(i wrote this on sunday and then stewed for a few days over its shortcomings, which remain, and with which i’ll have to be at peace, as it is all, day by day, just beyond me.)

Center of the World
I lived there for twenty years, now am seven years gone from that tiny town at the center of the world.

It was our joke back then– that the world was secretly centered in a community of fewer than 50,000 souls. But look there– wandering in proof, all along the downtown mall– our glamorous pilgrims: Gorbachev and Streisand, Ali and Newman. We had one of everything back then– a rock star, a movie star, an arthouse cinema, a poet laureate, a billionaire, a really good coffee shop, the best restaurant in the South. Statistics were burnished and traded like talismans: highest NY Times readership outside Manhattan; most bookstores per capita in the U.S.; happiest place, best place to retire or to live or to be born; most beautiful college town. A friend moved there after a pendulum dangled over a map of the continent pointed us out.

Smugness was endemic; lotuses the dish of the day, every day; willful blindness (sooner or later) the price of admission. Local activists went hoarse, screaming into the exquisite plushness. The righteous were either worn down or enveloped in a narcotic unison, or else they hauled themselves off to places with livelier acoustics. The choir was well-preached to. The poor and the dispossessed moved along on parallel tracks, witness and rebuke all in one.

We called it ‘Nickel-town’, for there, on the back of the five-cent piece, was Monticello, the house on the hill, that complex, chameleon house, a decoder ring for the town down below:

where Jefferson’s human chattel were sold at auction to chip away at his monstrous debt; where the Jewish owners (fifth and sixth generation Americans) were reviled as interlopers and Shylocks for the crime of saving the place; where the city fathers marched in torchlight to welcome the second coming of the Klan; where once the ‘s’ words (from slavery to Sally) were never spoken; and where today men and women of good faith struggle to tell the whole story, of all those who lived on the mountain; where, from Lafayette to Havel, citizens of the world seek the light of democracy and revolution; where every July 4, immigrants become citizens, with all the attendant rights and responsibilities.

Charlottesville (like Jefferson, or like Monticello, or like any of us) contains multitudes: Countless unbridgeable racial divisions have been bridged; countless more still remain. Profound wealth and rampant development reshape the face of the place, even as its essence remains recognizable. Victims of blinding ancestor worship live there happily alongside some of the world’s most progressive spirits.

Duality ain’t enough anymore. It used to be that the mark of a fine mind was the ability to hold onto two opposing ideas gracefully and simultaneously. Now, the truth comes in 50 shades of grey, the news is fake, and our collective hunch hangs in tatters. But here’s one small true thing, a tiny realization from some distance, after this weekend of fists on flesh and metal on bone:

About twenty years ago, the City of Charlottesville unveiled (to great hoopla and derision) a new municipal slogan: “Charlottesville; A World-Class City” for plastering on fire trucks and police cars and all else that held still for it. The idea, back then, that Charlottesville was even a city, and especially that it would aspire to any class numbering greater than one, that it would deny its essential singularity– this was naive and boosterish and way too insufficiently hip.

Then, this weekend, I read some formentor of hatred say that he and his ilk would ‘return to Charlottesville so many times it’ll make your head spin; we’ll make this place the center of the world”.

Suddenly a much-mocked civic slogan seemed instead like a fortune cookie. Charlottesville always thought in its secret heart it was the center of the world, but was too cool to say so. It was the town where movie stars could go to the grocery store and not be bothered. This wasn’t just a fact; it was a central pillar of civic identity. Charlottesville was a bubble; this weekend that bubble popped.

And Charlottesville became a center of the world. Not on terms any would ever choose. But in ways that are all too familiar for those of ‘us’ who have ever been marked out as a ‘them’. If you’re Black or Queer, if you’re Hispanic or Old or Fat, if you’re a Woman or a Jew or a Muslim, if you’re any of us minorities who are, in fact, the majority, you know in your gut what went down in that town. It wasn’t nearly the first time, nor near the last.

The happiest place, the best place, became the place where urine is thrown and torches are carried, where the banality of evil and the banality of the white polo shirt merged into one, where the agora became the hunting ground.

And so Charlottesville became a world-class city at last.

Like Ferguson. Like Charleston. Like Sandy Hook. Like Oklahoma City.

All of these times we felt — this one is different — this one will turn the tide– this one will change minds on the other side and get something done. Until the moral conviction bled away in the haze of false moral equivalences. Death by a thousand tweets and a billion quibbles. This time is proving no different. You can’t turn the tide. All you can do is be the tide – be the only thing that moves the tide – this planetary, glacial, inexorable moon eternally bending toward the horizon of good. The cruel joke is that is exactly what we were doing, in the only way you can — hemming and hawing our way toward moral clarity. And that’s what brought the attention of the hatemongers. Unbearable. And unavoidable. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

This week Charlottesville is the center of the world. Next week, humans being humans, somewhere else will be. But Charlottesville has now played a crucial role in the unmasking and confronting, by standing up and speaking out, with flowers and tubas and poster board and lives. And not just to and for and by themselves. The largest group of haters assembled in 60 years flooded the town. Those dear to me formed the human dam. Next time (or the time after that) it will be yours in the brink.

They are the best of us, the best people we know. They are, as we all are, fragile and insufficient to the task, facing the flames of hatred, armed only with meager words and foolish hearts and broken spirits. And when they did (or do, or will) in that moment, past or present or future, none of the rest of it– not the lovely coffee shop, not the bookstore, not the billionaire, nor the twitter nor the credit nor the blame nor any of the thousand points that move us ever-further from an illusive duality– it none of it matters.

These moments are binary. They’re 0’s and 1’s.

Stand up/Sit down. Witness/Turn away. Fight/Flight.

Charlottesville has stood up before, many times, often on the right side, sometimes not. It has taken back the night, and renamed the bridge and the parks. It has also shut down the schools and bulldozed the Hill and turned a blind eye. What the town has never done before is contain the zeitgeist, hold the center, break the bubble. Time was, every time a new poll came out naming C-ville the best place to be, we’d all feel smug and secretive. Pull up the drawbridge; we’re already here.

This time, at last, a light shone on it that truly accounted for the place and the people. This time, as they bandaged the breaks, and lit the candles, and buried the dead, there was no protective shell or echo chamber or shade or cool.

This time, at last, the slogan felt earned:

Charlottesville; A World-Class City.

(with thanks and love to the indispensable larry garretson)