I think that’s only partially true. Understanding your opponent, your adversary, can make you a more effective opponent and adversary. On the other hand, sympathizing with your challenger will likely weaken you, make you think twice before charging, feel sorry for them when you are about to pin them down.
But then again, understanding and sympathizing with another with whom you are at odds will most surely make you a better human being. And maybe you will learn that you do not have to make a court case out of every little messy human encounter you have.
It’s not easy, this being human.
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I wish I were a better political pundit. Well, sometimes I wish that. I try my hand at it from time to time (as you know), but I always hedge my bets the way the successful of them do not. I guess I know just enough about a lot of things to have an opinion on them, but not enough to take an unwavering stand on them.
Take Portland, for instance. It’s amazing to me how many people all across this nation know exactly what’s happening in Portland and why. How do they know so much for sure, when there are so many conflicting reports about it? Is Portland itself burning, or are there just a few small fires here and there? How do some know for sure so that they can pontificate on the situation? Perhaps some secret revelatory source to which I am not privy?
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I do know that a 17-year-old kid who shoots and kills two people with a weapon he was not old enough to have should not be treated as a hero or given a pass, even by the President of the Untied States. Especially by a president who decries violence in our cities. Or who claims to stand for law and order.
It’s an odd way to support the police, don’t you think?
No? You must know something I don’t know, then.
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Sunday evening we watched the first episode of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross on PBS. (I believe it was made in 2013, but we had not seen it before.) Gates mentioned that, somehow, the various political entities in Europe early on came to understand that they would not enslave one another, perhaps because it would not ever be easy to tell which white folks were free and which white folks were slaves. That understanding lead to another understanding: people of color were perfect for enslaving because you could always tell who was what, and they could never escape it. Very soon “black” and “slave” became two ways of saying the same thing.
Isn’t that what makes white racism so enduring and so appealing to whites? It’s easy, no two ways about it. But wrong.
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Here’s another easy one: Every time a white cop kills a black man, the cop is in the wrong.
Or, every time a white cop kills a black man, the black man had it coming.
It’s that easy…unless and until it isn’t.
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Yesterday Maxine and I delivered bags of food to seven homes all across our area. It’s a ministry of our church and another church, begun when the pandemic started to address the needs of people suddenly unemployed and without incomes.
I am not sure any of the seven homes we visited asked for food because of pandemic-related unemployment. They seemed more likely to be homes where poverty and need are ongoing realities. Several of the people I met were clearly either elderly or differently-abled in a way that made me doubt their employability. Once again, my eyes were opened to the reality of massive poverty in this, our “greatest country in all of human history.”
It would be so much easier to sit in Washington or Columbus and imagine they were all just lazy freeloaders. So much easier.
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It’s easy to leap to large judgments based upon small information. I do it all the time, until I cannot.
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