Losing Heroes

By GENE NICHOL

Like most folks I know, I took the news of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing hard. America’s greatest lawyer, greatest champion of equality, and most remarkable icon of heroic excellence passed away. She did so amidst the battle, on the field of engagement, carrying the uplifted banner for millions to follow.

Somehow, oddly, it came as a shock. She was, after all, 87 and a multiple cancer survivor. But, again like others, I had come to think that Ruth Bader Ginsburg could outpace death itself. She always had. We relied on it.

And, of course, she died at a stunning time. Scant weeks before the most consequential election in modern history — testing whether Lincoln’s “last best hope of earth” will, in any meaningful way, endure. She even left a note of aspiration: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

The duplicitous senator from Kentucky immediately vowed otherwise. And given the appalling nature of our politics, who knows whether McConnell’s boast will be fulfilled, and whether the passing of the nation’s best justice will work to hinder, or to aid, the re-election of our most dangerous and constitution-defying chief executive. Who knows, in truth, where we head?

2020 seems more like 1968 all the time. I was 17 then. The world unraveled. The two largest heroes of the first half of my life, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, were gunned down in horror. Streets were set ablaze. War raged. The nation re-embraced its worst instincts. Dreams diminished, in exhaustion and fear. Recovery was slow in coming, if it came. Wounds lingered. They linger still.

This year is also marked definingly by death. A different type, to be sure. But, if anything, more terrifying, more mysterious. And more divisive. Stoked by a master divider. Incompetent, apparently, at all else, but division. Brotherhood wanes, unity ebbs. Chasms are revealed in ways impossible to ignore. No claim of American exceptionalism can be proffered. We hope, instead, only for sanity and sustainability. Some manageable, reciprocal tolerance. It eludes us.

And in 2020, in the thick of all this, we have again, in quick succession, lost our two greatest heroes – Ruth Ginsburg and John Lewis. Our instructors in “good trouble.” Those who fought against “centuries of law-sanctioned inequality.” Who reminded that every “person” is entitled to “equal protection of the laws” and that hypocrisy is not an acceptable defining American response. That we are not powerless before the fates.

The loss falls differently on me now, in older age. And, of course, the mourning is eased, at least partially, by gratitude that Lewis and Ginsburg led long and beyond full lives. Lives generously doused not only with challenge and attainment, but with adulation and grace.

Still, having had a strange career, I knew Justice Ginsburg and Congressman Lewis a little. Mostly from earlier days. Making the sting modestly different. One can think of their eyes, their smiles, their generous voices, their lived and un-dismissible virtue. Sort of, to me, like Gandalf the white, having passed through the fires. But keeping the wry smile. Kennedy and King will never have that, sadly. Though all four moved from the same burning coal of the American promise.

I’m not one for larger thoughts. And if there is a God, I can’t seem to know, or grasp, what she (especially this day) might be. But perhaps she took these two from us, at this hardest of moments, to remind us what we’re capable of. When we need it most.

Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and in 2015 started the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund after the UNC Board of Governors closed the state-funded Poverty Center for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2020

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