Decency has brought you here. It has brought us here. That narrative must change.
This article first appeared on The Good Men Project and has been republished with permission.
We know the parts in this affair played by the obvious.
On the left are supposed heroes, fighting against insurmountable odds for the good of us all. Just right are the villains, strong, powerful and haughty. This is the emotional landscape that we have created for ourselves in present day America. The people vs. The privileged. The enlightened and learned vs. The brainwashed and ignorant.
It is narrative. Limited and trite. All of it. And, most importantly, it is essential for the maintenance of our sensibilities. We must, and do, in this country, and among our nation family, have an express need to create foils. Simple avatars upon which we can project blame. We must, by necessity, avoid our own sense of powerlessness and point to the great evil Colossus in the distance for the destruction of our landscape. There can be no other way.
The need for narrative, making it imperative, has castrated our reason.
We have shown ourselves to be more willing to commit to a tribe than to purpose, and collective rightness, and humane thinking and doing.
The poles of our ideologies house the shouting leftists and selfish right. Most of us believe, almost unequivocally, that we rest somewhere between these poles. We suggest to ourselves, in our quiet moments, that we are reasonable, and believe a bit of this to the left, and can appreciate some of this point made on the right. Balance is what we believe we live and breathe.
Simply more narrative.
What decency, this middling protective emotional crutch, fails to do is to challenge the poles. It is emotionally passive, at a time where action supported by reason is the only humane and brave option. Decency has become not only a protection, but an accepted form of cowardice and emotional currency.
This sense of balance, of being removed from the grand political stage of American life, is what we use to conceive of ourselves as decent men. As beings who largely want to live and work in peace. To worship as we choose, and we suggest, devoutly, that we wish these same privileges for others. We see fortune as favoring those who work for it. We believe that the world, and our corner of it, has matured to a true meritocracy. We believe that, due to whatever limited social optics are available to us (such a woman winning a two party ticket), that we are in some way past the toxic patriarchy, and our sophisticated brand of racism/classism/prejudice and xenophobia. Again, narrative. Many among us waxed poetic about a leader of mixed race who signified to you that racism and prejudice had died on some metaphorical vine, somewhere on the tree of American history. This was, and is, simply one of a line of reasoning influenced by our need for our narrative about ourselves to match our anxiety and dissonance when assessing ourselves, our motives and our failings.
The American narrative has been fabricated to allow you to carry on and rest us. It has been fabricated to assuage your guilt. There is the need in our emotional toolkit for the application of decency. The place where one who does not supposedly go about actively harming others is somehow free of blame for the victimization of the vulnerable. The narrative posits that one need to have an active motive, and express this publicly, and then carry out acts of racism to share blame for the continued oppression of the Black community in the United States. It posits that one must actively seek to halt or adversely impact the progress of women in the United States to be a disciple and minion of patriarchy. And on and on, with our immigrant communities, the education and protection of our children, policy with our neighboring nations…and on.
These myths, this narrative, are the cloth we use to wrap ourselves in this cloak of decency.
What this sense of decency fails to provide is proper perspective.
What decency, this middling protective emotional crutch, fails to do is to challenge the poles. It is emotionally passive, at a time where action supported by reason is the only humane and brave option. Decency has become not only a protection, but an accepted form of cowardice and emotional currency.
The decent fed this President’s engine with fuel. With votes and silence. With justification and a refusal to engage. It is the decent who suggest that we all support an individual who is wholly unqualified to gain our backing. One who has offered our neck to other nations, and who in his first month in office has gone about making every effort to through act or neglect, terrorize vulnerable communities.
It is the decent who have refused to face the necessity to actively engage and correct our methods of policing. It is the decent who see Black and Brown lives snuffed out pathologically by our peacekeepers, and instead of taking the necessary stance that no loss of life is tolerable, it is the decent who have remained silent outdoors, while assembling behind closed doors around the notion that these Black and Brown citizens are likely to blame for their deaths.
This leader, the one you decent men have empowered, has gone so far as to craft an executive order making it a federal crime to even attempt to do harm to a police officer. He has done this with your passivity often giving him wings.
You, decent and with resolve, have simply determined that this, on top of what has already been done to traumatize, ostracize and harm Muslim peoples, women and children, is acceptable. The fight, so you have determined, is either too great or not worth the effort.
Seeing a neighbor in need, one desperate for escape, one being victimized in your sight, one that you will not speak or act for … should they not see this, all of it, being the way of a coward?
It is decency, in it’s failed neutrality, and exercised by you as a means of upholding this façade of a civilized society, that has brought us here.
We, you, would not require decency if you truly were humane. If you truly were to practice empathy. You would not require the sedative effects of the narrative of decency.
What we, your nation family, needs, is goodness. We all require that you consider that your leader, and his cowardly supporters and benefactors in his cabinet and in both Houses, must be fought and challenged. They must be challenged in word and deed now, at midterms, and most importantly, in your daily life.
You cannot immediately influence what happens in the citadel, but you can practice empathy and active resistance, and advocating for your vulnerable neighbors.
I should not have to ask you to consider their point of view for yourself, it should be enough that I ask you to consider their humanity, as it is well past time that you determined that you are good.
Decency has brought you here. It has brought us here. That narrative must change. While you are allowed the privilege of being “OK” and not challenging your family who support a misguided tyrant, and believe along tribal lines as opposed to considering the wellness of us all, there are those who are victim of your silence and neutrality.
Enough.
Decide to be good. As challenging as it may be.
For the very purpose that these wrongs have been in your name, and your decency has made you complicit in their execution. Goodness is your mandate.
Look around you. You see all that is wrong. You know that a rich, diverse nation family is suffering. Decide, right where you are, in your small corner, to change that narrative. Goodness first.
