“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Friedrich Nietzche
Arguably, the most famous feud in American history was that of the Hatfields and the McCoys. What began as an argument over the ownership of a pig, eventuated in multiple murders, arson, injustice, betrayal, and even forbidden romance between the two warring extended families just after the end of the civil war. Hate begat hate and the feud climaxed in mass murder, involvement of the Supreme Court, life sentences, and a hanging. The end of a feud often comes with a bloodbath, but not so with the Hatfields and the McCoys; those who were left of the two families simply grew weary of the violence and stopped. In a typically American reconciliation, in just a few generations the descendants of the two families now share reunions, and have even light heartedly appeared together on the popular game show, Family Feud.
“A feud is this way: a man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that man’s brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in — and by and by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud. But it’s kind of slow, and takes a long time.
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The disaster in Baltimore this week is a little like deja vu all over again. The reaction of the key players was predictable, given the prior runs in Ferguson and New York. Determined not to make the same mistakes, city leaders proceeded to make entirely different mistakes, with equally disastrous results; but mobs and riots are tricky things to control. Unfortunately, as is often the case with civil unrest, we draw no closer to real solutions, but instead we see alignments forming that stereotype and erroneously group blacks, whites, and police officers into homogenous entities, and we cast them in roles of war.
The problem with war is that it requires devotion. Wars are difficult to fight if you are not sold out for your side. If you are at war with the police, it’s hard to imagine any of them as good people. If you are on the side of the police, then you tend to justify everything they might do, and you begin to see all urban blacks as thugs. If white people are calling your people thugs, and justifying the police who are killing your young men, then you have a hard time seeing that your young men might share some of the blame in some instances, and you can begin to assume that you can’t find justice without violence. Watch carefully, this is how feuds are made.
As I viewed the man on the street interviews, and as newsmen chased down protestors and pedestrians hoping for the anger and outrage that would feed the voracious 24 hour news cycle, I saw something different. I saw many common folks concerned for their families and their neighborhood. I saw people imploring that the rest of the nation not see them as hoodlums or thugs. I saw a young black boy selling water to the line of policemen, I saw a black man standing in the breach, using his own body to restrain the protestors from violence. I saw thousands pitching in to clean up their neighborhood after the riots. I saw a mother, beside herself when she saw her teenage son involved in the rioting, in spontaneous discipline taking the boy to the woodshed. I later saw the boy, embarrassed, not a thug at all, but just a typical teenager messed up with the wrong crowd and doing something stupid. I saw people. A few rotten apples, but many good ones both seen and unseen; the good ones not always drawn to the TV cameras. Why do we judge whole groups of people by their worst representatives? Whether it be police, urban youth, or – gasp – conservatives? If we generalize from the bad apples, no group will be safe, because bad apples are everywhere. What if instead we looked for the good intentions that good people share? There we would find our common ground.
If the riots have shown us anything, it’s that ultimately a police force alone cannot solve the problems of a city. There is wide agreement that good jobs will do more to cure the urban ills than good policing ever could, though how we get there is an area for argument. We all agree that people should be able to earn a living wage, though how we make that happen is again, a source of debate. Most of us want safe neighborhoods, peace in the cities, police who are our protectors and friends, a country where people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, a nation not at war with itself. We have our differences, but we are more the same than we sometimes see.
IMHO: If the first election of Barack Obama indicated a mandate of any kind, it was the desire of the nation to cast aside the specter of our history of racism and move ahead to the dream of MLK. How sad that instead of providing the leadership and policies to move toward that dream, the President instead exacerbated the divisions and created new ones to parlay that mandate in order to cement his reelection, trading the dream for political advantage. When our leaders don’t lead, it is up to us not to follow their example. Most nations require a King or Queen, a dictator, a general, or a beloved leader to unite them. Our country has never been so, we unite beneath an idea… liberty. Our feuds last for short times; weeks, years, a generation in the case of the Hatfields and McCoys, but not for centuries, not forever. We fought a bloody Civil War where friend fought friend, brother against brother, and where a great president was assassinated; yet the Union survived, and not just on the map. We have a heritage where we find unity in the midst of divisions. We can’t fall back into the rifts of years gone by. We can’t allow our politicians to pit us against each other to pad their party’s pull. We can’t allow a few bad apples to blind us to our common ground. America, we are better than that.
