Progress Report: The World’s Fair or a Fair World?

Photographer unknown: Ossie Davis standing behind Sam Mednick (seated)

My mother and father often told me that my great uncle, Tobias Miller, designed the folding chair. I didn’t believe them, though I searched everywhere for evidence. Years after they had passed, I summoned the Google muse one day, keying in “Tobias Miller, folding chair.” Up came a set of drawings entitled: “Auxiliary Seat. U.S. Patent 1302828. Tobias Miller. Publication date: 6 May 1919. Cleveland, Ohio.”66 My parents also claimed that he designed the Trylon and Perisphere: the iconic symbol of the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair. Credit for the Trylon and Perisphere goes, without question, to Wallace Harrison and J. Andre Fouilhoux of the Harrison-Fouilhoux architectural firm.

To date, the Google muse has come up empty. No matter. My internet perambulations have been worth it. I have learned a great deal about my family and, most of all, about progress, teaching and the power of human agency.

* * *

Trylon and Perisphere

At a cost of $160 million, the 1939–40 World’s Fair was a snow globe of modernity and marketing built on reclaimed swampland, the Corona Dumps, at Flushing Meadows in Queens. F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby modeled his Valley of the Ashes after the soot spewing from its coal-burning furnaces.

The Trylon, a 610-foot spire, rose phoenix-like, phallic and triumphant from those ashes. Visible from the top of the Empire State Building, it was reachable via the world’s largest escalator from the Perisphere, a moon-like orb constructed of steel and plasterboard housing its flagship exhibition: “Democracity,” a scaled model depicting the metropolis of the future: “The World of Tomorrow.”

The typical reverential homage to science and technology characteristic of most World Fairs was in full display, but this unabashedly went for the pocketbook. It was an art deco, futuristic, Coney-Island commercial funhouse of color photography, nylon, air-conditioning, the View-Master, Smell-O-Vision and the fluorescent lightbulb. An assembly line of workers packaging bacon for Swift Premium Meats. A “Mrs. Modern” versus “Mrs. Drudge” dish-washing contest. “Elektro, the Westinghouse Moto-Man,” performing tricks, and by his side, his robot dog Sparko: barking, begging and wagging his tail. Carnival rides, too! At this World’s Fair, corporations would outnumber countries. The National Cash Register corporation even built an enormous replica that displayed the daily attendance in 2½-foot numbers.

An average family could escape their daily crushing grind and take in the exotic wonders of 60 countries in a single day, step into the promise of a prosperous future, and snap up souvenirs and collectibles: bookends, clocks, aprons, salt and pepper shakers, earrings, cigarette lighters, paperweights, coins, kazoos, belt-buckles, toy airplanes and coasters. The New York Yankees, New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers wore a Trylon and Perisphere patch on their sleeves. Wearing a brand outside one’s clothes became fashionable.

In the World of Tomorrow, driverless cars end congestion, the air is fresh, parks are accessible and, in a nod to redlining, neighborhoods are separate, each tidy city block an entity unto itself. A historian at the Gotham Center for New York City History writes: “There was no crime in the city of tomorrow, no slums and no poverty. The heroic efforts of planners and designers had eradicated human conflict and hardship. Progress was presented as inevitable and uniform.”

The future was accessible and freshly scrubbed, that is, except for its burlesque side. Men slipped away “to talk business with a friend,” stamped out their cigarettes and entered Salvador Dali’s Dream of Venus exhibit “through pillars shaped like a pair of women’s legs.” One nude Venus lay in a bed of flowers on top of a taxi, another in a 36-foot bed shared with lobsters. Naked mermaids swam in two enormous pools. A couch was shaped like Greta Garbo’s lips. Dali made a statement about “the hideous mechanical civilization that is your enemy, that is also the enemy of the ‘pleasure principle’ of all men. It is man’s right to love women with the ecstatic heads of fish.” That is, if they didn’t get caught. Close by, at the Cuban Village, the vice squad raided a “Miss Nude Show.” Tomorrow included a wildly popular peepshow for just 25 cents.

World’s Fair planners faced two challenges. The first was how to finesse their way around public suspicion that corporate greed had plunged the country into the Great Depression. The answer was simple: better marketing. The Fair “[married] the product with the consumer and the consumer with the notion of good. And underneath that came the whiff of patriotism—capitalism dressed up as being good for America.” It would be only natural, then, that the world would follow America’s perspicacious lead. Unshackled from regulation, capitalism’s invisible hand would work its magic to spin a utopian future in which there would be no winners and losers, only winners. Certainly, fairgoers would open their wallets for this!

Second, the Fair had to convince Americans that capitalism and progress would be the truest, fastest path to peace. Up in the clouds of the Trylon, a publicist writes: “spectators will find themselves cast in the role of the gods of old, from Olympian heights, to pierce the fogs of ignorance, habit and prejudice that envelop everyday thinking, able to gaze down on the ideal community.” The Fair would be a gathering place for world leaders to negotiate peace. Simply put, the carnival atmosphere would surely “charm dictators.” Opening festivities included a “Pageant of Peace,” an “Altar of Peace,” and a “Court of Peace.”

Something for everyone. The confident, baritone CBS radio commentator, H.V. Kaltenborn, rhapsodized about the secret sauce of science, technology and American-style democracy against an Ira Gershwin soundtrack, “Dawn of a New Day,” played in the background.

Dear reader, I ask for your indulgence and take my parents’ word for it that Tobias was a player at the Harrison-Fouilhoux firm. Enter the theater, please, for a short presentation of his thoughts.

Stage directions: lights dim, then open on a recognizable big city thrumming with the city noise of commerce and construction, circa 1937. Upstage: brick tenements, fire escapes, laundry strung across buildings with faded advertising slogans, and traffic lights suspended from cables on either side of intersecting streets. Grills, headlights and the front part of the hoods of cars peek out from the wings, stage right and left. At a green light, people wearing hats cross the stage/street, while others wait at a red light, except for a gaggle of absent-minded shoppers who walk into traffic. Cue the honking horns, flashing headlights and drivers’ angry admonitions. Traffic eases and the actors walk to the wings. The cars recede behind curtains. Traffic lights retract upward and out of view. The stage dims again. A scrim falls to obscure the city outside. In the dark, stagehands hurriedly set up the next scene, a top-floor workspace.

Footsteps. A spot illuminates a hinged trapdoor. Enter Tobias. He lifts the square door with his left hand, using his head to keep it open. He is work-weary yet resolute. He looks around. With each step up he takes, we see more: his worker’s jacket with a bulging bottom-left pocket, a heavy tool bag on his left shoulder and the roll of plans pinched under his right arm. He heaves the plans upward and climbs onto the stage.

Once on his feet, Tobias switches on a light with his elbow, revealing an attic space transformed into a makeshift workshop. He spreads out his schematics and weighs down each corner with tools. Scattered about are a heap of tire rims, wire hangers, wood, rusted circulation vents and bicycle fenders. A school clock mounted on the wall reads 5:15 pm.

As Tobias steps away from his model of the Trylon and Perisphere to get a wider view, cue the voiceover in a less cinematic and more conversational tone: “Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Tobias Miller: inventor. He feels the world on his shoulders. He thinks: the world of tomorrow should be grand, yet not gaudy; extraterrestrial, yet grounded. Both structures should complement each other: one that jabs skyward like a spaceship ready to take off for a fresher, cleaner tomorrow. And beside it, a prototype city characterized by efficiency and cleanliness, round like a new planet ready to absorb a well-informed, larger population.”

He pulls out a flask from his jacket and takes a furtive sip, though he is alone, starts to put it back, takes another, then faces the audience: “A little fortification, folks!” He reaches in his other jacket pocket for a piece of whitefish wrapped in newsprint, pulls out a fork and stabs a bite.

Tobias returns to his schematics and pulls out a piece of charcoal to shade in one of his designs. He compares the drawings to the model and steps back for a bigger perspective.

Narrator: “He is onto something, wouldn’t you agree?”

The clock’s hands move to 6:30 pm. Tobias goes to the window, lifts it with two hands (cue the sounds of the city), props it up with a two-by-four, and sticks his head out to breathe it all in. Light from outside streams in to evoke those cinematic, crepuscular moments when the golden hour meets the blue hour. The narrator returns. “Our genius is satisfied, don’t you think? No need to push his luck. That’s enough for one day.”

Tobias collects his tools, rolls up his plans, and starts to wrap up the greasy newspaper when he notices a headline with gloomy news from Europe. His face changes. Satisfaction gives way to doubt. He paces.

Narrator: “It’s hard to design a future. The world does not travel at the same speed as our imagination.”

I imagine myself in the audience, squirming and uncomfortable. What does all this mean? Tobias is not oblivious to the world around him. Was he distracted and haunted by Aldous Huxley’s new, dystopian book, Brave New World? Was he worried that his designs would portend something bleak, sanitized and cold? Is the Trylon more a missile than a rocket ship? Is the Perisphere dome nothing more than a pathetic attempt to shelter and insulate a planet from forces trying to destroy it?

The narrator takes on a more ponderous, even portentous tone: “Tobias muses: what if the Trylon is nothing more than a gigantic pin and the Perisphere an enormous balloon? What if German designers laboring under huge, ominous klieg lights are putting the finishing touches on their own nefarious representation of tomorrow? What are their symbols?

He picks up his toolbag, tucks his plans under his arm and turns toward the stairs. Narrator: “For now, folks, let’s put all that apocalyptic thinking aside. Let us follow our dreams. Let’s reach for the stars! Let’s have fun! The future is bright!” Tobias lifts the trapdoor and twists his body to descend the stairs. Closing the door on top of him, the stage darkens and the house lights come on.

Narrator: “Tickets, please.”

* * *

A General Motors promo film described the World’s Fair as the true parliament of the world. Here the peoples of the world, like the Olympics, unite in amity and understanding, impelled by a friendly rivalry and working toward a common purpose: to set forth their achievements of today and their contributions to the “World of Tomorrow.”

In a breathless run-on sentence (abbreviated here), the voiceover waxes on: “True, each of us may have different ideas about what that future will be,” but science and communication will lead the way to “greater possibilities of the world of tomorrow as we move more and more rapidly forward, penetrating new horizons in the spirit of individual enterprise in the great American way!” Hopeful, but what does “penetrating new horizons” mean? Whose horizons?

Europe was, indeed, descending into hell, but on Sunday, 30 April 1939, 150 years to the day from George Washington’s inauguration in Lower Manhattan, the clocks turned forward an hour for daylight saving time. RCA introduced television to the public. In NBC’s first broadcast, President Roosevelt crackled to life.

Albert Einstein spoke: 

The World’s Fair…is in a way a reflection of mankind. But it projects the world of men like a wishful dream. Only the creative forces are on show, none of the sinister and destructive ones which today more than ever jeopardize the happiness, the very existence of civilized harmony.

On 15 March 1939, Hitler seized Czechoslovakia. World War II had begun. The New York Times reported that the “Czech Fair Center is Now an Orphan.”75 On 23 August, Germany and Russia signed the non-aggression pact. On 31 October, as the first season of the World’s Fair ended, an editorial in The New York Times mused plaintively on the disconnect between aspiration and reality:

In war and peace, prosperity and depression, scientific knowledge marches on…But it was clear, even at the Fair, that mankind has lagged in what have been called the social inventions. We have not yet invented a cure for war or a panacea for those destructive economic policies which preceded the present conflict…

On 30 November 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. The League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union and on 2 December Russia quit the Fair. Its four-million-dollar socialist-realist building, the tallest at the Fair (except for the Trylon), was to come down within 90 days.

The 100,000-square-foot lot was renamed the “American Common” and designated as “a performance venue given over to patriotic pageants and events celebrating democracy and American diversity.” There, scholar and activist W.E.B. du Bois spoke during “Negro Week,” 23–28 July 1940. W.C. Handy, the father of the blues, performed. “Negro Week” also featured the work of a fledgling drama troupe from Harlem, the Rose McClendon Players. Their dramatic adaptation of The Life of Booker T. Washington starred Dooley Wilson, the actor who played the diminutive pianist Sam in Casablanca.

My father, another diminutive Sam in that same drama troupe, had initially constructed the lighting for their sets, but the Rose McClendon Players needed a white guy to play the part of President Theodore Roosevelt. He obliged.

I imagine my father coming to rehearsal each day that week, looking up with admiration and pride at the Trylon and Perisphere. Inside the performance space, actors are murmuring their vocal warmups: alliterations, tongue rolls and scales. Ossie Davis (who would later star in Roots and Do the Right Thing) would then call everyone to sit for a discussion. “When Booker T. Washington decided to cross the threshold of the White House and meet President Roosevelt, was this an audacious act of ethnic pride by a former slave or naïveté for believing he could earn the respect of whites?”

An actor might reflect, “What might happen to us if white communities see a depiction of Booker T. Washington and call us uppity?” Still another, “What will the Black community think if we portray Booker T. Washington as entirely passive and conciliatory?” My father is silent. He stares at his lines. He was just a neighbor, filling a role. A friend.

One of the actors might pull out a brochure for the World’s Fair and read aloud: “The City of Tomorrow which lies below you is as harmonious as the stars in their course overhead — No anarchy— destroying the freedom of others— can exist here.” Someone surely must have asked, “Do all these highways include us? Will these new machines free us, too?”

The organizing committee for “Negro Week” included Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s 99th mayor; Hattie McDaniel, fresh from her performance of “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind (for which she was the first African American to win an Oscar); author Richard Wright; contralto Marian Anderson; and pastor Adam Clayton Powell Jr., born of a free woman at the end of the Civil War and the first African American from New York elected to the US House of Representatives. “Song of a City,” by William Grant Still, considered “the Dean of Afro-American Composers,” played on a continuous loop at “Democracity.” Impressive indeed.

Someone interjects: “Is our country ready for full civil rights and political representation?” When the Fair opened, 500 African Americans picketed, protesting discriminatory hiring practices, for good reason. A memo circulated to hiring managers mentioned “no distinct foreign or racial types.” Reverend Adam Clayton Powell met with the organizing committee to point out the hypocrisy of the Fair’s theme: “You cannot have a World of Tomorrow from which you have excluded colored people.” Grover Whalen, president of the New York World’s Fair Corporation, responded: “I do not see why the world of today or tomorrow of necessity has to have colored people playing an important role.” Of the 391 Blacks employed (out of 4356), mawere sanitary attendants. Most of the rest were maids, porters and entertainers.

This is progress?

Did the Rose McClendon Players frame a future of hope through education and self-reliance, or compromise and marginalization? Did they imagine that their children would go to schools led by creative teachers, or by an army of Elektros? In the future, would their children’s teachers challenge, inspire and believe in them, or ignore them? Could they envision “the dwelling place the earth could be if men could only learn to work together?”

It had been just over 20 years since the 1918 influenza pandemic had killed with abandon but struck the poor and illiterate with a particular vengeance. Surely, we would make enough progress in science, literacy and equally distributed public health for that never to happen again—or, for that matter, another world war.

Originally launched with the slogan “Dawn of a New Day” and the promise of “The World of Tomorrow,” the World’s Fair was impacted by tensions mounting in Europe, compelling organizers in 1940 to change the slogan to “For Peace and Freedom.” Close to bankruptcy, the Fair closed early. The World of Tomorrow met a wrecking ball. The Trylon and Perisphere were melted down and refashioned into armaments.

December the seventh, 1941, was a Sunday. The next day, my father enlisted in the American army, landed on Utah beach on D-Day, fought at the Battle of the Bulge, and helped to liberate Nordhausen, an extermination camp designed for ill prisoners. He lost touch with his fellow thespians, but he held on to his hope, convinced life would get better, safer, more humane, equal and fair.

I wonder if the Rose McClendon Players shared my father’s optimism. Ten years later, Langston Hughes was to publish his iconic poem, “Harlem.” Would their dreams be deferred, still? Sugared or scabbed over? Too heavy a load to bear? Could they imagine that it took until 1954 for the Supreme Court to rule that segregation in schools was unconstitutional? Would the Players have felt comforted in this pace of progress?

The very next year, 14-year-old Emmett Till would be forced to carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan on his back down an unpopulated road, be savagely beaten, disfigured and then thrown into the Tallahatchie River. Could the Montgomery Bus Boycott late that very same year be the beginning of the end for such racist depravity? At last, an era that valued justice and fostered human rights? Was progress just around the corner?

Were the Rose McClendon Players to dial up that time machine 20 years later, would they be impressed by the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and the assurance that voters would no longer be disenfranchised? That penalties would be exacted for obstructing voter registration? What might they have thought of Harper Lee’s new book, To Kill a Mockingbird? Progressive? Paternalistic? Could they see themselves as one of the four students attending North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College who remained steadfast on those lunch-counter stools at a Woolworth’s after having been refused service? Would they take heart the day six-year-old Ruby Bridges, escorted by four armed federal marshals, became the first Black girl to attend William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans?

Was that what it would take?

On Mother’s Day in 1961, a bus of Black and white Freedom Riders faced a white vigilante gang. A firebomb was lobbed through a smashed window. The Smithsonian reported that “arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. Even then, some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled.”

Less than three years later, George Wallace would block Black students from registering at the University of Alabama.

Two months after that, a quarter of a million people marched on Washington. Dr. Martin Luther King, implored by gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, would describe his “promises of democracy.” King would not mince his words. America’s “bank of justice is bankrupt.” The “unspeakable horrors of police brutality.” The refusal to grant a weary traveler a motel room. “It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.” America had “no time to engage in the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”

Was the price for the world of tomorrow a world of sorrow? Less than a month after Reverend King’s speech, four young girls would die in a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. And yet, Lyndon Johnson’s signature on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would prevent employment discrimination. In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated and John Lewis and others beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In 1968, President Johnson would inch forward a bit more to sign the Fair Housing Act.

What would the Rose McClendon Players think, had they known all this? Was the whiplash of this shape and narrative of “progress” living up to the word’s meaning in the original Latin: “to step, walk, go”? Even with all that persistent, institutional discrimination in housing, voting and employment? Those police beatings?

Let’s keep cranking the time machine forward, shall we? Sure, it was progress when Shirley Chisholm campaigned for the Democratic presidential election in 1972. Or when Barbara Jordan, Andrew Young and Thomas Bradley established their places in government, and Marian Wright Edelman founded the Children’s Defense Fund. Would they keep the faith, despite humiliations from self-help pundits attempting to blame Black communities for not lifting themselves up? Or when Black incarceration rates surged and Reagan’s cuts to federal housing assistance and unequal revenue from property taxes left Black youth without a quality education?

Would progress have to wait until 1980, when Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday would become a federal holiday? How about when The Cosby Show would try to normalize and socialize Black family life?

How about by 1990? More mayors, even in the south. More members of Congress. Would their hearts break again after the LA police beat Rodney King? How much patience and persistence might progress require? How wide and long must that arc bend before it reaches a vision that looks like justice or just snaps?

The year 2000? A new age, a new leaf, a fresh start? Surely when America elected a Black president less than a decade later. The day Barack Obama took the oath of office on his first day in the White House, I called my father.

“It’s about time,” he said wryly through tears of joy. “I’m too old to play the president, anyway.”

Alas, I never got the chance to take my father to the Martin Luther King Jr. monument in 2011 at West Potomac Park, right next to the National Mall, but I do imagine he would have fingered those words from its inscription, etched in stone: “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”

Surely, Black lives would matter. Finally.

The morning after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, I called my father from my university in Belgium. He was 101. Macular degeneration had clouded his vision. He had been sitting inches from a gigantic television, listening to an endless stream of pundits expressing shock and disbelief. I was in tears. He waded through my rants and sadness. He acknowledged the tragedy of the election and its blow to civility and progress, but then his tone changed. He had seen his share of poverty, war, disease and injustice, he said. “I fought the fascists. It’s your turn. Freddy, remember what Joe Hill said?”

Near his end, Joe Hill, songwriter and labor activist, sent a telegram to Bill Hayward, the head of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): “Goodbye, Bill, I die like a true-blue rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!” Hill followed that telegram with another: “Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.”

“But Daddy,” I remember saying, “Donald Trump, President of the United States?” How could the pillars of a social contract based on fairness, decency, truth and progress dissolve so easily, like all those collapsed buildings I have seen in earthquake zones? Was democracy that flimsy? Were our social and educational fault lines that compromised? Disappointed at not hearing words of consolation, I answered his question, mumbling, “Daddy, Joe Hill said: ‘Don’t mourn. Organize.’”

During the Women’s March in Washington the day after Trump’s inauguration, I was by my father’s side when the event was reported live on TV. I watched his bony elbows stiffen against the back of his favorite chair’s armrests. Through the blur and blotches in front of him, a swirl of seaweed and darting schools of fish, he had pieced together that hundreds of thousands of protestors were both mourning and organizing. He began to stand. I moved toward him in case he faltered, but he shook me off and rose to express his support. He even began to march in place.

My father did not live to see the Unite the Right fascists in Charlottesville or witness news footage of George Floyd’s murder. Sadly, neither could he celebrate the election of Kamala Harris, a Black South Asian woman, to the office of Vice President. Nor the election of Georgia’s Reverend Raphael Warnock, a Black pastor holding the same pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church held by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, to the United States Senate. He didn’t see the insurrectionists swarming through the Capitol building, waving Confederate flags and wearing “Auschwitz Camp” T-shirts. If he had, he would still have told me to remember Joe Hill’s words.

He would remind me that progress is fraught with failure, exasperating and painful. That it ebbs and flows in an uncertain continuum, but remains a trajectory, nonetheless. I am sure that I would promise him to remain patient and resolute. I would try, but when I see the growing number of attacks on the LGBTQI community, on the Jewish community, on Black and Brown people, and on Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, I wonder.

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker’s big-picture view of violence, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, argues that life is, indeed, getting better. All that grisly carnage we scroll past—shootings in schools, faith communities, shopping malls, beauty salons, grocery stores, night clubs; sarin gas; car bombs; knees on necks; families torn apart by war or repression or climate change and forced to leave their homes—are, in the long view, exceptions to a trend-line of measurable, even considerable, progress. We are supposed to step away from the microscope and look through a telescope. Get the big picture.

According to Pinker, the chronic raiding of land has declined. Published before Russia’s war on Ukraine, Better Angels points out that countries no longer attack each other with the same ferocity as the ancients, because the world is watching. Humanity’s five demons—predatory violence, dominance, revenge, sadism and ideologically driven acts of violence—have given way to our four better angels: empathy, self-control, moral sensibility and reason.

This is where I struggle. There is no question that we have made progress in overall global development. But…but…in an era characterized by a precipitous swing to the far right, unregulated hate speech, Russian genocide against Ukrainians, the proliferation of gun violence, assaults on the truth, and an unprecedented rise in the number of families forced to uproot themselves and search for a better life, the world can look downright Pompeiian.

It’s hard to have faith in our better angels when, at a moment’s notice, the 8 billion people who inhabit this earth do not benefit equally from all those angels. The “Battle in Seattle” came roaring back. How do we measure moral progress? It’s difficult when the Sustainable Development Goals are slipping behind. When a bright-eyed woman in Afghanistan one day is stoned to death the next because of a rumor of sexual impropriety or impertinence. When the residents of a city that once trusted its water supply now carry irreversible neurological trauma from lead poisoning in its pipes. When women’s reproductive rights are reversed. Where are the empathic, moral, rational angels to stop the violence of climate change and ethnic cleansing?

I would lose the challenge to Better Angels, this painstakingly researched, exquisitely documented 800-page tome by a Harvard professor. I won’t even try. I can only ask: who better to foster an equitable, safe, inclusive world of tomorrow than teachers?

Dear reader, you’ve met several: people with information to share, who show up, who mend and repair the world.

So many others have shown up and continue to show up. In Zambia, Mbao Mwiya-Ngula shows up to educate people about rising malaria infections, even after the wide distribution of medicated bed nets. Having observed that many nets were not used correctly, thus leaving children exposed, she designed a global competition for children to design the most effective use of a bed net. The winning entry was a game to construct a pup tent out of the net material, the children sleeping in a new home-inside-a-home. Malarial infections declined.

In Kenya, Joseph Muleka and Mathias Osimbo showed up to adapt our peace education program for a region torn asunder by post-election violence.

In Haiti, Fenel Pierre, a Fulbright Scholar, has shown up to build teacher capacity throughout the country, from teacher preparation to earthquake science and safety, following the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Teachers in Palestine, Israel, Morocco, Yemen and Turkey have shown up to create MYTecC (Mediterranean Youth Technology Club) so that youth may gain technology skills and connect to each other across borders.

In Sudan, Eiman Yousif has shown up to create an in-country and expat network of volunteer teachers to reach students using Telegram.

“Don’t lose hope,” I remind myself. When the going gets rough, the tough keep teaching. In every corner of the earth, and in intractable and desperate places written off as beyond hope or labeled as “failed states,” teachers don’t lose heart. They organize. They show up.

They teach science and safety so that families can feel comfortable sending their children to school. They construct child-friendly safe spaces to protect children from thugs in pickup trucks with black flags and masks, or white hoods and burning crosses. They educate girls, even when they or the girls themselves may be abducted, sexually terrorized or shot. They teach even when their schools have been occupied, bombed, burned, ransacked and turned into storehouses of munitions or fronts for fake polling places. When repressive regimes consider civic discourse or dissent an act of treason, teachers insist on being heard.

Teachers are the last ones to call themselves angels or heroes. They think heroics should be left for comic books. I agree. They have taught me that our fetish about heroes elevates a few and leaves the rest of us out. On the contrary, these teachers define themselves as catalysts and cattle prods.

In the world of fairness teachers build every day, children of families fleeing injustice or war are not someone else’s problem. These teachers view their classrooms as a local patch of a global commons. In that fair world, they neither leave change to chance nor wait for Acts of Congress. They act from conscience. They don’t depend on rich benefactors or celebrity endorsements. Instead, they fashion lessons from local materials and collective expertise.

These teachers care little about the tyranny of the urgent. They’re more concerned about the urgency of tyranny.

I understand why my father insisted that I remember Joe Hill’s “Don’t mourn. Organize!” These teachers transformed their own mourning into mobilizations for social justice. I can hear him now: “Freddy, progress is not an escalator to the world of tomorrow, but it will go somewhere, I promise you.” Maybe this is Pinker’s point. Hard to tell.

Change might feel painfully slow, like watching a pearl descend in a curvy glass bottle of Prell. The odds that developing countries will emerge from a suffocating mountain of debt and the pernicious, generational impact of colonialism are not in our favor. The prospect that education can address the ravages of climate change, inequality and injustice, and reach those Sustainable Development Goals is, to put it charitably, Sisyphean. But then again, we have no other choice but to educate and act.

In a 2022 article for The Nation, Liat Olenick writes: “Healthy democracies don’t hate their teachers.” Given a true voice, teachers can build the democracy and the world of tomorrow the world’s children deserve.

Education isn’t the answer to everything. The world needs roads, vaccinations, fresh water, sustainable livelihoods, equity, safety, the consistent application of the law, clean energy, climate change mitigation and social justice. But without education and educators, the road falls into disrepair, the poor get poorer and sicker, good jobs drift even further out of reach, inequality widens, victimization deepens and racism festers. We lose hope.

Even hope, on its own, is not enough. Without a plan, a heavy dose of righteous indignation and a mobilization effort, hope alone is ephemeral, if not downright dangerous. Dr. Jane Goodall concludes her latest work, The Book of Hope, with this message: “Please rise to the challenge, inspire and help those around you, play your part.”

Greta Thunberg ruffles hope’s feathers but is saying the same thing. In Norma V. Toraya and Jared P. Scott’s film, Greta Thunberg Has Given Up on Politicians, Thunberg rages:

“You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! Yet another meeting is over and all that is left are empty words…I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to act as if our house is on fire.”

You may not consider yourself a teacher, but if you have valuable information to share, you are a teacher. Think about Jabriil and the forklift driver. The world may be a cesspool, but if teachers like these can strap on their boots and show up to wade through the muck, so can you. Look outside your window. If the world you see doesn’t look fair, then get out those timbales and cowbells and lesson plans, comrades, and make some noise. Don’t give bigots and tyrants another vacation day. Flex your inner tattoo: aquila non capit muscas (the eagle does not catch flies).

And let these teachers remind us:

Sameena: “No fear!”

Raphael: “Time is not on our side!”

Deya: “Habla sin pelos en la lengua.” Speak without hairs on the tongue.

Simba: “If not now, when?”

Don’t mourn. Organize, folks.

The clock’s tickin’.