worst predictions anticipate—"yet the menace of the years/ Finds and shall find me unafraid."
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
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