Which Side Are You On?

One of the saddest things I’ve seen during the recent horrors in Ferguson, Staten Island, and Brooklyn has been the speed with which people have been taking sides and accusing whoever disagrees with them of destroying America. Saner voices try to remind us that there are no sides—that we’re all in this together, and that we just need to understand each other and work things out. But the more I watch, the more I wonder if the first part of the statement is true. Maybe there are two sides to what’s going on, but in a different way than most people are thinking.

I used to love Martin Luther King, Jr.’s statement that the arc of the moral universe was long, but that it bent towards justice. I liked being reminded to take the long view, and I liked the sense of historical inevitability. But now I’m not so sure I buy it. I think the moral universe may actually be in a perpetual state of tug-of-war. We have within us the desire for justice and tolerance, the ability to make our communities more fair and peaceful. But we also have within us the desire to compete, to dominate, and to vanquish—and we’re definitely capable of ruling by force and separating ourselves from the weak and the defeated by walls and laws and armed guards. We can go either way, depending on the mood of the times. We can be ruled by hope and justice, or we can be ruled by fear and hatred. And one being ascendant, in any given period of time, doesn’t mean the other isn’t lying somewhere in our hearts, latent, ready to be re-born. This means that any ground we win in the battle for social justice is ground that can be lost. Just because we secure a victory in one generation doesn’t mean the problem has vanished. The problem is always there, under the surface, like a cancer that’s in remission but not gone.

I remember traveling in the Czech Republic in 1993 and seeing freshly-painted graffiti showing a Star of David with a gallows hanging from it—anti-Semitic hatred on display in a country that had barely known a Jew in 50 years. You could feel that weird, irrational, hatred under the surface, always—always looking for a reason to push back to the surface. Even here, it seems like there’s an instance every month of some idiot, somewhere, drawing swastikas into team logos, or creating shirts that look like concentration camp uniforms, or using some racial epithet or caricature to criticize the president, or calling a new vodka and stout cocktail, “Apartheid.” I don’t think it’s just thoughtlessness, or tactlessness, or historical amnesia. It’s nastier than that. It’s this ugly little, lizard brain voice saying, “Is it okay to hate them again, yet? Is it okay to put them in their place?” That voice needs to get beaten down whenever it whispers to us. We can’t ever assume we’re “beyond that.”

Likewise, I don’t think it’s just historical ignorance that drives some people toward wanting a repeat of the massive inequalities of the Gilded Age. It would be easy to think that millions of voters are simply dupes of power brokers like the Koch brothers, but I don’t think the reality is that easy, or that our fellow citizens are that stupid. No, I think it’s the pull of the tug-of-war—the message that life should be ferocious and competitive and brutal, because that’s all we deserve—a world where might makes right, and weakness deserves nothing but contempt. It’s that strange, visceral feeling of satisfaction when you get to respond to your own oppression by stepping on the neck of someone even lower on the ladder than you. It’s that weird, exhilarating feeling of relief when you decide you can give up trying be noble, because there’s no point in even trying. Camus talks about this in The Fall, when he describes the horror of having a drowning stranger call out to you for help—and the wonderful feeling of relief that comes when you find a way to talk yourself out of having to be responsible for saving his life.

It’s an abdication of responsibility that lies at the heart of all of this, I think. We can’t fix racism. We can’t fix poverty. We can’t change the world. So we decide who belongs inside and who belongs outside, we lock the door tight, and to hell with whoever is left out in the cold. Really—to hell with them. Fuck them. They’re not my problem.

I think we can see this at work in the way some people are responding to the new Senate report on torture. We see it the way people seem to be embracing the militarization of the police. Bad things are happening to some ill-defined them out there, but they’re not my problem. And the more that some people try to make the claim that those suffering people are our problem, the angrier the abdicators get. We don’t want to know. Do whatever you have to do to keep the peace—just leave me alone: that’s the new social contract.

There is something deeply disturbing about a free country so rapturously embracing images and ideas that smack of fascism—but it’s hardly new. Erich Fromm identified the strain back in 1941, in his book, Escape from Freedom. He saw that freedom and accountability could be terrifying and isolating for some people, and that authoritarianism had its comforts. Just because we’ve moved from feudalism to democracy doesn’t mean that democracy is a given. The desire to be ruled is still in our blood.

And maybe those are the real tugs-of-war we live with, day to day—the conflicts between the burdens of freedom and its gifts, and the dangers of authoritarianism and its gifts. When the drowning man calls to us in the nighttime and no one can see whether we act heroically or slink away…what will we do?

The fight ahead is not between the police union and the mayor. It’s not between minority citizens and white police officers. It’s not even between the 99% and the 1%. We are all in this together. We have to be in this together.  The real fight—the eternal fight—is against the cancer that’s always ready to wake up.  Camus (again) made it clear in The Plague that the disease is not neutral; when it wakes up, you always have to take a side. You’re either for the plague or against the plague. If you do nothing to fight it, then you’re for it.