Remembering RBG

Our country has had a lot of bad weeks lately, but this probably ranks as one of the worst. The development that affects me most is Donald Trump creating the 1776 Commission by executive order, aimed at shifting public schools curriculum towards thoughtless jingoism and directly opposing the anti-racist 1619 Project (and it doesn’t take an English major to decipher what anti-anti-racism is). So far it seems mostly aimed at history curriculums, but there’s a potential leakage into English as well, and as a soon-to-be English teacher who hopes to give my students an honest and accurate education, this has me worried.

But honestly, that’s probably the week’s smallest disaster. News also broke this week that immigrant women in detention centers are being systematically sterilized. So far we only have an anonymous whistleblower account, but given how close our country has already come to eugenics, that’s enough to be terrified and ashamed.

And then there’s the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When I found out, I was at a socially distanced dinner with some teachers I’ve been working with. One of them got a notification on his phone, said he had some bad news, but then fell silent for a while. During that silence, I was certain that he’d gotten an email from the principal saying that there was a COVID outbreak at our school and we had all been exposed. As it turned out, though it wasn’t the immediate crisis I feared, the news was worse.

When we all found out, there was a little while when we shared the shocked silence, then we said a little about how much she’d done and what a tragedy her death was. But it didn’t take us long to get into the immediate implications. Could the Democrats convince enough moderate Republicans to hold off the vote until after the election? Would Joe Biden take the nuclear option and expand the Supreme Court? Would the Supreme Court stay reasonable enough to hold back the worst case scenarios? Though we didn’t answer any of these questions, anyone offering a hopeful take did so with a shakiness in their voice, and anyone assuming the worst had a grim certainty.

Pretty much every take I’ve seen, online or off, Democrat or Republican, has followed a similar pattern. There’s a respectful moment at the start to mourn her passing, and then an fast shift into what we can or should do about it. Even Donald Trump spent a tweet on her memory before gloating about how quickly he’d replace her, and even if others are more authentic in their grief, remembering her is still always a transition into what her death means politically. There’s something about that feels a little perverse to me. Especially after seeing the documentary RBG a few years ago, I’ve deeply admired Justice Ginsburg, and want to take a little time just to remember all that she’s done and mourn her passing. I want to treat her like any other public figure who led a heroic life, to linger on her memory before moving on.

But I can’t blame anyone else for zipping through the normal rituals because I do it too. I have to; we all do. That’s the problem with representative democracy: we get attached to our favorite leaders. We learn about their personalities, their histories, their families. We feel like we know them. But if they die before they’ve left office, we have to face the fact that who they were as a person matters less to the world than what they had the power to accomplish or prevent. The death of Justice Ginsburg is a tragedy, but only a single life. The threat her open seat poses to reproductive rights, to LGBT rights, to the rights of immigrants, and to so many other issues I can’t name, all go beyond any single life. I know that I’m falling for a fallacy whenever I think that her life was more important than all the lives that depended on her, that we should all slow down and mourn. I know that my desire to slow down comes from a place of privilege too, since I’m one of the least likely citizens to be put at immediate threat in her absence. Still, it’s hard to shake that feeling.

But I’ve found a bit of solace in the increasingly common responses to her death that don’t move from memory to action, but who honor her memory through action. Action is necessary in her death, there’s no doubt, but then again, she defined herself by action. She was a person who dedicated her life to protecting and uplifting the oppressed; doing the same in her name is the most fitting kind of mourning that there can be. It’s a good strategy too, since using her name might be the only way we can shame Republicans into following their own precedent and holding off on a new appointee until after the election. But most of all, I think this kind of remembrance is important because it shows that the attachment we have to our leaders isn’t a one-way street. We aren’t stuck admiring people we’ll never meet and moving on once they die. We can act in their names too, even after they’re gone.