I was flipping through the TV the other day when I landed on the early 80’s classic 48 Hours, starring a young Eddie Murphy and an already grizzled Nick Nolte; I hadn’t seen the film since it first came out. Watching it felt like peeking into a time capsule from that era. The story’s hook is that Murphy, a black convict, and Nolte, a white cop, are forced by circumstance to work together for 48 hours to solve a crime.
In 1982, the movie had bi-racial leads was still a fairly big deal. Much of the story’s tension revolves around Nolte’s mistrust of Murphy. In fact, I happened to turn it on during the film’s most iconic scene. Murphy borrows Nolte’s gun and badge to get information from the denizens of a rough and tumble redneck bar. When no one is cooperative, Murphy pulls out his badge and shouts, “I’m your worst fucking nightmare, man. A n****r with a badge!”
The movie cut to commercial after the scene. I had forgotten how pervasive the racial tension the film captures was when I was growing up, even in relatively liberal Providence, RI. I didn’t experience that tension, overtly; it just seemed to be in the air like something waiting to happen, like an unfinished argument between a married couple.
No sooner did I think this than I noticed what had come on TV. It was a drug commercial depicting a happy wedding that the commercial’s drug was somehow making happier. The newlyweds, I realized, were a black man and a white woman. I say “realized” because this was hardly the first commercial I’d seen with bi-racial couples. In fact, if I hadn’t just been watching 48 Hours, it might not have registered at all. But it did register, and I thought about how drug companies are not typically vanguards of social change, and how that ad could never have existed when the movie was first released.
I turned the TV off. I’d had enough 80’s nostalgia for one afternoon. I still found myself thinking about all that had changed since I was a kid– Rodney King and Oprah, hip-hop and Obama. It’s hard sometimes to remember that things actually do change. You watch a bunch of guys marching with tiki torches and you might be tempted to think, “Jesus, we’re back in the fifties!”
I was reminded of when I struggled through the early stages of my writing career. On one dark afternoon, I learned that the literary agent I’d been working with to sell my third book had dropped me after I sent her my fourth: it was so depressing. I was four unpublished books in and, now, no agent, again. “Nothing’s getting any better,” I moaned to my wife. “Nothing’s changing!”
What a nightmare. ‘Hell on Earth’ would be a world where nothing changed, where experience taught me nothing, where no matter what different route I took, I always arrived at the same sad end. I look back on where I was then and where I am now. It’s easy to see–from this distance–how much had changed for me at the very moment I feared it had not, and, of course, how much would change over intervening decades.
But everything that changed for me did so at exactly the rate I allowed it to. I had a lot of ideas, then, about what I should or shouldn’t write, about agents and publishers, about criticism and praise–ideas that I loathed to let go of. Often, I didn’t even know I had these ideas; I thought they were ‘reality’. Ideas, after all, can change; reality cannot. Fortunately, while I can’t change other people, or the weather, or the outcome of an election, I can always change my mind. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been able to change.
I often think of society as one giant soul whose mind is slowly, slowly, slowly changing. It can be frustrating how slowly it changes, particularly if you’ve made up your mind about something that a bunch of other people are still debating. How easy it is to think that there is something very wrong with these other people or to begin worrying that they will never stop arguing because they will never change their minds. Except I see, now, that my writing career changed the more I let myself write what I loved and the less I worried about what other people thought of it.
Political and social debate is nearly always about what other people are thinking. How do we get these people to change their mind? I don’t really know. However, I do know that I have to trust that whoever I’m looking at is just like me, that if they understand what they’re choosing between they will always choose love over fear.
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