I’ve been taking classes on doing things with my hands, because I don’t know how to do a lot of things and I want to know more, and also because I think we will be entering an era where being able to help myself and those around me will become an act of radical care.
This last weekend, I took a set of wood refinishing classes at
Rockler. These were taught by one of those old men who have been doing this for decades, is now retired, and absolutely loves talking to people. He knew the history of every form of varnish, lacquer, and shellac. He had stories about things gone wrong and things gone right. And one of the things he impressed on me was this: you have to know what kind of problem you have.
As an example, he pointed out that there is no finish that can make an improperly made table last for centuries. If it’s not constructed properly, the expansion and contraction of the piece with humidity and temperature variation will eventually crack the wood.
You can finish it as lovingly as you want, and it will not last. (Side note: he gave us a long gripe about how people say that they don’t want to refinish their antiques because they watched a show that said that antiques are worth more with their original finish, but he said that if your choice is between finish coming off and refinishing, you must refinish because finish protects your piece and it will be worth less if it’s not in good condition.)
This combined with one of my persistent thoughts in the car: how do we fix America? I have been pondering this for over a decade. I remember putting together the diversity report for RWA way back in the before times and dividing the issues into “things we can fix as a Board of Directors”—things like making sure our actions were inclusive and recognized the merit and hard work of BIPOC by including them as speakers and article writers—and “hard problems,” and the hard problem (put in a slightly nicer way when I wrote the report) was that some people are just racist, and there are a lot of them.
This is our problem: America is a table in which the expansion and contraction of the times always causes the table to crack, and most of the solutions we have are finishing solutions: solutions that are like, did we sand with the right grit of sand paper?
There’s nothing that 400 grit sandpaper can fix about a table that’s cracked clean down the middle.
In normal circumstances, the thing you would do with a table that is irrevocably broken is to get another table. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really seem to be an option here, either. Some individuals may be able to leave, but for most people, America is the only table we have, and it’s the table we’re going to be sitting at for the rest of our lives, broken or not.
There are people I have encountered who point to this as proof that the only way to fix America is violence, and I have to be honest—I cannot see how that would work. The problem with America is, among other things, a lot of people with big opinions and big guns, and I cannot imagine how violence would ever do anything except smash the table into pieces as each side targets the few working parts of the other half of the table in order to bring them into submission.
The conclusion I have come to is this: the table is broken, and we are stuck with the table, and so our job is to try to figure out how to keep this broken table from harming as many people as possible.
We cannot make America into an unbroken table. I do not think it’s possible. I think the people who think there is an easy, or even a hard, way to do this are not grappling with how deep the cracks are.
But I do think we have the capacity to make it into a usable table, and that is what we have to shoot for.
That’s going to mean structural reinforcement to try to keep the table from breaking and collapsing and harming everyone attached to the table (which at this point is the whole world). It’s going to mean sanding broken edges and maybe finding some kind of resin or epoxy to fill in some of those broken, yawning gaps. It’s going to mean a lot of big changes.
But it’s also going to mean that we can’t just throw a tablecloth over the thing and tell everyone to sit down because it’s fine. We can never forget the table is structurally unsound, and we must teach the structural unsoundness of the table in order to make sure that we are keeping our reinforcements in place instead of stripping them off and selling them to the highest bidder.
I started to list all the things that I think are needed in this structural reinforcement, and it turns out that would make this a book and not a newsletter.
So I will come back to this again.
