Shouldering Each Other's Lives

A simple poem offers a key to the future of democracy and our humanity...

Left: © Mildegard | Dreamstime.com. Right: © Cbabi Bayoc, cbabibayoc.com

I. Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my favorite poets (and people), and “Shoulders” is one of my favorites among her poems. She’s one of those writers whose work illustrates what Oliver Wendell Holmes meant when he said, “For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies the other side of complexity, I would give my life.”

Many of Naomi’s poems are apparently simple “small stories” that open into complex “big story” challenges about how we live our lives. For me, “Shoulders” draws attention to three imperatives of a good life: (1) facing the truth that lies behind my illusions; (2) loving and bearing the heartbreak that love always brings; (3) turning my anger at all that stands against love into some form of life-giving action.

II. First, “Shoulders” lifts up the ancient and universal truth of interdependence, a truth so self-evident we shouldn’t need to talk about it. But we do. The frontier myth of “rugged individualism” has such a deep grip on America identity that we need to keep saying, “It’s not true! No one has ever ‘made it’ on his or her own. We’ve all been carried on the shoulders of others, whether we know it or not. Let’s lose the lunacy that says, ‘I did it all by myself, so the rest of you need to do that, too.’”

III. Next, the poem breaks my heart when I face into the fact that here in the U.S., the richest nation on earth, we keep failing our precious children, who so clearly cannot survive or thrive unless we carry them on our collective shoulders.

For a look at the scope of this national tragedy and travesty, I sought help from my friend Diane Nilan, who has long devoted herself to advocating for America’s homeless through her nonprofit Hear Us. She responded with the following: “Most Americans have no idea of the scope of homelessness among kids. The following numbers are solid calculations, but significantly low since this kind of homelessness is largely invisible and underestimated:”

• Homeless babies and toddlers: 446,996 in 2022–23. Homeless PreK-12 students: a record-setting 1.5 million identified in public schools in 2023–24.

• Each year, at least 4.2 million youth, teens and young adults experience homelessness in the U.S.—700,000 of them are unaccompanied minors. Roughly one in 10 adults ages 18 to 25, and one in 30 youth ages 13 to 17 will experience homelessness each year.

• The One Big Beautiful Ugly Bill Act (H.R. 1, 2025-2026), that slashed programs that once comprised our flimsy social safety net, will ravage the majority of our nation’s population, especially those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Here are specifics about the massive cuts now being implemented.

• For an intimate look at the lives behind those numbers, here’s a film Diane made—eighteen powerful minutes of children and mothers answering the question “What Does ‘Homeless’ Look Like?” If the numbers don’t break your heart, listening to these bright, courageous kids and moms will. For more information and action suggestions, join Diane on Substack.

© Kenishirotie | Dreamstime

IV. Finally, “Shoulders”—which features a caring father—arouses my anger at a longstanding American illness that MAGA has raised to a virtue: our sick notion of what it means to be a man. In the MAGA-mind, a real man is devoted to nothing except his own wellbeing, and swears by the “ethic” of might makes right. Men who advocate and care for the vulnerable are “woke, bleeding-heart snowflakes.” A real man will be out on some battlefield crushing “losers” in the Darwinian war of all against all.

With 87 years of experience as a man, I’d like to say, as politely as I can, “Give me a break!” MAGA’s male “role models” comprise a menagerie of some of the most twisted men ever to disgrace the national stage, to say nothing of the women who live to please them: POTUS, VPOTUS, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, and RFK, Jr., to name a few. Every one of them is living example of why mammas should not let their babies grow up to be MAGA.

The men MAGA celebrates are so anxious about their own masculinity that they have to keep staging cartoonish caricatures of “manliness” to hold their anxiety at bay, no matter how many people die from measles or wars of choice. They turn their personal fears into public policy via the dark magic of projection. Their self-doubt about their own masculinity becomes legislation that leads to the suffering of people who are nonconforming in gender identity or sexual orientation—nonconforming to MAGA’s myopic understanding of what it means to be human.

Where is Sigmund Freud now that we need him? When will we understand that a man can pump iron from dawn to dusk and still be a coward who needs to assuage his anxiety by crucifying others? When will these fear-ridden men summon the strength to shoulder the shadows in their own lives, so they can become full-fledged adults who can shoulder the lives of others?

V. Aye, there’s the rub: Before we can grow up and learn to carry others we must learn to carry the weight of the fears that live in our own shadows. That’s a task that can only be done inwardly. Left undone, it leads to an adult with the power to do great damage as he or she projects their inner darkness on others.

The surest sign of a person’s failure to do their inner work is the need to blame others for one’s troubles. Here, too, MAGA excels. MAGA’s base is thrilled with everything murderous POTUS is doing about immigration and DEI because they are convinced, against all evidence, that everything they regard as wrong with America is due to those “aliens” who want to make America their home.

They cling to the evil fantasy that America’s white Christian plurality was somehow planted here by the hand of God without coming from somewhere else, and that people outside that chosen group—including those whom white people kidnapped and enslaved to drive their economy—are to blame for everything from rape, robbery and rigged elections to a white person’s failure to get a job. Take away that fantasy, and MAGA no longer has a reason to exist.

VI. Amazing how a poem that tells a “small story” can lead a reader into so many big issues, and call us to get engaged in so much “good trouble!” But that’s the power of words in the hands of an artist like Naomi Shihab Nye—along with the power of our own imagination to help us envision and reach for a world that serves the common good.

I believe that such a world lies on the other side of the perilous passage we are now going through. That world will come to pass if the rest of us shoulder our personal and political responsibility to help humanity and democracy make a comeback in our land.

P.S. As if to prove my point about MAGA and masculinity, POTUS just announced a key element in his plan for America’s 250th birthday. He’s erecting [sic] a stage for Mixed Martial Arts fighters to knock the living daylights out of each other at the White House on June 14, with free tickets for more than 100,000 on the White House grounds and in the park across the street. Get your tickets soon and help POTUS ease his anxieties about his manhood.

NOTES: “Shoulders” is found in Naomi Shihab Nye’s collection Red Suitcase, available HERE. To hear Naomi read the poem, click HERE. I post on Substack every Friday, as time and energy allow. Free as well as paid subscriptions will always have access to everything I post. My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE.