Keep Moving Forward
I was listening to the National Public Radio program Fresh Air with Terri Gross. The guest she had was comedian Robert Schimmel and the subject was his experience with cancer. Mr. Schimmel was struck with cancer of the lymph cells when he was fifty. He wrote a book about his experience titled Cancer On Five Dollars A Day.
Mr. Schimmel recalled a particular time during his treatment when he was in the hospital where he had one more chemotherapy treatment to go. But the physical drains on his person were so severe that all he wanted to do was die. His father paid a visit to him in his hospital room and Mr. Schimmel asked him to help him die. The father understood and left the room. A moment later the father returned with his grandchildren, Mr. Schimmel’s children, and asked him to repeat his request.
Mr. Schimmel said that his father was an Auschwitz survivor. The man saw a lot of death and destruction and had his share of Nazi horror stories to share. Mr. Schimmel shared one particular story that his father shared with him. One day in the camp there was a man with his son and the prisoners were being told to march for no particular reason. Maybe it was busy work to give the guards something to do. Or maybe it was just a chance to be cruel. But the boy could no longer continue and dropped to the ground from exhaustion. A guard walked up to the boy and shot him in the back of the head. The father went to his son and knelt down to hold him. The guard shot him in the head as well. Then the guard told the rest of the prisoners, if you want to survive keep moving forward.
Mr. Schimmel said that he seized on this memory of his father’s story as a source of inner strength as he continued the rest of his medical treatments on his way to a full recovery.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a father and to have your child ripped away so cruelly in an existence so bleak. An ancestor memory or imagination popped into my head. I seriously doubt if my bloodline includes any experience in the concentration camps of Auschwitz. But I’m confident that my bloodline includes experiences with the substandard living conditions of the African American on the southern plantation at the peak of America’s institutionalized slavery. There, black families and communities were broken apart based on the sadistic whims of plantation owning enslavers and their employees. And all the survivors had left to do was to keep moving in order to survive.
Everyday I am reminded of this philosophy. Everyday black people are told to keep moving in order to survive. But it’s not said so coldly and succinctly. When black people falter or when someone says that things are unfair, the standard white mindset retort is to quit complaining and just keep going. Black people have no choice but to keep on keeping on in this environment of disparity where conditions and opportunities are so unfairly skewed against the black community. Keep moving if you want to survive. Exercise some personal responsibility if you want to survive. No one is coming to help you. Suck up your frustration and keep going. Other black people are fabulously wealthy. Why don’t more black people get a work ethic or learn a skill or obtain an education that will make them employable?
And in this environment that supports and rewards people’s negative racial stereotypes of blacks, the black community must keep moving in order to survive. Never mind that we are paid less for doing the same work. Never mind we are racially profiled when driving automobiles. Never mind we are racially profiled when walking down the street. Never mind we are more apt to fall under the gears of the justice machine. Never mind that our children are more apt to be arrested and sent off to be murdered in boot camps for having sex and other behaviors that hardly gain a second look from children in the white community. Black people need to keep moving if we want to survive.
Black people have adopted this philosophy so well that if we found ourselves as the prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camps, we would be more likely to grab the soldier’s rifle and shoot any weak or exhausted prisoners for causing problems. Black people are quick to tell the other black people, the ones that we should have the most in common with, to shut up and just fall in line. If these people sound like they toe the line of the status quo it must be because that is exactly what they are doing. The prison yard guards aren’t even necessary any more. Without a doubt we have to keep on going. There are no allied forces gathering in a land far away to come here and free the black community from these bonds. We are in a perpetual march of keeping forward with little to sustain us. And when one of us stumbles heaven helps the one that actually turns around and shows signs of caring.
