We have a choice of two futures, according to Ta-Nehisi Coates – and a stone mason

Waking up in Portsmouth, groggily looking out the third-story window of the Airbnb where we were staying, I couldn’t believe my eyes: pallets of stones were parked in the middle of Court Street – not any stones but beautiful old, rough-cut granite. As a former stone mason for 20 years, I thought I was dreaming.

I immediately walked over to talk to the five masons who were in the process of building a dry-laid granite wall along the edge of the street, some of it already as tall as I am.

They were replacing a wall that once stood here. When they showed me a blueprint of the original structure with each rock numbered, I couldn’t believe it:  they were building this wall by following the numbers to be an exact duplicate of the original wall.  It was like asking an artist to paint by numbers!

It was a slow, laborious process: multi-shaped stones with unique bumps and burrs never fit together exactly in the same way twice. Furthermore, looking carefully at their wall revealed a basic, utilitarian structure typical for that long-ago time and place, unlike what skilled stone craftspeople could build – that is if they were allowed to tap into their creativity.

In that instant, I had an epiphany. 

Requiring these skilled artisans to essentially paint by numbers to recreate a bygone era is a perfect metaphor for what is happening today in our country. We find ourselves with a mile-wide divide between the majority of us who wish to improve our lives by moving forward pitted against a sizable minority of us who want to go back to re-painting by the original numbers.  

This minority is clamoring for what strict constitutionists dream about: that the true meaning of our constitution is contained in the exact text penned by our Founding Fathers. We must follow their original intent in the same manner my mason friends are required to build a duplicate wall following the numbers inscribed upon the stones.

In reality, that original wall comes from an era that should be dead to us because America, as it was mandated in the Constitution,  disenfranchised most of us: women, minorities, and all those who didn’t own property.  Why would we want to go back to those days any more than these masons want to go back to build the same wall over again?

This topic –  being “plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world”^⁠1–  is the subject of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, “The Message.” 

For our country to move forward, Coates says, we must reject the notion that words have only one meaning: They are not paint-by-numbers, set in stone, “gray, automatic, and square.”  Instead, Coates says we need to  embrace a new vision filled “with angle, color, and curve.”^⁠2

Similarly, our constitution is not a dead relic set in stone, written for the benefit of a few wealthy white men. That connotation reeks today like a dead whale beached on a prehistoric sand bar. It’s wrong and morally repugnant.  Our constitution is not a dead whale but a living document designed to adapt to our changing societal needs.

Coates warns us that mass media confuses us by painting history and politics as an impenetrable web too difficult to understand. He says they are guilty of “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.”^⁠3 

The truth is self-evident if we just open our eyes.

 

On November 5^th, we can either vote to return to that old, dead society or join Kamala in forging a new, vibrant society of opportunity where we can all pursue our dreams in a fair society where everyone has a voice.

xxx

¹ Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Message (pp. 18-19). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

² Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Message (pp. 44-45)

³ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/29/books/review/ta-nehisi-coates-the-message.html