When I was in the 3rd or 4th grade – it’s been almost 35 years, so you’ll have to forgive my uncertainty – two of my fellow students enjoyed lightly harassing me and making it hard for me to focus on what we were all supposed to be learning. I don’t know if I’d call it bullying, per se, but it was enough of a problem that the teacher got involved and reassigned me to a new seat, further away from the two troublemakers.
I have to imagine these students weren’t happy about me shining a light on their behavior, because they found a way to continue their campaign against me; the new seating assignment was no match against their efforts to make me feel like I didn’t belong, like I was an outsider. I brought my concerns about the ongoing matter back to my teacher, to let this authority figure know that the harassment hadn’t stopped.
My teacher essentially told me to put my head down and keep my mouth shut. I had been moved once, had disrupted the classroom schedule and seating chart, and I was now the troublemaker, as far as the teacher was concerned. “I’m not going to move you around every time you can’t get along with other students,” the teacher told me.
In retrospect, this might have been the seed from which sprang my deep hatred for and intolerance of injustice. I know, I know. I’m a straight, cis, white male, and these two students probably had nothing better to do or had bad examples at home in their parents. I’m not exactly Dred Scott or Rosa Parks in this scenario. I’ve had a relatively easy life, thanks in no small part to the complete luck of the draw of my being born into the most desired position in our nation’s ruthlessly policed caste system.
But things hit harder when they happen to you as a little kid. I had no baseline of experience to tell me this sort of thing happens all the time or that it wasn’t actually the end of the world as I knew it. Even though it wasn’t the end of the world, and I got through that school year with good grades and good relationships with most of my fellow classmates, I knew, fundamentally and without it being explained to me, that the teacher’s backlash against me wasn’t right.
To this day, whenever I see an injustice happening, like the fundamental rights of millions of my fellow humans being stripped away by people who almost seem to take glee in it, it makes my blood boil.
If I can only explain to people the harm that they are causing, I rationalize, then they’ll understand and change course. Things go sideways when I don’t check my emotions, which, especially these days, are attached to a fuse about as long as the line of well-wishers offering support to Harvey Weinstein.
With the overturning of Roe v Wade on Friday, June 24, 2022, for the first time in the history of the United States, the Supreme Court took rights away from U.S. citizens instead of expanding them. The institution of slavery was upheld numerous times by the highest court in the land before the abhorrent practice was abolished during the Civil War. The court kept in place the same denial of rights – and basic humanity – for enslaved people that had been in practice for centuries, since the transatlantic slave trade began in the early 17th century. Still, while the sick institution of slavery was upheld, enslaved people were never granted a right that was then stripped away from them at a later time.
In the case of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and to choose whether or not to end a pregnancy, the court effectively made illegal a procedure that has been a protected right – however precariously, because of the efforts of anti-choice crusaders – for half a century. They took that right away from over half the population of this country. The court’s action is analogous to a nightmarish alternate-history scenario in which slavery was abolished in 1863 only to be reinstituted by the Supreme Court again in 1915 or so.
After learning about this disastrous decision, which will effectively enslave pregnant people into giving birth against their will in the 25 or so states that will outright ban abortion following the Supreme Court’s ruling, I was hit with both raw rage and deep despair.
I let those emotions engulf me, and I lashed out in anger and uncontrollable grief. I lashed out at my mother on – what else? – Facebook. I am deeply ashamed of how I spoke to her in my urgent need to make her understand what is happening to our country. I should have led with love, which is a strategy and guiding principle that I am determined to make central to my life and personal philosophy.
I won’t rehash the conversation, mostly because I don’t want this to come off as an attempt on my part to make my point of view clearer, or to excuse my belittling of my mother’s own lived experience. All I need you to know, all I need to make clear, is that I was thoughtless and cruel in my words. Words are very important to me. Human language – that ultimate invention of our endlessly inventive and inquisitive species – is our only way to share our inner existence with our fellow humans.
More often than not, I feel like a crushing failure because the words I’m able to string together are a feeble and woefully inadequate translation of the what’s going on between my ears. (A more accurate assessment is that I’m haunted by a relentless self-doubt that what’s going on between my ears isn’t interesting, incisive, or worth enough to bother expressing in the first place.)
I lashed out and did to my mother the one thing I’m desperate not to have done to me: I treated her like an idiot. I treated her like an idiot because she holds different beliefs than I do. For that, I am deeply ashamed and indescribably sorry. I expressed as much to her via a text-message thread, and, because she is full of love and is the best mother a son could ever hope to have, she forgave me. I had no right to expect her to do that, but she showed grace and mercy where I had none.
I truly believe that love is the only way the human species will ever overcome the divisiveness, mistrust, and hatred we all seem to be swimming in at the present moment. We have to lead with love; love for those closest to us, and love for those who look, sound, live, believe, and love in ways completely different from us.
I have to lead with love.
I thought that immersing myself in the artform that I love so much – movies – and wresting with stories from cultures around the world would make that happen naturally within me. It was Roger Ebert who once described film as “a machine that generates empathy.” While that’s true – in many, if far from all instances – it’s clear, because of my own inner struggles with my emotions and our collective addiction to outrage culture, that it’s going to take more from me to become the person I want to be: kind, empathetic, and caring.
I am not perfect. I have many faults. But I can make one promise to you that I will never break: I’m trying. I try every single day to be a better person, to be someone I can be proud of. I sometimes fail in that goal, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop trying.