Fighting for justice without giving in to hatred is an extremely difficult moral challenge
[An excerpt from the December 2014 Newsletter]
Wherever you pitch your tent in our politically and socially divided land, and whatever holiday you celebrate in the last weeks of the year, I extend my warmest thoughts to you for an enjoyable season and a healthy and peaceful New Year.
For us, the holiday is Christmas. I like the lights and the music and the traditions, and I've always liked the stories associated with the religious aspect of the season - Christ's humble birth, the mysterious intuition of the three wise men, angels and shepherds and happy new parents who are also, maybe, a little bit afraid. Of course, our crazy commercial appetites have taken the wise men's reverent generosity and turned it into things like the stampedes on Black Friday and the financial pressures of showing our kids we love them by showering them with the gift-of-the-year and assorted other things nobody really needs.
But somehow, within the foolishness of all that, I am able to hold onto a scrap of quiet satisfaction. I was raised among generous, fun-loving relatives and I like giving things to people I care about. I don't mind the holiday gatherings as much as I used to. Food, family, friends, a glass of vodka, time off from work for most of us - it's hard to be a Scrooge about those things.
Not so hard to be Scroogish about, or at least upset by, the news in the latter part of this year. However you look at the events in Ferguson, Staten Island, and Cleveland, it's obvious that, so many years after the abolition of slavery, we haven't yet been able to make a true, deep, and lasting peace across the national racial divide. Of late, I've also been more aware than usual of the male-female divide, the liberal-conservative divide, the rich-poor divide, and of a swelling tide of anger in the country I care so much about.
"Why so angry?" Rinpoche asks Otto in Breakfast with Buddha, and I've been pondering that same question a lot these days.
Are there legitimate grievances involved, real reasons for anger in those areas?
Yes, obviously and of course.
Is violent anger and hatred productive? Does it actually move us in a direction of addressing those grievances?
I don't think so.
I think it deepens the divides - all of them - alienates the "Other", whoever that other might be, and while it seems, in the moment, a perfectly legitimate outlet for the frustration that comes from generations of inequity, I don't see any evidence that violence, fury, divisive speech, revenge, or hatred moves us so much as a millimeter in the direction of a just, peaceful, harmonious society.
I'm not advocating the idea that if we all simply smile at each other everything will be fine.
Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, the brave Soviet/Russian dissidents of years past and times present, workers who risked and sometimes lost their lives so that we'd have decent wages and safe working conditions, women who broke old stereotypes so that - for one small example - my daughters are now able to participate in sports programs and aspire to every kind of career and lifestyle - they are all examples of people who had real grievances and who found the courage to stand up and bring about change.
But when those movements toward fairness take on a cargo of hatred or divisiveness, my own sympathy for the cause is eroded.
Fighting for justice without giving in to hatred is an extremely difficult moral challenge. I listen to talk radio sometimes on my late-night trips home from a speaking event, and the mockery, ridicule, name-calling, divisiveness, convenient bending of the truth, and brutally one-sided thinking makes me have to wrestle with my own anger. It makes the Loud Ones feel good, that kind of talk. There's often the stink of the bully to it, the urge for power, victory, vengeance, the need to have an Enemy. There's a satisfaction in feeling that you and your cronies are right, and that the oppressive Other is the cause of every wrong.
I try, in my own work and despite my own failings, to be a force acting against all of that. I have white characters marrying black characters ( In Revere, In Those Days) and loving brown characters (Leaving Losapas). I have people with old-school mindsets struggling to be open to the full humanity of a homosexual child (Revere Beach Boulevard). I have caring and strong men and brave handicapped women (A Little Love Story). I have people struggling with addiction (The Return). I have Jesus coming to earth and running for president on a platform that tries to respect both right and left and foster dialogue (American Savior). I have strong women (Fidel's Last Days, Vatican Waltz, A Russian Requiem) and people trying to climb out of the grip of abuse and poverty (The Talk-Funny Girl). I have, I hope, open-minded and respectful discussions about spirituality (Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner with Buddha), and I try to put in a measure of humor (Golfing with God, Taking the Kids to Italy, The Italian Summer, and others) because humor can be medicine for the sometimes self-righteous attitudes that plague us.
I have the good, the bad, and the ugly, but, like most serious novelists I try to make them individuals, not clichés, not types, not representatives of a certain gender, race, or class, but actual, complicated, human individuals. I try to see the world that way, too: each person a human being first, and then woman or man or black or white or Asian or Hispanic or Native American or straight or gay or liberal or conservative only as a secondary characteristic.
I do battle, in my books - and in real life - with my own prejudices and slanted attitudes, my own assumptions and close-mindedness, the limits of my own empathy and courage. That battle is what life is about, it seems to me, or at least a big part of what life is about. I try to laugh at myself on occasion, try to feel others' pain to the extent humanly possible. And, even in times like these, maybe especially in this season, I try hard to avoid oversimplifying the massively complex predicament that is human life and to avoid the false salve of finding someone else to blame for all America's troubles.
Wherever you stand in that conversation, whichever ring in the human circus you inhabit, I send - in this season and beyond - an abundance of good wishes to you all.
Wherever you pitch your tent in our politically and socially divided land, and whatever holiday you celebrate in the last weeks of the year, I extend my warmest thoughts to you for an enjoyable season and a healthy and peaceful New Year.
For us, the holiday is Christmas. I like the lights and the music and the traditions, and I've always liked the stories associated with the religious aspect of the season - Christ's humble birth, the mysterious intuition of the three wise men, angels and shepherds and happy new parents who are also, maybe, a little bit afraid. Of course, our crazy commercial appetites have taken the wise men's reverent generosity and turned it into things like the stampedes on Black Friday and the financial pressures of showing our kids we love them by showering them with the gift-of-the-year and assorted other things nobody really needs.
But somehow, within the foolishness of all that, I am able to hold onto a scrap of quiet satisfaction. I was raised among generous, fun-loving relatives and I like giving things to people I care about. I don't mind the holiday gatherings as much as I used to. Food, family, friends, a glass of vodka, time off from work for most of us - it's hard to be a Scrooge about those things.
Not so hard to be Scroogish about, or at least upset by, the news in the latter part of this year. However you look at the events in Ferguson, Staten Island, and Cleveland, it's obvious that, so many years after the abolition of slavery, we haven't yet been able to make a true, deep, and lasting peace across the national racial divide. Of late, I've also been more aware than usual of the male-female divide, the liberal-conservative divide, the rich-poor divide, and of a swelling tide of anger in the country I care so much about.
"Why so angry?" Rinpoche asks Otto in Breakfast with Buddha, and I've been pondering that same question a lot these days.
Are there legitimate grievances involved, real reasons for anger in those areas?
Yes, obviously and of course.
Is violent anger and hatred productive? Does it actually move us in a direction of addressing those grievances?
I don't think so.
I think it deepens the divides - all of them - alienates the "Other", whoever that other might be, and while it seems, in the moment, a perfectly legitimate outlet for the frustration that comes from generations of inequity, I don't see any evidence that violence, fury, divisive speech, revenge, or hatred moves us so much as a millimeter in the direction of a just, peaceful, harmonious society.
I'm not advocating the idea that if we all simply smile at each other everything will be fine.
Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, the brave Soviet/Russian dissidents of years past and times present, workers who risked and sometimes lost their lives so that we'd have decent wages and safe working conditions, women who broke old stereotypes so that - for one small example - my daughters are now able to participate in sports programs and aspire to every kind of career and lifestyle - they are all examples of people who had real grievances and who found the courage to stand up and bring about change.
But when those movements toward fairness take on a cargo of hatred or divisiveness, my own sympathy for the cause is eroded.
Fighting for justice without giving in to hatred is an extremely difficult moral challenge. I listen to talk radio sometimes on my late-night trips home from a speaking event, and the mockery, ridicule, name-calling, divisiveness, convenient bending of the truth, and brutally one-sided thinking makes me have to wrestle with my own anger. It makes the Loud Ones feel good, that kind of talk. There's often the stink of the bully to it, the urge for power, victory, vengeance, the need to have an Enemy. There's a satisfaction in feeling that you and your cronies are right, and that the oppressive Other is the cause of every wrong.
I try, in my own work and despite my own failings, to be a force acting against all of that. I have white characters marrying black characters ( In Revere, In Those Days) and loving brown characters (Leaving Losapas). I have people with old-school mindsets struggling to be open to the full humanity of a homosexual child (Revere Beach Boulevard). I have caring and strong men and brave handicapped women (A Little Love Story). I have people struggling with addiction (The Return). I have Jesus coming to earth and running for president on a platform that tries to respect both right and left and foster dialogue (American Savior). I have strong women (Fidel's Last Days, Vatican Waltz, A Russian Requiem) and people trying to climb out of the grip of abuse and poverty (The Talk-Funny Girl). I have, I hope, open-minded and respectful discussions about spirituality (Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner with Buddha), and I try to put in a measure of humor (Golfing with God, Taking the Kids to Italy, The Italian Summer, and others) because humor can be medicine for the sometimes self-righteous attitudes that plague us.
I have the good, the bad, and the ugly, but, like most serious novelists I try to make them individuals, not clichés, not types, not representatives of a certain gender, race, or class, but actual, complicated, human individuals. I try to see the world that way, too: each person a human being first, and then woman or man or black or white or Asian or Hispanic or Native American or straight or gay or liberal or conservative only as a secondary characteristic.
I do battle, in my books - and in real life - with my own prejudices and slanted attitudes, my own assumptions and close-mindedness, the limits of my own empathy and courage. That battle is what life is about, it seems to me, or at least a big part of what life is about. I try to laugh at myself on occasion, try to feel others' pain to the extent humanly possible. And, even in times like these, maybe especially in this season, I try hard to avoid oversimplifying the massively complex predicament that is human life and to avoid the false salve of finding someone else to blame for all America's troubles.
Wherever you stand in that conversation, whichever ring in the human circus you inhabit, I send - in this season and beyond - an abundance of good wishes to you all.
No comments have been added yet.
