HOLIDAY REFLECTIONS

          During the holidays that proclaim “peace on earth and good will toward men”, it amazes me that many Americans, who abhor torture of enemy combatants, fully support drone strikes that kill innocents with impunity.  Dark deeds in dark places that include water boarding and forced rectal feeding do not provide acceptable Christmas visions.  On the other hand, surgical drone strikes that kill civilians are viewed as an extension of the Xbox video game from under the Christmas tree.

          We would all do well this holiday season to set aside some time for moral reflection, apart from our busy schedules and gift giving.  This process can start by each of us putting on the shoes of someone far, far away, or of a family next door, that is being adversely impacted by misplaced American policy or world events.  This exercise is not unlike the catharsis that Scrooge went through in A Christmas Carol. 

          Start with the orphaned little girl who lost her parents, mistakenly killed by a drone strike in Pakistan.  Or, the young African American college student who has been stopped frisked and humiliated by police, while walking through a white neighborhood on the way to class.  Consider the Latino family, living in fear of deportation, who desperately wants to begin living the American dream for their children.  Ponder the broken mental health system and the family you know with no resources and nowhere to go for help.  Place yourself in the position of a parent who lost a child in the Newtown shootings, which happened two years ago during the holidays. Try to imagine the small rural village in Liberia, where every family has lost someone to Ebola. Place in your mind’s eye, the almost two million Syrian refugees who on Christmas Eve will be trying to survive in Jordanian, Turkish and Lebanese refugee camps, after walking across the desert.

          None of us alone can save the world from immoral deeds, death or destruction. Together, each of us can choose a wrong and pledge to do our part to make it right in 2015.  This small but significant act of one, when multiplied by: “a thousand points of light across a broad and peaceful sky” would provide a vision of Christmas with which even the most ardent non religious humanist could agree.

FOX NEWS RULES IN RURAL AMERICA

          I spent the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in a rural white republican community where Fox News rules the airways 24/7.  There are few minorities living in the area.  There are fewer residents with progressive views.  I found that political or social debate is futile when an individual’s news media input consistently reinforces his or her view of the world.  Even the business and human interest reporting on Fox News seems to be devoted to Obama baiting.  I quickly learned that discussing family, weather and sports were the safe topics to avoid controversy.

          No one at this extended family gathering could find empathy for a muscular young black teenager with a chip on his shoulder who was killed after a police stop for stealing cigars.  The fact that he was unarmed and shot 6 times did not seem to matter.  It was simply impossible for this crowd to place themselves in the shoes of African Americans, where the historical experience with white police officers is quite different from their own.  It was beyond the pale for them to consider, under similar circumstances, whether a pretty young white teenage girl with a chip on her shoulder, who was stopped for shoplifting, would have ended up dead.

          There was even less attempt to understand why a poor minority community would burn and loot its own neighborhood following the grand jury verdict in Ferguson.  Fox News consistently ran a conspiracy story over the Thanksgiving weekend, that the White House had commanded the Missouri National Guard to stand down, insuring that the destruction would take place.  Another constant news story was that well known civil rights leaders had entered the fray and encouraged the violence. 

          Apart from these rather ridiculous opinions, presented as facts, there was no attempt at role reversal or to understand how members of this poor black community could express their anger and rage over what was perceived as an unfair and biased application of justice.  No one at the dinner table was thankful that the aggrieved did not exercise vigilante justice as the white community has so often practiced in the past, when the legal system has not matched its expectations concerning black defendants.

          Colin Powell has stated that despite all of our progress on race relations: “a dark vein of intolerance” prevails in America.  Intolerance or the: “unwillingness to accept views, beliefs, or behavior that differ from one's own”, is not as destructive as overt racism, but it is close and certainly a byproduct of times gone by.  I am not advocating shoplifting, disobeying the police or looting.  I am suggesting that more tolerance by those in authority can avoid a crisis in the first place and help a community heal, after the fact.  This is the message that President Obama delivered immediately after the Ferguson Grand Jury decision.

          The proven solution to intolerance is diversity.  When homogeneous communities diversify, different views are incorporated into the community and the whole is richer than its parts.  Anyone who has spent time in NYC or Toronto knows what I mean.  When communities of color diversify the local justice system, everyone benefits from perceptions of understanding and fairness.  In regard to Ferguson, there is no question that poor urban communities need policing.  However the police force must be diversified to include black officers with its members living in the community and being sensitive to the needs and views of their neighbors.

          Unfortunately, rural America will remain white, protestant and conservative with no desire to diversify and little tolerance for what goes on outside its boundaries.  Fox News is the perfect media source to encourage the lack of diversity and to perpetuate the intolerance.   Sometimes it takes a Thanksgiving weekend to remind me that while the wide open country is a beautiful place to visit, I would never want to live there.