Purple State of John

2010-01-15 06:36:40

Filed under: Featured, Village Square
Posted by: John

Haitian children

As I wrestle with the gut-twisting images coming from Haiti, I am struck by the enduring meaning of being a neighbor. When it comes to epic human tragedy, it’s pretty clear America counts Haiti as a neighbor and a helping hand for neighbors is so fundamentally American that – push comes to shove – they even do it on Desperate Housewives.

Our neighbors, after all, are the people we know. They’re the “as thyself” who God or the universe (or just dumb luck depending on your point of view) saw fit to put right across the street, or maybe just across the ocean.

It’s the connection with people we know that compels us to rise to the higher angels of our nature, whether it’s to help someone lift a heavy box, dig through rubble during a breathtaking catastrophe or just bake a cake.

There’s another flavor of gut-twisting I feel when I contrast our neighborly response to Haiti with our lack of charity toward each other at home. I’ve had time to think about both hate and Haiti this week as The Village Square had the pleasure of hosting National Endowment for the Humanities Chair Jim Leach as part of his 50-state civility tour (we were #4).

Chairman Leach spoke of where we now find ourselves with respect to our civility toward one another:

“Everybody is aware of certain recent comments on the house floor, but vastly more rancorous commentary is alive and too well across the country. Public officials have been labeled too frequently in recent times as fascists, they’ve been labeled communists, and they’ve been labeled perhaps both at the same time. And also very surprisingly a new word has come back into the American vocabulary: Public figures have raised the secession word… and that is history-blind radicalism. And one might ask what is wrong with a bit of hyperbole? If 400,000 American soldiers sacrificed their lives to defeat fascism, if tens of thousands lost their lives standing up and holding communism at bay, if we fought a civil war to preserve the union, isn’t it a citizen’s obligation to think through words that have warring implications?

‘There is after all a difference between supporting a particular spending or health care bill and asserting that someone who prefers a different approach is an advocate of an “ism” that includes gulags and concentration camps.

‘Certain frameworks of thought define rival ideas, other frameworks describe enemies. Citizenship is hard. It’s a commitment to listen and watch, read and think in a way that allows the imagination to put one person in the shoes of another.”

…Like we do without thinking twice for a neighbor. Are we still neighbors?

Perhaps the most telling moment in the visit we had with Chairman
Leach was when he was asked to pass judgment on Joe Wilson’s heckling on the house floor during a presidential address – an event negatively referenced in Leach’s talk not 20 minutes earlier.

Much to the chagrin of many of us (oh curses to my lower angels), Leach declined. You see, it turns out Joe Wilson is someone Jim Leach knows. So he did what neighbors do… He allowed Wilson to make a mistake, gave him credit for an apology, forgave him his transgression and loaned him the dang sugar. For what it’s worth, so did President Obama.

I may not know Joe Wilson, but I do know Jim Leach:

“Words matter. Stirring anger and playing on the irrational fears of citizens inflames hate. When coupled with character assassination, polarizing rhetoric can exacerbate intolerance, perhaps impelling violence.

‘Conversely, just as demagoguery can jeopardize social cohesion and even public safety, healing language such as Lincoln’s call for a new direction “with malice toward none” can uplift and help bring society and the world closer together.”

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