The Death of Civil Discourse. The Rise of Bullies.

In a way, bullying is an ordinary evil. It's hugely prevalent, all too often ignored - and being ignored, it is therefore condoned.  

--Trudie Styler, actor and philanthropist

“Happy birthday Hitler!” 

That’s what a crowd chanted outside of Boston, Massachusetts’ Mayor Michelle Wu’s house on a recent winter morning. Standing outside the newly elected mayor’s home in the tightly packed neighborhood of Roslindale, the handful of protestors have showed up at Wu’s residence since early January, to oppose her COVID vaccine mandate for all Boston city employees.

Wu has lived there for years, along with her husband, two young children and mother. Since Wu announced the vaccine requirement in late December 2021, the number of vaccinated stands at more than 95 percent among municipal workers. Some unions have opposed the policy and tried to stop it in court. They are also in direct negotiations with Wu to work out a solution.

But the rabble is still at it, right now, and have been for many weeks, most days starting bright and early at 7 am. That is the legal time they can begin their campaign of chanting, yelling, holding signs, blowing whistles and, until very recently, using bullhorns and cowbells to verbally harass the first term mayor.

Along with attacking Wu and her family (including her mom, who struggles with mental illness), the pack of protestors are hassling all the other people in the neighborhood. Stay at homes Dads caring for kids and working Moms trying to get children off to school.  A 96-year-old veteran who lives near Wu is reported to be frightened by the noise. Imagine having to walk the gauntlet on the way to the bus stop?

Oh, and that “Happy Birthday Hitler”? Wu’s young son asked his mom who this “Hitler” person was, that the people outside were singing happy birthday to.  Try explaining how there are some people who don’t like what Mommy does at work. That’s why they make all that noise.   

The whole episode makes me wonder: when does legitimate protest cross over into the realm of actual harm? When does someone exercising their first amendment right to free speech morph from a freedom fighter into a bully, from one who protests into a scary harasser? Into someone who goes beyond the norm of having one’s voice heard in a democracy, to being right up an “enemy’s” face, literally. That’s the new norm in our country, in our civic dialogue, in how we disagree with each other.  

Bullying behavior is now legitimate political discourse.

I have the right not only to be against what you stand for, but I also have the right to do all I can to intimidate you. To scare you. To threaten you and your loved ones, your neighbors too. I will mock you, publicly humiliate you and harass you to get what I want.  

This was bound to happen. We had a Commander in Chief who regularly insulted and put down opponents on Twitter and in person, who mocked the disabled, women, and people from certain parts of Africa. If that is what passes for leadership, then, of course, we all have permission to bully. If he can do it, so can I!

Happens on the other side of the political aisle too. Just ask Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. In the summer of 2018, while eating out at a Louisville, Kentucky restaurant, the couple were harassed and verbally attacked by two patrons; that bullying was marked by yelling, flipping the finger, hurting that small business, and tossing food outside the restaurant.  
 
Public bullying has gone from infamy to virtue.   

The media contributes. Put on any cable news show. Watch as these devolve into shouting matches between the oh so self-righteous on the left and on the right. No pundit, no politician, no protestor is EVER wrong in 2022.  Arrogant surety marks the political and elite classes. Have you heard? They are 100 percent correct and you are 100 percent wrong.

Now we have bullies with a microphone. Bullies tweeting. Bullies invading private spaces. Bullies taking over the capitol of Canada, Ottawa. Bullies storming our own Capitol. How else to describe January 6th, 2021? It was a violent a mob of bullies, who attacked the heart of American democracy.

Yet still, I believe in the need for our world and our political and social dialogue to reject bullying. To embrace kindness as the mark of our public relationships. Private relationships too. In the faith I grew up in and still practice, I was taught to lead with kindness always, no matter who I was dealing with. Learned that when I bully another, I’m bullying the very image of God that is a part of every single human being. I was taught that in the biblical story of the bully versus the boy, David against Goliath, we’re supposed to cheer for the little guy, not the mean old giant ogre.  

Yes, you can call me corny, soft hearted, naïve, even pollyannish for still believing in simple human decency, one neighbor to another. I trust in the power of kindness.  I also believe in free speech, the right to protest and to peaceably assemble, too. But bullying has no place in the political realm, the public arena or on a neighborhood street.
 
“Happy birthday Hitler!” Really?!

C’mon bullies. Please just go home already. 

(Photo credit: Boston Globe)

Even If You Ban Books, You Can't Ban The Truth.

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”  --Jorge Luis Borges

“Curious George Goes to the Hospital”: that’s the very first book I remember reading, or having read to me, or maybe both.  At the age of 5 or so, I was days away from entering the Boston Children’s Hospital for a tonsillectomy, and I was very scared. Then one day that book arrived in the mail. In a package addressed to me!

 

Written and illustrated by Margret and H.A. Rey, the 1966 book tells the story of how one day George swallows a puzzle piece and so must go into the hospital to have it removed. Through his adventures I, and thousands of children, still today, find comfort in this simple story, and its introduction to young readers about what it’s like to be in the hospital.

 

And so, I’ve been reading books ever since.

 

I’m an omnivorous reader, will read anything I can get my hands on. As a kid I used to even read through the World Book Encyclopedia.  In boyhood I remember reading “Encyclopedia Brown,” a series of books about a boy detective who solves neighborhood crimes and mysteries.  The thing I loved is that the answers were at the back of the book and so I got to guess! I recall one night reading a slim paperback on a break from my very first job, as a 15-year-old clerk at a now long-gone local department store. Sitting at that soda foundation counter, I sipped Coke and got lost in the many amazing worlds described in Ray Bradbury’s collection of short stories “The Illustrated Man.” I’ve been hooked on science fiction ever since.

 

It’s mystical and a miracle that some books, the memory of those books: these stay with us, because in profound and simple ways, they changed how we looked at the world and ourselves. That’s what great books do. They open our minds and invite us to experience peoples, ideas, histories, and beliefs we might never have encountered without a book to take us on an exotic journey. A book to invite us on exciting trip of the mind and the imagination.

 

I wish I could listen as you talked about the books that have shaped and changed your life. 

 

Was it Nancy Drew mysteries that got you to fall in love with reading or perhaps Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” …that story made you feel not so alone in the world.  Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcom X”—did that wake you up to the pain of so many of our fellow children of God? Were you as blown away as I was by Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” a slim volume that tells the tale of the Holocaust through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy. His description of seeing the flames leap out of the top of chimneys as he approached by train car the concentrations camp: it still haunts me.

 

Books: yet for all they make this life better, and expand minds and hearts, still some books don’t always inspire curiosity. Instead, some books inspire fear, even censorship. That’s what happened last month in McMinn County Tennessee, where the school board voted unanimously to remove the book “Maus” from its eighth-grade curriculum about the Holocaust.  According to minutes from the board’s meeting it took this action because of their concerns about questionable language and depictions of nudity in that Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic 1991 novel, written by Art Spiegelman.  I don’t deny that board’s right to make such a choice. I do mourn the fact that kids in that place won’t be able to be moved by the poignancy and power of “Maus,” at least in the classroom.

 

It's not just “Maus” that’s provoking such actions to remove “controversial” books from schools, libraries, and classrooms. According to the American Library Association, 2021 set a record for the number of book challenges brought by parents, school boards and other groups. Books removed from American libraries include “A Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee and “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas.

 

Funny thing is that immediately following the story of “Maus” being banned, it shot to the top of Amazon’s best seller list. Just goes to show you can’t ever fully censor or squelch or deny the truth that books contain. Can’t erase the history that books tell us about, even when those stories might make us feel uncomfortable or even guilty. Can’t for long keep down any book, not with so many places to find and to buy and to read books.

 

Bans are often temporary, of the moment, but books? The ideas they contain within are eternal.   Thank God for books, for every single book, from the Bible to the bawdy, from the profound to the trivial, from the controversial to the child-like. Like “Curious George.” 

 

Happy reading!   

What Lies Beyond Resilience? We're Finding Out.

 

"Someone I once loved gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” – Mary Oliver

I’m done with being resilient. Being plucky and dogged. Putting on a happy face. Keeping calm and carrying on. Trusting that after some bumps and detours our world will somehow return to normal (whatever the heck that is!).

It’s been almost two years since COVID smashed into our world and changed it so completely.  In that time, as I’ve written here and preached from the pulpit and dealt with my own feelings of dislocation and struggle, I’ve always tried my best to fall back on the practice of resilience to keep going. The hope that resilience will see me through.

Resilience. Webster’s Dictionary says that resilience is, “the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress…and an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” 

Yes, that stress strained body definition is certainly a good example of the need for resilience. We’ve all been physically strained by COVID in the past twenty-three months.  Eyes blurry and itchy and tired from so many Zoom meetings. Numb backsides from so much sitting before the computer or on the couch in the midst of some Netflix or Apple TV binge watch. There’s my ever-lengthening facial worry lines getting even longer and longer. Who hasn’t been anxious about our aging parents getting sick or our toddler getting sick or ourselves getting sick or our job going away or our loved ones having to always be at arm’s length--literally?

Then there’s the expanded waistlines too, the “COVID twenty” so many of us have put on but that now sticks around, refusing to leave. Sure, the fact I’ve taken up baking homemade bread to ward off loneliness is great. The fact I eat so much of that bread, and ice cream and Chips Ahoy cookies and Cheetos? Not so great. I’m not so sure my body can bounce back, recover somehow. I may just have to buy a bigger belt, or at least a really, REALLY, stretchy one.

That second definition of resilience —that’s even harder to realize. Recovering or adjusting easily to misfortune or change. Easily?! What are those Webster logophiles smoking? Who are they kidding? Yes, resilience has helped me bounce back from my own vocational dark thoughts (will anybody ever come back to church ever again?!) We keep opening the doors every single Sunday morning and trying our best but that’s a lot of sabbaths to just buck it up. To soldier on. 

You could say that about so many other professions weighed down by COVID’s tenacity. Teachers still teaching—how do they do it? First responders still responding: ambulances overflowing, violent crime on the rise.  Imagine being a restaurateur. Talk about needing to be resilient. All those empty tables. Or a theater owner or anyone else in the business of performing live. 

For all of us: the wells of resilience are getting pretty dried up.   

Thus, instead of trying our best to be resilient, to bounce back instead, we can practice spiritual transformation: being changed as we move forward. Being changed to adapt to this brave new world now being born.  Embracing change and accepting the fact we can’t go home again; we can’t go back. The only way through is straight ahead.

Resilience is about a return to normalcy, to the status quo, to homeostasis. But what if our communal trauma is so big, so world changing, so powerful, that there is no reverse, no turning around and getting back to square one? What if the only way forward is forward? What if changing who we are and how we live is the only way we can get through to the other side of the virus and all its societal implications and fall out?

The author and holocaust survivor Victor Frankl wrote, in his memoir of survival, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”  

Growth. Freedom.

Dare we have the courage to change and to be changed? I know I can’t practice my work or my faith in the same ways anymore.  There’s no going back for institutional religion the way it was, of this, I am sure. We can’t do the same old same old same old and expect the same results. Nope. I must change. Believers must change.

And if you think of your own world, your own ways of being or working or loving, you too might realize you are being called to change as well.  Sure, it is so tempting to believe that one day soon it will all be over, and it will all be just like the good old days. But I think those days are going, going, gone.  And sometimes they weren’t so good.

All we can do, all we must do, is be open to growth and to transformation. It’s actually kind of exciting if you think about. Yes, a bit scary but tomorrow beckons. Tomorrow is the place where my Creator and the Creator of the universe awaits.

Resilience? Not so much. Onward? Absolutely. See you on the journey.