Something more serious

If you read The Anchoress, you know she's brilliant. And she often looks at things from a perspective "above" what a lot of others take. ("Above," I am sure, because she is so informed by her faith. She wrote a wonderful "Don't worry" post before the election, reminding us that everything is in God's time.)

Well, she has another great post today where she precisely delineates why I have been so uncomfortable with the descent into name-calling that politics has become.

"Dehumanizing people begins with baby-steps like name-calling, or the sort of intellectual dishonesty that delights in deliberately twisting the meaning of others in negative and misrepresentative ways. Those are the little gateways to the great evils that come once you’ve managed to thoroughly de-humanize others."

That is why, though I may disagree with President Obama on matters of policy, while I may question the advisability of his choices of some advisors, while I may find some of the things his wife has said distinctly off-putting, I refuse to descend to name calling. I am a better person than that. And even though I realize if I chose to call our new President by some offensive name - or make some kind of bad pun on his name - he would never know it, he would never be hurt by it - still, I spent enough years on the playground being taunted and called names to know that that's not something I want to do to someone else.

I think also I'm a bit haunted by this passage, from Matthew 5:22:

""But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, 'You good-for-nothing,' shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, 'You fool,' shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell."

Because honestly, that's something I have problems with. I don't suffer fools lightly, as the old saying goes. I don't like it when people behave in ways that seem to me not to be fitting to their intellect. I am one of those people who screamed at the television every time some commentator made what I interpreted as a snide remark about Bush or Palin.

And I guess I'm just scared enough by that Bible passage above to not want to have to spend time in the Beyond answering for stuff I said to or about another person in the head of anger.

One of the things I actively work on is "seeing the other person" - even when someone is being a "Problem Person," even when someone isn't using their God-given intellect, when when one side of my brain is screaming at them to "get to the point already" or "how on Earth could you do that" the other side of my brain is quietly reminding me that that person is a child of God, even if he or she doesn't know it, even if he or she would actively deny it, and as a result, it is my duty to treat that person with some measure of respect, not to go off on them and tell them they're stupid or a turkey or any of the other names the angry side of my brain is taunting me to say.

And so I try. Really really hard. I am, at times, perhaps more patient and tolerant of people than I need be. But I see it as part of my duty.

So being patient and tolerant and not hurling insults is going to be my pose for the next four years. Because honestly? Obama's been dealt a bad hand. He has an ugly economy to try to deal with. He has a divided populace that deeply distrusts (and with good reason) the government. He has a war going on against an enemy that is slippery and hard to pin down - it's not the same as fighting Nazis in WWII.

So though I may disagree with the man, though I will vote R in 2010 and do what I can to change the balance of Congress, I'm not going to say rude things.

So, even if there's a general piling-on to our new President, either because he's not as prepared for the office as people assumed he was, or because his ideas don't work in practice (and honestly, how many of us have ideas that look great to us, until we try to put them into practice), I'm not going to throw stones. Oh, I reserve the right for reasoned criticism of policy; that's different. I reserve the right to advise him "in absentia" about what I think he should do.

But I like to think that I'm a more compassionate person - thanks to my childhood experience of being the butt of every playground joke - than those who spent the past eight years comparing our President unfavorably to a chimp, or a weasel, or to whatever.

I do think healing whatever rift in our country will begin with people realizing that animal comparisons, potty mouthed jokes and the sort of juvenile humor that seems to pass for political humor these days just doesn't help any.