Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
A Riveting History
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
At the kitschiest tourist attractions in New York, I’m a goofy, gawking, neck-straining tourist—a cliche. One hundred and two stories into the sky, today I am on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building.
The milky grey rain slashing my cheeks is so thick I can taste it, smell it, drown in it. The air is crabby, deafening.
From this height in this storm, I can barely make out the Manhattan street grid, the Lego-like high-rises, the far-off boroughs, the Hudson and East Rivers, Central Park. I don’t see workers walking to work, two friends using sign language, parents playing with their children, the Mexican barista singing off key in Spanish, a white-haired gentleman cashing his social security check, a secretary headed home with her head full of the day’s jolts and joys.
Down at street level, Manhattan is a murmuring hum of humanity. Eight million New Yorkers speak eight hundred different languages.
Restless, striving voices. Angry voices. Laughing voices. Voices cheering. Hawkers hawking. Dog walkers barking. Voices calling friends. Late night voices falling in love.
In the airwaves over New York, commentators are calling out the collapse of common sense by the American electorate. In somber, frightened voices they bemoan the Trump Terrors screwing up the global economy, stomping on individual civil liberties, sandbagging families, students, immigrants and sick people. The power-grabbing ugliness that our constitution was supposed to thwart is unthwarted. In the White House, human decency is an orphan.
In my high school history classes, my students expect that I know something about how America will get itself out of this mess. When asked, my mouth turns dry and dusty. I’m a teacher without answers.
Soaked and shivering, I seek refuge in the building’s flashy, narcissistic, multi-media exhibition about itself. Half-bored, I wander aimlessly until, just when I was starting to shrug off my classroom impotence, the towering historical truth slams me like a steel girder.
To build the Empire State Building, 1,575,100 rivets were required. Four-person construction teams worked hundreds of feet in the air. One worker heated the rivet, then tossed it ‘a catcher’ who caught it an old paint can so the ‘bucker-up’ could hold the red-hot rivet for ‘the gunman’ to hammer it in place. The teams were so tightknit, so in sync with each other, that if one of the team was absent or out sick, the entire team stopped working.
Teamwork—not tax cuts, power grabs or luxury yachts—built this skyscraper. Shared sacrifice and citizen participation, that’s what made America great.
American history— from the women’s suffrage movement to the United Farm Workers’ boycott of table grapes, from protests against the War in Vietnam to civil rights marches in the South—is simple enough: democracy is a verb. A lesson from history worth knowing—an action plan.
A shudder ripples my skin. My palms turn sweaty. Here’s a lesson plan worth teaching.
The wind is settling down, the rain taking a rest. Straining my eyes, I see the faint, gauzy outline of the Statue of Liberty.
In a democracy, no one rivets alone.
