Anger and Resolution

It was an interesting week in a comment thread I joined. An article described a priest in New Mexico going before a judge to be sentenced to six months in jail for peacefully standing up against the war. The initial posts to the thread were from people happy that someone had the courage to stand up to the government. But soon it started devolving into criticism of the Catholic Church, and dissing the priest for being a part of a corrupt religious tradition.

I jumped in to defend the goodness of one man and got several hot answers in reply. Though I'd encouraged people in my post to allow one man to be good even if the organization he represented was corrupt they weren't able to do so. Alongside the strong and immediate responses against my plea I noticed the absence of anybody supporting me.

So I tried a different tactic. One of the responders was good enough to write that I was defending my church, so I had the opportunity to write that I had never been part of the Catholic Church and had stepped away from religion altogether, though I still seek spiritual instruction. The responder wrote back, this time much more genial, and described what his or her stance on religious beliefs was (the name could be a man or a woman...it's Pat!, or something like that). An apology was offered for the mistaken assumption and we came to agreement.

What happened was that once we started talking about who and what we are, we found that there is not enough difference to call ourselves enemies. That fostered a space for us to talk in cooperative discussion, not competitive debate. This has been the recommendation to eliminate discrimination in all forms. And by golly, it worked.

This leads to a question that has defied answer for me and countless others: how can we get the masses to understand and use things like this? Thousands of people have put in countless years trying to do it. On the surface, it's just not that difficult. But there are underlying social dynamics that work against it -- the continual push of marketing to define ourselves as individuals apart from others (with the laughably strange result that we all use the same products, look the same, talk the same, and so on), the constant political and religious messages to distance ourselves from those Not Like Us and to think badly of Them, the devaluation of critical thought and resulting shallowness of thinking that makes it a threat for people to look inside themselves -- and make our task difficult.

I don't know if we'll ever get there. But I've got to say, having small connections here and there despite the opposing social dynamics puts some really cool moments into life.