[ "What old men know is that everything can change. What old men
know, too, is that all that is gained can be lost. Lost just as the
liberation that the Civil War and Emancipation brought was squandered
after Reconstruction..."]
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HARRY BELAFONTE: WHAT DO WE HAVE TO LOSE? EVERYTHING  
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Harry Belafonte
November 7, 2016
New York Times
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_ "What old men know is that everything can change. What old men
know, too, is that all that is gained can be lost. Lost just as the
liberation that the Civil War and Emancipation brought was squandered
after Reconstruction..." _

Photo: Montgomery, Ala., 1965, Credit: Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
// New York Times

 

See how this article appeared when it was originally published on
NYTimes.com.
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_“O, yes,_

_I say it plain,_

_America never was America to me,_

_And yet I swear this oath —_

_America will be!”_

— Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”

What old men know is that everything can change. Langston Hughes wrote
these lines when I was 8 years old, in the very different America of
1935.

It was an America where the life of a black person didn’t count for
much. Where women were still second-class citizens, where Jews and
other ethnic whites were looked on with suspicion, and immigrants were
kept out almost completely unless they came from certain approved
countries in Northern Europe. Where gay people dared not speak the
name of their love, and where “passing” — as white, as a WASP,
as heterosexual, as something, anything else that fit in with what
America was supposed to be — was a commonplace, with all of the
self-abasement and the shame that entailed.

It was an America still ruled, at its base, by violence. Where
lynchings, and especially the threat of lynchings, were used to keep
minorities away from the ballot box and in their place. Where
companies amassed arsenals of weapons for goons to use against their
own employees and recruited the police and National Guardsmen to help
them if these private corporate armies proved insufficient. Where
destitute veterans of World War I were driven from the streets of
Washington with tear gas and bayonets, after they went to our
nation’s capital to ask for the money they were owed.

Much of that was how America had always been. We changed it, many of
us, through some of the proudest struggles of our history. It wasn’t
easy, and sometimes it wasn’t pretty, but we did it, together. We
won voting rights for all. We ended Jim Crow, and we pushed open the
Golden Door again to welcome immigrants. We achieved full rights for
women, and fought to let people of all genders and sexual orientations
stand in the light. And if we have not yet created the America that
Langston Hughes swore will be — “The land that never has been
yet” — if there is still much to be done, at least we have
advanced our standards of humanity, hope and decency to places where
many people never thought we could reach.

What old men know, too, is that all that is gained can be lost. Lost
just as the liberation that the Civil War and Emancipation brought was
squandered after Reconstruction, by a white America grown morally
weary, or bent on revenge. Lost as the gains of our labor unions have
been for decades now, pushed back until so many of us stand alone in
the workplace, before unfettered corporate power. Lost as the vote is
being lost by legislative chicanery. Lost as so many powerful
interests would have us lose the benefits of the social welfare state,
privatize Social Security, and annihilate Obamacare altogether.

If he wins this Tuesday, Donald J. Trump would be, at 70, the oldest
president ever elected. But there is much about Mr. Trump that is
always young, and not in a good way. There is something permanently
feckless and immature in the man. It can be seen in how he mangles
virtually the same words that Langston Hughes used.

When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, “Let America
be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,” he
acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration,
that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to
be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, “America
never was America to me,” and through the rest of this remarkable
poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America,
and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never
be extinguished.

Mr. Trump, who is not a poet, either in his late-night tweets or on
the speaker’s stump, sees American greatness as some heavy, dead
thing that we must reacquire. Like a bar of gold, perhaps, or a bank
vault, or one of the lifeless, anonymous buildings he loves to put up.
It is a simplistic notion, reducing all the complexity of the American
experience to a vague greatness, and his prescription for the future
is just as undefined, a promise that we will return to “winning”
without ever spelling out what we will win — save for the exclusion
of “others,” the reduction of women to sexual tally points, the
re-closeting of so many of us.

With his simple, mean, boy’s heart, Mr. Trump wants us to follow him
blind into a restoration that is not possible and could not be endured
if it were. Many of his followers acknowledge that (“He may get us
all killed”) but want to have someone in the White House who will
really “blow things up.”

What old men know is that things blown up — customs, folkways,
social compacts, human bodies — cannot so easily be put right. What
Langston Hughes so yearned for when he asked that America be America
again was the realization of an age-old people’s struggle, not the
vaporous fantasies of a petty tyrant. Mr. Trump asks us what we have
to lose, and we must answer, only the dream, only everything.

_[HARRY BELAFONTE is an artist and activist.]_

_A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 8, 2016, Section
A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: What Do We Have
to Lose? Everything._

* Harry Belafonte
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* Donald Trump
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* 2016 elections
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* 2024 Elections
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* GOP
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* Democratic Party
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* Republican Party
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* Racism
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* African Americans
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* civil rights movement
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* jim crow
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* New Jim Crow
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* South
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* Langston Hughes
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