Sense of Decency

By DENNIS HARROD

I had an opportunity today to do what I always say I will do. But I didn’t do it.

After nearly two hours in the rain at the Hands Off rally in Hamilton, N.Y. April 5, I was walking back to where I’d parked a couple of blocks away. As I walked east along the sidewalk, a group of three crossed and came onto the sidewalk about 20 yards in front of me. I didn’t know them, but I recognized the flag they carried. They were part of a group that had been on the other side of the road from the park where we were protesting the acts of the current presidential administration. 

I’d spent a lot of time watching the group of about two dozen counter protesters, who held up signs supporting Trump and saying “Don’t Tread on Me” and such. One of the flags said “Jesus, 2024, Our Only Hope, Make America Godly Again.”

As people spoke or sang on our side of the street, the people across the street would occasionally interrupt by chanting through a megaphone “USA! USA! USA!” or “We Love Elon!” One guy held a sign that said, “Trump Is Your Daddy.” Indeed.

At one point, someone on our side passed out lyrics to “America the Beautiful” and we sang three verses. Everybody knows the first verse:

O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain!

America! America! God shed his grace on thee,

And crowned thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea!

We sang the second verse, as well, which I didn’t know and probably had never heard. I had to read from the handout:

O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern impassioned stress

A thoroughfare of freedom beat cross the wilderness.

America! America! God mend thine every flaw.

Confirm thy soul in self control, thy liberty in law.

The third verse I had never heard. It was added to the Katherine Lee Bates’ original by Pamela Haines, which celebrates the working people of America:

O beautiful for working folk, who forged the wealth we see

In farm and mill in home and school, unsung in history.

America! America! May race nor sex nor creed

No more divide, but side by side, all rise united, freed!

A little further on, the group on the other side of the street sang “God Bless America” and then “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The latter is notoriously difficult to sing well, and they should have stuck with “God Bless America.”

Later, after we again sang “America the Beautiful,” including the new verse, the other side gave it a try as well. But nobody had blessed them with lyrics, so they only got the first verse in.

During the whole demonstration and counter demonstration, a guy in a big black Silverado bedecked with flags, American and Trumpian, circled the green with another, smaller truck behind him with a little DOGE sign on its door. The woman driving the second truck was on her phone each time as she drove by. Texting Elon, no doubt. A Tesla Cybertruck made the rounds a couple of times, too.

The guy on the bigger truck had some kind of music playing that I assume was supposed to be macho or intimidating or annoying, but I couldn’t identify it. At one pass, he yelled out the window “Communist!”, which I found ironic because I was holding sign that said, “Putin Owns Trump.”  I know Putin technically isn’t a communist, but a Red’s a Red in my book. 

As I caught up with the counter protesters in front of me I noticed that one of them was carrying the “Jesus” flag. As I walked past, I thought I should say something, start a conversation, maybe break down a barrier or two. They seemed like nice enough people, chatting among themselves about the harsh weather and, like me, wondering why they’d parked so far away. I’m always advocating reaching out to the “other side” and looking for what we share rather than what divides us.

But I didn’t. I walked by them and muttered something about the weather and kept going. I noticed they glanced at the sign in my hand and realized I was from the “other side,” but they agreed the weather was bad and I kept on going. As I got into my truck around the corner, I saw them getting into their car across the street from me. I still didn’t say anything and drove away instead.

I wish I’d stopped and talked to them, saying something like, “It’s nice to be on the same side of the street” or something equally inane that might have chipped away at the prejudices we feel toward those who don’t agree with us. Maybe they would have told me to drop dead. Maybe they would have said they’d been wanting to talk to someone like me. Maybe. But I’ll never know.

And all that afternoon and evening I thought about a profound essay by Jesus Colón, a brilliant and wise Puerto Rican writer who lived in New York in the middle of the last century. In “Little Things Are Big” he wrote about being in a subway station late at night when the only other people were a white woman and her children. The woman had a baby in one arm and a suitcase in the other. She had two other small children as well. Colón says he thought about offering to help her, but hesitated because he wasn’t sure how she would react, alone in a subway station late at night, if a Black man approached her. How would she react? In the end, he walked past her. And all the way home, he questioned his assumptions. He writes:

“Perhaps the lady was not prejudiced after all. Or not prejudiced enough to scream at the coming of a Negro toward her in a solitary subway station a few hours past midnight.

“If you were not that prejudiced, I failed you, dear lady. I know that there is a chance in a million that you will read these lines. I am willing to take the millionth chance. If you were not that prejudiced, I failed you, lady. I failed you, children. I failed myself to myself.

“This is what racism and prejudice and chauvinism and official artificial divisions can do to people and to a nation!”

Colón concludes:

“I buried my courtesy early on Memorial Day morning. But here is a promise that I make to myself here and now; if I am ever faced with an occasion like that again, I am going to offer my help regardless of how the offer is going to be received.”

I only hope that next time I will be as brave and as compassionate and as wise as Colón.

Dennis Harrod is a co-founder of Sense of Decency.