We were just your normal American family. After dinner, we would gather in the living room and watch TV. My brothers and I often held sway over the viewing schedule for the evening and would watch “Combat,” following the exploits of Sgt. Saunders, Kirby, “Frenchie” and “Little John” as they traipsed across France making the world safe for democracy. Later we added “Twelve O’Clock High” to the schedule. Just your normal kids. Except that our mother grew up in Germany during World War II. I remember one evening, my mother quietly getting up from her chair and going into the kitchen and rustling about. Being a nine year old, and well, having the sophistication of a nine year old, I asked her if she wanted to watch TV with us. She quietly replied, “No, you go ahead. If you have lived through it, you don’t need to see it again.” This is where my curious path about trying to reconcile issues around conflict began.
My mother and I would return to the issues of war and conflict all throughout her life, as I tried to understand the history that I read and the history that she lived. Around the time of the first Iraq war, I remember one conversation in particular about war and the nature of evil. At one point in the conversation, she asked me what the moral difference was between the Allies and the Nazis, between the ovens of the death camps and the phosphorous bombs dropped on Dresden. The only answer I could offer, and an admittedly feeble one at that, was that the Allies did what they did to stop evil, and once the evil was stopped, they stopped employing the tools of evil. My mother ended the conversation by saying, “The morality of war doesn’t matter to the dead. The innocent are just as dead no matter who was right.”
This conversation has informed all of my inner dialogues on right and wrong, tactics and strategies, war and conflict, all of my life. How “right” do I have to be, how “wrong” does an opponent need to be to justify imparting loss or suffering on anyone? If there was a clearly defined evil in all of the twentieth century, was it not Nazi Germany? But what of the “White Rose?” What of all the private citizens like Oskar Schindler who risked his life to save the lives of Jews from the Holocaust. What to make of the inaction of the powerless and fearful who lived under Nazi rule? If, in this most easily defined evil, I can find reasons to question the strategy and tactics of the Allies, how can I be so sure of any situation that I might be confronted with? What would it take for me to call on the strategy and tactics of those that I oppose in order to defeat them? And worse, if I spend too much time employing the strategy and tactics of the evil, no matter how righteous my cause, will I become the evil that I oppose?
Does using the methods of my enemy make me the moral equivalent of my enemy? Are there no self-imposed strictures or restraints that will allow me, without moral inconsistency, to maintain the integrity of my cause? William S. Burroughs once said, “When I become Death, Death is the seed from which I grow…” Did he usher forth a universal truth from a drug -induced haze? Is it my actions, or is it against whom my actions are directed that determines the morality of my cause? For example, is it the target or the words that make a statement bigoted? In English, the word "bigot" refers to a person whose habitual state of mind includes an obstinate, irrational, or unfair intolerance of ideas, opinions, ethnicities, or beliefs that differ from their own, and intolerance of the people who hold them.[1] If this definition mirrors my thought processes as I hurl invectives at someone that I consider to be of a “privileged group,” am I not engaged in bigotry? Does it really make a difference if I am branding everyone employed in the financial industry with the same iron? If I am doing so without regard to anything positive that they may be contributing to society? Is there some phrenology chart hanging on the wall somewhere being used to find “evil bankers?” Is this not bigotry as well?
We are confronted with a very contentious political season. Emotions are running high. Anger is easy to find. Calm voices of reason are daily tempted into picking up the tools of angry discourse. At the heart of this conflict is less disagreement over ideas as it is conflict over processes. The policy goals of Democratic candidates, if placed on the political spectrum along with that of their Republican counterparts, occupy such a narrow slice on that broad spectrum, and stand at such polar extremes to their Republican opponents, that I am totally mystified at the strategy and tactics that Democrats have chosen to employ on each other. The internecine warfare is being conducted in a manner that bears closer resemblance to the Tea Party insurgency in the Republican party than just about any other case study I can find. And at the heart of it is anger. That anger has its roots in disappointment with any or all of a number of valid complaints about society and our political system.
Anger has a place. It is our inner signal that something has reached a point where action must be taken. Anger is what we can use to overcome the moment of inertia in society, to begin movement towards rectifying a problem. But anger is not a tool, it is a weapon. It tends to recreate the strategies and tactics of the opposition in order to defeat the opposition. When anger is not transmuted into reason and passion, it is nothing but a crude weapon whose repeated use can turn you into that which you oppose. You may win the battle, but in the larger sense, by becoming what you abhor, your “enemy” has won the war. If you use the tactics of the Tea Party, i.e. if your habitual state of mind insists upon no compromise, absolute fidelity to the cause, and brooks no dissent, and when anger is your weapon of choice, you will reap exactly what they have harvested: a broken party incapable of healing itself, swirling in circles of insatiable anger.
Understanding the nature of anger, and putting it in its place, provides the space for reason to work. Reason will lead towards the strategies and tactics that can change hearts and minds so that goals can be reached, even if those goals are about the process. Anger is only effective at forcing others to submit. Reason gives others cause to join in common purpose. Anger spawns an ever greater number of adversaries. Anger tells you to that when a house is in flames, you should just let it burn down. Anger never asks, “Who is inside the house?” Reason helps one navigate questions such as “Will acting to fulfill this desire for one group come at the expense of failing to fill the legitimate needs of another?” Or, “Is this injustice so great that the disorder in society caused by rending the whole process asunder is justified?”
Surprising enough, this inner dialogue about the nature of conflict, this concern about not becoming what I opposed, has never frozen me in place, unable to act. In fact, it has driven me to be constantly engaged. I am always looking for the means whereby I may have some small influence that if applied early enough and often enough, might change the course of events to come. The one question I never want to ask myself only to find my answer wanting, is this: “What did I do, or not do, that I felt compelled to pick up a weapon instead of a tool?”
[1] en.wikipedia.org/...Bigotry