Were you, as a child, warned about the undertow?
I had been warned, but still: I remember a moment when I was very young, my feet in the Atlantic, water driving powerfully in a few directions, my balance gone, my eyes on the swirl and confused as I started to fall, and then my uncle was gripping my arm and dragging me out toward the beach—pulling me and scolding me and bringing me back where I needed to be, all at once.
I’m not sure who could grab my arm like that today, but I feel some of what I felt just before my uncle’s hand latched on—a powerful swirl at my feet and rising, a loss of balance, forces I can’t clearly see moving in ways I do not understand.
What I didn’t know when my uncle pulled me from the ocean was that his politics and mine would turn out to be so different—that as we got older, he would gleefully send me newspaper clippings from his side of the country about riots and chaos on my side of the country and that I would respond with photos of my young kids walking happily and unsupervised through Portland’s peaceful, leafy streets. I didn’t know that we would argue about which was needed more, a wall or bridges, or that we would disagree about whether his hometown’s widely read newspaper was slyly perpetuating a grand hoax or offering an essential and increasingly lonely part of the fix. I didn’t know that my uncle and I could look at the same things and see them so differently.
And yet, in my daily work, I invite people to share different perspectives and I try to create conditions for a range of opinions to emerge. Alongside the people I work with, I try to eschew moments of easy consensus and to get people to dig into the differences between them, even about their deepest convictions, as a means of helping us become more connected.
Today I have the feeling that my commitment to this work, perhaps more than ever before, is in for a strange sort of test, a trial. Having been committed to—even evangelizing for—the idea that we should aim to understand each other more than to defeat each other, to make positive change in our shared world by talking with each other rather than demonizing each other, I wonder now if I’ve only been seeing—and mostly been wanting to see—the sunny surface, attending too little to the thrashing below.
I was warned as a child about a few kinds of powerful forces: the undertow, hate, power separated from care. As I grew, I was drawn to books that took dark forces seriously and to thinkers who stared these forces in the face and tried to see how we might find our way through. They reminded us that life can be solitary, nasty, brutish, and short, and that civil war—the worst kind of war—is always nearby. They told us never to forget what people can and will do to one another.
But they also argued, even in the face of the preponderant evidence of their own experience, that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. And perhaps this is a crucial part of the test now: to keep believing in that arc, and to keep seeing that many of us—most of us—believe in that arc too. Does mutual understanding—and dialogue and listening—help us move further along that arc? Can this soft stuff stand up against, be a necessary complement to, and mean at least as much as the harder stuff?
These are the questions, the test, here in late autumn of 2024, as I wonder if I am, still, naive about the undertow—about what it takes to get out, who to count on for help.
When I saw my uncle not long ago, he heard only some of what was said. He can no longer drive and will no longer step into the ocean, let alone recover a flailing child. Still, we joked about politics, briefly. And then, as we walked slowly and uncertainly down a short flight of stairs, I held on to his arm.
Adam Davis is executive director of Oregon Humanities.
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