You Heard It Here First

Having children really cleaned up my language.

Not that I was a big user of swear words, but it’s
amazing how quickly I learned to edit what I said on the fly. And not that I’m a prude about swearing either, but I’d rather be a good example to them, of what is appropriate to say and when it is appropriate to say it. Because with all I do not know about raising children, this one thing I do know: what they hear, they repeat, they learn, they believe, they live.

Yeah, you really have to watch what you say around children.

Which brings me to wondering what they are learning from us adults these days. How to live be nice and share and play well together, how to care about things that truly matter, how to control our worse impulses, how to hope, how to love, how to live in grace?

I think not. I think what they are seeing mostly from the adults around them these days are swear words, selfishness, corruption, greed, hatred, bigotry.

How to hate? How to hate and hate and hate until you want to kill?

Last Friday we heard on the news of a horror that most of us could never imagine, of the mass murder of innocent men, women and children in the name of religion, philosophy, politics. Not surprisingly nor humorously, some commentators immediately assumed that it was yet another Muslim terrorist attack. After all, aren’t all bad things that happen Muslim terrorist attacks? It’s not ironic how wrong they were, it’s illuminating. We need a new word in our vocabulary to describe our enemy’s worst traits when they show up in our mirror.

But of the many, many tragic elements of this story, there is no doubt in my mind what the worst is: the shooter thought he was doing a good thing. A right thing. A purposeful thing. A righteous thing.

And how did he come to that conclusion?

How does a human being come to the conclusion that the wanton murder of other human beings could ever serve any larger purpose? A more wise doctor of human behavior than I will have to describe the path of that pathology, but I do know its starting point: he heard it first from some other mouth.

Hatred is not original to human beings. Anger, prejudice, violence, these are our
original sins. But it takes another voice to direct those sinful impulses against another human being. It takes help. It takes a word that must be heard first from
without.

It takes a father to teach his children to swear.

Peter Beinart asks courageously the very important question for us all:

So let’s ask that question about the real Breivik attack: Could an anti-Muslim bigot commit a large-scale terrorist attack in the U.S.? The answer is, Absolutely, because the same anti-Muslim bigotry that influenced Breivik in Europe is widespread here …

Lots of “experts” will poo-poo his question, dismiss it, out of hand, because they are afraid of it, because they know too well its true implication. We can’t acknowledge that it could happen in America because then we will have to confess our own
responsibility, our own culpability, our own disease, our own sin. Like fathers swearing in front of their small children, we are teaching each other to hate, passing on our own smallness, validating our neighbor’s narrowness, fueling the violence that boils not far beneath the surface of our society.

The attack in Norway on Friday is not merely one man’s psychosis, it is our national (international?) personal failure. And if we do not have the ability to filter what we say, then perhaps it is time we started listening to what the person next to us is saying. Or the guy on the radio. Or the woman on the TV. Or the person on the campaign trail.

And to do something about it.