Sound and fury signifying nothing

Speech, the lead singer for my favorite rap band and the most positive rap group that I am familiar with, Arrested Development, posted this article by black sports columnist Jason Whitlock on Myspace about Imus. It's some of the more thoughtful and decent things I've read written about the whole Imus affair.

Imus isn't the enemy

I have to say that some of the more thoughtful pieces I've read on Imus' behalf have been written by thoughtful black folks.

The best article I read was by Michael Meyers, the executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and former assistant national director of the NAACP.

Let the Idiocy Be Heard

The truth is that I don't care anymore about self-righteous outrage on anyone's behalf, anymore. It's useless. And accomplishes nothing. The only worthwhile thing that has happened over the course of this whole sordid affair is Imus' apology to the girls on the Rutgers team and their accepting his apology. Everything else is sound and fury signifying nothing.

I suppose enough people will have to be taken down by this period before we face up to that fact and our own ugly hypocrisy and mean-spiritedness and otherwise vice masquerading as virtue.

In the meantime, if I saw Imus, today, I'd offer to buy him a beer and wonder why people can't seem to reconcile themselves to what self-righteous hypocrits they so clearly are and how this whole episode makes that so much more crystal clear than anyone wants to take responsibility for.

You know what the bottom line is to all of this, I think?

It's not that most people are without sin. That's definitely not true. To the contrary, it is that they feel so bad about the sins in their lives, about what shitheads they have been at various points in their lives, about their own mistakes and foolishness and stupidity. And, probably more importantly, they still harbor all kinds of bitterness and pain and cynicism about all the ways they've been wronged by others in their lives. And instead of just forgiving themselves and others for the sins and the mistakes and the bad judgment and the learning involved with all of that, instead they hold onto that bitterness and cynicism like it is a security blanket that will somehow keep them safe from all of the pain. It won't. But they don't feel strong enough to encounter more. None of us do. But we will. And sadly, we will encounter more pain and bitterness the worse we treat ourselves and one another.

When really what we all need is to just be cut some slack and to forgive and to be forgiven more readily. Jesus and Buddha and Ghandi and King didn't say all that stuff just to hear themselves talk or just to prove how much better they were than anyone else and how noone could ever really live up to that example. We're all just too big of dumbasses to see that. They said all that stuff about love and compassion and empathy and forgiveness because it is the only way that we can function best in world where pain and power were all too present in our lives.

And the bottom-line is that we will all live lives of pain and subject to the bullying and aggression of others as long as we rationalize all that pain and aggression as our excuse for why we must bully and hurt others for our own purposes.

None of which touches conscience and thought, which is the basis for any real progress in a culture. In Jesus' time. In Buddha's time. In Ghandi's time. In King's time. In our time. At all times. At every moment in history. And the most serious sign of progress in every historical period has been how much we have left that more brutish, aggressive means of resolving our problems behind us and how much we have given space for genuine conscience and thought to have room to breathe and grow and learn and develop.

Until then, all this bluster is sound and fury signifying nothing.

It is more justification for everything that divides us and polarizes us and keeps us apart.

And we will never been fully reconciled as people until we can search deeper for what we have in common, including our propensity for the not-so-noble, if we ever aspire to strengthen and elaborate and reconcile ourselves with our highest values.

And we will never be able to lay claim to those highest values centered around anything but our most reconciled liberal values. Values that look after everyone. Period. No exception.

Those are the liberal values that really matter most. Imus, Speech, me, you. All of us. Terrorists may have to die as we protect those values, but we must do everything we can to prevent that and to bring them to justice, if we take those values seriously. And our freedom to be less than our most noble selves must not only be taken seriously. It is the only way that we will ever see more clearly that we are without a doubt not being our most noble selves, in this political period. We are not living up to those highest values. Not yet. And the only way forward in that direction is found in the very same forgiveness of Imus that we need ourselves for what shitheads we've been this entire period. Our progeny will have to forgive us to move forward. And we must forgive ourselves and others if we want to move forward as well.

Love,
Ben