Hanging Onto Hope While Everything Around Me Is On Fire

Back in the 1980s, my father used to collect aluminum cans as a form of exercise. In those days, people regularly just chucked cans, food wrappers, and other litter out of moving car windows. Anyone old enough to personally remember the Reagan era will recall that American roadsides, especially urban roadsides, were consistently choked with post-consumer waste.

So my father would take a lawn-and-leaf bag and go walking aimlessly. The walk gave him necessary low-impact exercise and time to clear his head. And he knew it was time to start home when the bag approached full of the aluminum cans he collected. He would take the full bags to the local recyclery for cash, and use the proceeds to take us kids out for burgers.

After eating, he insisted we dispose of our wrappers correctly.

Once upon a time, American attitudes toward waste were, by today's standards, appalling. A New York PR professional coined the term “litterbug” in the 1940s, but the notion that post-consumer waste was “disposable” created the persistent idea that we could just pitch waste anywhere and trust the Lord to handle it. And way too many of us just did. Part of America's anti-urban sentiment in the 1970s and 1980s referred to the trash on every street and sidewalk.

I was too young to understand when things changed, but they did. In the early 1990s, my dad's walks took much longer, and our burger runs became less frequent. At some point, he started coming home with his bag only half-full. Around the time I finished high school, these walks stopped being worth the effort for him. He stopped carrying the bag with him, and he walked much more predictable, programmatic routes.

That was a loss for Dad, of course. His litter-collecting ambles had been an important part of his exercise regime since before I was born. But even he acknowledged that it was a net good. He couldn't find recyclable litter because fewer people were creating litter; more people accepted that they had individual responsibility for the common good. And streets were far cleaner.

Such changes in public morality don't happen in a vacuum. A combination of public education, media campaigns, and changing local laws overpowered the notion that litter was a “victimless” offense. The more people who accepted their responsibility for clean streets, the more pressure on those who dragged their heels. Eventually the momentum became irresistible.

Not that nobody tried to resist. Some people absolutely insisted on their right to litter; some still do. When I was in college, the campus conservative student group sold t-shirts with a disfigured recycling symbol and the logo “Environmentally Unsafe And Proud Of It!” They turned their sloppiness into a political status and a social identity.

Yet the very fact that they did so proved that they were just fighting the tide, and they knew it. Even while wearing that t-shirt, I watched several of them throw their food wrappers in the trash, and their soda-pop bottles in the recycling. The shirts had a brief, voguish popularity, then vanished as the wearers realized they didn't look brave, they looked like dickheads.

We saw similar fates for other once-popular actions: smoking, for instance, or driving with ethylated gasoline. Or racism, or hating on LGBTQ+ populations. These were once commonplace to the point of being bland, then they became agitated political positions, then finally identities. Because the more obvious it became that these were unsustainable behaviors, the more momentum built against them.

As I write, we're witnessing rapid reversal on some of these positions. The incoming administration has passed sweeping revisions that empower racists, homophobes, and irresponsible environmental attitudes. It's easy to think that, because these actions have government approval, it's impossible to stop them.

But I take comfort in their militant aggression. The administration has to fight so viciously because they know they don't have the momentum on their side. I will admit that losing government support for a more just, more responsible society is a massive setback. But they're fighting so hard because, fundamentally, they know they're losing.

Please don't get me wrong. Victory is far from a forgone conclusion. If we get discouraged and squander the energy, we will lose momentum. To win, we need to keep standing up for a just society and a broad, inclusive definition of citizenship. But I still believe the weight of history is on our side. Victory is ours for the demanding, as long as we remain mindful of the moment.

Jump, Jive, and Wail Against the Machine

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 53
Thomas Carter (director), Swing Kids

Imagine a world where a group of relatively well-off White teenagers adopted the culture, dance, and trappings of Black musicians. The teenagers pretend this adoption is apolitical, and their subculture is merely fun. But the racially segregated, authoritarian state sees this White embrace of Black culture as tantamount to treason. So they use vaguely written laws to force kids into mandatory social retraining. Some kids resist this conversion; others can’t.

Screenwriter Jonathan Marc Feldman and director Thomas Carter presented this movie in the Reagan/Bush I era’s immediate hangover. Their intended commentary on recent events was particularly unsubtle. This perhaps explains why critics greeted this movie with ambivalence; Roger Ebert, a dedicated acolyte of ars gratia artis, particularly hated it. Yet in subsequent decades, its commentary has become only more relevant, its message more prescient.

Peter Muller (Robert Sean Leonard) and his friends admire the freedom and authenticity of American and British pop culture over Germany during the ascendent Reich. They cut a rug in unlicensed dance clubs with music first recorded by Black and Jewish artists like Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. As often happens with new youth subcultures, their rebellion includes petty crime. Peter gets arrested, and sentenced to join the Hitler Youth.

The opening act really emphasizes the Swing Kids’ desire to avoid politics. The overwhelmingly White subculture simply yearns for the liberty they perceive in minority cultures, blind to the ways oppression shapes that culture. The Swing Kids refuse to take sides even as Germany begins the march to war. This even though many members are of conscription age: they’ll almost certainly be expected to carry arms for the authoritarian state.

After Peter is forced to join the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend, shortened to HJ), his fellow Swing Kid Thomas (Christian Bale) also joins, in a show of solidarity. They pursue a double life, keeping up with HJ ethics of athleticism, nationalism, and militarism by day. At night they don their flamboyant British suits and dance feverishly. They insist they can maintain that dualism, until the moment they can’t.

Their friend Arvid (Frank Whaley), who is Jewish-coded, plays a mean jazz guitar and admires Django Reinhart. Arvid makes bank playing underground clubs and basement dances. But in an autocratic surveillance state, it doesn’t take long before HJ thugs come calling. A back-street beating breaks several bones in Arvid’s hand, rendering him unable to play. Stuck alone in a shabby loft, Peter and Thomas must decide which side they’re on.

l-r: Frank Whaley, Christian Bale, and Robert Sean Leonard in Swing Kids

Feldman and Carter exaggerate the Swing Kids’ moral trajectory. Their early insistence on political innocence is so overwhelming that you initially wonder whether they’re deliberately deceiving themselves. But that willful ignorance gives way quickly. Thomas, surrounded by constant HJ propaganda, eventually starts to believe it. Peter, dragooned into government atrocities, goes the other direction and prepares for a confrontation.

This deliberately didactic theme didn’t help with critics. The movie’s gut-punch arc of moral specificity led some to disparage it as a meaningless weeper designed for children; Ebert, near his death, included this movie among his list of worst movies ever. Undoubtedly, it guides viewers with a heavy hand, and fears that its mostly young intended audience won’t get the message unless it’s heavily signposted.

Yet as educators and activists feud over how exactly to teach that audience about the war, this movie has gained second life. Its aggressively sentimental approach to the lessons the characters learn—especially Peter—reflects the betrayal students feel when they realize the history they’ve learned has been thoroughly whitewashed. Yes, this movie is unsubtle. But so is the discovery of the depths of cruelty humans repeatedly achieve.

It also forces the intended audience to examine itself. Just as Hamburg teenagers pinched Black swing culture, Memphis youths stole Black rock’n’roll, and Oakland kids filched hip-hop. In every case, White kids pretended their cooptation of Black culture was apolitical, that their use of the signs and signifiers of rebellion were party-time fun. White kids love Black culture, but generally need jolted to recognize the forces that shaped that culture.

One can question whether the Swing Kids subculture actually accomplished anything. Doomed resistance movements, from Wat Tyler’s rebellion to the Order of the White Rose to the Woodstock generation, are generally more celebrated after the battle is over. But in a conformist, autocratic state, the Swing Kids movement reminded its participants that they needed, ultimately, to answer to their own consciences. That’s one thing the state can’t take away.

Today’s world can stand to learn that lesson.