Do We Have the Courage To Make the World a Loving Place?

THE LAST PICTURE in Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s Nothing Personal, an exploration of American identity through the photographer’s eye and the essayist’s heart, holds a haunting some 60 years later. Two young boys look solemnly into Avedon’s lens. It is as if they stare into the soul of the watcher. It is as if in their innocence they wonder about the world in their silence. It is the children’s eyes that I can’t stop thinking about.

Their eyes are still our eyes, their gaze, still our gaze — weary, longing, determined, and despairing. Baldwin writes in the 1964 book, “Despair: perhaps it is this despair which we should attempt to examine if we hope to bring water to this desert.”

Baldwin and Avedon’s friendship and work together can be instructive for us because what we face as a nation is not much different from the Civil Rights years. We are presently dealing with a lack of trust; the forces of polarization are deepening within and without. There is, writes Baldwin, an “unspeakable loneliness” that we feel, wondering if anyone can feel what we feel and are angry about what we are angry about and are sad about what we are sad about. Then there is the kind of loneliness that takes root when “we live by lies.”

So many in our country are trying to forcefully return us to an American past that never was. They are locked, as Baldwin says, in a past that thinks that only one group must tell the story of our country, that wants to ban books and take away rights, that is never looking toward who we can become as a nation. They do not want to learn from the past, they want to weaponize it, use it in ways that are nostalgic, where they are in power and everyone else is not. That is what saddens me about this moment: We are still dealing with what Baldwin says is a “crisis of identity.”

It’s much easier to murder than to change, Baldwin says. It is much easier to live in innocence and ignorance of what is destroying us than to face it, he says. “And what we are struggling against is that death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live,” he says. And what is the root of this inhumanity? The lack of love.

For Baldwin, love was a commitment to dignity, to life, to sharing the stakes of this world together; a trusting of one another and trusting in one another, as he and Avedon had done since when they first met as high schoolers in New York City. It is a love that must be felt, not just a disposition; it changes and expands when you encounter another person’s life. To Baldwin, this was a miracle.

When we say that all human beings deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the most important part is the happiness that comes from being treated as if you matter, as if your existence is not expendable, as if you count for something and that we are accountable to you and where you exist in the world.

These are the questions Baldwin and Avedon ask us: How can one be happy and loved if when you call for help, you are met with a police officer’s gun? How can one be happy and feel loved when it seems that adults care little about your future? How can one be happy and feel loved when it seems no one will fight for you, be a friend to you, care for you, and do what is necessary to make sure you survive?

“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” Baldwin writes. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often, but I am also aware that we save each other some of the time. And all that God can do, and all I expect [God] to do, is lend one the courage to continue.” The courage, as he says, to trust one another when we say things hurt and that we need help. The courage to make this unloved world a loving place for almost the first time — streets filled with love, communities filled with love, policies filled with love, nations filled with love, art filled with love.

As I sit with my copy of Nothing Personal, I think about what we are facing together in this country. I think of the despair Baldwin wrote about, the crisis of identity, the need for us to build bonds of trust, the Light that feels as if it is almost out, that fearful shaking of the head when one sees the state of affairs in the United States and abroad.

We need the courage, as Baldwin says, to not place things above people, to give our children a loving example, to not choose “safety” at the expense of justice, to grow up and make better choices for one another, and to protect the light in each and every one of us. “But he saw the light in the eyes, which is the only light there is in the world,” Baldwin writes. “And honored it and trusted it.”

In America today, we are dealing with forces that are deep and pervasive and they mean us no good. We have inherited them from the past and are wrestling with them in our present. We are often sad and tired and angry, as Baldwin was. We have seen dying and death as had those boys facing Avedon’s camera in Atlanta. Yes, there is much to learn and there is so much to do. And yes, we often feel powerless to move. But something in our souls says get up, and get up now, and go out to save this world.

We know that the world cannot be saved by one of us alone. We know that salvation is of utmost importance; that one day, history will tell the story of the people that we were. And we are a people together, and we need one another, and none of this will happen if we don’t find a way to do it, and we can, and we don’t often do it, but we have done it and can do it again. We must do whatever we can to save this world, my God, we must do what we can.

“The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out,” Baldwin writes. There is still a light. There is still a light.