Transcending partisan politics (make sure my funeral doesn't look like this)

I just happened by this link, today, for a review of the coverage of the funeral of Coretta Scott King back in February.

Everyone who cares about me: make sure my funeral isn't like this. It was an ugly partisan-fest. I understand why liberals wanted to use the occassion to criticize the President, after years of feeling like the President would not listen to criticism about the war or anything else. I agree with a lot of their concerns even as I have differences about how to address them.

But my major concern reading the coverage of this funeral was seeing just how tragically wrapped-up people get in politics. How it becomes the only or most important lens through which they see people. What a hard time people have just accepting that people have differences with them, that people just look at things in life differently -- with potential for a future reconciliation of views, rather than a foreclosed difference -- instead of assuming that people are in bad faith or trying to be destructive.

The problem is power, I think. When you want to use power to hurt peoples' friends, they tend to get pissed off. Everyone. So people do what they did at this funeral which is take pot shots at one another. Even people associated with a legacy as great as Coretta Scott King's and Martin Luther King's legacy.

One of the best things that has happened to me over the last 5 or 6 years is that I don't look at people through partisan lenses, primarily, anymore. I'm not really a partisan in any meaningful sense, these days. I don't think anyone or any group has all the right answers. And I know every group has plenty of wrong answers.

And what that has meant for my life is that I just have a lot of friends and family that I love, that I agree with much of the time, but that I also disagree with plenty, and with whom our common ground is always more substantial than our disagreements.

The idea that people would kill one another over partisan differences, as happened over much of the 20th century, or that they would kill and threaten revolution, as was supported by far too many liberals and conservatives and their more militant, radical counterparts in the 60's; the idea that people would threaten one another, prosecute and persecute one another, villify and embarrass them in public, insult them in a way that is meant to hurt them rather than enlighten anyone, strong-arm them, force their hands, or otherwise seek to hurt them or threaten them to win a political point is just ugly and certainly not a standard we should aspire to, from my vantage point.

Funerals should be a time to honor someone, their life, and their legacy. Not to tear down someone else.

So many people are filled with so much anger and rage and hate and envy and other destructive impulses towards one another, politically and otherwise.

It's so sad to me. That politics and religion and education and all kinds of high-minded aspirations get used by people to direct their rage and hate and envy at one another.

It's the saddest kind of rationalization, to my mind. To use high-minded pursuits to cloak one's ugliness and destructiveness. We all have nasty impulses. Everyone. No exceptions. And we need an opportunity to vent them or share them openly so that we can accept ourselves for them, despite them.

But so many people waste so much of their lives trying to pretend that they don't operate with such impulses. Or that those impulses are more nobel than they really are. Fearing that others wouldn't accept them or that they couldn't accept themselves if they admitted just how ugly their attitudes had gotten in the name of whatever self-righteous cause.

It is the basis for terrorism, Communism, Naziism, Fascism, authoritarianism, autocracy, genocide, apartheid and all of the worst evils of the history of humanity.

And it exists with more or less power in contemporary democracies and will continue to have much power as long as democratic citizens both fail to acknowledge it and allow themselves to be manipulated by it and to manipulate others with it.

Our great hope is that we have escaped this kind of ugliness in the past, and we can escape it in the future.

Almost 400 years ago, Thomas Hobbes wrote a book that students of politics still read today, The Leviathan, which was a comprehensive effort on Hobbes' part to help Great Britain escape the vestiges of religious partisanship and sectarianism that has torn apart his country in bloody civil wars.

Hobbes is recognized today as perhaps the first political scientist, attempting to account for political thought and behavior in a secular, scientific way rather than cloaked in religion -- though Leviathan has plenty of religious arguments as well; if you've not read it, I highly recommend it, especially in a modern political theory class with a professor as quality as Dr. David Ericson, my modern political theory professor at Wichita State University -- and in a way that was meant to transcend the bloody religious differences that had torn apart his country in 1642.

It was clearly a noble cause from our vantage point, today. Leaving behind the vestiges of a destructive religious sectarianism that could never resolve itself in any meaningful way except in common ground. It was very similar to the destructive ideological partisanship that we experience today, where so many people claim to have found ultimate truth about matters that they clearly have not out of a self-righteous notion that they or their thinking about the world is superior to their neighbor.

It is our democratic commitments that have more consistently than not saved us from the fate of Hobbes' 17th century England. I'm not quite sure how America would have fared the tumultuous 60's with their violence and ugliness without a mature, committed democracy. Democracy cannot save us from civil war, always, as America learned in the mid-19th century (a civil war that I've increasingly wondered if it might have been averted with diplomatic intervention by the French or another party and differences resolved more peacefuly and substantially, rather than through so much bloodshed).

And the saddest part about studying that period in English history or any such similar period in history or any such similar situation, where bloodshed or force replaces reasonable engagement, like genocide or holocaust or apartheid or segregation or oppression or repression or colonization or occupation, is that it is always for naught. So many people die or are hurt for so little valuable a cause.

Noone looks back on 17th century Protestants and Catholics and celebrates the heroism of partisans. Noone looks at dominance of Hutus of Tutsis, of white South Africans of black South Africans, of the British or French or Spanish or Portuguese over their colonial subjects and thinks thank goodness they imposed their will. Noone looks back over any political period and says those Democrats or those Republicans always seemed to get it right and the other guy always seemed to get it wrong. At least not honestly.

But, for whatever reasons, we all get so caught up in our partisanship, trying to prove our true colors, our true convictions.

When you would hope that the reason we would even care is to make peoples' lives better, not to destroy them or hurt them.

But for whatever reasons, we get so lost in our destructiveness and our desire to prove that we are right.

When the irony of the strongest reasoning is that it does not try to prove that it is right. The strongest reasoning is characterized by disconfirmability. The strongest reasoning tries to test if it is wrong. It is open to challenge. It looks for ways to prove it is not true, knowing that only an idea that can withstand such a challenge can be more true.

Everything else derives from other, less noble impulses. The impulse for power or to exact revenge or to hurt those who you believe have hurt those you love.

And so the cycle continues, unabated. A self-fulfilling prophecy of hurt and hate and control and threats and ugliness.

And all for naught.

It is so sad to me that people would be so lost in their animus toward one another that they would do this.

As Pablo Freire writes, those who are hurt or oppressed are likely to take it out on those who have hurt them or others.

I've been really angry with Brandi, lately. I've been trying to let it go. She was my best friend, after all. And by breaking off communication she was doing what most women and men likely do when they get married.

I've just been feeling really hurt. Hurt at the idea that I would not be able to keep up with her life or know how she was doing.

But I don't want that kind of shit on my heart. And I don't want to take it out on others.

I just want to wish her well and hope she's doing ok.

Whether we like it or not, love is what animates our lives. And it is what needs to animate all that is best about us. It is what we all need, most, and need to share most.

Jesus was right 2000 years ago. It's too bad they crucified him. I bet he would have been a pretty decent guy to hang with, even with all that Messiah talk:). I would have had a beer with him and suggested that he tone down the Messiah stuff and maybe hang with the rest of our friends. Or maybe find a girlfriend. But keep teaching. Because he had a lot of good things to say.
I hate all this hate. I don't understand why we have such a hard time to learn how to treat each other decently. I don't understand why we are so mean-spirited with one another in the name of being good to one another.

Why we are constantly forcing one anothers' hands in the name of freedom or equity or democracy and goodness or decency.

"Can't we all just get along?" Rodney King asked 15 years ago (my freshman year of college).

Can't we all just get along?

It's a good question.

"And if we can't, then who really gives a shit about any of it?" is my question.

Here's to loving our friends and family and neighbors just because, and not because they agree with us.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Love,
Ben