on road signs and the banality of evil

In long rural stretches of our country, the miles seem indistinguishable, never ending. Nearing a state line, there is no spatial distinction between a road claimed by Tennessee and one claimed by North Carolina. Indeed, the Smoky Mountains, and the curves and tunnels of Interstate 40, don’t really care which state’s Department of Transportation pays for each mile. And yet, for a driver tracking her progress, signs that announce when a county ends or begins are helpful. They offer perspective. “Tennessee: The Volunteer State, Welcomes You”, is a sign reminding you that you are not trapped on an endless journey with no direction. It tells you where you are and where your actions are leading you.

Hannah Arendt was a philosopher and political theorist who attended Adolf Eichmann’s trial after World War II. After sitting in court, hearing the testimony of Nazi order givers and Nazi order receivers, she wrote a piece in The New Yorker in which she described “the banality of evil.” Evil is not radical, she claimed, it is neither exceptional nor always recognizable. Hearing purveyors of evil confess their choices and delusional perceptions of the impact of those choices, Arendt refused to compartmentalize the evil that created the Shoah. Horrifically, she concluded that evil is ordinary because people don’t pay attention.

Arendt understood that everything matters. She also understood that the human capacity to maintain perspective is wildly undependable. Most of us tend to think we both control our decisions and understand the implications they have for others. We know we have to share: the earth’s resources, our infrastructure, our learning, roads, food and water. Moreover, we share humanity, with inherent dignity, dreams, and our need for shelter, belonging and purpose. However, this shared-ness exists in conflict with a dominant identifier of American culture: Independence.

Our love of independence has wonderful outcomes. The protestant work ethic, the resiliency to survive, our identity as overcomers…these are all fruits of the tree of independence. Our love of individuality has a delusional side though, namely that we believe that our choices are ours alone. We get angry if anyone tells us what to do, and we often avoid the obvious truth that what we do with our time, money, energy and children impacts others. We say we want to be responsible for ourselves, but I want to suggest that we are responsible for the way our action and inaction affect the people around us. Our choices are not made in vacuums because we don’t live in vacuums. We live in neighborhoods, and each of us would perish in a week if we tried to live without the assistance of others.

This is why those state welcome signs are so helpful. As Arendt discovered, we quickly lose perspective, and without a marker—a sign reminding us of where we are and where we are headed—we easily continue down roads that are destructive. Like those who followed evil orders in Germany and Poland, seemingly unaware of the implications of their actions, we also quickly adjust to a status quo that demeans others, even if it is evil.

For instance, in Nashville, Tennessee, we have close to 88,000 kids enrolled in our public schools. 3,000 of them are homeless. One in six of them suffer from daily food insecurity. Parents who work full time for minimum wage live well below the poverty line, unable to pay for rent and food for their families. Our Sheriff’s Deputies are first line mental health care providers in our city, even though they receive neither the training nor the resources to adequately meet the mental health needs of our impoverished and addicted community members. Our state has not taken adequate steps to provide medical coverage for our citizens, despite the fact that we are absolutely certain they will need and receive the most expensive form of healthcare through emergency rooms. These realities are outrageous, and they should make us furious. How do we blithely share neighborhoods and roads and grocery stores with folks who are desperate to survive the kind of evil that ignores their existence?

Arendt would say we share space with folks living in extreme suffering quite easily, because evil doesn’t wear a cape and carry a pitchfork when it enters our neighborhoods. It exists in the banalities of life. It thrives when we make small choices to segregate ourselves so we don’t have to see suffering people. It thrives when we decide our ability to choose our insurance provider—our independence—matters more than making sure every person who needs healthcare is covered. It flourishes when we trust politicians and business owners who say higher wages will hurt the economy and stock market, but don’t pause to figure how little full time minimum wage actually earns a person. It grows when we rename apathy “faithful”, and pretend that paying attention to the slow tragedy of crushing poverty is not our job.

Evil thrives when we decide we aren’t responsible for the things happening in our communities. It takes root when we don’t pause to consider how our choices impact the lives of others. The great news is that we don’t have to live this way. We don’t have to ignore the ordinary signs of evil to which we have grown accustomed. Instead, look for the signs that offer perspective. They will likely be different for all of us, but they will appear if you look for them. Pay attention to the lives of vulnerable folks, and allow what you see to reorient your own approach to life. Instead of driving on cruise control, lost in thought, look around. Look for the markers that will restore your sense of justice, of shared dignity and responsibility to you. Look for signs that allow you to see where your choices take you, and who they ignore or diminish. Follow urges to take responsibility for what happens around you. Develop the habit of paying attention, and then take action to help, lest we all surrender to the monotonous road, full of ordinary evil.

MLK's evolving legacy

This week, a repost about the remarkable life of Martin Luther King, Jr, the status quo he challenged, and the comfort he disrupted.

I read today that in 1966, a Gallup Poll measured Martin Luther King, Jr’s favorability at 33%, while 63% of those polled disapproved of him.   This was over 10 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which launched King to prominence and focused the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement.  This was 3 years after King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech on the Washington Mall, unifying the call for freedom and the need for jobs with his singular voice.  This was 1 year after the successful march from Selma to Montgomery, a march that was attempted 3 times, where white and black civilians linked arms, allowing their conviction and hope to propel them to walk across a bridge and a state, some sacrificing their wellbeing or very lives as civilians and policeman brutally, openly, attacked them.  The violence broadcast in the month of the march woke the conscience of a nation, encouraging the Congress of the United States to support the Voting Rights Bill.  Dr. King was the face of a movement that not only lifted up the spirits of his fellow African American brothers and sisters; he also required the gaze of a country to confront the indignities they suffered by observing the sacrifices they made.

Dr. King and the SCLC forced the country to observe their status quo.  Their bravery was remarkable, but it was effective because it created a setting in which African Americans and their white allies were vilified and attacked for doing every day life: for sitting on a bus on the way to work, for walking across a bridge, or for ordering coffee at a lunch counter.  These acts of resistance were brilliant because they were mundane.  Everyone knows what it is like to order a drink expecting to receive one.  Although not many white folks knew what it was like to be black, they could certainly understand what it meant to be refused service just for existing.  To be beaten just for walking in your Sunday best. 

Dr. King and the SCLC reminded the country of visceral, instinctive compassion.  The images captured and scenes witnessed were so uncivil that they “announced that hurt is to be taken seriously, that hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness” (Bruggemann).  Those living in the white majority would most likely have argued that society could not be characterized as full of hate; rather, they were full of civility and kindness and would remain so as long as African Americans stayed in their lane.  This type of delusional break from reality is only possible when compassion and empathy are dead.  This is how the antebellum South could be remembered as a place known for genteel manners, kind hospitality and gorgeous vistas in settings in which bodies were chained, whipped and forced to work in the glare of said gorgeous vista.  We cannot hold onto both ideas at once, so we ignore the ugly and mythologize the good.  Dr. King was both wildly unpopular and most effective because he exposed the average citizen to the flaws in their own mythologies.  Truth tellers are often avoided (Cassandra, anyone?), and Dr. King kept showing the country the truth of the everyday, mundane trauma African Americans experienced, dispelling the delusions that America was a land of respected and kind free people who rewarded hard work.

In 1966, the actions of Dr. King disrupted the status quo in violent ways.  The actions of those in the movement forced people to realize there is a vast difference in order and in peace.  Those “more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity”…people “who prefer a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice” would not and could not find Dr. King ‘favorable’ (King).  Dr. King’s actions boldly broke the beloved mythology of ‘separate but equal’, a centuries-long commitment of society to silence dissent to such a degree that, according to King, “we have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated.”  The demonstrations of the Civil Rights Movement proclaimed that the status quo of society destroys the inner lives of African Americans.  They explained that waiting “for more than 340 years for [their] God-given and constitutional rights” leads a person to be “plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodyness’” (King), your own humanity cries out to simply do mundane tasks—like taking a bus, taking a walk, or taking a sip of coffee at a counter—with dignity.  Dr. King’s actions made him unpopular in the moment because he demonstrated the injustice and unsustainability of the status quo so cherished by white people with power.  His actions, and the violent reactions to them captured on film, forced society to engage compassion as they realized everyday, mundane hurt is “an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness” (Bruggemann).  63% of Americans didn’t favor him because his actions destroyed their delusions.

Dr. King’s words also made him unfavorable with a very powerful group of people in the South: White Christians and their churches.  Dr. King, always willing to collaborate with those who followed Christ in the work of doing justice and making things right for their neighbors, forcefully outed those in the church who chose power over sacrifice, acting as the “arch supporter of the status quo” (King).  Indeed, his words claimed that—especially for Christians—the measure of peace cannot be the absence of trouble, but must instead be the flourishing of all people in great and mundane tasks.  He wrote, “somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied to a single garment of destiny….I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”  For a Church committed to theologies of victory and favor, committed to a status quo maintains power for their glory, such words of interdependence wound deeply, demonstrating why he was unpopular.

Each of us must decide if we will be a peacemaker or a peacekeeper. There is a vast difference, and the lives and wellbeing of many hang in the balance. Apathy and ignorance are not spiritual gifts.

civility: what ta-nehisi coates taught me

Ta-Nehisi Coates came to Nashville this week. His first novel, The Water Dancer, was released this fall, so he came to talk about it. Coates is a truth teller of our time, and his voice has become a trusted translator-of-history for so many of us trying to understand how the biases and beliefs and policies and norms of our past determine how we move in our present world. His 2015 book, Between the World and Me, explicitly tries to explain the implications of American history and habits for the body of his son. Toni Morrison called it “required reading” because she understood our collective need for a voice to explain not just how we got here, but what our responsibility is to ourselves and each other now that we have arrived. 

 As a white person reading, I benefit from eavesdropping on this important and familiar father-son chat. Coates helps me understand more intimately how America’s disdain for and abuse of black bodies built the foundation of wealth we now enjoy. At the same time, we erase and diminish those very bodies who made America great. He educates me.

 As an American reading, I am confronted with the reality of our predatory past. Coates helps me understand my own responsibility in carrying this past with me in 2019. While the book is for his son, he gives us all the gift of his honest lament: Reading eyes and lips join his chorus as we confess what we have done and grieve what has been done to us/for us/against us/in our name.

It is easy to leave such lessons to historians, but Coates allows no such thing. For him, history is cyclical, living, breathing and informing our every moment. Indeed, The Water Dancer, set in early 19th century America, centers around memory as an invitation to mourn and as a conduit to power. Memory inspires action, ever present, ever affecting.

 In the compelling interview he gave in Nashville this week, Coates was asked about his research for the book. He visited Monticello and other plantations that once belonged to famous founders or lesser known influencers in our history. He spoke specifically of time he spent in Tennessee, and of a tour he took of various Civil War sites across the South. He told of a long day that ended at a site where they planned to fire a canon for the guests’ education and edification. Feeling the weight of all he had seen and witnessed that day already, Coates said he quietly slipped away to his hotel. Knowing why he had come, he also knew the cost such a tour took on his mind, body and spirit. Our American history is a story of pain and loss, even as it also tells of resilience and hope. That evening, he had seen and heard enough of pain and violence, and decided to avoid witnessing more.

 The next morning as he joined the group, Coates shared that the other guests began to stammer apologies, to express their concern that he had been made to feel uncomfortable, to extend their warm welcome to him as a full participant in the tour. On stage in Nashville, he explained, “For them, it’s a civility thing.” His fellow guests could not or would not grapple with the evil parts of American history and their implications on the belonging and safety of a black man. They could not or would not imagine how they share the weight of responsibility for this history, that a person like Coates should not be alone in feeling the awful trauma of our collective past. They could not or would not openly acknowledge that this history of white supremacy lives on, that it damages and divides us still, shaping the way we view the worthiness or belonging of non-white people. They could not or would not speak to the horrific and long-term injustice of the majority of our past. Instead, they apologized for their bad manners, for their incivility.

 On this tour, Coates had seen slave quarters and cotton fields, plantation houses and dim, crowded kitchens. At gas stations and restaurants he had seen rebel flags and Lost Cause memorabilia. The other guests took it all in at his side, compartmentalizing this present history, perhaps? Maybe they did not see the connection between the tour sites and the windows proudly displaying images of white supremacy. They approached Coates that morning not to comfort a body and spirit still impacted by this history; instead, they kindly reached out in an effort to be civil.

 As another election cycle ramps up, so do calls for our lost civility. We decry the meanness of so many of our public figures, their rants on Twitter offending our notions of respectful discourse. We want civility! As The Water Dancer and the movie Harriet show, however, even slave owners sometimes treated the bodies they owned with civility. Consider this: If we each stay committed to civility without confronting the deep disdain, abuse or indifference that thrives underneath our “civil” surface, we have refused to carry the burden our country—built on notions of white supremacy—offers us. Even worse, if we train our mouths to be civil while our policies exclude or even destroy the bodies we undervalue, we can claim innocence even as we destroy the lives of others.

 Our problems with history are not with the way we retell it or how uncomfortable it makes us feel. Our problems with history are that we have ignored the greed and abuse of the folks who owned it, and we continue to deny the implications of such a foundation. For each of us, it can’t just be “a civility thing”; it has to be a justice thing.

 Civility is helpful, but if we are to learn from our nation’s history, we need to offer more. Each of us has the choice to carry, and thereby share, the burden of our white supremacist history. If we each carry our part of the load, we will begin to understand America’s historical and present approach toward those whose lives were necessary but abused. If we each carry part of the load, we will embody civility by acknowledging our wrongs and pursuing justice to correct them. If we each carry part of the load, we will realize that we no longer have to live as an us and a them, but as a people with a broken past who must constantly work to create a more perfect union.