Recently, I spoke with someone about our current historical moment, and the person expressed concern, as I do, about what we see happening around us everyday. The person’s response, though, like many others, had a feeling of dejection and defeatism to it, a feeling that no one has been here before or experienced the same things we experience today. While at its core those sentiments ring true due to the historical qualities of the past and the qualities of the present, I reminded the person that what we endure today has happened previously, countless times, and that while we, coming of age during the 198os onward, have not necessarily experienced this threat of authoritarianism and fascism others in the past have, in various forms, and they have fought for their beliefs and ideals in a better world.

Over the past few years I’ve had similar conversations to the one above, and I always remind my interlocutor of the past, of people who have fought back against such moments and pushed forward. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this conversations even more I as teach Walt Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life.” Each of these poems, written in 1856 and 1838 respectively, at a time when the United States simmered before boiling over in 1861, remind us of the fact that others before us have experienced similar circumstances and that we must act and think about those who come after us, showing them a way to engage with tyranny when it stares them in the face.

Whitman’s poem drives home the fact that while we exist in a temporal moment, for a finite amount of time, we also connect with those who came before and those who will come after. Whitman sees us, as he crosses on the ferry, “face to face,” and we each, if we cross from Manhattan to Brooklyn, look upon the same river and the same birds and the same sky because “[i]t avails not, time nor place — distance avails not.” Nothing stands between us because Whitman, living over 175 years ago, thought of me, and he “consider’d long and seriously of [me] before [I was] born.” He could not know me specifically, but I was with him, just as he is with me now what I read him.

He knew me and warned me that I am not the only one upon whom “the dark patches fall.” They fell upon him as well. They fell upon the others he saw on the ferry. They fell upon all of us. Whitman proclaims that he

Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,

He experienced the same things we experienced. The same feelings. The same hates. The same loves. The same lusts. He brings to mind James Baldwin’s who said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

We tend to think about ourselves as isolated, as disconnected not just from those who inhabit the earth around us but from those who inhabited it before us and those who will inhabit it after we cast off this mortal coil. That line of thought leads us, in many ways, to inaction in the face of authoritarianism and fascism. It leads us to cower in fear as we stare down the powers that seek to destroy our very being and the very beings of those around us. It leads us to think that no one has faced such moments, and it leads us to ignore those who came before and fought back. They have provided lessons for us to use. They have given us tools. They have provided us inspiration.

In his 1852 speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, Frederick Douglass quotes a stanza from Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” calling upon us to use the past in the present, to use it to fight back. Longfellow writes,

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, — act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Within this section of his speech, Douglass tells his audience that we must not mythologize the past. We must not mythologize George Washington. He led us during the revolution and served the nation, but he also enslaved individuals and disregarded the indigenous population. We cannot remember one and forget the other. “We have to do with the past,” Douglass tells us, “only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” We can remember that we helped defeat the Nazis during World War II. We must not forget we did this alongside the Russians and Chinese. We must not forget hat we kept countless American citizens of Japanese ancestry in concentration cameps. We must not forget we had Nazi sympathizers in the United States, including politicians. We also must not forget we had people who fought back those fascist sympathizers at home and abroad. We must not forget that countless Germans and others resisted Nazi ideology.

While I do, at times, feel anxious about our present moment, I also have found myself seeking out clarity from the past. Learning more about what came before makes me not as anxious as I have been in the past. It doesn’t make me joyful, but it makes me able to navigate this moment with a clearer head for what has come before and what we must do to ensure everything for what comes after us. As I concluded Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015), I felt dejected at his outlook, over a decade ago, but also reassured that we are not the first to face down these issues. Snyder points out that “[m]ost of us would like to think that we possess a ‘moral instinct.’ Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.” Snyder paints a grim picture, and I don’t disagree with him; however, Snyder also presents people who fought back, and we must take the lessons from those who resisted and resist.

Longfellow and Douglass, leading up to the Civil War, called upon their listeners to act. Whitman calls upon us to think about who has come before and who will come after. Each of them tells us that we are not alone, that we are not unique in the obstacles that stand in front of us. Each of them tells us that others have endured tyranny and that unless we resist those who come after us will come into the world under tyrannical systems that seek to oppress and profit off of them. I don’t want that, and I don’t know anyone who wants that. To resist that, we must know the past and use that past in a way that benefits us in the present and for the future.

To conclude, I would recommend watching Edward Norton on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert about how we respond to the anxiousness of doomscrolling and constant barrage of news. Norton recites, in part, Whitman’s poem, driving home the themes I have discussed in this post.

What are some of your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.