Other
It’s Pride Month in Canada and there will be the usual parades across the country. While I don’t normally attend them, I commend that they still happen as a reminder, even though we also have a charter of rights and freedoms. That’s why reading American Supreme Court and other legal decisions is so depressing. A side issue is the way news media always names the party in power when a judge was appointed as a rationale for the decision... I have no idea of the party affiliation of any Canadian judge, nor do I care. I still trust judges to be nonpartisan – and I still trust the system as a whole. If there have been bad decisions in the past, new knowledge and new understandings can change them for the better.
But what is common to recent decisions is the US political sphere in almost a knee jerk reaction – cynical acceptance of the decision in advance or even surprise. What is sobering is the dismissal of the “other.” It’s everyone for themselves” in a dog-eat-dog world. But it’s deeper than that. Whether believing, agnostic or atheist, the speaker often reveals his definition of the divine.
I continue to be a person who tries to practise my understanding of my faith. Karen Armstrong quotes a monk who once stated, “It doesn’t matter what you believe – but it does matter what you practice.” Maybe that idea gets it right. If you believe in a deity that punishes, you live in fear – for yourself and for those you care about. You need to do whatever it takes to feel safe. Protecting leads to becoming defensive – and the right to defend seems now to be the right to be violent against anyone who is perceived as the other.
In a recent hearing here was a response to Senator Slotkin who quoted from a memoire, “Senator, I’d be careful of what you read in books and believing it — except for the Bible,” he said. The speaker was the United States Secretary of Defense. What does he believe?
And that’s where we now - in serious trouble. Even though he and I both might call ourselves Christian, we seem to have big differences about the contents and directives of that book, Reading it in many translations, seeing splits and wars in empires based on interpretations as small as the single word, “and” in a creed –. Beliefs lead to actions.
I don’t always know what I believe. Unlike most of my family and friends, I stick it out in a faith community because I’d rather be able to attack it from the inside if I need to. But it is because of what all its community teaches me – not just the official leaders or hierarchies, though some of them are models too. Thar community saves me from that fear of the other.
When I do see that fear in action in other parts of my life, I try not to become fearful of its consequences. If life is a gift, we are neither gods nor objects. As Simone Weil said, the past and the future are our only treasures. We have the gift of insight into ways our world could be better – and we can do some small things to make that happen.
We all depend on those others – first parents, then friends and colleagues and so many others, past and present, that make our lives possible in ways we can never know. To humiliate others, to torture others, to remove others is never the answer. We are watching a regime unfold in which everyone is suddenly becoming the enemy – a different color of skin, a different political party, a different view of the law, a different gender or orientation, a different view of science. It's not just sad. We can learn from history. It’s another country on a route of self-destruction. It’s even more important to live in my own country and take steps, however small, to make it the place I want it to be – compassionate, creative, courageous – and beautiful.