You think that your pain and your heartbreak
are unprecedented in the history of the world,
but then you read. It was books that taught me
that the things that tormented me most were the
very things that connected me with all the people
who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
- James Baldwin, from the film
James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket
I find myself in pain and at a loss so/too often of late. I struggle to comprehend what we've made of this great country of ours, even as I appreciate its remaining - and, hopefully, eternal - abundance of blessings and the reality that so much of what we know of the world is not new so much as new to us. This world has long been a place of pain and torment for too many, as has this country been; it's just that modern media has brought to us so much of what was already there but unknown to us before that we cannot evade this painful (self-)knowledge (although some clearly go to great lengths of delusion to do so).
What's been weighing on me lately is a sad and tawdry mélange of issues and scandals and other instances of inhumanity that trouble me precisely because they don't (sufficiently) trouble so/too many of my fellows. Because of this I've come to agree with the definition of privilege floating around social media of late: its existence is proven when something that affects others but doesn't affect you directly also doesn't move you to consider it a problem because of the reality that it doesn't affect you. When your empathy and compassion fail, you are indeed in a privileged position, the one of not caring or having to.
And what is it that so/too many are too privileged to care about? What's in this mélange of troubling reality that gnaws at me at the moment and, seemingly, always?
Certainly race: that it's rearing its ugly head in new riots a half-century after the ones of my early childhood is a profoundly disturbing reality. Yes, we've made progress in this time ... but too many of us apparently feel that enough progress has been made so that we shouldn't have to deal with the rest of the work that we have left to do. I'll let you guess who's mostly in this camp. If you say the 'winners' - that is, those whom racism benefits rather than disadvantages - give yourself a gold star.
Yet we have so far left to go and no Dreamer to lead us there. Not to be trite, but I really do suspect that candidate Obama was right: we are the change that we've been waiting for. Now the question is do we have the courage and conviction to do the work. And not just some of us, but all of us; racism winners and losers alike. It seems to me that if we really want this to be a land where all men and women - indeed, all humans - are created equal and are able to live in this way, then we have to address and eliminate racism and all of the other -isms that demean and diminish the lives of too many of our fellows.
And certainly, too, I am troubled by religion, especially when it intertwines with our politics in life-diminishing ways: I am constantly dismayed that so much of what is claimed in the name of Christianity today is actually the antithesis of our Patron's example. The institution of the Christian church has been aligned with the powers that be since the fourth century, so one could expect some 'drift.' Yet today's religious right is, to be kind, far too often similar to or worse than those who persecuted Jews like Jesus back in the day. We demonize the poor, the different and the Other ... when the man in whose name we do it did the exact opposite, reaching out to the disaffected, the downtrodden and the Other of His day. And we wonder why the fastest growing segment of our population is the religiously unaffiliated? When the ugliness that is too much a part of modern Christianity is reflected upon, is it any wonder that fewer and fewer people - and especially the young - want to be associated with it?
(By contrast, I have a belief that if we were to become/be true "Followers of Jesus" - to borrow Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks' term - who are committed to emulating His example, this trend would reverse in a powerfully positive and life-affirming way.)
And, of course, on the world stage, it's not just Christianity. Adherents of many religions seem to vie fiercely to prove who among them wins the metaphorical inhumanity prize. It's true of too many believers that their behavior in the name of God is so, well, ungodly. This leads some to conclude that big-R Religion is the culprit, but to them I say not so fast: there is much beauty being shared with the world in the name of religion, too; it's just that the ugliness seems to outweigh this too greatly and too often (and certainly gets more media coverage). It seems to me that if we really want to worship God, that ultimate Source of Life, then we must judge ourselves by how life-affirming our behavior is, not by the often false piety that we speak or the judgment that we project in God's name.
And I'm also bothered by the seemingly increasing level of hypocrisy ... though this, too, is subject to the evaluative question whether it's actually increasing or whether our awareness of it is what's increasing. The current 'scandal' in this vein involves a member of the reality-celebrity Duggar family who, while until recently shilling for a 'family values' organization, turns out to have been molesting young women and girls, including his own sisters (with, of course, some in his family dutifully covering it up). On the one hand, the cynical me isn't surprised and hardly considers it news anymore when one of the moral grandstanders in our society is exposed; hate to admit it, but now I assume that all of them are false prophets but we just haven't found them out yet.
On the other hand, I shake my head in world-weariness and sadness that sexual abuse is so common in our society - one source says that 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys will be sexually molested before the age of 16 (yes, you read that right - a quarter of our daughters, nieces, etc., and a sixth of our sons, nephews, etc., will be victims of predators, in many cases who are known to them) - and yet we seem not all that outraged about it. If you ask anyone, of course they'll proclaim their ire at and disapproval of such conduct. So who's doing the molesting? And, even worse, who knows about it and isn't doing anything about it and/or covering it up? If we want to be as good as we too often think we are, these percentages must go down ... a lot.
And I am troubled by economic inequality in our society (and world) and our in-justice system and our bought-and-paid-for politics and our willful environmental blindness and our stunning ignorance of other people and cultures of the world and our decrepit and decaying system of public education and our focus on winning at all costs that has led to widespread shortcutting and cheating in our schools, in our sports and in our society and our seemingly endless bloodlust and incessant warmongering and....
The list could go on and on ... which is the point: in so many ways we have literally lost our way as a society and our ego-salving claim to American Exceptionalism rings ever more hollow over time. In fact, I might go so far as to say it exacerbates the problem: when you can retreat into the fantasy that you're the best, you feel no pressure to acknowledge the reality that you're not and address it.
But, try as we might, we are not leaving our children a better world than we inherited in many, many meaningful ways. And this we own. The world has become a better place in my lifetime, but not nearly enough progress has been made to stem the tide of our own inhumanity. Ultimately, this may be the test of our Exceptionalism: in that we have chosen to ignore so much of what diminishes the lives of so many of our fellow citizens and human beings - especially now that we're so much better informed about so much of it (and, in fairness, so much more aware than previous generations could have been) - perhaps we are different. Perhaps we're exceptional in that we know how bad things are and have just chosen not to care....
Americans suffer from an ignorance that is
not only colossal but sacred.
- Attributed to James Baldwin
