“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” - Ecclesiastes 7:4
Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” album, which I’ve been into lately, reminds me of a family trip we made across the plains of Wyoming in 1984. I was a daydreamy adolescent kid, and that bleak, lonely, free country made me feel the same way the album does now. I wasn’t developed enough to be cynical, and my mother was still alive.
Back then, my mind could more easily access an unalloyed sadness which, in retrospect, seems important. I don’t mean depression, where feelings become compacted and threatening. I mean the belly-filling sadness, serene, when we perceive that this world will pass away and we with it.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
In my later teenage years, I found my sea-to-sea pride in a large bedroom U.S. map troubled by the Civil War, as well as by cultures older than ours. European intellectualism entered in, and the War appeared unresolved, despite military victory over the South, my home. You could say that sadness got crowded out. Eventually, despite a full scholarship to Vanderbilt University, culmination of my youthful advantages and efforts, I found myself lost in a torrent of conflicting ideas, especially following my mother’s sudden passing. It was not the school or my family – it was me, adrift in the heart of success, a broken hero unable to mourn.
Is our America today another broken hero? Really it was just ever a progressive ideal in a darker world, an anomaly. In an abundance of anger and fear, which in this fatal moment appear to be our unfortunate guides, can we afford sadness, or is it another inconvenience? Sadness in a time of battle for preservation of our ideals might seem an indulgence.
Yet, it continues to pool quietly below us, within reach. We were never perfect, but the competition of our highest values, between free markets and principles of equality, lifted millions into a better life. Our forebears tried valiantly to defeat evil, both domestic and international. Is there no sorrow in our present disarray? For if American moral authority fades, the world will become darker, more impulsive, more fatalistic. Even if no worldly power lasts forever, can we not feel the deep tragedy in this?
Sadness comes with nostalgia, in the way we long for happier days. My mother helped bring my bright-eyed young self to college, reassuring an immature, anxious me. Likewise, we used to know how to comfort one another in this country. Sadness also comes with unrealized dreams, in the way we sense that our brightest aspirations may never be. My father worries, with the strife, if there will be something left for my daughter. We worry as a nation with him. Maybe the real sorrow is that loving parents must one day leave us on our own.
Notably, we don’t need qualifications to sorrow – this feeling touches both the derivatives trader and the grocery store cashier. In a moment where anger and fear guide us toward violence, some of us now perhaps inevitably, we often perceive the glee in the faces of the violent – we are on the cusp of a decisive victory. Worse yet, we perceive the cynicism in our leaders as they icily manipulate our feelings for political gain. In such unbalanced moments, joy always turns to sorrow, because we begin to sense how we’ve harmed ourselves in a way that prestige and money cannot remedy, and bitterness appears.
Sadness hurts but purifies. It is precious and gives rise to compassion, which frankly now may be all that can heal us. Americans of all stripes are suffering with stress and illness at a high and unaccustomed level – few are spared.
Of course, feelings cannot rule the day – we have laws to uphold, and we’ve managed fairly well. Recent events – riots in our wealthiest places, a contested election, and an armed mob in the heart of where laws are made – would have already ripped a lesser nation apart.
It took me the better part of a decade to come out of the turmoil of young adulthood and an entire winter of life to rediscover the sadness which was there all along. So it is with the U.S. - we may all emerge diminished from this crisis, but sorrow can engender the true acceptance we need to heal. Acceptance of loss is, after all, a cornerstone of faith.
Douglas D. Ford is a commercial litigation and criminal defense attorney in Atlanta, Georgia.
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