Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Never Again
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Inside New York’s Central Park, I’m paused on a park bench. The air is sodden, misty, murky.
Like the American Constitution, Central Park is man-made. Half a million cubic yards of topsoil, 95 miles of drainage pipes, 6 million bricks, 65,000 cubic tons of gravel, 26,000 trees and 250,000 shrubs were needed to configure the terrain into a pastoral sanctuary with grassy lawns, playgrounds, ponds, an ice-skating rink, a children's zoo, a conservatory and home to a 3600-year-old Egyptian obelisk. For all that, the park’s sprawling stillness doesn’t cure me from biting the inside of my cheek.
I’m replaying last night’s battering nightmare. At 3:17 am, I woke up in a tangle of sweaty sheets. In my fevered vision, a mob of masked Christian Nationalists ordered me to post the Ten Commandments in my classroom. Then a confederate flag. Then a swastika. Then a gold-framed photo of Donald Trump. I screamed but I was as ignored as a third-party voter.
It’s simply impossible to imagine Trump strolling in Central Park. Too bad. He might have discovered that the Gothic visitors center was once a working dairy producing fresh milk for New York’s children. He might even have hesitated before abolishing free school meals for hungry kids.
While Trump looks like his mom is still dressing his chubby little body for Sunday School, he governs like he’s never heard the biblical command to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In Trump’s Age of American Cruelty, all my pencil erasers are chewed off.
After witnessing slavery in the American South, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted explained his vision for Central Park, “There need to be places...where the rich and the poor, the cultivated and the self-made, shall be attracted together and encouraged to assimilate.”
After my travels to Germany’s Dachau, my high school class lectures include the Holocaust. My students come to understand the linkage between kindness and civil liberties, between rejecting tyranny and love of country. They research Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, the imprisonment of Japanese citizens.
On top of these atrocities, Trump’s ICE kidnappings and concentration camps are American history in the making. Parks and prisons are not inevitable, not preordained. Like Central Park, a police state needs to be imagined, invented, implemented.
My stomach is acidic with anger. I need a better lesson plan.
Never before have I wanted to run away from the burden of teaching, of truth-telling. I don’t want the unwanted responsibility of explaining the inexplicable to my civics classes.
Lost in my thoughts, I hardly notice an African-American man with droopy, watery eyes seated at the other end of the bench. We are an Edward Hopper painting—alone inside ourselves.
Breaking the silence, he startles me. “My brother and I fought the Nazis. I made it home, he didn’t.” As if he’s haunted by his own nightmares, he snarls, “Fuck Trump. He’s a fascist. He needs stopping.”
His words slap me.
History books have final chapters. Movies have endings. Vacations come to a close. People pass away. But democracies aren’t supposed to die.
No crematoria, no gas chambers, are yet billowing smoke, but the time to teach “Never Again” is before it’s too late.
