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Are you waiting for the same thing as I am?

18 Dec
It was 1969 and at the end of a mixed bag of a decade. As an adolescent in the midst of her 13th year, I was acutely aware of what was going on around me—the Vietnam War was still in process, two Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and a number of others involved in the civil rights movement in one form or another had been killed. Still in the midst of the “Cold War,” we were less than a decade past a time when school kids wore dogtags and regularly went through drills where they crouched under desks or with their heads between their knees. Age 30 was a line of demarcation. If over 30, many people thought those under were irresponsible, lascivious, out of control. If under 30, many thought those over were rigid, oppressive, too in control. Yet, in the midst of it all, we’d actually sent some guys off into space and landed them on the moon! Very involved in the organized church in my small town of Cordele, Georgia, I became aware of another battle raging, one which emanated from the venerated Emory University, not two hours driving away from my home. A professor had said God was dead and the literal minded (I said literal, not liberal, mind you), similarly to today, had a metaphorical heart attack.
I was already questioning spiritual things by that point—the fact that inside church we were singing, “Jesus loves the little children of the world,” and outside church the same people were clearly saying, “But we don’t.” And then I’d read for myself that Jesus talked about loving our neighbors and turning the other cheek, and had even repaired the ear of a soldier cut off by Peter, who’d grabbed a sword from somewhere and lopped it off. Yet at the same time, it was somehow God’s will that we send young men just a few years older than I was halfway around the world to kill the Communists?
For Christmas that year, my sister gave me a little book of poetry and prose she’d bought for me at her college bookstore. It was a small book in size, but there was nothing small about the messages inside. In fact, this little book provided for me the feeling I wasn’t alone in considering the possibility that none of us knows or can know the “whole truth,” and that skepticism and curiosity about contradictions only strengthens, matures, refines one’s faith. To this day, I keep the book close by. It isn’t as difficult as it used to be, because almost 40 years later, I was given the pleasure of republishing the little book by Dr. Lois Cheney, the woman who’d written the gems inside. One of my early favorites is now a favorite again.
How does God’s truth prevail?
A large chunk of truth was placed right in the midst of men by the Almighty God. And people saw it and were awed by it, and were humbled by it. They walked around and around it, looking at it, gazing at it, and loving it. Then they got organized.
First, they posted a guard over it, while others built a fortress for it. That was o.k. for a while. Then they decided to do more with it. So they sent in five wise, devout men to study it. They stayed in there a long, long time. Then strange and quarrelsome noises began to come from within the fortress, and out stalked the five men, red-faced and very angry, each with a large packet of papers under his arm. They walked off in five different directions reading loudly from their papers, which said what the chunk of truth really meant. People scurried around, first listening to one and then another, and finally they grabbed up all their belongings and followed after the one they liked the best. And they built little camps about a mile away and studied the pages of their chosen leader, which told them what the truth really meant.
Things would be calm for a while, then from first one camp and then another, would come sounds of angry voices and scuffling. And you’d see several people jump up and walk off in different directions with fresh packets of paper under their arms, that explained what the truth really meant. Again, little clusters of people would follow, and they’d establish fresh camps about a mile further off. This went on and on.
Soon there were many, many camps for miles and miles in all directions, each with its packet of papers, explaining how the truth really was. Sometimes they would argue and debate which of them was closer to the ancient fortress. Sometimes there’d be awful fights between camps, and the camp that won would proudly enlarge its scope of what truth really meant, and pride themselves on expanding and perpetuating the real truth. Sometimes camps would combine their packets of paper. Sometimes some people would get weary with the whole thing, and go off without any papers at all. They’d establish camps where the land was good or the water was plentiful or some other reason than setting up a camp around some silly papers.
Every once in a while would come a wanderer, usually all alone. The wanderer would roam through the camps or skirt them, and would wind up coming right up to the neglected and overgrown fortress, and walk right in and stare at the real chunk of truth. The wanderer would gaze and gaze at it, and pick it up and handle it, and stroke it, and start strutting all over the place, glowing and carrying on, and generally throwing camps into confusion. The wanderer would do all sorts of old-fashioned things in old-fashioned ways, grinning and humming all the while.
And that’s how God’s truth prevails.
Which one of these people are you? Are you waiting for the same thing I am?

Vally

P.S. You can buy a copy of God is No Fool for yourself right here. And believe me, if you’re like me, if you’re alive then, it will still be on your bedside table 30 years from now.

Breathe

9 Dec

It was March 2002, six months after 9/11, and I was in Dublin, Ireland. My body clock had not yet reset itself, so I was still awake at 2:00 in the morning. Trying not to disturb my fellow travelers, I grabbed a notebook and headed downstairs to the all-night coffee shop in the lobby of our hotel.

In this particular hotel, the night desk clerk doubled as the coffee shop waiter, and while I sat in a booth with my pen and paper, he proceeded to sweep the floor. It was just him and me, so I decided to strike up a conversation.

The toll of a 90% drop in tourism in Ireland that year was obvious. We were oddities, Americans who had ignored the tendency to hunker down, to not fly–especially internationally–and those in the Irish service community noticed it. There were several times when people spontaneously approached us and thanked us for being there. This young night clerk/coffee shop waiter was among them.

“May I ask you a question?” I asked him.

“Of course, you can,” he said, stopping and leaning on his broom.

“What did you think when you heard about planes flying into the World Trade Center?”

He paused for a second. “Do you really want to know?”

When I nodded, he said, “Well, my first response, of course, was to feel sad. You know, there were quite a few Irish people who were in the buildings too. But the second…well, honestly…was…, ‘Now they know.'”

Through the years since, few things have hit me between the eyes quite like this three-word phrase. He was, of course, talking about the fact that before 9/11, most of the world outside of America was well-acquainted with the always-there spectre of life changing in a “New York minute,” as the Don Henley song proclaims.

“In a New York minute
Everything can change
In a New York minute
Things can get little strange…”

This young man, barely 30, if that, had grown up in Belfast before the 1994 ceasefire between the IRA and British forces in Northern Ireland. He’d had an everyday admonition from his parents, probably from the day he was born, to be careful, to watch closely when he walked down the streets near his home. At any moment, a perfectly average car could explode with no warning, devastating anyone who was near. Events like the Oklahoma City bombing or the future Boston Marathon tragedy were “old hat” to this young man.

Our bodies, wondrously, are built with an emergency system. We are each capable of a surge of adrenalin that renders us able to run faster or fight harder than under “normal” circumstances. If angry or frightened (which are pretty much the same feeling except for the projection of responsibility), we are temporarily supplied with the physical power to do things we couldn’t even approach doing when not angry or afraid.

That emergency system works very well in the face of literal physical emergencies. It came in handy thousands of years ago when the type of emergency confronted was a bear or tiger. It came in handy to Queen Elizabeth II when Windsor Castle caught on fire. It was told that she’d single-handedly grabbed a precious rolled-up tapestry and run out with it. I’ve heard of prople lifting the rear of a multi-ton car to free someone they love trapped beneath only to find themselves unable to budge it an hour later. And as drivers, we’ve all managed at one time or another to avoid collisions in remarkable ways. That weak-kneed feeling that comes after we’ve just avoided being creamed is the system returning to “normal.”

There’s an Achilles heel of that emergency system, though. It can’t determine what is a “real” emergency and what is a “perceived” emergency. And it’s a looping thing. If we’re aroused, if the adrenalin is in our systems, making our hearts beat faster, our palms sweaty, our muscles stronger, we are more likely to perceive there’s an emergency when there isn’t. Connections develop between things we know are not threatening when the fight-or-flight response is not in mid-stream and that same-old usually adaptive response. That’s part of the mechanism of phobias. Somehow, the fight-or-flight response has been invoked and connected to something that isn’t an emergency at all. It’s classical conditioning — instead of saliva and the ringing of a bell, it’s whatever we’ve decided is threatening and the elicitation of the emergency system.

And sometimes, when things happen that all the running and fighting in the world won’t fix, we’re left with a new state of “normal.” What was once just a call-on-it-when-it’s-needed function is in force all the time. We forget what it felt like not to be afraid. We forget what it felt like not to be angry. As I used to tell my clients, “We’re all dressed up with no place to go.”

It’s bad enough when the fight-or-flight response gets out of kilter for one, but it’s devastating when it spreads. And it’s highly contagious. A lot of things happen that no one person in a group is intending. Think of the number of people who are hurt everytime there’s a stampede at a sporting event. If you’re Christian and know the story of Barabbas, what do you think really happened there? Without the contagion of those around them, do you really think that any one of those people would have chosen Barabbas instead of Jesus to free?

It takes self-control, the ability to invoke our thinking brains despite all the signals coming from our bodies that we are threatened, and assess the reality of the danger for ourselves as best we can, to prevent the sad results that always occur when the mob mentality takes over. Unless we stop ourselves and use the cognitive parts of our brains, our reason, to determine if we are facing real emergencies or if our bodies are sending us misguided signals, the probability that we will overreact is high. If you’re a parent, how many times have you perhaps spanked your child in a fit of anger or fear, only to wonder if the pop was harder than it should have been?

The irony of the situation is that there is one thing we can do to start the return of our bodies to the lowest stage of alert. We can stop and breathe. One slower, deeper, calm breath sends the message to our fight-or-flight system that it may be a false alarm, giving us time to consider what we are contemplating. It takes one breath to allow us to take back control, to quiet the frightened child inside who’s not thinking at all.

Sometimes, yes, the decision we make is that we are, indeed, in danger. That there is something we can do to protect ourselves, something we must do to reduce the probability of facing a future catastrophe. But the key is to make a decision not driven by the fight-or-flight system, to distinguish between real emergencies and the stories we have concocted in our minds out of nothing but fear.

When FDR said to the people of the United States that there was nothing to fear except fear itself, this is what he was talking about. It’s what we should be talking about now. It’s what we MUST talk about now.

In a New York minute, everything can change. The possibility is always there. But the probabilities wax and wane. Changes, born of misguided actions stimulated by our no-thought-fight-or-flight systems, are not inevitable, but some of them are irreparable. We must choose our responses with wisdom and courage, or we will become the victims of our own hallucinations.

Yes, now we know. But before we act, we must breathe.

 

One by One

28 Jun

I’ve chimed in here and there on Facebook during the past few days, sparring with others over the Confederate flag in general and in specifics in the state of South Carolina, but, introvert that I am, I had to wait before writing a blog to let the dust and noise settle so I could contemplate what I am truly feeling. The first item of business I had to consider is the enormity of the deaths of nine Christian disciples at the hands of a misguided, and perhaps demented young man, and the response of the people of South Carolina and across the South itself. And then there were not one, but two rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court, both of which honestly surprised me because of the cynicism I admit I’ve felt in recent years. And then today, I learned that the Episcopal Church, of which I am a member, elected a new presiding bishop who is African-American—from the Diocese of North Carolina, a one-time Confederate state and my newly adopted home. On the very first ballot, no less.

Years ago, when I was a psychotherapist, our “protocol” was to give a new client a battery of tests—a measure whether anxiety was a long-standing problem or just a function of a recent trauma, the MMPI, occasionally others based on what the client’s presenting complaint was. The results of those “inventories” provided a jumping off point for therapy, and it was easy to form an initial sense of the areas needing exploration. There was never a time when I wasn’t forced to completely reevaluate the ongoing treatment plan in my head on the basis of the disclosure of an experience by the client and his or her perception of the event I couldn’t have anticipated. I learned quickly that every person who walked through our doors was unique, that I could make no generalized statements about any of them on the basis of their employment or clothes or physical characteristics. Symptoms, yes, but not demographic data. For me to assist them in finding a path to healthier functioning in their own individual lives and relationships, in their own individual circumstances, with their own individual bodies and brains required that they trust me to hear their stories from their points of view without judgment. In a word, it required me to respect and honor the boundaries between us, the differences, while seeking the similarities that supercede them—our desires to love and achieve, be special and important to someone, to be loved and appreciated for who we are, irrespective of where we came from or the mistakes we have made.

As a child, what drew me to the stories about Jesus was the idea that God knew every hair on my head. Not the heads of all girls or the heads of straight-A students or the heads of all Americans or the heads of all Southerners or the heads of all Southern Baptists or the heads of children raised by single parents or the heads of financially-challenged families or whatever demographic group of which I was a part or was to become a part of in the future. God knew every hair on MY head. God knew every circumstance, every experience, every good behavior, every bad behavior, and wonder of all wonders, loved me in spite of them all. It didn’t matter what other members of the groups of which I was a part did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, approved of or didn’t approve of. I was considered, comforted, confronted, blessed, all by my little, inconsequential self. What they did, what they thought…was irrelevant.

For me, the next logical step in that burgeoning awareness was knowing that if God knew every hair on my particular head, then he knew every hair on everybody’s else’s head, too, and that he loved them as fiercely and as unconditionally as me, no matter what I thought of them.

The only question, then, was what to do when the boundaries collided. And when that collision happened—and it is inevitable, a hundred times a day—how do we respond?

Jesus lived as the ultimate respecter of boundaries. It didn’t matter that Zaccheus was a tax collector, despite the fact that most of the people in the crowd probably wanted to strangle him and had already dismissed him as a traitor to his people. He called him down from the tree and sat down at his table with him. It didn’t matter that the woman at the well, or the woman caught in adultery, was someone that he, according to local or cultural laws, was prohibited from speaking to. He stood right there, in front of God and everybody, and told her—in the act of speaking to her—that she too could drink the living water straight from the well, without bowing to any man or religious law. He even looked at the thief hung beside him on a cross and said, in effect, “Hey, I don’t know what you did, but I know who you are, and you’re coming with me.”

In terms of the U.S. Constitution, the boundary questions are the same. If we are to be equally protected and equally privileged under the law, at what point is there a collision that renders us unequal? Who gets to say where the line is? And what do we do to try and ensure, however imperfectly, that no equal citizen is disenfranchised from the expression of that equality? That, and that alone, is the job of the U.S. Supreme Court, of nine equally-endowed and equally imperfect people.

In the end, whether we’re talking about Jesus or the U.S. Constitution, it all comes down to respecting each other’s boundaries. Doing the oh, so difficult work of examining our own motives and acting in a way that accepts the pragmatic reality that there are limits to the expression of our freedom and the limit is the boundary of the “other,” whether we’re talking about the neighbor we are to love as we love ourselves or the First Amendment and all the rest of the amendments, which only attempt to clarify and define where those boundaries are, protecting and preserving the rights of all Americans—irrespective of what one individual or one demographic group or one religious congregation has arrogantly deemed to be the authoritative end all of what God says. I can’t help but believe, if I look at the words and actions of Jesus as a whole, that what he meant by loving each other was based squarely on the concept of respect of each other’s boundaries. As both he and St. Paul would say later—if we love God and each other, the rest of those commandments, all dealing with boundary violations, will take care of themselves.

Because of that perspective, being a Christian and being an American—in the ideal—are not difficult for me to reconcile, to live in parallel, but thankfully, there is still a boundary between the two. We must make no choices, give no favors to one religious opinion over another. I am eternally thankful to have been born an American because of that. I can rest in the assurance that Sharia law or Mormon law or Roman Catholic law or even Episcopal law will not govern me as long as the separation of church and state remains intact. But having that assurance comes with responsibility and personal limits, too. Every Muslim, every Mormon, every Roman Catholic, every other religious adherent—is safe from whatever cockamamie religious law Franklin Graham or Pat Robertson proclaims or the ones I dream up in my head, too.

Even the Affordable Care Act, and its haters, is a battle of boundaries. How do we promote the well-being of those who can’t, for mostly reasons of poverty and depressed income, irrespective of our wretchedly arrogant opinions of their deservedness, pay the premiums of health insurance in 2015 without putting those who are barely making it, but making it, at risk? How do we not favor the members of one group over another, based on the circumstances and the timing of their lives in the midst of a recession from which we have not, despite all the political rhetoric, completely recovered? It ain’t easy, but the personal boundary assaults from both sides of the issues are ugly, and they have no place in our public discourse.

The other happenings of this week raised boundary issues, too—individual ones. There are nine dead individuals, dead because of one of those physical characteristics and not the desires of their hearts, their individual experiences, or their own individual respect for the boundaries of others. Dead because a young man violated their boundaries in a vicious way that cannot be mended, only forgiven and punished. Dead because a young man, right or wrong, perceived that his boundaries and those of his association were in danger of violation, that “their” country was being “taken over.”

There are people who, for whatever reasons that no one but God can discern or judge (though I personally doubt the latter is even an issue—see above), are attracted to people of their own gender, who now have the freedom in America to publicly and legally proclaim their love and commitment to each other, no matter what I or anyone else may find uncomfortable about it. The boundaries of respect, at least under the law of the land, are upheld. We can’t stop another equal citizen from expressing their love as a matter of public record just because we don’t think it’s biblical or natural or fill in the blanks with your own adjective.

There’s a boundary battle between those who maintain that a flag is simply their “heritage,” flown by soldiers defending a “right” that is no right under God or the Constitution by any measure—that of owning other humans and defining their value as less than whole—and those in the group devalued and diminished by the symbolism of the flag, who cannot view it without the visceral and archetypal memory of split families, of murder, of whips, of rape, or being stolen from their lands and chained and sold as recently as 150 years ago. Both crying for the very same thing—respect, the birthright of every child of God.

There have been boundary issues since Cain and Abel. There will be boundary issues long after we’re gone. Jesus said as much. “Our father,” he taught us to pray, “forgive us our trespasses (violations of other’s boundaries) as we forgive those who trespass against us (violate our boundaries).” We are only offended, ranting and raving about our “rights,” when we perceive that a boundary of ours has been violated. It is our duty as Americans, but more importantly as Christians, to commit to examining our own desires and behavior, seeking never to intentionally offend, to be clear on where the boundaries between us really are (translate where our rights end and those of others begin) and to forgive the real—and the ones we only imagine in our heads—offenses against us. It isn’t in any way easy—but it is possible. Jesus showed it over and over, and the families of the Mother Emanuel nine did it in living color.

To solve these boundary disputes requires that, just like Jesus did every time, we meet each other one by one, seeking the similarities between us and respecting the differences as what they can be—the icing on the cake of a rich, diverse, multi-colored life for us all. One gun owner at a time, one gun-control advocate at a time. One person of black, white, Asian ancestry at a time. One “liberal” at a time, one “conservative” at a time. One heterosexual, one LGBT at a time. One Southerner at a time, one non-Southerner at a time. One 1 percenter, one 99 percenter at a time. One welfare recipient, one corporate CEO at a time. One Republican at a time, one Democrat at a time, one Independent at a time, one candidate at a time, one every-hair-on-the-head-loved-by-God-just-like-me person at a time. We will, no doubt, find those we choose not to engage with because of their inability to show respect, but that decision can’t be generalized without squandering potential we cannot recover. Lord knows how much we lost long before the nine people at Mother Emanuel.

God bless the United States of America, our President and members of the Executive Branch, our Congressional representatives and senators, our state governors and representatives and senators, and one other nine of significance this week—the U.S. Supreme Court.

But most of all, God bless us every one, and help us to do the same. One by one.

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“True” Christians

7 Apr

One of the stories wafting around the internet in the past week or so is the allegation that a Dublin, Georgia teacher told some member or members of her classroom that a “true” Christian wouldn’t vote for Obama since on her authority (or some website’s she defended when a parent-teacher conference was called) Obama isn’t a Christian (and by default, shouldn’t be the President of the United States despite the Establishment Clause she obviously didn’t understand when she took high school civics–assuming she passed).

It’s an allegation, yes, but I don’t have a problem believing it. I’ve been hearing such for over 50 years. My sister was told no “true” Christian would vote for Bill Clinton back in 1992, and before that being a “true” Christian was an excuse for not integrating schools. You know, it was God’s will to keep the races separate. No “true” Christian would go against a teaching as obvious as that, despite the fact that there’s nothing obvious about it at all.

“True” Christians, by my estimation, would be those who pay attention to what Christ said first, understanding even the Old Testament through the lens of a man who, if nothing else, stood on the premise that loving others–even if you’ve drunk the Koolaid that convinces you that you know the life history and circumstances of the woman in front of you in the grocery line paying with food stamps–is the only requirement for following him. Absent love, as St. Paul would later say, calling yourself a Christian and suggesting that you and you only are a “true” Christian on the basis of a voter choice is just a lot of loud noise. I think it more–namely, I think the lack of humility demonstrated by anyone who would presume they know what a “true” Christian is and are entitled to disseminate that information has taken the Lord’s name in vain. Which, in case you don’t know, is a much more serious offense.

Today a couple of days past Easter, I was thinking about the fact that the only time we know of that Jesus’s anger got the best of him was when he encountered the people in the outer courts of the temple in Jerusalem who were blocking access to the inner sanctum and profiting by it. You know, the moneychangers — the ones who were selling doves for those who couldn’t afford lambs that were to be sacrificed by some religious leader (and not themselves) and suggesting that the poor couldn’t possibly be “true” Jews because they hadn’t worked hard enough in their opinions, I guess, to merit an audience with God.

I thought about the fact that I’ve never had a problem with the concept of democracy and its parallel with Jesus’s message of the equality of people before God and the importance of people over made-up rules that protect no one except the rule-makers themselves, because they both honor the value of individual human beings irrespective of circumstance. And I thought about voting and healthcare and religious freedom and the gay-marriage controversy and “my right to an AK-47 trumps your child’s safety” and I decided that if Jesus were here and his kingdom were of this world instead of the spiritual one over which he claimed kingship, he’d be pretty pissed off about now.

But it wouldn’t be at the voters who may be denied access to vote–the inalienable right of a citizen in a democracy. Wouldn’t be at the people who couldn’t even afford a healthcare “dove” or the people who commit to each other to love and cherish each other above all others despite having the same private parts. And certainly, the guy who restored an ear Peter cut off just before running and hiding and denying he even knew Jesus wouldn’t look very kindly at someone who suggests his alleged right to own whatever weapon he wants supersedes respect for the logic and reason God gave us all. No, Jesus wouldn’t be mad at those people, and he would remind us that “true” love is demonstrated in laying down not only one’s life, but one’s demands and desires, if the inalienable rights of others are being shortchanged.

They asked Jesus how to tell the difference between false prophets and “true” ones, and his answer was clear. By the fruit of their labor. And if the fruit of the labor diminished and denied rather than encouraging, supporting and honoring the lives of all those around them, irrespective of their differing look or opinion, the Jesus I’ve read about over and over would more likely assign the phrase “false prophet.” That’s certainly who those religious leaders were whose tables got turned over. And they were the same ones who got so indignant, so angry about the possibility that if Jesus were really the king their power over the masses would be less strangling and their daily bread not so lavish, that they made up stories about him and convinced the Romans that he was a danger to them.

Down through the ages, “true” Christians most often ended up dead for the very same reasons Jesus did, and he predicted it. “True” Christians didn’t keep any of their income, such as it was. “True” Christians got eaten by lions, murdered by gladiators in front of adoring crowds. A good old middle-class wannabe Christian told Jesus he was ready to follow him and Jesus responded that he should look closely at him before he said it in earnest, reminding him that “the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head.” I doubt who the guy voted for would’ve even entered the picture.

So, if you’re inclined to announce that anyone other than yourself isn’t a “true” Christian, if I were you, I would take pause, and remember that fruit of the labor thing. And I would contemplate just whose table Jesus would go for the next time.

Freedom Not to Speak

9 Jan

I haven’t said anything until now about the Parisian tragedy, the massacre of cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo. I continue to stand amazed at the level of inhumanity displayed by groups such as ISIL and al Qaida, who is likely to have been responsible for the deaths of the satirists, and I mourn for both their families and friends, as I do for those of any victims of senseless violence. I haven’t said anything because there is nothing for me to add to the conversation about that.

What disturbs me, though, is the automatic jump to invoke freedom of speech in the discussion. I don’t know the nuances of the French definition of “free speech,” or what laws protect whom, but I do know about our version. And I know the legal definitions of libel and slander, two words that I doubt members of our Congress can spell, much less define.

I’m pretty sure too that the people I “hear” screaming about freedom of speech every time there’s a backlash for something said or written that offends someone else have never bothered to read the First Amendment. In case I’m right, I present it herewith.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

If you were paying attention in English class, you would know that an alternative format for the text of the First Amendment would be as follows:

Congress shall make no law…

  1. respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or
  2. abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or
  3. [abridging] the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Congress shall make no law…Congress shall make no law…Congress shall make no law…

Chicken-sandwich maker Dan Cathy’s freedom of speech was in no way abridged when he answered a question about anti-gay groups he’d donated money to. No law made by Congress (which is the only test) threatened to imprison him on the basis of giving the interview and answering the question.

Rush Limbaugh’s freedom of speech wasn’t abridged when he called a young woman a slut on national radio and thereafter lost a host of sponsors for his radio show. No law made by Congress (which is the only test) threatened to imprison him for saying what he said, nor did one influence corporate America.

So when I hear the justifiable outrage for the murders of these French men, the argument that they were martyred because of their exercising freedom of speech falls flat. They were murdered because murderers wanted to cause French Muslims and non-Muslims to rise up against each other, hoping to drag peace-loving Muslims down to the gutter with them. It had nothing to do with cartoons and nothing to do with freedom of speech. It’s worth saying that any murdered person has had his freedom of speech abridged.

Yes, the First Amendment protects our right to say whatever we like, but it doesn’t protect us from the judgment of others for having said it. The First Amendment protects our right to prove ourselves to be verbal assholes without any threat of being arrested for being assholes, but it doesn’t protect us from the social consequences of being assholes. The First Amendment protects my right to speak here, to put whatever I think on Facebook or LinkedIn or some other social media site without worrying about someone from the government knocking on my door to take me away. But it doesn’t protect me from being “unfriended” or from the the impact of what I say if I should ever explicitly set out to offend someone.

I happen to love most political cartoonists—Mike Luckovich of the AJC has been a favorite of mine for years, and still is. Like what I consider a good preacher on Sunday is hired to do, I never know from cartoon to cartoon if he will have championed my opinion or surreptitiously slid in the knife, piercing my ignorant defenses, in the midst of my laughter. I’ve winced more than a few times, but it was wincing that made me think through my position on something, not to find a gun and hunt Mike down or maliciously attack his reputation with the intent of his losing his job, which is, by the way, one of the “tests” of whether when you publish something incendiary about another, it qualifies as libel or slander.

I’ve looked at some of what the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo have published. In my experience, Mike Luckovich wouldn’t stoop to it. The point is that Charlie Hebdo wasn’t blocked from publishing their cartoons and there was no threat of jailing or even a civil suit. They were a struggling satirical magazine whose circulation was shrinking, and having seen some of their stuff, I can understand. The massacre in Paris wasn’t about their exercise of freedom of speech or even satire. It was about raging jihadists for whom any life is dispensable, including their own, in service of a cause. They were simply the focal point for insanity. This isn’t about Charlie Hebdo any more than the World Trade Center attack was about the cuisine of the restaurant at the top. This is about al Qaida and terrorism.

But, lest we walk around with our noses in the air, transforming ourselves into adolescent blobs incapable of self-examination, we should remember that there was once a time in America when it was widely understood that it was evidence of ignorance, of incivility, of low upbringing to call another person’s daughter a slut or to call a person of a different racial or ethnic background a “whop” or a “spic” or that infamous “N” word in public, much less broadcast it to the heavens. There was a time when, at least by my way of thinking, it was understood by people still in touch with the inherent goodness of humans that a relationship with Jesus is a private affair, and that it is nobody else’s business to define or oversee, much less address in political cartoons. There was a time when, all other things aside, true freedom-loving patriots who understood the definition of equality resisted the temptation to mock another citizen for any reason, much less the religious figurehead of a tradition other than their own. It was a matter of respect, of decency, of honesty, not driven by political correctness or bravado or to boost newspaper circulation. It was the character of the speaker that came into question, not the subject of the rant.

I am not naive enough to think that America has ever been perfect, nor do I think we were ever a shining city on a hill, and I think we should take care with that moniker. I have a sneaking feeling that what Jesus meant when he talked about salt and light had nothing to do with self-described and unexamined superiority. American bravado these days is sadly more like the story of the emperor with no clothes. But that’s a topic for a different day.

As much as I am truly saddened by the deaths of those who went to work on Wednesday in Paris to never go home again, and as much as I continue to be struck dumb at the brutality of it all, I can’t help but wonder if Charlie Hebdo achieved what they set out to. Unlike Bill Maher, who apparently thinks freedom of speech is about the right to insult anyone and anything, I can’t help but wonder what possible good, what possible result the cartoonists expected to come of their cartoons, which Muhammed aside, had no obvious point except to insult.

Again, I make no excuse for what happened. I’m in no way saying that the cartoonists deserved what they got, anymore than on the basis of the very limited information I have, that Michael Brown deserved to be shot six times for stealing cigarillos and threatening a store owner. But the two things are unrelated. Michael Brown wasn’t shot over cigarillos. And Charlie Hebdo wasn’t shot because their publication was up for an award.

If I’m honest, I frankly don’t see a lot of difference between cartoons of the prophet Muhammed depicted in sexual orgy and the act of painting a swastika on a synagogue on Yom Kippur or burning a cross in the literal or figurative yards of black people or homosexuals. And yet those things still happen, even today, and we pretend that all is well with our souls.

Charlie Hebdo’s folks are murder victims, some of whose lives were snuffed out way too early. They were a conveniently visible focal point for an attack on the French by people who’ve lost touch with their own humanity, but they aren’t heroes anymore than Rush Limbaugh or Dan Cathy or Bill Maher.

Just because we’re free to speak doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think before we do. And perhaps, in this moment, we should consider that, having examined the profanity of what we might think in a moment of anger or fear, we are also free to choose to say nothing at all.

Vally

Mark 7:15

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The Future Past Can Be Cured

17 Dec

Over the weekend, I attended the funeral of a woman whom I held in great honor and respect because, among many other things, she was the epitome of the best of the South in which I grew up—a genuinely welcoming soul to everyone I ever witnessed her interaction with. I was close enough to her in spirit to have sat with the family at the funeral service, but at the last minute, I chose not to. Instead I sat across the aisle from the family.

When I first sat down, I was alone on the end of the pew in the chapel where the service was to be held. But soon I was surrounded by a group of women dressed in colorful hats and uniforms with badges. It took me a moment to figure it out, but the group was the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization in which the lady whose funeral it was had been an active member. Some years ago, she had become the formal or informal family archivist, as her son wrote in her obituary, and, to me, the most prominent item among the objects in her archive was a collection of letters written by an ancestor to his wife during the Civil War, on which the book Letters to Amanda was based. (It is co-written and annotated by Sam Hodges and Jeffrey Lowe, in case you’re interested in reading it, published by Mercer University Press).

The fact that my decision not to sit with the family had resulted in my being ensconced conspicuously bare-headed and badgeless amongst this colorful group struck me as humorous, but one family member thought it funny because of what she considered the irony, given the “liberal” things she has seen me post on Facebook before. I have to confess that that thought had not crossed my mind, mostly because I don’t consider what I post on Facebook as aligning with any political or other man-made group, and therefore not necessarily liberal or conservative. I am not the sum total of my opinions, mostly because they often change as new information is acquired, and although my views are dynamic, the basic principles I try to live by with respect to my fellow humans aren’t.

Granted, if you look at the political environment of the recent past, I understand why my view is seen as more liberal than conservative. There have been infinitely more opportunities for me to rebut the views of some “conservatives,” despite the fact that I consider other terms more accurately descriptive of some of those views. But, unless you’re stalking me (and free of confirmation bias), it is unlikely that you will have seen everything I post, and your assumptions about what I believe about things I haven’t written about are very likely skewed as a result.

But back to the Confederacy. In this sesquicentennial year of the march of Sherman through Atlanta, I have had reason to revisit a number of times the impact of the Civil War on my life and others of my geographic identity. Once again, arguments about states’ rights have reared their heads, this time with respect to voting procedures, same-sex marriages and learning standards.

I happen to have been born, raised and still reside in the southeastern United States. I am Southern through and through. I celebrate the fact that it is only in the South that people still pull their cars to the side of the road in honor of a passing funeral procession. It happened on Saturday even as we drove down a divided highway on the way to the cemetery, and at one turn, a man holding a sign for some sale in the strip shopping center behind him bowed his head as we passed. Excepting the gnats and mosquitoes, I’d much rather live in place that can’t justify buying a snow plow. There will never be anything to me that compares to the sound of crickets at dusk or the slamming of a wooden screen door or the melody of one-syllable words stretched into three. There will never be a more beautiful sight than a freshly plowed field of red clay mixed with beach sand from 10,000 years ago. Nothing will ever taste better than a watermelon straight from the field or peanuts boiled in brine. The history of almost 400 years is marrow in my bones.

But despite the fact that a glance at my personal ancestral history will find nothing but Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, including one who died at Gettysburg, I do not and will not swear my allegiance to the St. Andrew’s battle flag or the cause for which it stood. From 1957 when I was born to today in almost 2015, I have never been a Confederate American, an oxymoron if there’s ever been one. I am an American, period, who has spent a lifetime swearing my allegiance to a country in which people of character take credit for what they achieve and responsibility for the mistakes they make, ensuring that those mistakes are not continued. They make amends when they are proven wrong, even if the amends are simply the expression of compassion, the acknowledgment that another has been injured by something. They unite around the liberty of every citizen today, including the descendants of those enslaved or otherwise mistreated by members of their family trees, including those Americans interned during WWII and those whose reputations were besmirched by the likes of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose perverse spirit seems curiously alive in some today.

I don’t know what my attitudes or opinions would have been if I’d been born in 1857 instead of a hundred years later in the burgeoning era of the civil rights movement. I don’t know what I’d feel if it had been my uncle and not my great-great-uncle who likely died in Pickett’s Charge. But that is not the world or the country into which I was born, and many things have transpired to affect my perspective, including culturally-imposed restrictions on my gender for no rational reason–not the least of which was the fact that by virtue of having been born with two X chromosomes, I was considered a freak to have a high aptitude for math and incapable of assuming the top responsibility of spiritual leadership in the church I spent the majority of my adolescence as part of. It was only natural, I suppose, that I identified more with those who were not only prevented from eating beside me in a restaurant or studying beside me in school because they were dark-skinned and I am of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic origin, but actually beaten, tortured or murdered for daring to try and change it.

Let me hasten to say that there is nothing about the United Daughters of the Confederacy that offends me, but I’m not a member. I’m not a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, either, though I qualify via several branches. I appreciate history for its ability to illuminate why certain decisions were made by certain people at certain times under certain conditions, and the clues for decision-making today that it brings, both in choosing paths and not choosing paths based on the triumphs and mistakes of those past. One of the perks of reading Letters to Amanda for me is in getting a little closer to what it might have felt like for that soldier to be so far from home for so long and what it might have felt like to, in this case, be one of those at home who would not only never see him again, but would be denied the opportunity to lay him to rest in a known location. It gives me an idea of what it must be like for those families with MIAs from WWII and Korea and Vietnam and the Near and Middle Eastern wars in which we have involved ourselves. External things have changed, but the hearts of humans have not.

One of those characteristics of the human heart means it is not impossible for me to suffer inconvenience or to accept changes, even if it requires me to give up some privilege I have grown used to but am not entitled to, especially if it is in support of the “common defense” or “general welfare” of every American, even those who subscribe to different or no religious beliefs, manifest different skin pigmentations and hair textures than mine, or have an IQ higher or lower.

It is not impossible for me to have an opinion or belief so far removed from another’s that I cannot conceive of how he came to have it, and yet be devoted to defending his right to have it, even while resisting his decidedly undemocratic intent to make laws that favor his view over that of others who don’t share it for equally valid reasons of their own.

It is not impossible for me to quietly honor in my heart the preachers and hard-scrabble farmers from which I received my DNA and their willingness to risk death for what they believed…and still state, absolutely and unequivocally, that they were 100% wrong, that no amount of economic dependence on cotton and tobacco would ever justify what they did to African men and women kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains to this land we occupied.

Now, that in no way suggests that I condone revenge-taking for wrongs committed. Nor does it suggest that I believe there should be reparations for slavery in any financial form. The idea of placing a dollar value on a human life based on what might have been in a world as unpredictable as ours is offensive to me, whether we’re talking about the opportunity costs of the centuries-long oppression of demographically-defined groups or damages in a wrongful death suit based on projected lifetime earnings. If God loves me so much that he knows every hair on my head, then he knows every hair on the head of every human who has ever graced this earth with his or her presence, and there is nothing—including the opinions of any other humans—that can separate him or me from that love, or raise or lower our value in the eyes of the only One who matters. As Jesus said, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” The sun shines on both, too. It’s the nature of life. The people to whom reparations might have been owed and the people who arguably might have owed them are long gone. And as Queen Elizabeth I once said, “The past cannot be cured.”

But the past can be studied, the accomplishments of our ancestors honored, and the mistakes they (and we) made acknowledged for what they are. And the future past—today—can be cured in advance.

If you think those views are liberal, so be it.

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