[Sent 20 June 2021 to my wife and our three daughters]
Greetings. I find myself pausing frequently this weekend to consider my personal narrative in relation to this year’s overlapping celebrations of Father’s Day (now an international holiday that – along with Mother’s Day -- calls special attention to parental ties/loyalties) and of Juneteenth (now – with President Biden’s signing the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law this past Thursday -- a federal holiday that has been commemorated widely but selectively since 19 June 1865 when Union Army General Gordon Granger announced and began enforcing the freedom of slaves in Galveston, TX). My focus/core for parenting (and for all encounters however fleeting or enduring) was clarified/set forty years ago as I responded to the then recently published Parenting for Peace and Justice by James and Kathleen McGinnis. (Yes, I wore my peace symbol t-shirt yesterday and am wearing my ‘Literacy and Justice for All’ t-shirt today!)
I recommended to you a few months ago Andrew Ward’s The Slaves’ War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves in which former slaves are given voice to guide readers chronologically through the war years and the years immediately after the war. I found this attempt to see from/through their experiences and observations to be illuminating, sobering, haunting, convicting. I fought off the instinct – common to the affluent/privileged -- to rush, to gloss over, to look away, to talk back. I am deeply disturbed that neither my formal education nor my family/community upbringing exposed me to the painful realities/perspectives the former slaves recall. Instead, ‘founding myths’ (see Ray Raphael’s Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past) that are deeply engrained/entrenched in our society’s official self-understanding block the way, offer reassuring distraction, create an easy conscience, spawn fearful reactions to accurate information.
You will remember our many discussions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s December 1942 After Ten Years essay he wrote for his parents, his siblings (and their children), his closest friend Eberhard Bethge, and his fellow covert resisters embedded in the Abwehr who had all been courageously resisting -- covertly and/or overtly -- Hitler and the Nazis for a decade. By late 1942, Nazis resisters such as the Bonhoeffer family had reason to hope. Germany’s military losses on the Eastern/Russian Front had set in motion elaborate plans for stopping Hitler by arrest or assassination. Dietrich and many for whom he wrote these reflections were arrested and executed in the months ahead. Dietrich’s father read the After Ten Years essay to the assembled family on Christmas Day 1942. I have been privileged to have had the assistance of Renate Bethge – Eberhard’s wife and Dietrich’s favored niece by his older sister Ursala -- as I revised and finalized my translation of After Ten Years (including the fragment inserted below). Words/phrases in parentheses offer additional nuances, add implied ideas, or indicate alternative translations.
Dietrich’s ‘The View from Below’ description/assessment -- a fragment most likely written at the time he wrote the December 1942 essay – has been singularly pivotal for my life decisions and self-examination since I discovered the fragment in a 1974 graduate seminar reading assignment.
Greetings. I find myself pausing frequently this weekend to consider my personal narrative in relation to this year’s overlapping celebrations of Father’s Day (now an international holiday that – along with Mother’s Day -- calls special attention to parental ties/loyalties) and of Juneteenth (now – with President Biden’s signing the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law this past Thursday -- a federal holiday that has been commemorated widely but selectively since 19 June 1865 when Union Army General Gordon Granger announced and began enforcing the freedom of slaves in Galveston, TX). My focus/core for parenting (and for all encounters however fleeting or enduring) was clarified/set forty years ago as I responded to the then recently published Parenting for Peace and Justice by James and Kathleen McGinnis. (Yes, I wore my peace symbol t-shirt yesterday and am wearing my ‘Literacy and Justice for All’ t-shirt today!)
I recommended to you a few months ago Andrew Ward’s The Slaves’ War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves in which former slaves are given voice to guide readers chronologically through the war years and the years immediately after the war. I found this attempt to see from/through their experiences and observations to be illuminating, sobering, haunting, convicting. I fought off the instinct – common to the affluent/privileged -- to rush, to gloss over, to look away, to talk back. I am deeply disturbed that neither my formal education nor my family/community upbringing exposed me to the painful realities/perspectives the former slaves recall. Instead, ‘founding myths’ (see Ray Raphael’s Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past) that are deeply engrained/entrenched in our society’s official self-understanding block the way, offer reassuring distraction, create an easy conscience, spawn fearful reactions to accurate information.
You will remember our many discussions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s December 1942 After Ten Years essay he wrote for his parents, his siblings (and their children), his closest friend Eberhard Bethge, and his fellow covert resisters embedded in the Abwehr who had all been courageously resisting -- covertly and/or overtly -- Hitler and the Nazis for a decade. By late 1942, Nazis resisters such as the Bonhoeffer family had reason to hope. Germany’s military losses on the Eastern/Russian Front had set in motion elaborate plans for stopping Hitler by arrest or assassination. Dietrich and many for whom he wrote these reflections were arrested and executed in the months ahead. Dietrich’s father read the After Ten Years essay to the assembled family on Christmas Day 1942. I have been privileged to have had the assistance of Renate Bethge – Eberhard’s wife and Dietrich’s favored niece by his older sister Ursala -- as I revised and finalized my translation of After Ten Years (including the fragment inserted below). Words/phrases in parentheses offer additional nuances, add implied ideas, or indicate alternative translations.
Dietrich’s ‘The View from Below’ description/assessment -- a fragment most likely written at the time he wrote the December 1942 essay – has been singularly pivotal for my life decisions and self-examination since I discovered the fragment in a 1974 graduate seminar reading assignment.
The View from Below
It remains an experience of unparalleled (incomparable) value that we have learned to see for once the great events of world history from below – through the perspective of the barred (put out, cut out, blocked), the suspects, the badly treated, the powerless, the oppressed (restrained), the scoffed (derided, mocked), in short the perspective of those who suffer. (It is) only in this time when neither bitterness nor envy (jealousy) has cauterized (corroded, gnawed away) the heart that we see with new eyes great and small, fortunate and unfortunate, strong and weak; that our view of greatness, humaneness, justice, and compassion has become clearer, more free, more incorruptible (not subject to bribes); indeed, (that we see) that personal suffering is a more suitable (qualified) key (code, cipher), a more fruitful principle, than is personal good fortune for exploring the world by observation and action. It follows that this perspective from below will not be the partisan claim of those forever discontent, but that we are centered in all life’s dimensions by a higher contentment that is grounded properly beyond ‘from below’ and ‘from above’. And so it is affirmed.I have to date found no indication that learning to see from below was a previously established unparalleled or incomparable value, goal, or expectation for Dietrich, his family, or his fellow conspirators when they committed themselves to a resisting posture toward the Nazis. In fact, it seems to me that they at least in part began resisting the Nazis in an attempt to defend what they considered to be ‘cultured’. Learning to see from below was thus an unanticipated result to which Dietrich proposed by December 1942 to assign “unparalleled (incomparable) value”.
I imagine asking Dietrich to identify when along the 1933-42 continuum he became aware of this learning to see from below experience. Did all recipients of the essay agree with Dietrich’s unparalleled (incomparable) assessment of learning to see from below? How does seeing from below contrast with seeing from above? Are individuals born into from below circumstances as unaware of their view as are those born into from above circumstances? How far and how long into seeing from below before one cannot recover a seeing from above view? How far below should children see?
Not all eye opening experiences are life changing experiences that reconfigure our unparalleled (incomparable) values. I have inserted below the current draft of a spectrum I first created several decades ago as a tool for differentiating the differences – in some cases, very subtle differences – among the reactions/responses of the privileged who see from below. The spectrum is organized around several key terms or phrases we have discussed often as a family – e.g., ‘affluent’ (to flow to/toward), ‘respect’ (to look back/again), ‘radical’ (to the root), ‘genuinely present’ (with integrity).
The resolve to learn to see from below drew me to Barbara and shaped our parenting attempts when you – Erin, Kimberly, Morgan -- were children. We wanted you to always find us on the ‘+’ side of the spectrum. We are encouraged (i.e., infused with courage) as we observe you now as adults also tracking on the ‘+’ side of the spectrum!
Much love, Doug/Dad
____________________
But what does it mean to ‘learn to see from below’?
(-3)_____ (-2)_____ (-1)_____ (0)_____ (+1)_____ (+2)_____ (+3)
DISPOSITION -3: Those who demonstrate a complete lack of respect for deeply wounded sufferers by noticing them solely for the purpose of exploiting or eliminating them.
DISPOSITION -2: Those who demonstrate a complete lack of respect for deeply wounded sufferers by noticing them solely for the purpose of shunning/avoiding them.
DISPOSITION -1: Those who routinely disregard deeply wounded sufferers, but who are latently predisposed to shun/avoid them if significantly disturbed by them and who are not predisposed to object to their being exploited or eliminated.
DISPOSITION 0: Those who are not predisposed to shun/avoid deeply wounded sufferers, but who do not respect them deeply enough to resist their being exploited or eliminated, thereby forfeiting the opportunity ‘to see the great events of world history from below’.
DISPOSITION +1: Those who express a resolve to stand with deeply wounded sufferers and thereby ‘to see the great events of world history from below’, but who turn away rather than take the radical (i.e., ‘to the root’) actions necessary to learn ‘to see . . . from below’.
DISPOSITION +2: Those whose respect for deeply wounded sufferers leads them to take the radical (i.e., ‘to the root’) actions that result in the opportunity ‘to see the great events of world history from below’, knowing this experience will be life changing.
DISPOSITION +3: Those for whom the opportunity ‘to see the great events of world history’ from the perspective of deeply wounded sufferers is of such value (i.e., of ‘unparalleled value’) that they make professional and personal choices that sustain and maximize their efforts to ‘see . . . from below’ to life’s end.
