Denker: A cynical country faces resurrection

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of material from 11 contributing columnists, along with other commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Cynics don’t go whale watching. Or at least, I assume they don’t because it’s not the kind of activity you go into with a bitter and unbelieving heart. Or maybe, you do. Maybe you got roped into it, a Midwesterner on spring break in Southern California, piling into a rickety, raft-like boat on a cold and windy day, holding tightly to its edge while you and your kids bounce up and down.

The truth is that the most miraculous parts of whale watching are not easily verifiable. You learn quickly that taking photos in that briefest instant — when the magnificent beast breaches its body above the waves, turning sideways and glittering for just an instant in the shining sun — is not only impossible but a silly distraction.

The problem with whale watching today is that it’s not very Instagrammable. You try to brag about your experience to people, and then you show them a fuzzy photo of bluish-gray water with something shiny hovering in its midst. It’s uncertain, unclear. Captions and hashtags can’t save a bad photo, can’t rescue a complicated story.

“You had to be there.”

But did it really happen at all if we can’t post filtered photos of it on social media?

I guess I know it did happen because I was that Midwestern cynic who went whale watching earlier this month, barely holding down my free hotel continental breakfast as we bobbed up and down — up and down — on a windy day in the harbor, my stomach contents sloshing from side to side.

In a world of instant gratification, it’s tough to get your kids to believe in anything wondrous, miraculous or unexplainable anymore. We’ve become hard to impress, too cool and jaded for the life-giving miracles of everyday life: like trees budding, flowers blooming and plants growing into edible food or lifesaving medicines.

I felt good, then, when we all put down our devices and held our mouths agape, watching the shimmering and fleeting moment when the whales made their secret and mysterious lives visible to us above the deep. They were otherworldly, and yet here they were. Alive. With us.

Our captains told us that the whales we saw that day were gray whales who were whaled to extinction in the North Atlantic in the 18th century and to near-extinction in the Pacific in the 19th century, hunted for their meat, oil and blubber. Their population in the Pacific today remains endangered. Our captains told us the whales we saw were in the midst of a major migratory journey from Mexico’s Baja California up to Alaska’s Bering Sea, where they’d finally reach their feeding grounds, threatened and pushed northward under melting Arctic ice.

We weren’t sure how many whales we even saw that day — maybe three, maybe five. Gray whale mothers usually make the migration with their calves, but our captains were concerned about one of the whales we saw. She (I’m calling the whale a “she”) was dangerously skinny and potentially malnourished with a long way to go on her migratory journey. They weren’t sure if her calf was with her.

This is, of course, the nature of miracles — of wonder — those times when life becomes tangible and freighted with meaning because it is also tinged with danger and death. Here we were on this glorious day in the ocean, having achieved the feat of seeing whales, and at the same time we had to come to terms with the fact that they were constantly in peril, in danger, and had been so for centuries mostly because of humans and our insatiable greed and cynicism about the dignity and fragility of life itself.

Some of us put on our cynicism every morning when we wake up, like a uniform we think will carry us through this second term of Donald Trump’s presidency, a shield against the growing horror of deportations, the official cruelty toward the poor and the weaponization of religion to sanctify hatred. We say, of course, it is bad. It has always been bad. And so we muddle forward with the pursuit of accumulation of wealth with narrowed, embittered eyes: squinting sometimes to hold back the grief that wells just under the surface.

I stepped off the whale-watching boat and came back to myself, took off my whale-watching jacket and put back on my robe of cynicism, jaunty and hard around the edges. I carried my cynicism even with me into Holy Week, to the Sunday before Easter, while Christians sang hymns and prayed pious prayers and neglected to remember that the same one whose name they proclaim as their savior was also wrongfully accused, arrested, sentenced to death by means of capital punishment, imprisoned without being tried for a crime.

Then, as my cynical brain scanned social media in the restless hours when sleep refused to come, I came upon a horrifying image. About 30 miles up the coast from where we witnessed our whales, a gray whale lay dead on the beach — splayed out and bloated, filled with air — where scientists would examine its body for a cause of death.

Here lies the necessary ending of a cynical people, a cynical country. Those who elected a crook because he promised to make them rich and be their champion; those who traded morality and decency for a bargain of “policy” and a grab-basket of preferred special interests and groups to blame for our problems. He’s deported innocent people and disdained the idea of mercy or of “turning the other cheek” or of defending another people simply because freedom was a cause worth fighting for, regardless of how they might repay us or not.

Whales are magnificent and beautiful and miraculous in the water, where they belong. On land, they are sad and tragic, a signpost of our tragic and mournful times.

Some people, when they saw the dead whale on Huntington Beach, made jokes about its smell and the way it came to be here on the beach, alone. Its massive size was daunting and intimidating but did not save it. Instead, it made it vulnerable. It was not too big to fail, to die. Nothing is.

On Easter Sunday, millions of us cynical Americans will attend Easter services. Too many of us will blink mindlessly through a feel-good, triumphant sermon and count the money in our plastic eggs. We will think of resurrection through the lens of a resurgent stock market, our faith in that which will never really save us.

But there is lying in our midst, if only we see it: a dead body, a bloated and beached whale, a country gasping for breaths, a man hanging on a cross. To make it to any kind of resurrection, we must first put off our cynicism and see life, all life, for the tragedy and miracle it truly is.