Archive | Common Sense RSS feed for this section

What I Mourn Today

25 May

This Memorial Day, I have many thoughts wandering around in my head. The hope that I will soon be able to safely visit the Georgia National Cemetery in Canton, Georgia, and hear the new carillon play. That makes me think of my first visit to Arlington and the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, for me an experience that left me speechless then and still does, my ears ringing with the profundity of the silence. It reminds me of the late Judge Sam Lowe, who spent 11 months in a POW camp in Germany.

It also brings to my mind two other men—my great-uncle, Lieutenant Colonel Weyman Major, and my now late friend, Captain Robert “Punchy” Powell, who devoted the last years of his life to ensuring that the 352nd Fighter Group, which escorted bombers from England to Germany, and its remarkable men would be remembered.

I can go straight in my mind to Uncle Weyman’s funeral in 1967. It was the first time I saw a 21-gun salute and heard Taps played in person by a lone bugler. When he knew he was going to die, he asked to come home and be buried in a small cemetery in Cordele, Georgia, a momentous event for our small rural town. Three months before he was due for promotion to full colonel, Uncle Weyman, my grandmother’s youngest brother, died of leukemia at age 48, evacuated from his last post in Anchorage, Alaska.

Uncle Weyman enlisted in World War II and served under Gen. Mark Clark in north Africa and Italy. (Gen. Clark would later become the commandant of The Citadel in Charleston.) Uncle Weyman remained in the Army, rising as a non-commissioned officer to serve in a variety of places across the U.S. and around the world, including a mission in Korea in 1961, when the Cold War was full on and our involvement in Vietnam was first beginning. I have no evidence to support the idea, but I’ve wondered if his blood disease, unseen in anyone in my grandmother’s family before or since, was connected to one of his apparent specialties—biochemical warfare. Just a theory—we’ll likely never know.

I was only 10 when Uncle Weyman died, but from that moment, I would hold every lost soldier in my heart, according each the same sense of somberness and honor of the sacrifice—whether I agreed or not with the agenda of those who sent him or her into harm’s way.

I never got to talk with Uncle Weyman as an adult about his knowledge of things we will likely never know or his opinions of the judgment of his superiors. But, I was privileged, while working with Punchy Powell to publish a book of stories and interviews from the 352nd, film a video tour of the museum he once kept in his basement, and provide technical support for him when his sight failed him, to talk with him about a wide variety of things. I proudly drove him, along with one of his 352nd compatriots, Don Bryan, to and from the airport in Atlanta when they made their last visit to Bodney, England, the site of their airfield they flew from in 1943-44. Bless you, my beloved West “by Gawd” Virginian.

When I first met Punchy, I was a younger woman in my 40s, politically independent, but leaning left (still am). At the time, Punchy was in his mid-80s, and a registered Republican. He was an Eisenhower Republican—of no relation to the ilk of the Republican Party today. Punchy and I debated any number of issues during the hours we sat beside each other at his computer. I learned much about things I had not been taught in history class and I think he learned that the world looked somewhat different to me, a member of the generation of his children.

But one thing was the same—we both held each other in great respect. I dare say that Punchy came to love me. I certainly loved him.

Unfortunately, these men are not all I mourn today. I mourn that the very ideals they fought for are disintegrating in front of my eyes, that some large contingent of Americans—large enough to continue to defend a president who doesn’t have a clue to what respect and humility and sacrifice even mean—apparently can’t or won’t read the Bill of Rights for themselves and have the perverted sense that what all these men fought and died for was the “right” for them to have anything they want, irrespective of whether their desires impede other equally valuable, equally important citizens from getting what they need or want for themselves.

Nor do they apparently “get” the concept that if as a citizen something is their right, it is also the right of every other citizen, even those—especially those—who speak with an accent different from their own, subscribe to a different set of man-made interpretations of what “God said” or “God thinks,” have darker (or lighter) skin, or have a different set of reproductive organs—despite the fact that our brains and hearts aren’t found in our vocal chords, skin, or genitals. (Thank God that I figured that last one out early on—I had a hysterectomy in 2001 and if I’d depended on one of them to help me make the decision, I might have feared I would be undergoing an elective lobotomy.)

I can assure you that Punchy and Uncle Weyman and all of the men and women who have fought and died in dangerous parts all over the world didn’t fight so you could buy an AR-15 and parade it through a restaurant with no regard for others there. They didn’t fight and die so you could refuse to wear a mask during the epidemic of a virus for which there is neither a cure nor a vaccine. They didn’t fight and die so you could demand that Target or Walmart or Lowe’s be opened (with your AR-15 along) so you can buy a new grill to flip your hamburgers on today.

Yes, they did fight for a country whose highest ideal is freedom of personal choice, but with that freedom has always come responsibility to others. Most of them never dreamed they were dying so we could make choices with no regard at all for the impact those decisions would make on others—especially those who have no choice or ability to get out of our arrogant way. The Declaration of Independence ends with the statement, “With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” What else, pray tell, does that mean? We mutually pledge the risk of our lives, our money, and our dignity as human beings to each other. It’s mutual—you don’t get to demand my pledge to protect your rights without making the same pledge to me and vice versa.

So, today, I mourn not only for those brave humans now gone, but for the loss of the America they fought and died for. I am hopeful that those who share with me the drive to create new alternatives for living in peace and safety and liberty together will link arms together this fall and remove those from power who couldn’t give a damn about anything except themselves, many of whom I suspect would find it difficult to prove they even took a course, much less learned anything about civics or accounting or economics or administration. And leadership? Please.

But today, I am less hopeful than in years past. I am no longer as assured as I once was that we as a people are capable of achieving that outcome, because it requires a commitment to an American ideal that I have discovered even some I once knew apparently, to my despair, don’t and perhaps never shared—that when compared to the lives and safety of those around us, an annoying inconvenience is a small price to pay.

Otherwise, we spit on the graves of those who paid the ultimate price.

Tags:

Polio On My Mind

6 May

I woke up this morning thinking about polio(myelitis) and spent my first cup of coffee poking around the internet about it. If you’re around my age (which isn’t yet old enough to sacrifice myself for the good of the young, as some of you seem to think), you’ll remember getting your polio vaccine(s) as a child—via a shot in the arm and/or sugar cubes soaked in drops of the virus. The sugar cube was clearly more enjoyable. The shot left a unique scar—one I still have as you can see in the light square in the picture to the right.

There were plenty of people who, as today, either dismissed the polio virus, blamed it on some group of people somewhere, or were convinced because of some combination of ignorance and a narcissistic confidence that the God of their own faith tradition would place an invisible shield around them. I am also sure there were many willing to try anything to protect their children, who—unlike the COVID-19 virus, thankfully—seemed to be most vulnerable to polio.

What made me go looking are the increasing groans from some that it could be as much as 18 months before a vaccine for COVID-19 is created and tested. And the indignation of those inclined to dismiss the danger of a novel virus and demand that we go back to “normal” immediately, bringing their handguns and AR-15s to legislative buildings like the mobs they are. As if we could return to a time when over 70,000 (and rising) of us in the U.S. alone were alive.

I get it. We humans feel best when we have a sense of control, of power over the negative consequences of things we encounter—large or small. It’s why people—ignorant by virtue of a lack of access or understanding of the advances of science—reach for their holy books in search of cut-and-dried rules or follow equally ignorant leaders in their pulpits or governments.

I use the term “ignorant” here, not as an epithet as it is too often used in our political discourse, but as it was basically and originally defined: lacking knowledge, information, or awareness about a particular thing. We are ALL ignorant about thousands of things. I know a fair amount about a few things—psychological testing and statistics, programming and computer software, book editing and publishing—but I am ignorant when it comes to everything from the laws of thermodynamics to how to identify which snakes are poisonous to how the engine of my 2015 Hyundai Elantra works, much less how to fix it. I am eternally grateful that I live in an age where, for virtually everything that touches me that I know nothing about, there are people who do—and that, for the most part, I can tell who they are and who they aren’t. I am a walking example of the old adage: “The more I know, the more I know I don’t know.”

I do know this: It was scientific research—most notably that of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who developed the shot and the sugar cube vaccines, respectively—that ultimately tamed the polio virus. And it will be scientific research that will tame this one and the host of other novel viruses that may erupt in the future. But these days, it will take up to 18 months, not six decades. (The first recorded polio epidemic in the U.S. was in 1894.)

We must listen to our experts in public health, infectious diseases, and epidemiology. They are telling us how to begin to take control, not only to curb and reduce the sickness and death, but to speed up our ability to safely reopen our businesses and put people back to work.

Although I am a “high risk” person for COVID-19, over the age of 60 and diabetic for starters, I am not unconcerned about the economic fallout of extended “shelter at home” ordinances. In the recent Great Recession, I lost, as did many, the financial security of a lifetime of work that I will not likely recover. But we cannot protect the majority of those who are vulnerable and return to any level of normalcy until every municipality, every county, rural or urban, Democratic or Republican, can test everyone. Neither random sampling nor testing only those with symptoms, although better than nothing, won’t do the job with any speed or efficiency.

If we can mobilize businesses to create ventilators and masks, we can mobilize laboratories across the nation to create test kits for “Do you have it?” and “Are you now immune?” and PPE for health professionals to administer them. We can use the census data from 2010, notwithstanding the current census in process, to know exactly how many test kits to send where. Databases exist to store everything from what you just ordered on the internet to the details of your last tax return. And we have airlines, delivery services, trucking firms and the U.S. Post Office, that could mobilize to get them to the ends of the earth. The ship of “containment” has sailed, but the ship of protecting as many as possible—both workers and customers, who are the only true drivers of the economy—hasn’t.

I am chagrined that in the United States of America, which produced the scientists who stopped polio in its tracks—scientists who were, by the way, both of Hebrew ethnicity, one the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, the other an immigrant himself—has apparently disintegrated into a ship of fools, pitied by friends who once looked to us for leadership, and led by—at the very least—an ignorant man who, like the emotional infant he is, craves and demands praise for cleaning up the very messes he has made while blaming them on everyone but himself.

And yet, amazingly, I am still hopeful. Most of us will survive and a new morning will come—because thinking people who know what they know and know what they don’t know will continue to do what they have to do to move through and on. I may be among those who survive. I may not. But no matter what, until the new Salks and Sabins appear, I will practice the three “W”s. I will wear my masks, I will wait six feet away to peruse the meat counter in the grocery store until the person already there is done, and I will wash my hands.

And, if you can’t do the same while waiting for 18 months to see something our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents waited six decades for, all I can say besides, “Please stay away from me,” is “Bless your heart.”

Thank You…COVID-19?

3 May

Intrigued by the title of a book by the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, I read it when it came out in 2016. An occasional reader of Friedman’s column because I’m interested in technology and globalization, I wondered what Thank You for Being Late could possibly mean.

In short, the title came from an incident in which someone with whom Friedman was scheduled to meet didn’t arrive on time. On this particular day, rather than huff and puff at the offending friend’s disrespect for his time—which is a more common response than most of us are willing to admit in our previously over-scheduled days—Friedman had used the time to pause and reflect on the possibilities and dangers inherent in the chaotically accelerating speed with which new technologies were becoming available and globalization of the marketplaces was becoming further entrenched. The possibilities are mind-boggling, but the dangers too. The evidence is that humans have not evolved as quickly, i.e., are not cognitively or emotionally equipped to adapt with equal speed to the changes. The title, as well as the content of the book, was a call for us to slow down for a moment ourselves and contemplate the meaning and purpose of our lives in the midst of the malaise.

Having grown up in a rural community attending a small Southern Baptist church largely populated with the farming families, I immediately thought of the wisdom of the Sabbath. It was easier in those days—I’m old enough to remember when shopping on Sundays was virtually impossible because store owners took their Sabbaths as well. Except for mom-and-pop shops in both rural and suburban towns, and folks like Truett Cathy, whose commitment to Sabbath is still demonstrated by the closure of Chick-Fil-A restaurants on Sundays, the adoption of the custom has disappeared from the landscape largely. Until now.

Predictably, as with the full transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, which Friedman estimates took 30 years, we humans aren’t built for ongoing, ever-increasing change. Although Moore’s law of technology (which basically codified a rate of technological advances that rendered new discoveries obsolete in 1.5 to 2 years) continues—what number iPhone or Android are you carrying now?—it still takes humans about 15 years to move from the “early adopter” stage to full integration of new products and services.

We can’t keep up the pace, blindly moving forward and struggling to hold on to the tail of the tiger. Nor should we want to. We need time to think, to process, to determine if the tail we have wrapped our white-knuckled fingers around indeed belongs to the right tiger for us.

I don’t know why we have to have an event like 9/11 or a worldwide pandemic to bring us to a screeching halt. But here we are, and in many ways, I’m thankful. The coronavirus, like Friedman’s colleague late to the meeting, has forced us to stop. We can use it to panic, to demonstrate our inherent selfishness like those who early on hoarded toilet tissue and now some, with even guns in hand, who suggest that they are the centers of our universe—and that our First Amendment rights include the right to go to Target, their favorite pawn shop or tavern, or in-person church service, no matter whose inalienable right to life is violated in the process.

Or we can take a breath, assess our surroundings, and reflect. In the Lord’s Prayer, when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” I’m convinced it was a double entendre. I’m sure he probably meant us to pray for guidance in securing our basic needs for food and water, but I don’t think he was just talking about “Nature’s Own” or “Sara Lee” or the goods from the bakery downtown. After all, he’s the one who, according to the story of his time in the desert, also said, “Man does not live by bread alone.”

We have a chance here to reevaluate what we’ve been focusing our time and energies on, to reconnect on a personal level with those we love and even with those we used to just pass in the hall at work with—via amazing technologies like Zoom and its peers that were little more than ideas less than 15 years ago. And an opportunity to revisit the tigers whose tails we’ve grabbed.

Despite the fact that we were brought to this place kicking and screaming, together, we can be the change we desperately need.

Proud to Have Marched in D.C.

24 Jan

I was—for me, as many can attest to—relatively silent about my general feelings during the run-up to the recent presidential inauguration. I started several times to blog but changed my mind, struggling to put into words the roiling of my emotions, which have ranged from peaceful observation to mourning to anger to an almost daily consideration of what I would accept in silence and what I would speak out against.

For most of my adult life, I have had no problem discerning what I saw as my responsibilities as a Christian and those as an American citizen. Fortunately, they have not often come into conflict with each other, but the course of recent events have presented many opportunities to do battle in my head over what I consider to be “right” actions and what I consider not to be. Because I am Christian first, and will always be no matter where in the world I pitch my temporary tent, the first question I ask is how, if at all, I see the thoughts and actions of Jesus applying to whatever is happening around me, and then I try to think about things the way he would and act in that way. So, when the march came up, I asked Jesus what he would do. How would it look through his eyes? What would he be looking at? And what, if anything, would he do, based on that vision?

Let me hasten to say that, in asking the question, I am not inviting you to chime in with your version of what Jesus would do because what you think Jesus wants me to do is not even remotely relevant. Nor is what Franklin Graham or Pat Roberson or Mike Huckabee or the Bishop of Western North Carolina, the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope says. I can read and think and talk for myself—I’ve never studied from other people’s notes and it has turned out well for me. If Jesus had any message to the fellow 1st-century members of his tribe, it was that they didn’t have to go to the temple and follow what the priests said about buying doves and lambs to find out from the priests what God said or wanted them to do. (As an aside, that’s why Caiaphas and his lieutenants conspired to have Jesus killed by the Romans and told lies about him, e.g., that he was engaged in a jihad against the Romans.)

For me, to “believe in Jesus” as yet another bottleneck to reach God flies in the face of that message. For me, “I am the way, the truth, the life,” Aramaic idiom that it is, means that emulating the life that he lived, assuming the mindset through which he viewed himself and those around him, and treating myself and others as he treated himself and those around him would bring me peace and set me free. Not from the experience of pain, but from ever thinking God wouldn’t love me if I didn’t follow a bunch of cockamamie rules made up by someone else.

Now, what does any of this have to do with the fact that I marched in the Women’s March on Washington this past Saturday? Well, when asked how to tell a false prophet from a true one, Jesus said to observe the fruit of his labor. And I have.

For starters, the Jesus I’ve read about and talked to and tried for most of my life to think and act like never once “grabbed a pussy” whose owner hadn’t consented for it to be grabbed. He was poor, apparently by choice, as we assume his earthly father Joseph had involved him in carpentry but he’d chosen not to stay in the family business and stiff the people who helped him build it. (He also said something about rich guys having a really hard time entering the kingdom of heaven, too, so I suspect he was avoiding the temptation of wealth.) He gave up being a homeowner in Nazareth, rode in other people’s boats, and developed a nasty habit of eating with people who might easily today wear rings in their noses and dye their hair blue or whatever styles you or I might think despicable. And, God forbid, he even ran around with people who took tax money and gave it to the government or other people and sometimes even kept it for themselves (think Matthew and Zaccheus).

He dared to intercede to keep a single pregnant woman (How exactly do you think they caught her in adultery? I doubt they blasted into another man’s compound and dragged her out of bed) from being stoned to death (the baby would have been killed too) and he dared to suggest that a Samaritan (translate Mexican or Muslim or libtard or alt-right, for our purposes) was the true neighbor in a story — not the priest or the “pure” assistant to the priest (Levite). He mocked none of the disabled he met constantly along the way. And when unjustly arrested because of the lies some of the Pharisees and Sadducees told, he didn’t “hit back harder,” and then justify his behavior with Orwellian “doublespeak.”

So, in the face of that, when I said to Jesus, “What should I do?” he said, “Stand up for love.” I asked him if he’d be there, and he said yes. For the record, he also said he had upcoming engagements in south Georgia because a big storm was coming where he would be needed, with some Syrian refugees in Turkey, in the hospital where a young couple was about to lose a pregnancy, and at a bar in Green Bay where someone was just about to bet all of his family’s rent money on a football game.

If you have a problem with that, you’ll have to take it up with Jesus.

John 21:18-22. 18 Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” 19 Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, “Follow me!” 20 Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. (This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said, “Lord, who is going to betray you?”) 21 When Peter saw him, he asked, “Lord, what about him?” 22 Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? …”

Vally

P.S. I can’t tell you who spoke at the march or what they said. I can’t tell you how many groups supporting god knows what there were. But I can tell you that for a few hours, I stood with the kindest, most polite, most diverse group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience and got a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.

One Night

9 Jul
It was 11:30 p.m. during the summer of 2008. I had just left a committee meeting at my church in suburban Atlanta and was driving home on Jimmy Carter Boulevard in my 1999 Jeep Grand Cherokee, which I was holding together with baling wire. The left rear tail light and turn signal was temperamental, as has been true of many, I would learn later. So much so that I had taken to checking the turn signal before I backed out of the driveway, and getting out and banging on the light until it worked. In the weeks prior, the Jeep had also begun to suddenly idle too low and shut off when I stopped at traffic lights, and on this particular night at the entrance to the bridge from Norcross toward Lilburn, it did it again. For those familiar with this intersection then (it has been completely redone since then), it would not be a good place for a woman alone to break down, so I prayed that it would start again.
A victim of the Recession (which frankly still isn’t over for me or for a substantial number of others I know, despite the stock market buoyancy), the stress of the financial challenges I faced was high and I was, frankly, exhausted in addition to being tightly wound.
Thankfully, the car started, and when the light turned green, I pulled away, only to look in my rearview mirror and see flashing lights. After crossing the bridge, I turned right onto McDonough and came to a stop. The police cruiser followed and pulled in behind me.
I assumed that it was the light, and started to get out of the car, only to hear the police officer scream at me to get back in the car. I complied. He walked to the passenger side of my car and I let down the window. He asked to see my license and insurance card, the former of which I had already removed from my purse. Glancing at the insurance card, I saw that it had expired a month before and I started looking in the console and glove compartment just in case I had just failed to put the new card in my wallet—but I had a sinking feeling that in my ongoing juggling of funds, I’d forgotten to pay it for the first time I could remember in 20 years.
The moment I reached for the console, the officer started screaming at me to keep my hands in view. I saw that his hand was on his holster and I stopped searching for a moment. Because I could see his face in the streetlight’s glow, I knew the Hispanic-American man was young enough to be my son, and I reacted like a mother with a kid who was out of control. With my hands in front of me, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Officer,” I said. “Officer, stop!”
I guess it surprised him, because he did stop yelling, and I was able to explain that I was trying to find my insurance card. I handed him the one from my wallet, explaining that I knew it was not the new card, and picked up my cellphone to call GEICO, which fortunately had agents on call 24/7. While he was checking it via his dash computer, I confirmed that I had, in fact, failed to pay the last premium, and proceeded to pay the bill with a credit card right then and there. I asked the agent if she would speak to the officer, she agreed, and I got out of the car and started back to hand him the phone.
Once again, he jumped out of his car, screaming for me to get back in my Jeep. I stopped and held up the cellphone, telling him that my insurance agent was on the line and would confirm that I had just paid my bill and was now insured again.
It took some doing, but I convinced him to talk with her and he did. He initially told me that I would not be able to drive the car home, but relented and gave me a ticket. Shaking, I took the ticket and my cellphone, thanked the officer for his allowing me to go on home, and got back in the driver’s seat.
I have been reminded of that incident several times this week, but especially in relation to the police shooting in Minnesota.
When it happened, I was in my early 50s. I’ve wondered several times what might have happened had I been carrying a concealed weapon. I wonder what might have happened if I had had a gun and had disclosed it to the officer. I wonder what might have happened if I had had a gun and had NOT disclosed it to the officer.
And I know, with a certainty, that because I’m a white woman, the answer to what might have happened is…exactly what did.
Had I been black, I’m not as certain. Had I been both male and black, I’m not certain at all. The officer was scared—it was late, it was dark, there was no one else around. I was scared—it was late, it was dark, there was no one else around. And though I am white and female, the potential for a life-changing event for the both of us existed for a few excruciating seconds. But I know that because I am white and female, the idea that I might have been shot to death or otherwise brutally treated never crossed my mind.
As a person who once was a counselor, I know of the poor judgment we are all capable of when we are panicked. And I know what we are capable of when we deal with each other as human beings—responsible, compassionate, understanding human beings. It wasn’t the officer’s fault that I had financial problems and had forgotten to pay my insurance, nor was he responsible for responding to me without holding me accountable for my failure. I was guilty as charged. Nor was it my fault that because of the nature of our increasingly uncivil society, the officer felt he had to protect himself by expecting to be shot during a traffic stop rather than expecting to find a person with emotional maturity sitting behind the wheel of that broken-down Jeep.
But it was what it was, and on that night eight years ago, what should happen between two human beings in a confrontational situation did. And it does every day all over the United States between people of all persuasions. And it will continue to be so if we keep our heads and treat each other with the respect we all deserve.
But only if.
Vally

“Low and Outside” is still more likely

30 Mar
One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies goes something like this: “Look for low and outside…but watch out for in your ear.” I think of it often when something happens that I was “sure” wouldn’t happen, and I am reminded of the fragility of our perceptions of anything that’s going on around us. There’s always something, some detail we either missed or couldn’t have known about a circumstance—even in one-to-one relationships—that might have had us looking for “in your ear.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought a couple madly in love, only to hear later that they’re engaged in a nasty divorce. Or the times when I’ve been totally blindsided by people I worked with because I was “sure” they understood what I was saying and why. Once or twice, it has resulted in my losing not just a job but a relationship I valued. I was looking for “low and outside,” and totally missed the signs that the ball was coming for my ear. The damage done me required that, for a while after, to protect myself from further injury, I switched what I was looking for. In other words, I began just to look for “in my ear.” It was easier to avoid getting hurt again.
You’ll notice, perhaps, that I didn’t say that I switched to looking for “in my ear,” but watching out for “low and outside.” That’s because we humans don’t usually work that way. At times, I wonder how many relationships and situations I’ve avoided that would have enriched my life beyond measure, all because I forgot to look for “low and outside.”
There’s a video parading around the internet about a Georgia teacher, who has now resigned over what has been called abuse of a special needs child. And another, of Donald Trump’s campaign manager, allegedly attacking a female reporter. There are multitudes of them, all posted as examples, posted by self-righteous people with unknown, though sometimes obvious, agendas of accusation of others of hideous crimes. What pops into my mind are the not only posted but edited videos, like those presented as “evidence” of Planned Parenthood’s evil. Thankfully, in that case, “evil” has been shown more in the subterfuge of pretense by the videographers than of Planned Parenthood itself. At least, that’s what the grand jury, who was there to observe the evidence, concluded.
Whether I happen to pop onto Facebook or a friend/acquaintance sends me an email with a link, I usually go and try to look at the videos with “fresh eyes,” as unencumbered as possible by the “pre-introductions” and headlines that are transparently intended to influence the way I or anyone who views them…well, views them. I’m human, so I don’t always succeed, but I do try. I sometimes avoid sharing memes and articles and videos because I look to see who the original posters are and decide that I don’t want to be automatically associated with a group by a particular name or I get a few paragraphs in and see that the author is neither promoting an independent journalistic perspective or fails to distinguish between factual news and editorial opinion.
I’ve always been so inclined. I don’t know if that’s because, as a student, I never studied from other people’s notes or if it’s because I am a psychological diagnostician by training or if it’s because I have found myself many times on the wrong side of other’s perceptions and beliefs. I would guess that the practice comes from all three, but especially the last. The perceptions that find their way into action that attempts to discriminate against, humiliate, or ignore the feelings or validity of the perceived have the longest-lasting effects—perpetuating the insult exponentially.
But back to the videos. When I watched the video of the teacher whose life has now been immutably changed, I understand how someone could, under the influence of headlines, “see” abuse. But I also understand that, when my hands are full, I use my knee or elbow to do things. I learned as a child in south Georgia how to handle gnats around my eyes by blowing up with my lips, for instance. In other words, I can also see a teacher with her hands full, coming around a door to go into a classroom, encountering a child in the doorway, and nudging him to move forward with her knee. I can also imagine, because it has happened to me, that a child whose balance is not perfectly set, could fall forward–especially if he wasn’t expecting the nudge. Maybe he was a child who often stood on the outside of things, afraid to go in, and needed a nudge. Maybe the “nudge” was harder than the teacher intended. We don’t see what happened afterward, but allegedly, there was another adult just inside the door who reached to help the child, who stood up and went into the room, followed by the teacher with her hands full.
I’m not saying that it wasn’t exactly as it was presented by the original poster. Maybe this is an outrageously abusive teacher who should’ve been gone long ago. But a five second video observed objectively can’t give us any of the information we need to determine what really happened. A glance on Facebook or YouTube can’t. We have juries of 12 people in most criminal court cases, and have for many years, simply because one person’s view, even of two people standing side-by-side observing the very same event, can be vastly different for reasons we can’t possibly know. We hope that a majority will see something about the event in the same way, and that majority will come closer to the truth of the matter. But in the court of Facebook and YouTube, a teacher is now forever guilty in the minds of some of something she may have done, but more importantly, also may not have. She’s lost her livelihood, her vocation, her ability to contribute, based on her own professional training, to the learning of someone’s child with developmental problems.
The same thing is true of Donald Trump’s campaign manager. I’ve watched that video several times too, and what I see is something that probably could’ve been solved by a simple apology—after the fact, because it doesn’t appear to me that Corey Lewandowski even knew he had done it until later. I suspect he was focused on getting Trump out of the room to safety. Remember the breach of the secure perimeter at an earlier rally? The assassination of Bobby Kennedy as he strolled through a crowd in a hotel?
Let me hasten to say that I find Donald Trump to be nothing but a classic narcissist who if elected president would bring unparalleled incompetence at governance (and that’s saying something, given today’s Congress) and bring down on us more potential for attack from the outside than any other candidate. And Corey Lewandowski, as Trump’s campaign manager, would be an accessory to the crime of helping to bring it about. But when I look at the video of the incident with the Breitbart reporter, the possibility that it was simply a function of a reporter’s being in the wrong place at the right time seems more likely. I got a bruise on my arm when I was standing near a sidewalk at the BellSouth Classic Golf Tournament a few years ago waiting to see Phil Mickelson go from a green to the next tee. People have died in stampedes at soccer games—should we search the videos to see just who stepped on them and file wrongful death suits on their behalves?
Stop. Think. Breathe. Don’t believe anything unless it resonates with you, and be careful to check why it resonates with you. Make sure that it isn’t bound in a cemented view already in place that somebody else you’ve never even met told you was true. Make sure that just because someone black in a hoodie stole a TV from your neighbor, your wife left you for another man (or woman), a police officer shot a kid with a toy gun in the next town over, a deranged person who happens to be a (Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew, you fill in the blank) blows himself up in Pakistan or Beirut or Boston—that you don’t indict, try and convict every black person, every woman, every reporter, every police officer and anyone born into a particular faith as guilty solely on the basis of a single characteristic. Look for more evidence. Because once you throw a pitch at somebody else’s head, you’ve created a whole new reality…for them, and for you.
As I said, I know it’s hard when you’ve been ignored, humiliated, called stupid or aloof or arrogant or condescending, or treated as if you are 3/5ths of a person. But before you react, before you share, before you retaliate, check first to see if maybe you’re looking for “in your ear,” and forgetting that “low and outside” is far more likely. And no matter what that Facebook post and the National Enquirer seem to suggest, it still is.
We have a choice over how we view everything, even our lives. Why we seem not to choose the view that causes us and others the least damage…I don’t know.
But here’s to low and outside. If it turns out to be in my ear…so be it.
V