To Jeff Blackburn
"Make America civil again!"
We need civility more than ever. Social media has given people a shot of digital courage to say things to others they would never say to their faces, to call them cuss words and idiots because they don't agree with them. What happened to a thing called propriety? What about the idea of holding back? Running one's thoughts through a filter? And if what you feel like saying is going to escalate hostilities, letting it go? Nobody can do this 100 percent of the time. We're human beings, we're going to argue, we're going to fight. In person and online, I'm afraid. But shouldn't we try to minimize that and shouldn't we be the bigger person and say "sorry" when we've crossed over the line?
It sounds simple. It's not. I believe we have a moral responsibility to speak out against bullying, bigotry, injustice and that kind of thing. I think passivity in the face of those things is wrong. Anger, I think, is sometimes justified. Righteous indignation. I don't think we have to necessarily always be nice, respectful maybe (I'm not sure), but not always nice. And I think some fights are worth taking on because some things are worth fighting for. Some things aren't. It's subjective, and probably no two people are going to agree on where the line is, but shouldn't we still ask the question? Should we contemplate it?
But it gets even more complicated. What do you do when your uncle says something racist at the Thanksgiving table? I used to experience this when my former father-in-law would go on a rant about Muslims or the border wall or hating on Democrats at every family function we had. I like the guy, but I don't like his politics one bit. So I had to ask myself if it was worth calling out his racism. This was a volatile guy with no filter who lived off yelling at people's faces and had been known to get violent. Did I want to risk pissing him off, getting the cops called and ruining my kid's birthday? I opted to abstain from challenging the guy, or challenging his racism. It wasn't worth it in my opinion. In another venue it might've been, but not there. It sucks, having to always be the bigger person, but sometimes you have to do it.
It says in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes that there's a time to speak and a time to be silent. It doesn't say when those times are. That's one of the places where the Bible becomes a book of questions, rather than answers. We have to use our own discernment and wisdom we only acquire with age and through trial and error.
I thought to myself I wouldn’t say anything political on Facebook anymore. It's divisive on its face. But then I thought, wait a minute. What if I want to say something about climate change? Racism? Women's rights? I don't think of those as political issues. They seem universal to me. Doesn't everyone care about the environment, the planet? Don't we all agree that racism is bad? Wouldn't any reasonable person want women to be treated as fairly as men? Aren't these universal principles that go back to things like the Golden Rule? I definitely wouldn't think these would be partisan issues. You'd think both parties would want to raise all ships, but have different philosophies on how to get there. If you actually believe that's happening, though, you're living in a fantasy land.
Of course, this is nothing new. America today is a lot like it was 100 years ago in terms of racism and xenophobia. Today, politicians stir Americans' hatred of Latinos and people of Middle Eastern heritage. In the 1920s it was Italians, Poles, Jews and Asian people. "Communist" and "socialist are hate words of this generation just as they were in those days of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's "red raids" following the end of World War I, just as they would be in the McCarthy era of the '50s.
You'd think 100 years later, we'd more evolved.
I don't go for trolls (that's a good name for them) who go on other people's social media with comments like, "You're fucking brainwashed." Even if I disagree with someone, even if they (gasp) love Trump, it's their right to say what they want. However, I can think of one time when I was a troll although I'm kind of proud of that. Someone said on Facebook that Barack Obama should be "hung from a tree." "You like the idea of hanging people," I responded. "Especially certain kinds of people, huh?" He responded by calling me a "fucking retard," which is a slur on developmentally disabled people. That was the only thing I found offensive about an insult that I otherwise laughed off. I had a relative who was born with Down's Syndrome.
I said I'm not sure if respect is required 100 percent of the time. I'm just thinking of the Gospels where Jesus called the hypocritical religious leaders of his day a "generation of vipers" and said, "You come from your father, the devil." I believe we can (and should) call out the religious leaders of our day who fleece people and twists Christ's message of love into an agenda of hate. But I think we have to be careful not to become the thing we hate. If one were to make an overgeneralization - "Christians are a bunch of hypocritical, hateful people" - isn't that a form of bigotry? There is no one monolithic Christian body. There is no monolithic Islam or anything else.
Then there's that story from the Gospels where the money changers turned the temple into a "den of thieves" and Jesus overturned the tables and chased them out the door with a whip he'd fashioned. Of course, he was Jesus. I don't know anybody who could harness that much anger, express it while keeping control.
I’ve often found I can defuse potential conflict by responding to something rude with something nice. That’s from advice I take from the Bible: “A soft answer turneth away wrath; But a grievous word stirreth up anger.” (ASV) - Proverbs 15:1.
It’s a lot to think about, but shouldn’t we - shouldn’t I - think before speaking? I think there’s a time to avoid conflict, a time to defuse it and a time to meet it with assertiveness. Even a time to be angry. We’re never going to get it perfect as long as we’re human beings, but we’ve gotta try. We’ve gotta do something.