“You must agree with me!”

• Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Founding Executive Director

  A few weeks ago, I joined thousands of others at a rally on our Statehouse lawn.  We were calling for safeguards and respect for democratic institutions, for human rights, for preserving programs that make it possible for families, veterans, and others to thrive.
   
  We were asked to rally peacefully and de-escalate angry exchanges if we could.  It was, I was glad to see, a peaceful crowd. Kids on their parents’ shoulders, even some bipartisanship; cheers went up when the Lieutenant Governor, a Republican, spoke in support of the rally’s demands.
   
  As I made my way out of the crowd to leave, though, I heard one loud and angry voice.  As I got closer, I saw that it came from a woman wearing a U.S. flag like a cape, tied together at the neck.  Her words rasped as she screamed at a young man standing alone, holding a single, small sign.
   
  The woman stepped close to the young man, peppering him with questions. I caught only a few. Are you a traitor?  Do you hate this country? What is wrong with you?  
   
   “Excuse me,” I said to the woman, keeping my voice even, “the organizers have asked us not to engage this way.” She stopped screaming, looked at me and the sign I carried, and pointed to his sign, glaring.  My sign said, “Hands off Trans Kids.”   His said, “Trump 2028.”
   
  I already knew what was on his sign; I’d read it before I spoke. I nodded to the woman, repeated the organizer’s request, and she started to turn away. But the young man held out his hand, offering to shake hers. She stopped turning and looked at him. “Thank you for talking to me,” he said.
   
  When I thanked him for staying peaceful, he answered, “Well, we have to listen to each other.”
   
  Poet and activist Audre Lorde wrote a poem for her children in 1973, a mother’s instructions for living a life of self-preservation and integrity. “Be who you are and will be,” it begins, “learn to cherish/that boisterous Black Angel that drives you.”
   
  I am, of course, not Black, nor do I feel driven by particularly boisterous angels.  But I have returned to that poem over and over again since I first read it, probably forty years ago.  It’s taught me a lot about how to behave in the service of a more just and peaceful world.
   
  When I read, “Do not be misled by details/simply because you live them,” and “Remember our sun/is not the most noteworthy star/only the nearest,” I am reminded that my perspective is defined by my experience, by the details of my life. I cannot understand, without asking, what drives others to act and believe as they do.
   
  Later in the poem, Lorde wrote, “Even when they are dangerous, examine the heart of those machines you hate/ before you discard them.”   If I reject out of hand the structures that others believe in, I risk not understanding them. If I don’t understand them, I can’t know what to do about them. I risk, as Lorde wrote, “reliving them.”
   
  Examining ideas and structures that frighten me requires me to be earnestly curious.  Earnest is an important distinction here.  Earnest curiosity is motivated by a determination to understand. It signals I mean you no harm. It is serious, calm, and genuinely interested.
   
  Other kinds of curiosity insist on answers or validation for the questioner’s position. Some curiosity accepts only answers that will quell the discomfort or fear of the curious.  
   
  Those kinds of curiosity don’t lead to real understanding. Those kinds of questioners won’t give up until they get the answers they want to hear, or prove themselves right and the other one wrong.  They leave people feeling interrogated, not engaged -- bullied, and far from understood.   
   
  Those kinds of questions do nothing to advance a world in which all people can thrive. They do nothing to shed light on how to counter dangerous ideas.  They only stand draped in one flag or the other, shouting, You must agree with me.
   
  Lorde wrote, finally: “You will never be able to defend your city/while shouting.”  I wish I could have found a way to say that to the woman at the rally, screaming at that quiet young man.
   
  For me, the city of which Lorde speaks is the right of all human beings to thrive, to live with dignity and meaning.  It is just governance. It is schools, organizations, and communities where everyone who chooses to can thrive.
   
  There’s a place for shouting in the work of change - of course there is. I have shouted myself hoarse at more rallies than I can count. 
   
  But shouting questions that only pretend to want answers will not defend the rights of all humans to thrive. The stakes are too high to waste time and energy that way.  So I will ask my questions earnestly, sincerely, respectfully, or I will not ask them at all.