It exploded on the Internet. It was shared by millions because it was emotional for some and informative for others. The creator, Bria Goeller said, “We hoped it would inspire young women.”
If you have not seen it, it is an image of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in a dark suit, briefcase in hand, striding beside a white wall. On the wall is the silhouette of a little girl taken from a painting by Norman Rockwell.
In 1960, Look magazine commissioned Norman Rockwell to create a piece on civil rights. Rockwell selected the image of 6-year-old Ruby Bridges breaking the color barrier by attending the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the desegregation of New Orleans schools.
It was Nov. 14, 1960. On that day a straight-backed, determined child walked with U.S. marshals flanking and towering over her. It was an uplifting image of social progress and the bravery of an American 6 year old. The Goeller image shows the achievement in exactly 60 years — November 1960 to November 2020 — from the first Black girl entering an all-white school to the first female vice president-elect.
Just outside the frame of the Rockwell painting was an angry crowd shouting, menacing and throwing objects at that child. The crowd threatened the little girl as if a 6 year old were the enemy. It was an image hard to forget and hard to understand. Rockwell did not include that crowd, but he did not deny its existence. On the wall above and behind the child, he painted the stain of a tomato thrown. Rockwell focused on the best in us but did not deny the rest of us.
Today America seems surprised, perhaps threatened, by the fact that 48 percent of voters voted for Trump. Someone said, as if discovering a new truth, “They will always be with us.” They always were.
We have always been so divided. Rockwell was prescient; he named the painting commissioned in 1960 and published Jan. 14, 1964, “The Problem We All Live With.” It was the problem we lived with in the 1960s, and the problem we fought a civil war over a hundred years earlier. A hundred years before that, it was the problem difficult to resolve at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.
In 1964 as Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he said, “We Democrats have lost the South.” Others quote Johnson as saying, “Democrats have lost the South for a generation.”
It was longer. It took 56 years for Democrats to regain a sliver of the South. In the interim, Bull Connor and George Wallace or Martin Luther King, Elijah Cummings and John Lewis led one side or the other into the streets or across a bridge shaking fists, carrying guns and clubs, or marching peacefully and writing legal briefs. There was never a time without people on both sides of the divide.
This is who we are — not half of this, but all of this. What changes us is the leaders we choose. Some suppress long guns in the street and reduce the 48 percent of 2020 to 33 percent. Throughout history our leaders set a tone, as did Kennedy and King, and change laws, as did Lincoln and Johnson. They influence what is seen as acceptable behavior.
The most important thing said about Trump was said by a minister in Chicago: “Some bring out our better angels and others bring out the worst in us. Trump will bring out the worst in us.”
The power of social pressure is very real in the USA. It stopped smoking, and it caused a whole country to engage in World War II, not just the soldiers. Those who say we are better than this might say more accurately: We can be better than this. What matters is who we are striving to be. Rockwell and his images are so popular because they depict who we wish we were.
There was a college professor who leaned back in his chair almost to the tipping point. Students, many of whom did not like him, watched in fascination to see him tip over. He never did. What he did do was point his pen at a student brave enough to speak out in class and say, “You, sir, have missed the point exactly.”
Perhaps we have missed the point exactly. Republicans may not be democrats. That does not mean Republicans are not members of Democratic Party, but some Republicans may not be supporters and defenders of democracy. If true, that is our national problem going forward, not Trump. Trump may have been the convenient idiot willing to carry anti-democracy ideas forward in a loud, insistent voice when some Republicans only whispered.
Since the 1970s, the Republican Party has been shrinking. Registered voters are only 25 percent Republican, 35 percent Democrat and 40 percent Independent. Democracy is a form of government wherein the majority rules. To remain relevant and remain powerful, some Republicans were willing to use every trick in a political arsenal: gerrymandering, voter suppression, wedge issues and all the isms — racism sexism antisemitism and the rest.
Trump said if we do not reelect him, “You will never hear from me or see me again.”
I don’t know if we can depend on being that lucky; however, in his poem “The Masque of Pandora” (1875), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.” We can probably depend upon that. It is not Trump we need fear but his enablers, those who would destroy democracy to hold power — and ourselves: those of us so confused we jeer and throw objects at a 6 year old in a starched white dress and pigtail.
