Editor’s Note

DISCOVER OJAI MONTHLY

Bret Bradigan

THE DUTY OF POLITICS

"Keep your face to the sun and the shadows will always fall behind you.” — Helen Keller

The cloud of pandemic anxiety is finally starting to lift. It’s feeling like one of those gloomy May days when the marine layer settles on us like a thick blanket, dampening down our spirits, then the sun breaks through, leaving vanishing wisps of clouds in the sparkling blue sky. The streets of Ojai seem lately to teem and thrum with energy, not just on the weekends. After what we’ve been through, the chatter of crowds sounds like a benediction.

However, there is yet a darkness at noon in local politics. Exhibit A: A paranoid scheming with an imputation of bad faith and self-dealing that manifested itself in a mean-spirited cartoon in the local paper, which I don’t really understand except that it was meant to satirize the local school superindentent. Judging by the hundred-plus positive, positively glowing comments on her Facebook reply, it was an epic fail. She must have felt like Tom and Huck listening from the balcony to the premature eulogies when they were presumed dead.

I’ve only ever lived in small towns, and I learned there’s nowhere you can go that isn’t essentially the junior high cafeteria. Malice and backbiting are etched into human nature, to deny it is to be like that proverbial king smiting the waves with his sword.

It’s a reminder that the work of bringing a community together is an endless task, thankless and frustrating, yet as necessary as breathing. To nourish our better angels requires rejecting the easy anger and impulses of anonymous trolling, and feeding them with the spirit of service, of all of us being in it together.

The social media companies have banked many billions on the fact that we are motivated by outrage and hate, yet that doesn’t have to be us. As America’s greatest theologian Reinhold Neibuhr wrote, ‘‘Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.’’ It’s hard work building a community, it’s easy to tear one down. It just takes a few strokes of ink.

In Rick Perlstein’s brilliant new volume on the right-wing influences in American politics, ‘‘Reaganland,’’ he writes about Jimmy Carter’s troubled presidency, some of the troubles his own doing, some of those failures the fault of his most ardent supporters who expected magic-wand solutions to intractable problems that have plagued the American body politic for generations. Carter kept on his desk another Neibuhr quote: ‘‘The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.’’ I would amend that for our particular village. In Ojai the work is not always so sad, since the sun shines on us so much of the time. The thing about sunshine, though, is that it brings the shadows into sharper relief.

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