Sometime during the 2004 presidential election, I saw a Republican right-wing fundamentalist on TV--I don't remember his home state, but it was a red one-- saying, "As long as you godless liberals despise us, we will never go away." In one sentence he stated the paradox of where we stand today and of a deeper division, which centers on social injustice. Social injustice is always present, but only at historic moments does it occupy center stage waving the banner of good. When such a reversal happens, it is necessary for each of us to take up the cause of truth-telling. But truth-telling underpinned with hatred, contempt, and corrosive political motives can also become self-defeating. It becomes its own kind of wrong, and the cause of good is crippled. Can we apply this observation to the current moment? Social injustice has taken center stage. This, I think, is an article of truth that if taken seriously, leads to more than self-righteous anger. It calls upon that part in each of us that learned practical morality from Gandhi, George Orwell, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Mother Theresa and all the other truth-tellers who share one thing in common. None are alive today.
There is no void of angry criticism. That role is being filled very well, but wrong is sticky. It can pull you in when you think you are on the other side. Those of us who incessantly lambaste and demonize President Bush (as I too have done) who call him a fool and a knave, may feel like truth-tellers. But we really aren't, not in the spirit of real truth-telling, which is always backed by love. We have all participated in a loveless pull toward social injustice in its present shape: Fundamentalists Christians have hijacked a religion of love and turned it toward bigotry, intolerance, and close-mindedness. In turn they are despised for their self-righteous avowal of social injustice. Right-wing conservatives have made greed and selfishness into a virtue, and they pretend that neglecting the poor is no one's fault but the poor's. In turn they are despised for their blinkered negligence and cruelty.
Racists have made it respectable to consider black people a lower caste, heaping on their heads the onus for crime, drugs, lack of education, and unemployment. In turn they are despised by the people of color being treated that way. The current coalition that brought us to this point in history is based on these social wrongs, which have in common that a mask of goodness is worn to disguise the truth. We have to be careful not to demonize one political party. The former coalition that centered around FDR and the New Deal was a coalition of virtue by comparison, but it, too, could only rule by pandering to Southern Democrats, turning a blind eye to wrongs committed against black people until by the 1960s, idealism prevailed over neglect and collaboration. Having a coalition of virtue with feet of clay is very different from having a coalition of social injustice outright. For the sake of fairness, it is important that we include other wrongs that truth telling cannot overlook: The national dependence on militarism, with its unchecked barbarity and ever-expanding arsenal of death, is a huge social evil. The mouthing of nationalistic rhetoric to excuse waging war overseas is a wrong closely linked to militarism. The denial of civil liberties to drug offenders, Muslims suspected of terrorism, and gays, is, each in its own way, a bald-faced injustice. That this country imprisons so many harmless drug-users and criminalizes nonviolent offenses is a wrong long overlooked.
If we agree that social injustice is occupying center stage and somehow has succeeded in calling itself good, the responsibility to tell the truth and keep telling it falls on each of us personally. But the second part, using truth with love, is something that bothers, annoys, outrages, frustrates, and even sickens many critics of the present situation. They feel that unlimited anger is justified. They see no bottom to the calumny that wrongdoers deserve. In this, they share the values of those they despise. One only has to refer to an example of wrongdoing in the clergy, and the sickened response that endemic pedophilia causes. This seems like the starkest instance of evil wearing the mask of good. "Evil" was the word one heard most often, even from the ethically cautious who try to avoid this all-condemning tag. Most people excoriated the guilty priests and demanded maximum punishment. The Church took the apparently amoral position that these offenders should atone before God--and take whatever time they need to do it coupled with getting therapy for their sickness. But aren't we caught between two views of morality here? In the religious view wrongful deeds are sins that can be atoned for and forgiven; the most moral attitude toward sinners is compassion. This view, however faulty, depends upon love. The opposing civil view holds that sinners are criminals and should be punished with no consideration of forgiveness; the most moral attitude is even-handed justice under the law. Every great moral teacher has uttered some version of the Golden Rule, and so I ask myself: Would I want to be punished to the full extent of the law, without a chance of forgiveness, for every bad act I have committed? What if that act is gay sex or opposing a war or marching for civil rights? Each is an emblem of evil in someone's eyes. I cannot see "sin," "evil," or "the law" being the final word on morality. (I know President Bush wants all looters in New Orleans punished to the full extent of the law, even those who robbed stores for desperately needed supplies, but the moral feeling toward such people would be compassion first, legal justice later. Even by that standard, justice for the totally dispossessed isn't the same as justice for members of the country club.) At some point forgiveness on both sides, compassion and tolerance for all, and putting the shoe on the other foot have to come into play. Otherwise, we will be drawn deeper into social injustice for the very reason I heard that man say on TV: "As long as you despise us, we will never go away." It is not easy to rest easy with the commenters who throw up the smokescreen of "You expect me to love Hitler?", or who turn their scorn on the absurdity that love is the answer to social injustice. One could expect sympathy from people who agree with what all this "in theory" but who wish to point out that in this hard world the only rebuke to evil is constant hostility and extreme force as needed. Maybe there are theological twists we can't stomach, such as loving the sinner but hating the sin. I can only say that if you think love is a weak, foolish, naive answer to social wrongs, read any great spiritual teacher and see how many agree with you.
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