Extraordinary People
I first posted the piece below on my old blog on September 11, 2015. I had been watching the Republican primaries with an increasing feeling of dread. I knew history well enough to recognize the silhouette of three ancient, gnarled dragons, old heralds of the curse of Babylon, rearing their ugly heads: nationalism, racism, and a divided field. These three things are not new to the world and have never lead to anything good, only intense suffering. I knew -perhaps its more like I accepted - the threat before many others. I also knew that no one would hear or believe me if I spoke my concerns out loud. (This is a theme that has repeated throughout my life.) This blog post was my attempt to indirectly say what was worrying my heart.
I posted my first political comment on Facebook in December of 2015, just two months after I wrote this. I never dreamed I would be outspoken online. I never dreamed I would feel like I should speak up, certainly not against my own party. It was not even possible to my imagination until that year. I felt a growing responsibility to do so, as I saw that speaking out was too costly, too anxiety-inducing, or just flat out impossible for others. I was born loquacious and made somewhat fearless by circumstances beyond my control, but I did not court controversy online before 2015. Not once. This is as close as I’d ever come to making a strong public political statement online. But it wouldn’t take long for me to find my voice.
As the months went by, I saw my private fear manifest in a screeching, fire-breathing reality. I began to see a wave of power silencing men and women of good character, even when I knew they were privately dismayed. The minimizing, denying, and rationalizing had already begun. Some of us know the signs better than others. A type of goodness I had long admired was in retreat and a type of evil I knew too well - that of a man corrupted by a habit of abusing power - was advancing. We’ve heard there is a banality to evil; there is also a repetitive, even boring pattern to it.
I still find this veiled, timid first attempt to name the darkness I saw, lurking at the horizon, affecting and true. I dearly hope the sentiment expressed within it comes to pass. I hope that we can find each other again as a nation, to long for the best for one another even when we disagree. Regardless of the outcome tomorrow, I will continue to speak. I have found my voice and I trust my heart better now than I did five years ago. I don’t fear being disbelieved anymore. I never truly feared being discredited.
Once you’ve seen how quickly the dragons can descend, it is impossible to doubt where and when the red lines are crossed. It’s always further back in the process, in the early days, when you are not quite certain what is happening. The confusion is what creates the opportunity. I know this present moment began back in 2015, at the very beginning of the election cycle. We let the beasts in ourselves when we did not hold one man to the same standard of decency and honor we had pledged was required to serve. Our boundary was crossed. The grooming had begun. It’s an old story repeated at an enormous scale.
But hope and escape are always possible. These dragons can be slayed. I know that truth as well as I know the signs of the gathering darkness. The best way to find that escape is to call the darkness by its real name. Once you name it, you will be able to slay it.
***
“…a gaping hole in the World Trade Center.”
Those were the first words I heard that day, on the radio when my alarm went off.
I remember standing in the living room with one of my roommates, watching live as the second plane hit. We both screamed. I remember the eerily quiet skies from grounded planes, barely any students on campus, how the music building had turned on televisions in every hall so people could hear the latest news.
I remember the “helpers”, as Mister Rogers would call them, most of all. Images of ordinary people, called to extraordinary action that day. People longed to help, were eager, despite how little they knew about what had happened, what might happen next. It was amazing to watch.
The men in those planes were also ordinary people doing something extraordinary, so to speak. Some called them heroes for what they did. That was their truth, born of decades of complex struggles and increasing tension that found no release. It was ugly, deadly, and futile thinking: ordinary people murdering other ordinary people, leading to decades of more death and war.
Human beings are capable of incredible evil and incredible good. That contradiction, that bizarre truth, was indelibly written into my heart that day, embodied by both the terrorists and the “helpers”. People don’t like that notion, tend to think we are all basically good, or they make black/white distinctions between the “good” and the “bad”. But I can’t agree with those overly simplistic explanations. History argues violently against both a humanist point of view and that wretched false dichotomy of the “good” and the “bad”. It points, rather emphatically, toward a tension or contradiction instead, where we each have a serious potential for harm or for good residing in our hearts. The potential to harm is far more potent than anyone is comfortable admitting.
To know this reality is to know something about the world which can thoroughly alter how you live in it. You stop seeing people as good or bad, including yourself. I think it softens your eyes, as you understand the fight happening in the hearts and minds of ordinary people dealing with a complicated world. We choose, almost hour by hour, paths that lead to degrees of evil or enable degrees of good, and those incidences can be small to start. That is how we are best deceived.
“The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
I think we all see the anger and divisions growing over domestic politics and contrasting ideologies. Some avoid it and others are right in the thick of it. Be careful, y’all. And think…please.
We are a pluralist society. We will have to choose each other to survive. If you want to see that happen, then look first to your own heart. Avoid cheap insults or hyperbole always. Think; stop reacting. Edit these words from your vocabulary if you are only capable of using them as pejoratives: Liberal, Conservative, Gay, Christian, Atheist, Muslim, Communist, Capitalist, Immigrant. Find common ground with people you don’t like, which is a time consuming and messy business, as you will have to bother to talk to them (the horror!). Get in that mess, take the time. Work through problems as much as you can; don’t dismiss or run away. Strive for empathy like your life depended on it because one day, it might.
The surest way to walk a path that is evil is to see yourself as the hero and someone else as the enemy. Heroism is something you are called out to do, something thrust upon you. The “helpers”. It makes someone move towards people, not away; into clouds of debris and difficulty, not out. If your “good” alienates, divides, or hatefully slanders* others – yes, including those whose view of the world you hate, especially them – then your “good” looks more like the terrorists and not at all like the “helpers”.
That September day taught me that ordinary people can be moved to do the extraordinary, whether for good or for ill, and that such an experience would not feel or look like a movie. The music will not swell for the good guys and the violins screech for the bad. My heart, like all human hearts, is not immune to the bad.
Be mindful of your hearts, y’all, for you never know what the day will bring.
* Slander and legitimate critique are not the same. The former does incredible damage and is usually done apart from the object of the slander. It is moving away from it’s object. The latter invites a response, dialogue, and relationship. It is moving toward it’s object.
