After many years of trying to understand life I've come to the conclusion there are two states we can exist in, the state of fear or the state of love. I'm not talking soppy romantic love, although it has some wonderful benefits, I'm talking about a love that accepts what is, trusts that we're mostly doing our best, and forgives the mistakes. Love is hope. Love assumes the best, rolls with the punches of the worst, and stands up again.
Fear is the root of all the rest. Anger is fear, resentment is fear, bigotry is fear, selfishness is fear, greed is fear, hatred is fear. Fear drives racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia. Fear drives voters to vote against their own best interests. Fear underlies every example of American aggression as a nation, every moment of civil rights abuses, every war, every choice for violence.
I enjoy the hell out of MOT's rants against the RW's dishonesty, cowardice, and cognitive dissonance, but they don't change any of those things. Being yelled at deepens the fear and feeds the manifestations of that fear. We change no hearts or minds by emulating their behavior.
{Note to MOT - your rants help me blow off steam, this is not a criticism of what you write. It's a suggestion that we blow off the steam here, and engage with people in our community in a less threatening way, hoping to sway a couple of them.}
My daughter gave me her Kindle last year, and I downloaded as much free stuff as I could find. When I was a kid I read many of my mom's books, and two of them were written by Gene Stratton-Porter, so I downloaded her entire output. I got to the third book, and was appalled. It was written shortly before Pearl Harbor and was a not-thinly-veiled propaganda piece masquerading as the story of a young woman's efforts to be top student in her HS. I did a little checking and discovered that many writers were encouraged to help create an environment hostile to the Japanese. She did just that. The internment camps were made possible by people who were probably seeing themselves as patriotic Americans fighting ultimate evil. They weren't awful human beings, they were doing what they believed was right. The Japanese were a juggernaut no one seemed able to defeat, allied with another juggernaut no one had stopped. There was reason to fear them, and fear ruled the day.
When I was very young, age 3 to about age 7, I was sexually molested repeatedly and horrifically by a man everyone in town knew had impregnated his 14 year old daughter. The fact that nothing was done to stop him from hurting her, or me, or my brother, or who knows who else wasn't based in evil intentions. There was no structure available for people like me, and nice people did their best not to know anything about ugly realities. I've paid a high price for their choice to hide, but I can't call them evil anymore.
The fact that the nuns at the church across the street from my dad's church taught me to kneel in front of the Blessed Virgin and pray for salvation from my wickedness (being Lutheran) complicated the hell out of my recovery from that abuse wasn't because they were evil women. They had no idea I was praying to be forgiven for being, somehow, evil enough to bring sodomy and fellatio to myself as punishment. They had no idea I was terrified that my evilness might result in the murder of my parents and siblings. They were sweet little old ladies who genuinely liked me and wanted my non-Catholic soul to be saved.
The recently replaced Priest at the church where I now play the organ is not an evil man, he simply believes that mankind has fallen so far that only magic (X number of Novenas, confessions, Holy days of obligation) can save us from eternal damnation. It wasn't his intention to alienate half the congregation, or to instill rigidity and fear in the other half. He was sincere, misguided, and deeply conflicted himself. He saw that this country was likely headed in the direction Europe has taken over the years, and he was afraid for the future of a Church he dedicated his life to.
I studied hard in school, but somehow I never learned about reservations, or the mass slaughter of the Native American population. I never heard about smallpox infected blankets, or firewater, or the fact that they lived here before anyone else did. We played Cowboys and Indians when I was little, and the Indians were scary bad guys, except for maybe Tonto, and Pow-Wow, and the nice Thanksgiving Indians. I wasn't ignorant, or evil, I just absorbed what was around me, and believed it. Until I was 12 or 13 I only saw Native Americans on the screen or as Tobacco Store statues. It was a much smaller world.
In 1981 I attended my first High Holy Days service with my future in-laws. There were a lot of police cars there, more than I thought necessary to control traffic on a frontage road. I asked why so many. There was silence, and then dear Alice said "It's dangerous to have so many Jews in one place." I still didn't understand. It was the wind down of the 20th Century, why was there danger? Later I found out about the bomb threats that were SOP for these congregations. I also found out that my father-in-law had been a brilliant student, but wasn't allowed to become an electrical engineer because he was Jewish. He pulled wires and repaired equipment. Mt. Sinai hospital existed because Jewish physicians weren't allowed admitting rights at most hospitals. Jews had to have separate but equal country clubs, they lived in "their" neighborhoods, they were not acceptable in the mainstream. This was after WWII, after the holocaust, after most people knew what price Jews had paid for their religious tradition. Was everyone in this country fundamentally evil? No, they absorbed what was around them, accepted it, never thought to challenge it.
There's no reason to demonize the people who have absorbed the endemic racism that poisons our national well. There's no need to hate people who just don't comprehend homosexuality. It won't change anything to humiliate bigots, or rage at people who choose the simplicity of Fox News' take on the state of the Nation. There's a reason they're vulnerable, and the reason is fear. We're hardwired for fear, it takes effort to overcome that self-protective drive. Engendering more fear doesn't get us the result we want.
It takes deep courage to talk to people who are spouting nonsense that ties our stomachs in knots and causes our fists to clench. It takes a solid belief in good, in love, in our better angels to keep us from yelling, walking away, responding to ugliness with ugliness. I hold as role models the Jewish lawyers working for the ACLU who defended the free speech rights of neo-Nazis. Faced with people whose beliefs are anathema to them, they fought for a principle they valued. It will take a special kind of grace for me to follow their example.
We are a fractured nation right now. It's a carefully nurtured fracturing, it's a state of the nation that makes it easier for the greedy to amass more, the hate-filled to wrap themselves in religion and patriotism and escape consequences.
We know what feeds this dissension, who benefits from it. We know that violence breeds violence, hate breeds hate, attack invites counter-attack. We know that lies repeated often enough DO become the accepted truth. I see it here. I engage in attack here, because my survival depends on not letting the Republicans finish what they've been attempting for most of my life. I'm driven by fear, and I lash out when I'm afraid that those people I most need on my side might choose to stay home on election night. Without Social Security and Medicare, I'm a dead woman. I fight from that state of fear, and don't accomplish what I hope to accomplish. It's a dead end.
In my better moments I'm able to see my neighbors as people who are watching the world, the reality they counted on, fall apart. (I had some practice with this when I started playing the organ at St. Mary's. I had some personal reasons for being uncomfortable with Catholic theology, including my annoyance that women are so secondary in that church. In spite of reservations, I've come to love the people there, to see them as brothers and sisters, to be able to allow them to see things differently. I would still like to see radical change in that structure, I mock the message that God loves us so much he has to send us to the first level of hell even if we're saints, because we're so sinful by nature. That just doesn't feel like love to me.) If I can do that in such a loaded environment, I have to believe I can also do it with political differences. I don't think I'll be part of change I can believe in unless I change myself enough to be welcoming, tolerant, and open-minded enough to try to hear what these people are afraid of, and to offer them some reassurance, if possible.
I may never stop being angry with the people who are behind all the crazy shit that's out there. I may never learn to look with eyes of love at Mitt Romney, or Rick Perry. But then again, if their agenda dead-ends, I won't have reason to fear them so much, so maybe I could reach down deep and find kindness. It's a goal.
I'm going to give grace and tolerance a try. I'm going to see if it works when I'm campaigning for President Obama. I'll let you know what happens.