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Cry, My Beloved Country
I don’t recognize my country anymore. It’s up to us to make something better of what remains.
When I was in high school, we studied the novel by South African author Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country. There is much that can be said about the book, but there are two things that I distinctly recall about it. I remember that the novel, written while South Africa was still under apartheid rule, was heartbreakingly sad. And I remember what my English teacher declared to be the theme of the book and so important that she demanded we memorize it:
“Deep down, the fear of a man who lives in a world not made for him, whose own world is slipping away, dying, being destroyed, beyond any recall.”
More than 40 years after I read that book, that haunting sentence has stuck with me. In fact, at a class reunion a few years back, it turned out that it had stuck with several of my classmates, who could still recite this sentence word for word. I wonder if they are thinking of it today as they watch the news.
I think of that sentence as I see my country moving ever closer to authoritarianism. After a week of protests against police violence — protests that themselves included too many…
